tailieunhanh - HOW TO FORM AESTHETIC BELIEF: INTERPRETING THE ACQUAINTANCE PRINCIPLE

The mask joins many things—earth, sky and sea, and it shows a person's relation to other beings—in fact, it is a composition of seal, human, fish, and bird. “Finding relations among discordant things,” Mr. Siegel said in a lecture on Hieronymus Bosch, “has been an instinct; it has also been a method in tendency to these combinations does exist, and present day art is in the midst of that tendency: to make the world even more coherent by being more audacious and finding that in discord there isn’t as much discord as one thought at firsta desire of man is to put some harmony into. | Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics Vol. 3 No. 3 December 2006 HOW to Form Aesthetic Belief Interpreting the Acquaintance principle Robert Hopkins university of Sheffield I. What are the legitimate sources of aesthetic belief Which methods for forming aesthetic belief are acceptable Although the question is rarely framed explicitly it is a familiar idea that there is something distinctive about aesthetic matters in this respect. crudely the thought is that the legitimate routes to belief are rather more limited in the aesthetic case than elsewhere. if so this might tell us something about the sorts of facts that aesthetic beliefs describe about the nature of our aesthetic judgements or about the responses that ground them. Getting the epistemology right here may help with the metaphysics the semantics or the philosophical psychology. investigating the legitimate sources of aesthetic belief may thus teach us something important about the aesthetic realm. I begin with a principle that seeks to identify which sources of aesthetic belief are legitimate and use it to review the possible candidates. I don t attempt to defend the principle merely to explore the shape it imposes on the phenomena. previous discussions of the principle have concentrated on only some of its implications and previous discussions of the possible candidate sources of aesthetic belief have overlooked some. In both respects i aim to be more comprehensive. Towards the close i suggest that the principle itself is interestingly ambiguous. There are two rather different positions it might be used to articulate. 85 Robert Hopkins II. The principle I discuss is more or less the one Richard Wollheim dubbed the Acquaintance Principle judgements of aesthetic value unlike judgements of moral knowledge must be based on first-hand experience of their objects and are not except within very narrow limits transmissible from one person to another 1980 . However there are some complications with Wollheim s .