alcaraz leon (2008). the rational justification of aesthetic judgments

MARIA JOSE ALCARAZ LEON

The Rational Justification of Aesthetic Judgments

This article is concerned with the rational justi-fication of aesthetic judgments.1 In the first sec-tion, I briefly characterize the experiential aspectof making aesthetic judgments. In the followingsection, I describe two different notions of justify-ingor arguing foran aesthetic judgment, takinginto account the debate between aesthetic realistsand antirealists. For the purposes of this article,what distinguishes a realist from an antirealist isthat the former regards aesthetic judgments as as-sertions with truth conditions, while the latter re-gards aesthetic judgments as quasi-assertions, ex-pressing a beholders reaction to the work.2 Whenit comes to the issue of aesthetic justification, re-alists tend to think that justificatory relationshipscan only be rightly characterized by linking aes-thetic properties to a more basic set of nonaes-thetic properties. On the other hand, antirealistshold that, strictly speaking, we cannot talk aboutjustifying an aesthetic judgment given that its con-tent is not a property in the full sense of the word;at most, they hold, we can aspire to persuade oth-ers to perceive an object in a certain way. In short,the point of arguing about aesthetic judgments isnot to justify a given description of the object butto persuade others to perceive it as the speakerperceives it.

The central question at this point will bewhether, given an aesthetic judgment, we canpoint to certain evidence in support of the judg-ment and whether the evidence provides rationaljustification of the judgment. So the divergencebetween realists and antirealists at this point goesdown to the ontological status of aesthetic proper-ties. Hence, it looks as if accounting for aestheticjudgments and their rational justificationhas somerelation with ontological debates about the statusof aesthetic properties and the way in which they

figure in aesthetic judgments. One of the purposesof the present article is to see the extent to whichthis is so. In the third section, I offer an initialapproach to what I think must be some of theconstraints upon aesthetic justification.

i. setting the scene

There are many different kinds of aesthetic judg-ments and descriptions. Some fit quite well thenotion of seeing-as or aspect perception, such asseeing a building as labyrinth shaped or as whaleshaped, but others might be less amenable to theaspect perception model, such as the claim that acertain movie is sentimental or a certain paintingis dark (even if it is painted in bright yellow). Itis likely that a wider and finer distinction can beprovided, but the purpose of identifying at leastthese two kinds of aesthetic description is relatedpartly to the discussion I want to develop here;for the question of aesthetic justification has beenusually framed in terms of the special justifica-tion that seeing-as descriptions might demand.

Some have argued that all aesthetic judgmentsare, indeed, reports of aspect perception experi-ences and, thus, develop the problem of aestheticjustification within the boundaries of this notionand its particular logic. The benefit of this ap-proach is its apparent ability to explain a com-mon fact of aesthetic attributions; namely, givena specific artwork, it is likely that more than oneaesthetic description of it might be provided. Acritic may experience a painting as exciting andyet another critic as boring. Actually, it is perfectlynormal for art critics to have greatly differing ex-periences of the same work. If the aspect viewis correct, aesthetic judgments would be reports

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 66:3 Summer 2008c 2008 The American Society for Aesthetics

292 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

of experiencing the objects in different ways. Butthis view has the consequence of leaving any ref-erence to aesthetic properties as the putative con-tent of aesthetic judgment outside the pictureor,at least, of reducing the notion of aesthetic prop-erty to the less objective notion of aspect. Thisseems intolerable to some authors who have cer-tain realist intuitions about aesthetic properties.

I will now introduce a couple of constraints onaesthetic judgments that both realists and antire-alists generally agree on.3 These constraints dis-tinguish, in turn, aesthetic judgments from otherkinds of perceptual judgment, such as color judg-ments.

The first feature has come to be known asthe Acquaintance Principle (AP) and, followingRichard Wollheims formulation, it states that thejudgment of aesthetic value, unlike judgments ofmoral knowledge, must be based on first-hand ex-perience of their objects and are not . . . transmis-sible from one person to another.4 According tosome versions of this principle, the putative statein which one assents to an aesthetic judgment can-not be achieved without experiencing the objectoneself.5 According to this principle, no matterhow many aesthetic descriptions I am providedwith by someone who has perceptual access to aspecific work, I cannot genuinely assent to them.To genuinely assent to them I must experiencethe work myself.6 AP, in turn, might be under-stood as denying two different things, or both atthe same time: (1) it may deny that aesthetic be-liefs can be acquired by testimony; (2) it may denythat aesthetic beliefs can be acquired by argument.Though some have tried to challenge the idea thataesthetic knowledge cannot be acquired by tes-timony, I will pay more attention to the secondcase, for it seems directly related to the problemI am interested in here, that is, the possibility ofaesthetic reasoning and justification.7

