The constructivist's Dilemma

Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

Volumn 55, Issue 1, 1997, Pages 43-52

  Stecker, Robert ^a  

^a CENTRAL MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61049383250     PISSN: 00218529     EISSN: 15406245     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/431603     Document Type: Article

References (16)

1. See Graham McFee, "The Historicity of Art", The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 38(1980):302-324;
2. "The Historical Character of Art: A Re-appraisal", The British Journal of Aesthetics 32(1992):307-319;
3. and "Back to the Future: A Reply to Sharpe", The British Journal of Aesthetics 35(1995):278-283.
4. For a critique of the 1980 piece as well as other constructivist proposals, see Jerrold Levinson, "Artworks and the Future", in Music, Art and Metaphysics (Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 179-214.
5. McFee is also criticized in Sharpe's "Making the Past: McFee's Forward Retroactivism", The British Journal of Aesthetics 34(1994):170-173. McFee's 1992 piece replies to Levinson.
6. At various points, I may seem to make epistemic assumptions that a constructivist would question. Many constructivist projects are motivated by skepticism about our epistemic access to interpretation-independent objects. This skepticism sometimes directly argues that we lack access to such objects. Sometimes it is more indirect, claiming there are no such objects by arguing that we would lack access to them if they existed, and then invoking a verificationist criterion of what exists. A more moderate version of this line of thought adopts an agnosticism about such objects. I have argued against this sort of epistemic motivation for constructivism in "Fish's Argument for the Relativity of Interpretive Truth", The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48(1990):221-230
7. and in "Pragmatism and Interpretation", Poetics Today 14(1993):181-191.
8. Richard Shusterman makes a similar point in "Beneath Interpretation: Against Hermeneutic Holism", The Monist 73(1990):181-203.
9. Thus, Shusterman asks, "If we could never understand anything without interpreting it, how could we understand the interpretation itself?" (p. 196).
10. For a fuller account, see my "Incompatible Interpretations", The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 50(1992):291-298;
11. "Art Interpretations", The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52(1994):193-206;
12. or Artworks: Meaning, Definition, Value (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997).
13. Margolis argues for this view in, among other places, The Truth about Relativism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991)
14. and in "Plain Talk about Interpretation on a Relativistic Model", The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 53(1995):1-7.
15. Also see Stephen Davies's "Relativism in Interpretation" in the same issue, pp. 8-13.
16. Michael Krausz, Rightness and Reasons: Interpretation in Cultural Practices (Cornell University Press, 1993).