Weitz reconsidered: A clearer view of why theories of art fail

British Journal of Aesthetics

Volumn 38, Issue 1, 1998, Pages 33-46

  Kamber, Richard ^a  

^a The College of New Jersey   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 63149193404     PISSN: 00070904     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/bjaesthetics/38.1.33     Document Type: Article

References (33)

1. Morris Weitz, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 15 (1956), pp. 27-35;
2. reprinted in Philosophy Looks at the Arts: Contemporary Readings in Aesthetics, ed. Joseph Margolis, rev. edn (Philadelphia: Temple U.P., 1978), p. 122. Subsequent page references are to the reprinted article.
3. See Barbara Scholz, 'Rescuing the Institutional Theory of Art', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 52 (1994), pp. 310-325.
4. Maurice Mandelbaum, 'Family Resemblances and Generalizations Concerning the Arts', American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 2 (1965), pp. 219-228.
5. Weitz, 'The Role of Theory in Aesthetics', p. 128.
6. Morris Weitz, The Opening Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), p. 242.
7. Even the disjunctive definition that I proposed in 1993 now seems to me inadequate to capture the current concept of art. See: Richard Kamber, 'A Modest Proposal for Defining a Work of Art', British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 33 (1993), pp. 313-320.
8. This thesis may reflect Weitz's reading of Friedrich Waismann. Compare Waismann, 'Verifiability', The Aristotelian Society, vol. 19 (July 1945), pp.27-35.
9. Even Stephen Davies, who has read Weitz more carefully than most of his critics, repeats this claim. See: Stephen Davies, Definitions of Art (Ithaca: Cornell U.P., 1991), p. 15.
10. Morris Weitz. Hamlet and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1964; repr. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International, 1991), p. 307.
11. Morris Weitz, 'Wittgenstein's Aesthetics', in Benjamin R. Tilghman (ed.), Language and Aesthetics (Lawrence: The University of Kansas Press, 1973), p. 15.
12. Weitz acknowledges that there may be many logically distinguishable varieties of open concepts, but he specifies only a few. In addition to the perennially flexible, perennially debatable, and the irreducibly vague, he discusses concepts that have sufficient but no necessary criteria (e.g. 'human action' in ch. 6), and concepts that have necessary but no sufficient criteria (e.g. H. L. A. Hart's 'contract', pp. 35, 237). He argues that the concept of morality is perennially debatable but not perennially flexible (ch. 7).
13. I omit from this paper detailed the consideration of the relation between the word 'art' and the concept of art. Although there is a close correspondence between one's concept of X, and the use one makes of 'X' in talking, writing, thinking, etc., the precise nature of this correspondence is a matter of debate. I suspect that talk about concepts can be translated successfully into talk about the use of words, but that is a subject for another paper. My argument in this paper is compatible with Weitz's view that concepts 'are not reducible to words, things, paraphrases, contextual definitions, uses of words, or abilities to yield words or perform other tasks'. See The Opening Mind, p. 17.
14. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics 1140a10, trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985), p. 153.
15. Weitz, The Opening Mind, p. 58.
16. See: Harold Osborne (ed.), The Oxford Companion to the Decorative Arts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 492.
17. See Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Cambridge: Harvard U.P., 1980),
18. and Hilary Putnam, Mind, Language and Reality: Philosophical Papers, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P.). Although Kripke and Putnam overestimate the scope and importance of the rigid designator model, I believe it can be defended as a useful model for a very narrow range of cases. Other critics have been more severe.
19. For a recent critique which grants their key assumptions but finds their conclusions flawed, see Chenyang Li, 'Natural Kinds: Direct Reference, Realism, and the Impossibility of Necessary A Posteriori Truth', Review of Metaphysics, vol. 47 (1993), pp. 261-276.
20. Davies, Definitions of Art, p. 179.
21. I have chosen this laborious wording and the tag 'deep-structure theories' in order to avoid the more familiar but muddled concept of natural kinds. Consequently, I do not endorse George Dickie's recent suggestion that art theories be classified as 'natural-kind theories' or 'cultural-kind theories'. See George Dickie, 'Art: Function or Procedure - Nature or Culture?', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 55 (1997), pp. 19-28.
22. Clive Bell, Art (London: Chatto & Windus, 1914);
23. Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. Norton, 1966), pp. 374-376;
24. 'Creative Writers and Day-dreaming', reprinted in Frank A. Tillman and Stephen M. Cahn, Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics: From Plato to Wittgenstein (New York: Harper & Row), pp. 441-449.
25. For a late version of Beardsley's theory, see Monroe Beardsley, 'An Aesthetic Definition of Art', in Hugh Curtler (ed.), What Is Art? (New York: Haven, 1983), pp. 15-29;
26. William Tolhurst, 'Toward an Aesthetic Account of the Nature of Art', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 42 (1984), pp. 261-269.
27. George Dickie, The Art Circle: A Theory of Art (New York Haven, 1984).
28. Dickie, The Art Circle, p. 111.
29. Noel Carroll, 'Art and Interaction', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 45 (1986), pp. 57-68;
30. Jerrold Levinson, 'Refining Art Historically', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 47 (1989), pp. 21-33;
31. James D. Carney, 'Defining Art Externally', British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 34 (1994), pp. 114-123;
32. Robert Stecker, 'Historical Functionalism or the Four Factor Theory', British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 34 (1994), pp. 255-265.
33. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1953), p. 32e.