The second constraint has its roots in Kantscharacterization of the autonomy of the judgmentof taste and its subjective character, and can benamed, followingPhilipPettit, thePerceptualElu-siveness of Aesthetic Descriptions (PE). Accord-ing to Pettit, [V]isual scrutiny of a picture, nec-essary though it may be for aesthetic knowledge,is not always sufficient to guarantee it. One maylook at a painting and fail to come to a positionwhere one can sincerely assent to the aesthetic de-scriptions which are true of it. One may look andlook and not see its elegance or economy or sad-

ness, for example.8 That is, acquaintance is neces-sary but not sufficient to perceive the object underthe aesthetic description that is allegedly true ofit. Very few deny this feature of aesthetic experi-ence. A recent attempt has been made by RobertHopkins, who has tried to defend the claim thata perception can be the outcome of an argumentor a piece of reasoning, so that we can expect tomake it at least possible to rationally motivate anaesthetic judgment in someone who at first failsto notice a certain aspect or feature of a work.9

His conclusions do not necessarily imply that PEmust be rejected, but they at least significantlyreduce its strength. Someone might fail to noticea certain aesthetic aspect of a work, but there ishope, if Hopkins is correct, that he or she can berationally motivated to make the adequate aes-thetic judgment and to perceive themissed aspect.Moreover, Hopkinss argument for a kind of aes-thetic reasoning will also restrict the scope of AP;for if aesthetic reasoning can provide the basis foran aesthetic judgment, then AP can still be under-stood as banning knowledge through testimony,though it seems less clear that it must also banthe possibility of acquiring aesthetic knowledgethrough arguments.

As I have pointed out above, no ontologicalpicture can be derived necessarily from the ac-ceptance of these constraints of aesthetic judg-ments, since both realist and antirealist defendersseem to agree on them. However, it seems thatsome arguments have been suggested that appealto these features in order to support certain onto-logical claims about aesthetic properties and aes-thetic judgments. The present discussion is con-cerned with how these arguments are entangledwith some views about aesthetic justification.

ii. aesthetic justification within a realistontological framework

Most of the defenders of aesthetic realism tend toaccept some form of supervenience relationshipbetween nonaesthetic properties and aestheticones.10 This relationship provides an ontologicalframe within which the epistemological relation-ship of justification at first sight finds a good ba-sis. Thus, John Bender holds: Supervenience hasbeen thought by many writers to be importantlyrelated to the logic of aesthetic justification, sinceit both explains why certain properties of works

Alcaraz Leon The Rational Justification of Aesthetic Judgments 293

are cited in defence of ones aesthetic ascriptionsand also seems to lendmetaphysical respectabilityto aesthetic properties.11

It follows from accepting the supervenienceclaim that no aesthetic difference will take placewithout a change in the nonaesthetic base.12 How-ever, this does not imply that a whole descriptionof the base can provide a justification of the appli-cability of a given aesthetic term to a given work,nor that we can infer from the description alonewhich set of aesthetic properties the object pos-sesses. That is, it does not do the work of entirelyjustifying an aesthetic judgment.

But, although supervenience alone cannot tellus what justifies an aesthetic judgment, for itmerely determines the ontological status of aes-thetic properties, it seems that it can at least pro-vide a framework within which aesthetic ascrip-tions are taken as assertions and thus can be trueor false. This could also be expressed in a negativeway: without supervenience it may not be possibleto justify aesthetic judgments. As Bender puts it:The seconddifficulty of a realist without superve-nience comes in producing an adequate account ofthe justification of aesthetic ascriptions. Superve-nience relations help to explain why it is relevantto cite certain of a works non-evaluative featureswhen justifying the assertions that the work pos-sesses some aesthetic property.13

Supervenience accounts are compatible withthe response-dependent character of aestheticpropertiesa feature nobody seems to denyand,thus, allow that the same base properties yield dif-ferent aesthetic properties in other worlds.14 Theyrule out, however, the possibility of two different,conflicting aesthetic descriptions of the same ob-ject in the sameworldsomething that, as we havealready seen, fits perfectly well within the aspectperception model embraced by some antirealists.This implies that within the realist-superveniencemodel there cannot begenuinedisputes in aesthet-ics, or, at least, it is rather difficult to accommodatethemwithin the realistic framework.15 The expres-sion genuine dispute might be confusing be-cause itmay be understood in two different senses.It may be understood in a strong sense, such aswhen two people judging a work offer two com-pletely different aesthetic descriptions and neitherof them is able to see the work as the other does;in this sense, aesthetic disputes are understoodas the output of PE. Normally, this is the senseappealed to by an antirealist and that a realist

view finds difficult to accommodate. There is alsoa more flexible sense of the expression, one thatrefers to the differences between two people judg-ing an object regarding not the kind of aestheticdescriptions they apply to the work, but the kindof values they attribute to the properties identifiedin the work. For example, two people may agreethat a work is comical but value this feature differ-ently and so produce a different overall judgmentof the work. This second sense is compatible withthe realist view about aesthetic judgments, but itis not usually the sense that the antirealist appealsto in order to ground antirealism about aestheticproperties. For a realist, given an aesthetic dispute,there can always be one aesthetic description thatis correct and others that are not.

