Thick Aesthetic Statements: A Dual Relativist Account

ORLANDO, ELEONORA

Buenos Aires

Workshop; Workshop on Philosophy of Language and Metaphysics of Science; 2020

Sociedad Argentina de Análisis Filosófico

The aim of this talk is to evaluate the prospects for an aesthetically informed assessment-sensitive semantic account of thick aesthetic predicates (TAPs) such as ?balanced?, ?unified?, ?sombre?, and ?shocking?. I distinguish two meaning dimensions concerning TAPs, truth-conditional and use-conditional or expressive, and provide a dualist semantics that posits assessment sensitivity at both levels. Then I evaluate the extent to which assessment sensitivity is an apt rendition of aesthetic discourse involving TAPs. I distinguish between experiential TAPs (?sombre?, ?shocking?) and theoretical TAPs (?unified?, ?balanced?), and argue that aesthetic disagreement provides evidence for a relativistic construal both at the truth-conditional and the expressive level for experiential TAPs, but not for theoretical TAPs. Thus, an upper bound is found on how much assessment sensitivity characterizes aesthetic discourse.