The acquaintance principle

British Journal of Aesthetics

Volumn 43, Issue 4, 2003, Pages 386-392

  Budd, Malcolm ^a  

^a NONE   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61049249741     PISSN: 00070904     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/bjaesthetics/43.4.386     Document Type: Article

References (6)

1. Richard Wollheim, Art and Its Objects, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1980), p. 233, My concern is the claim that aesthetic judgements must be based on first-hand, not second - or third-hand, experience. I shall understand first-hand experience to include, where appropriate, perception, not of the object itself, but of an adequate reproduction, one that provides a good idea of the object's appearance. (Difficulties in elucidating the idea of an adequate alternative to perception or awareness of the object itself are well expressed in Paisley Livingston's 'On an Apparent Truism in Aesthetics', British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 43 [2003], no. 3, which I was able to read only after this paper was finished.)
2. Michael Tanner, 'Ethics and Aesthetics are - ?', in Jose Luis Bermúdez and Sebastian Gardner (eds), Art and Morality (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 29. This is a familiar line of thought that derives from Frank Sibley. For example, Sibley suggests that the reason a person needs to experience a work of art in order to judge that it possesses a merit-constituting property is that there is no conceptual connection between its possessing a determinate merit-responsible property and its possessing the merit-constituting property for which the determinate merit-responsible property is responsible. See Frank Sibley, 'Particularity, Art and Evaluation, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume XLVIII (1974). An item's aesthetic properties could not in general be derived from a description of its phenomenal properties, for its aesthetic properties are a function of various features other than its phenomenal properties, such as its artistic category. I leave aside the question of the truth or falsity of the view that the possession of an aesthetic property cannot legitimately be inferred from a description of all of the item's relevant non-aesthetic properties because of the manifest insufficiency of the view to establish the Acquaintance Principle. (There is an extended discussion of this view in Paisley Livingston's paper, 'On an Apparent Truism in Aesthetics'.)
3. Tanner, 'Ethics and Aesthetics are - ?', p. 33
4. Roger Scruton, Art and Imagination (London: Methuen, 1974), especially ch. 4
5. Philip Pettit, 'The Possibility of Aesthetic Realism', in Eva Schaper (ed,), Pleasure, Preference and Value: Studies in Philosophical Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1983), pp. 24-25
6. Pettit, 'The Possibility of Aesthetic Realism', p. 33