I have said above that both realism and antire-alism agree with AP and PE; let us briefly see howit is the case with the realist view. It seems thatnone of the features of the realist view conflictwith AP. Actually, given the relational characterof aesthetic properties, AP will easily fit withinthe realist picture, for the very nature of aestheticproperties demands that the perceiver respond tothem in an experience of the work to which thealleged properties are ascribed. PE, on the otherhand, can also be accommodated, since we canalways attribute a failure to see an aesthetic prop-erty to some divergence in the input received bythe disputants or to a difference in sensitivities.16

Let us now briefly consider the relationship be-tween those features of aesthetic experience (APand PE) and aesthetic antirealism. One of theusual arguments is that AP implies aesthetic an-tirealism, such as one given by Roger Scruton.17

He thinks the reason why we cannot allow thatan aesthetic judgment can be reached indepen-dently of an experience of the object is preciselybecause the properties that are referred to in aes-thetic judgments are not properties, strictly speak-ing, but aspects or features of ones experience ofthe objects; hence, regardless of their assertoricappearance, aesthetic judgments are not asser-tions but quasi-assertions, for they do not reportsomething in the object but a certain experi-ence of the object for a subject. The content ofthesequasi-assertions is not a certain fact but a cer-tain experience of an object aesthetically judged.This should prevent treating aesthetic judgmentsas statements where the question about their truthconditions might arise: nothing in the object willmake the aesthetic judgment true or false, given


that there is nomatter of the fact that the aestheticjudgment refers to.

However, Scruton does not defend the viewthat any experience of an object fitting the logicof aspect perception is an adequate one. For him,only aesthetic experiences can provide the basisfor correct aesthetic judgments. He needs, then, toprovide a definition of aesthetic experience. Buteven within the scope of aesthetic experiences itis possible that disagreement about aesthetic de-scriptions of a work arises, and so the problem ofaesthetic justification will remain; for the antireal-ist therewill be no further fact to appeal to in orderto show that a particular aesthetic judgment is truewhile others are false. Scrutons answer does notlook very promising, for there seems to be no gapbetween understanding an aesthetic descriptionand providing the conditions for its acceptance.He writes: In aesthetics you have to see for your-self precisely because what you have to see is nota property: your knowledge that an aesthetic fea-ture is in the object is given by the same criteriathat show that you see it. To see the sadness in themusic and to know that the music is sad are oneand the same thing.18 It follows from this charac-terization that one cannot understand an aestheticjudgment unless one has the corresponding expe-rience, and this leaves a very narrow space eitherfor justifying the aesthetic ascription in questionor for rejecting it. An example might be usefulhere. When I understand the aesthetic judgmentthat Goyas portrait of Charles IV and his familyis ironic, then I must also have the experience ofthe painting as being as the aesthetic descriptioncharacterizes it.

But, what happens if you do not perceive it asironic but, rather, as sympathetic? I might per-suade you to perceive the painting differently bypointing out other features of the painting thatare coherent with my judgment. However, can Ipersuade you that your former experience waswrong? What kind of reasons might I appeal toin order to justify that the former experience waswrong and that mine is right? I take it that aslong as the experience upon which the judgmentis based is an aesthetic one, there is no way toshow that the corresponding judgment is wrong.I guess Scruton would say that if the experiencehas been a truly aesthetic one, most of the viewerswill agree in seeing the irony in Goyas portrait,but since aesthetic perception is framed in terms ofaspect perception, it is possible to find some other

cases of aesthetic experience where the work isregarded under a different aspect.19

The problem with this view as far as the is-sue of aesthetic justification is that we seem to bedeprived of most of the elements that currentlyenter into any picture of what justification means.I think that this view of aesthetic justificationcomes from a certain understanding of the notionof seeing-as, according to which there is no justi-ficatory role that can be satisfied by certain fea-tures of the object. Thus, the only proof of anaesthetic ascription is in fact the experience fromwhich it is a report, and the only possible correc-tion would involve, indeed, a different experiencealtogether. This has been specifically expressed byB. R. Tilghman when, in arguing against some re-alist claims, he holds:

Understanding a painting, for example, is not like that.There can, of course, be evidence for its attribution,iconography, or subject matter, but hardly for the bal-ance of its composition, the appropriateness of the treat-ment of the subject, or for its being perhaps overly senti-mental. . . . [T]he features that we cite to bring someoneto appreciate the composition or the appropriateness ofthe dramatic subject matter do not work like evidence.They are, instead, guides to alter ones perception in or-der to bring one to see the thing in a certainway. To bringone to realize that this picture is sentimental kitsch mayrequire a rather radical readjustment in his view of theworld.20

