Thick concepts in aesthetic statements

ORLANDO, ELEONORA

Buenos Aires

Workshop; Emotions and the arts; 2019

IIF-SADAF

This paper is focused on the semantic analysis of thick aesthetic statements, namely, those containing predicates, such as ?balanced?, ?sombre?, ?shocking?, etc. The main thesis I want to defend is that thick aesthetic statements are context-sensitive in two senses: both their truth-conditional content and their expressive content depend on the adoption of an aesthetic perspective. This dual context-sensitivity is grounded on the fact that the thick predicates that they contain have in turn a dual meaning: a representational or truth-conditional meaning constituted by a particular kind of response-dependent gradable property and an expressive or non-truth-conditional meaning, constituted by an encoded global value or valence. Now, when thick predicates appear in aesthetic statements, both meaning components may vary according to the adoption of a certain aesthetic perspective: with regard to the representational component, the aesthetic perspective determines a criterion of appraisal that is constitutive of the represented property; as for the expressive component, it determines a global evaluative attitude, namely, the endorsement, reversal or specification of the corresponding predicate?s valence.