IIF   26912
INSTITUTO DE INVESTIGACIONES FILOSOFICAS
Unidad Ejecutora - UE
congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
Thick Aesthetic Statements, Context Sensitivity and Expressive Meaning
Autor/es:
ORLANDO, ELEONORA
Lugar:
Villa General Belgrano
Reunión:
Workshop; VIII Workshop on Language, Cognition, and Context; 2019
Institución organizadora:
Facultad de Filosofía y Humanidades, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba
Resumen:
This paper is focused on the semantic analysis of thick aesthetic statements, namely, those containing predicates, such as ?balanced?, ?sombre?, ?shocking?, etc. These predicates have been traditionally supposed to be thick in the sense of encompassing both a descriptive and an evaluative component. In that regard, they are usually contrasted with predicates such as ?beautiful? and ?aesthetically good?, which are thought to be thin or purely evaluative. Accordingly, the thick aesthetic statements made by means of sentences like(1) Interior and Interiority is balanced.(2) Guernica is sombre.(3) Brillo Box is shocking. are different from the thin ones made in using sentences like(4) Guernica is beautiful.(5) Brillo Box is (aesthetically) good.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. In other words, the adoption of an aesthetic perspective plays an important semantic role concerning thick aesthetic statements by determining both the representational and the expressive meanings of the thick predicates they contain. This may lead one to think that thick aesthetic statements can be interpreted along semantic relativist lines, a possibility that is briefly examined in the Appendix. It is convenient to make it explicit that the proposal belongs in the dualist approach inspired by Kaplan (1999), according to which certain expressions require a dualist or hybrid semantics, committed to the existence of two meaning dimensions: a representational or truth-conditional meaning, making a contribution to the truth-conditions of the statements in which they occur, and an expressive or non-truth-conditional meaning, making a contribution to their expressive correctness-conditions. Now, as stated, I intend to extend this approach so as to cover thick predicates, since, in as far as they are partly evaluative or not purely descriptive, they can be considered to be expressively loaded words. So, a thick aesthetic statement will have not only a truth-condition, namely, a set of possible worlds/a world-condition in which it is true, but also an expressive-correctness condition, that is, a set of contexts in which it is expressively correct. As also stated, the notion of aesthetic perspective will play a role in specifying both kinds of conditions (in selecting both the possible worlds/the world-condition in which it is true and the contexts in which it is expressively correct), by providing an appraisal criterion and a global evaluative attitude fixing, respectively, the representational and the expressive meanings of the thick predicate at stake. The dual context-sensitivity of thick aesthetic statements will be thus based on the context-dependence of the two meanings of the thick predicates they contain.