There are at least two points that must be noticedhere. In the first place, Tilghman enhances theguiding role in the perception of the object thataesthetic descriptions have; in the second place,he takes it that this role lacks justificatory powers:its function is a pragmatic one, not a justificatoryone. It is, then, a common feature of the antirealistview of aesthetic reasoning that, although therecan be reasons for a certain aesthetic judgment,these never have the justificatory power that weexpect in other kinds of judgment (for example,nonaesthetic perceptual judgments). They help toyield a certain perception of the object, but theydo not argue for it. As Bender points out, withina model that rejects supervenience,

[T]he question of epistemic relevance of the given fea-tures to the aesthetic attribution seems to turn into therhetorical question whether I can get you to come toagree to the attribution by pointing out other features


of the work. . . . There is a long tradition of pragma-tist/rhetorical theories of aesthetic justification and it isoften said that a critics main function is to direct ourattention over a works features in such a way that wecome to see the work as the critic does, i.e., to agree withhis or her aesthetic ascriptions.21

Bender characterizes the difference betweenthese two views of aesthetic judgment in termsof their ontological claims and, thus, places theepistemological problem of aesthetic justifica-tion in terms of the ontological assumptions re-quired in order to grant its rationality. His crit-icism against the antirealist view is focused onthe ontological demands required for grantingaesthetic justification. It seems, then, that an as-pect perceptionbased, antirealist model cannotprovide the necessary elements for rationally jus-tifying an aesthetic ascription, but it canmerely tryto get the unconvinced observer to see for himselfor herself.

However, Hopkins has argued that the fact thataspect perception is, in fact, an important sourceof aesthetic ascriptions does not conflict with thepossibility of aesthetic justification; his argumentpartly rests upon a rather different understandingofwhatwe take the structure of seeing-as to be andhow some features can be conceived as satisfyingthe evidence role.22 His point is that by assuminga different conception of what critical perceptionmeans, we can allow the conclusion that a percep-tion can be motivated by reasoning. This concep-tion of critical reasoning has some peculiarities,namely, that the argument leading to a perceptionmust includewithin its premises someperceptions.Thus, he seemingly keeps the AP within the pic-ture. However, as I have pointed out above, hisview also implies that the force of PE diminishes,at least if we accept the role of critical argumentsfor aesthetic perception. Hopkinss picture doesnot include any ontological consideration in hisargumentation for the rational motivation of aes-thetic judgments, but I assume that his view isunderpinned by realist assumptions.23

I havementioned in passing the idea that agree-ment is a kind of criterion for the antirealist; giventhat no justificatory relationship can be offeredapart from the very fact of experiencing the workin a certainway, some reason for adopting one aes-thetic ascription rather than another will be thatmost viewers share a certain experience, that they

agree in ascribing to a work this or that property.So, instead of being the result of aesthetic deliber-ation, aesthetic agreement is appealed to as a signof valid aesthetic ascriptions. This wouldmake thevalidity of aesthetic judgments somehow depen-dent upon agreement. Given AP and PE, the onlyclue that we have available in order to tell apartvalid aesthetic judgments from invalid ones is thata big enough group of observers respond to thework in the same manner.

A further reason why we could reject the prag-matist antirealist model is that it is, if not incom-patible, at least incongruent with one feature ofaesthetic discussion. It seems to me that we couldhave few grounds to sustain the belief that aes-thetic discussion is possible at all if we strictly keepwithin that view. For given that the conditions forunderstanding an aesthetic judgment are the sameas the conditions for accepting it, that is, having acertain experience of the object, there is no spacefor disagreement, unless we only understand it astotal disagreement. It seems that this view leaveslittle space for a shared experience of the objectupon which the aesthetic discussion can be sus-tained. It is as if the aesthetic experience werethe bedrock upon which one can lie but that onecannot argue against except by adopting anotheraesthetic experience as bedrock.

My worry with this view is that the understand-ing of aspect perception underlying it leaves nospace for aesthetic arguing or reasoning. If aes-thetic justification is to be possible at all, our pic-ture must include some reference to somethingelse apart from having a certain experience: weneed to characterize how a certain experience iscorrect, and that might involve referring to fea-tures of the object that are over and above theexperience we are assessing.

Let me briefly summarize the situation so far.We seem to have two different views of aes-thetic justification, both grounded in ontologicalassumptions, realist and antirealist, respectively.On one hand, the realist view provides a strongmodel of aesthetic justification, for aesthetic judg-ments or ascriptions can be rationally justified byrelating the objects possession of them to the ob-jects nonaesthetic properties. One of the virtuesof this analysis is that it does not sacrifice APand accommodates PE. The problem faced by thisapproach, however, is that it cannot clearly accom-modate the case of genuine aesthetic disputes.24


On the other hand, the antirealist view of aes-thetic properties cannot offer but a pragmatic-oriented account of aesthetic justification, wherethe conditions for understanding an aestheticjudgment and the conditions for its acceptanceare one and the same. Aesthetic judgments arenot, within this view, genuine assertions but quasi-assertions and, rather than expressing a fact aboutthe object characterized, they aim at yielding acertain experience of itthis being its pragmaticfeature. The nature of aesthetic justification re-mains, thus, a matter of agreement or consentamong the observers who experience the objectin the same manner. There is no space for arguingfor contrasting descriptions; at most we can aspireto change the viewers perception, but changing itdoes not mean justifying it. We have mentionedHopkinss proposal of critical perception as an al-ternative bias to account for the aspect percep-tion that most antirealists embrace as partly re-sponsible for the lack of justifying space withinaesthetic description. But his account will also belinked to a realist stance and, so, will fall on oneof the sides of this ontologicalepistemologicaldebate.

