The ontology of art and knowledge in aesthetics

Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

Volumn 63, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 221-229

  Thomasson, Amie L ^a  

^a Department of Biology   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34249433471     PISSN: 00218529     EISSN: 15406245     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.0021-8529.2005.00202.x     Document Type: Review

References (25)

1. I have argued for the relevance of issues in aesthetics to other general issues in metaphysics in my Fiction and Metaphysics (Cambridge University Press, 1999)
2. and in "The Ontology of Art," in The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics, ed. Peter Kivy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004)
3. Michael Devitt and Kim Sterelny, Language and Reality, 2nd ed. (MIT Press, 1999), p. 91
4. Of course some have argued that we can be mistaken in thinking, for example, that terms such as 'cat' or 'kangaroo' refer to biological species, since it could turn out that the things referred to by 'cat' are little demons (see Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity [Harvard University Press, 1972], p. 126)
5. or that 'kangaroo' refers to a kind of robot (see Richard Miller, "A Purely Causal Solution to One of the Qua Problems," Australasian Journal of Philosophy 70 [1992]: 427). I have argued against this elsewhere (in my unpublished Ordinary Objects), but in any case little hangs here on exactly how precise the relevant disambiguating concept must be - the crucial point is only that there must be a disambiguating ontological concept
6. Thomasson, "The Ontology of Art."
7. Hilary Kornblith, "Referring to Artifacts," The Philosophical Review 89 (1980): 109-114
8. Amie L. Thomasson, "Artifacts and Other Human Creations," in Creations of the Mind, ed. Joseph Margolis and Stephen Laurence (Oxford University Press, forthcoming)
9. For example, Paul Bloom, "Intention, History and Artifact Concepts," Cognition 60 (1996): 1-29
10. and Amie L. Thomasson, "Realism and Human Kinds," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 67 (2003): 580-609
11. Bloom, "Intention, History and Artifact Concepts."
12. See Kendall Walton, "Categories of Art," Philosophical Review 79 (1970): 334-367
13. and his "Categories and Intentions: A Reply," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 32 (1973): 267-268
14. Alvin Goldman, A Theory of Human Action (Princeton University Press, 1970), p. 18
15. See, for example, Risto Hilpinen, "On Artifacts and Works of Art," Theoria 58 (1992): 58-82
16. See Goldman, A Theory of Human Action
17. One consequence of this view is that the ontological status of the objects referred to by terms like 'painting,' 'musical work,' or 'sculpture' may vary over time or across cultures as the background ontological conceptions of those who ground and reground the reference of the term vary (see my "Fictional Characters and Literary Practices," The British Journal of Aesthetics 43 (2003): 146.)
18. Gregory Currie, An Ontology of Art (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989), p. 8
19. John Dilworth, "The Fictionality of Plays," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 60 (2002): 263-273
20. Jerrold Levinson, Music, Art, and Metaphysics (Cornell University Press, 1990), p. 234
21. Mark Sagoff, "On Restoring and Reproducing Art," Journal of Philosophy 75 (1978): 459
22. So, similarly, accepting that the ontological status of species is established by grounders' ontological conceptions does not preclude genuine discoveries and possibilities for error about, for example, whether it is a species of fish or mammal, what its precise DNA structure is, how it evolved, and so on
23. Kit Fine, "Vagueness, Truth and Logic," reprinted in Vagueness: A Reader, ed. Rosanna Keefe and Peter Smith (MIT Press, 1997), p. 120
24. Compare Stephen Schiffer, "Language-Created Language-Independent Entities," Philosophical Topics 24 (1996): 159
25. and Mark Johnston, "The End of the Theory of Meaning," Mind and Language 3 (1988): 38-39