I think that the lack of support that these mod-els can bring to any justificatory relationship isbased upon the supposition that a certain meta-physical condition must be met in order to allowcertain justificatory relationships to hold. The dif-ference between the realist and the antirealist isnot, then, in their view about what ontologicaldemands must be satisfied in order to grant jus-tificatory relationships, but in that the antirealistsdo not think that the ontological conditions areavailable for the aesthetic case.

Moreover, I think both realists and antireal-ists misconstrue aesthetic justification partly be-cause they misunderstand the subjective char-acter of aesthetic experience. We have alreadyseen that aesthetic properties are typical exam-ples of response-dependent properties, that is,properties whose identification cannot be rightlybrought about without referring to a subjects be-ing affected by them. This phenomenal characterof aesthetic properties (but also of what is usu-ally called secondary properties, such as, colors,sounds, or smells) has been understood as im-plying that they are not objective properties. Ifthese are subjective properties, then they cannothave truth conditions, for only objective ones havethem.

However, as John McDowell has tried to makeclear, this claim relies upon confusing two differ-ent senses of objective: on one hand, objectivemight be understood as something whose naturemay be specified independently of a subject beingaffected by it; on the other, it can also refer towhatis part of the world and, therefore, can be the sub-ject of knowledge.25 According to the first sense, itis quite obvious that response-dependent proper-ties are subjective, for they resist being describedin terms that avoid reference to subjects being af-fected by them. However, according to the secondsense, response-dependent properties need not beunderstood as subjective, that is, as not being partof the world, as objective properties we can beaffected by. McDowell has pointed out that on apar with this confusion there is a wrong underly-ing picture of objectivity that describes the worldas if in it there were no sentient beings that are af-fected by how the world is. Thus, after McDowell,aesthetic properties can be rescued from the sub-jective realm they have been placed inthough,of course, they remain thoroughly subjective inthe sense of being only characterized by referenceto a sentient being that is affected by them. Inshort, in a world without subjects there would beno aesthetic properties, but in a world with them,aesthetic properties are no less real than otherproperties.

Now I think this line of thought can also behelpful in showingwhy the aesthetic realism basedupon supervenience lacks the necessary appeal.For the realist assumes that the reality of aes-thetic properties can only be sustained insofar aswe characterize them through some relationshipto nonaesthetic properties, as if the objectivity ofthe former could only be guaranteed by its depen-dence upon the latter.

However, if McDowells line of thought is per-suasive, the phenomenological character of aes-thetic properties does not amount to their beingnonobjective properties. They are aspects of theworld to which we are sensitive. This, in turn, alsocompels us to reject any account of these prop-erties that understands the task as a reductiveone. Hence, taking seriously the phenomenolog-ical aspect of aesthetic properties involves givingup reductive strategiessuch as supervenience.Contrary to Benders intuition, the ontological re-spectability of aesthetics properties need not relyupon its dependence upon other, less controver-sial, properties.


iii. does a proper characterization ofaesthetic justification require a commitmentto an ontological view about aestheticproperties?

Maybe a possible solution to this debate could beprecisely to give up the ontological dispute thatbacked each of the positions I have delineated andconcentrate upon the kind of reasons that are usu-ally taken to be justificatory in aesthetic debates.Is this possible? Can we offer an explanation ofwhat it is for an aesthetic judgment to be justi-fied without getting involved into disputes aboutthe ontological nature of aesthetic properties? Ido not think that simply paying attention to thecanonical reasons usually put forward in aestheticdisputes can help much in solving this question.Rather than being a true solution to the problem,it leaves it unresolved; for the dispute over the pos-sibility of justifying aesthetic judgments cannot besettled just by listing the usual reasons we bringin our aesthetic disputesthese practices are ac-knowledged both by those who hold the possibil-ity of aesthetic justification and by thosewho denyit. That we argue about our aesthetic judgments isnot disputed; what is under discussion is the justi-ficatory force of these arguments. And it seems tome that the only way to fully acknowledge the jus-tificatory relationship between an aesthetic judg-ment and the reasons that allegedly support it isto provide an explanation of the conditions underwhich we take aesthetic judgments to be true; andthis, in turn, brings us back to the issue of objec-tivity in aesthetics.

Relations of justification cannot, I think, beproperly settled without taking into account thenature of the content of our judgments; for whatcounts as evidence for asserting one judgmentrather than another must be linked to the na-ture of our discussion. So we still need to providesome such account for the case of aesthetic prop-ertieswhich I take to be the putative content ofaesthetic judgments. Considering the alternativesmentioned so far, I think I am more confident inmy rejection of the antirealist model of aestheticjustification than inmy finding persuasive the real-ist account based on supervenience. I have alreadyprovided some reasons for this, but I will try to of-fer some more and to tentatively introduce what Ithink a plausible realist account can be.

I have rejected the antirealist view of aestheticjustification because, as it is, it cannot, in my view,

satisfy any of the conditions we usually expect jus-tifications to meet. If what gives content to anaesthetic judgment coincides with what justifiesit, we lack the typical distancebetween assert-ing something as true and providing reasons forit to be suchrequired for a justificatory relation-ship to take place. This distance is something I willcome back to later.

So, when is an aesthetic judgment justified?First of all, it must be noticed that a picture ofaesthetic justification need not guarantee that ajustified judgment is totally immune to possiblenew aesthetic descriptions that enrich an objectsaesthetic description. As well as the fact that oursensory capacities may be more sensitive whentrained and thus can provide us deeper access toaspects of the objects we experience, our aestheticsensibility can also develop so that we can even-tually aesthetically redescribe an object.

Moreover, and as it is usually emphasizedwithin aesthetic discourse, aesthetic ascriptionsare not law governed, though this need not pre-vent any hope of the possibility of aesthetic justifi-cation; for, unless we think that only law-like rela-tionships can count as justificatory relationships,there is no reason to think aesthetic justificationdepends on law-like relationships.26 What justifiesa particular judgment may be a matter of experi-encing the object in a certain way together withsomebeliefs about the object judged, though thesedo not need to have the form of generalizations.

Aesthetic justification needs, then, to be framedin terms that respect these two conditions. Whenwe say that a work is comic because it is, in aparticular case, X and F, we are not claiming thatanytime a work is X and F then it is also comic,but that in that particular case X and F amountsto the works being comic. Why can this relation-ship not be a justificatory one? A possible an-swer is that X and F could have amounted to adifferent aesthetic property, such as ironic, forexample. So, on what grounds do we assert thatX and F are responsible for the comical aspectof that work? It is true that X and F can figurein many objects and that their presence can con-tribute to an objects being comic, anothers beingironic, and maybe to some others other proper-ties. Thus, a red background in a paintingmight beused in many different ways and with many differ-ent purposes. This, however, does not imply thatwe cannot explain some aesthetic property of the


representation of a landscape (for example, thatit is threatening) through that particular feature.Besides, some other properties, not merely per-ceptual ones, can enter into our justification of aparticular characterization of a work. For exam-ple, we can justify our attribution of originality toa work and not to its copy when we know them tobe the original work on one side and the copy onthe other. Thus, historical information about theobject is also relevant in determining the aestheticdescription that it deserves.

As we can see with these examples, aestheticjudgment departs from the logic of perceptualjudgments, such as color judgments, in that inthe latter it is usually held that the experienceof seeing red explains and justifies our judgmentof something as red. However, when it comes toaesthetic attribution, the mere experience of see-ing an object as comic is not enough to justify it.If it were, we could never be wrong in attribut-ing a comical aspect to a work when we perceiveit as comic. But we can be if we historically mis-place the work, for example. This does not meanthat aesthetic judgments are not based upon per-ceptual experiences. They are indeed, but when itcomes to justifying them, we cannot simply restcontent with reporting our experience; we mightneed to make reference to some other features,and some of them might be nonperceptual ones.

I think that if we understand aesthetic ascrip-tions as not only dependent upon perceptual fea-tures of the object but also as determined by itshistorical identity, we can get closer to a charac-terization of the aesthetic value that leaves roomfor a justificatory relationship.27 This does not in-volve, as it might appear to, giving up the per-ceptual character of aesthetic value identification.It merely requires that we understand aestheticproperties as three-place relations: an aestheticproperty is one that (1) an object possesses invirtue of (2) its appearance for (3) a subject whois well informed about the historical conditionswithin which the object was produced and the in-tentions that governed its production.

I said before that for a justificatory relationshipto take place in the case of aesthetic judgments,we need to characterize a certain tie between theexperience that we want to justify and the allegedreasons that can indeed justify it. I talked thenin terms of a certain distance between the aes-thetic experience and the aesthetic judgment, adistance color judgment does not seem to require

and that points to a disanalogy between what areusually called secondary properties and aestheticones, although both are regarded as perceptual orphenomenological properties.

iv. conclusion

I have tried to offer an overview of some ap-proaches to the problem of aesthetic judgmentsjustification. Aesthetic judgments seem to involvea special challenge as far as their justification isconcerned partly because of the peculiar natureof aesthetic properties. In order to characterizeaesthetic experience and the corresponding aes-thetic judgment, I have introduced AP and PEas typical principles that are commonly acknowl-edgedas proper to aesthetic experience.Both real-ists and antirealists have tried to offer a picture ofwhat an aesthetic judgment is and a correspondingview about aesthetic justification. I have also triedto argue that both misconstrue the nature of thisproblem partly because of the ontological claimsembraced by each. While the realist guaranteesthe ontological respectability of aesthetic prop-erties by establishing a supervenient relationshipbetween themandwhat are called base properties,the antirealist thinks that the response-dependentnature of aesthetic qualities deprives themof theirobjectivity.

I think that we will likely get a correct pictureof aesthetic justification if we achieve an adequateontological characterization of aesthetic proper-ties. Although their relational character is unde-niable, this need not amount to a rejection of theirobjectivity. Hence, if we come to accept this, itis likely that the supervenience strategy loses itsappeal. Moreover, that there are no law-like rela-tionships governing aesthetic terms need not be aproblem unless we assume that a justificatory re-lationship can only hold when a law-like relation-ship is involved. But I think many examples fromour current reasoning and arguing practice con-firm the dispensability of this relationship.My sug-gestion is that we can perfectly well guarantee thepossibility of justifying our aesthetic judgmentsonce we get rid of some previous misconceptionsabout the nature of aesthetic properties. Besides,a necessary picture of the justificatory relation-ship within aesthetic discourse needs to take intoaccount the fact that simply having an experienceof an object as having certain aesthetic properties


is not enough to ensure the truth of the corre-sponding description. Since an object can surelysupport more than one aesthetic description, weneed to appeal to features other than aestheticones in order to support one description ratherthan another.28

MARIA JOSE ALCARAZ LEON

Department of PhilosophyUniversity of SheffieldSheffield, United Kingdom S10 2TN

internet : [email protected]

1. This article has been possible thanks to the finan-cial support from the Ministerio de Educacion y Cienciato the research project La expresion de la subjetividad enlas artes HUM200502533 and the postdoctoral researchscholarship EX-20061137.

2. Thus, Philip Pettit writes: What does it mean to re-gard aesthetic characterizations realistically? At a first levelit means two things: that one believes that under their stan-dard interpretation, under the interpretation which respectsspeakers intentions, they comeout as assertions; and furtherthat one believes that the standard assertoric interpretationis unobjectionable. For the purposes at hand assertions maybe taken as utterances which are capable of being true orfalse. Philip Pettit, The Possibility of Aesthetic Realism,in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art: The Analytic Tradi-tion: An Anthology, ed. Peter Lamarque and Stein HaugomOlsen (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 158171; quote fromp. 160.

3. Although there are some authors who reject some ofthem.

4. Richard Wollheim, Art and Its Objects (CambridgeUniversity Press, 1980), p. 233. As far as I know, the firstexplicit formulation of this principle was given here. Forsome criticisms of this principle, see Malcolm Budd, TheAcquaintance Principle, The British Journal of Aesthetics43 (2003): 386392; and Paisley Livingston, On an Appar-ent Truism in Aesthetics, The British Journal of Aesthetics43 (2003): 260278.

5. For other formulations of this principle, see RogerScruton, Art and Imagination: A Study in the Philosophy ofMind (London: Methuen, 1974). He derives an antirealistinterpretation of aesthetic judgments out of this principletogether with the frequent employment of metaphorical ex-pressions in aesthetic characterizations. See also Pettit, ThePossibility of Aesthetic Realism, pp. 158171, for a realistversion of aesthetic attributions compatible with AP.

6. A contrast with the color case is usually called uponto clarify this principle. While if someone tells me that thecar parked in front of the Arts Tower is white, I may acquirethis knowledge and know what experience will be obtainedif I look out and see the parked car, but no similar situationobtains if someone comes back from the gallery and saysthat the painting he or she saw was beautiful.

7. For a rejection of AP, see Livingston, On an Appar-ent Truism in Aesthetics, and Budd, The AcquaintancePrinciple.

8. Pettit, Aesthetic Realism, p. 162.9. RobertHopkins, Critical Reasoning andCritical Per-

ception, in Knowing Art, ed. Dominic McIver Lopes andMatthew Kieran (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), pp. 133157.

10. To my knowledge, the only realist account of aes-thetic properties that explicitly rejects supervenience isthat of Marcia Muelder Eaton. See her Intention, Su-pervenience, and Aesthetic Realism, The British Journalof Aesthetics 38 (1998): 279294, and The Intrinsic, Non-Supervenient Nature of Aesthetic Properties, The Journalof Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52 (1994): 383397. Thoughit is true that supervenience has been mostly embraced byrealists, supervenience is also compatible with an antirealistview of aesthetic properties; thus, we cannot take this rela-tionship as themark of aesthetic realism.Rather, as has beensaid above, what distinguishes a realist from an antirealist isthe way each regards aesthetic judgments as assertions withtruth conditions or as expressive statements. For an antire-alist view with a role for supervenience, see Alan Goldman,Realism about Aesthetic Properties, The Journal of Aes-thetics and Art Criticism 51 (1993): 3137.

11. JohnW. Bender, Realism, Supervenience, and Irre-solvable Aesthetic Disputes, The Journal of Aesthetics andArt Criticism 54 (1996): 371381.

12. Bender has offered amore refined supervenience ac-count and distinguishes between the supervenient base andthe determining properties of an aesthetic property. It is be-yond the scope of this article to discuss his arguments, butit must at least be mentioned that in distinguishing betweenthe relationships of aesthetic determination and superve-nience, he seems to avoid some of the current argumentsagainst supervenience accounts. See his Supervenience andthe Justification of Aesthetic Judgments, The Journal ofAesthetics and Art Criticism 46 (1987): 3140.

13. Bender, Realism, Supervenience, and IrresolvableAesthetic Disputes, p. 377.

14. The relational analysis of aesthetic propertiesclaims that a works having an aesthetic property, F, suchas grace, power or starkness, is for it to have some set of(other) features and relations which makes the work evokein some relevant class of perceivers or critics certain re-sponses and judgments, including the judgment that it isappropriate to call the work F. Difficult details aside, theplausibility of viewing at least many aesthetic properties ashigher order relational properties connecting the evaluativeresponses of a class of standard or ideal perceivers to lowerlevel properties and relations of the work has long beenacknowledged, especially in the empiricist tradition of aes-thetics. Bender, Realism, Supervenience, and IrresolvableAesthetic Disputes, p. 371.

15. Bender recognizes that if we do not reduce the prob-lem of aesthetic disputes to a question of the value eachcritic attaches to an aesthetic property, then the problemremains a genuine one for the realist view. See his Realism,Supervenience, and Irresolvable Aesthetic Disputes.

16. Bender explores the possibility of divergent aestheticascriptions due to the actual divergent sensitivities of thepercipient subjects in Sensitivity, Sensibility, and AestheticRealism, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 59(2001): 7383.

17. This is not the only argument offered by Scruton foraesthetic antirealism. In a former section he adopts antire-alism, arguing that metaphorical ascriptions are currently


employed in aesthetic ascriptions and that, if we assumeDonald Davidsons view about metaphoric meaning, wehave no reason to think that aesthetic properties are cap-tured by these ascriptions. For a criticism of this argument,see Nick Zangwill, Metaphor and Realism in Aesthetics,The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 49 (1991): 5762.

18. Scruton, Art and Imagination, p. 54.19. The fact that aesthetic perception is understood in

terms of aspect perception also explains why the antireal-ist can easily accommodate PE, for there is already in theWittgensteinian literature a notionaspect blindnessthatdoes exactly the work PE requires.

20. B. R. Tilghman, Reflections on Aesthetic Judg-ment, The British Journal of Aesthetics 44 (2004): 248260,quote from p. 257.

21. Bender, Realism, Supervenience, and IrresolvableAesthetic Disputes, p. 377. He is not merely referring tothe antirealist but also to the realist proposal put forward byMarcia Muelder Eaton in The Intrinsic, Non-SupervenientNature of Aesthetic Properties, The Journal of Aestheticsand Art Criticism 52 (1994): 383397.

22. Hopkins, Critical Reasoning and Critical Percep-tion.

23. I take Hopkinss acceptance of realism to be partlybased upon his criticism to quasi-realism in Kant, Quasi-Realism, and the Autonomy of Aesthetic Judgment, Euro-pean Journal of Philosophy 9 (2001): 166189.

24. It is possible, however, to see in the argumentoffered by Hopkins in Kant, Quasi-Realism, and theAutonomy of Aesthetic Judgment a certain rejectionof AP. If I understand his point correctly, we can havereasons to modify our aesthetic judgment to the extentthat the aesthetic judgment and the experience might notmatch each other. So, he will reject the claim that aes-thetic judgments can only be based upon the subjectsexperience.

25. John McDowell, Values and Secondary Qualities,inMind, Value andReality (HarvardUniversity Press, 1998),pp. 131150; also see his Aesthetic Value, Objectivity,and the Fabric of the World, in the same volume, pp.112130.

26. Frank Sibley, Particularity, Art and Evaluation, inAesthetics and the Philosophy ofArt: TheAnalytic Tradition:An Anthology, pp. 243252.

27. In a way this is similar to Kendall Waltons view inCategories of Art, Philosophical Review 79 (1970): 334367, or Jerrold Levinsons in The Pleasures of Aesthetics(Cornell University Press, 1996) and Aesthetic Properties,Procedings of Aristotelian Society, Suppementary Volume 79(2005): 211227.

28. I thank Professor Robert Hopkins, Professor Fran-cisca PerezCarreno, Elisabeth Schellekens, Paul Sludds, andthe anonymous referees who sent comments about an ear-lier version of this article.

alcaraz leon (2008). the rational justification of aesthetic judgments

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