Aesthetic Judgments, Evaluative Content, and (Hybrid) Expressivism
Aesthetic statements of the form ‘X is beautiful’ are evaluative; they indicate the speaker’s positive affective attitude regarding X. Why is this so? Is the evaluative content part of the truth conditions, or is it a pragmatic phenomenon (i.e. presupposition, implicature)? First, I argue that seman...
Saved in:
| Main Author: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Michigan Publishing
2024-07-01
|
| Series: | Ergo, An Open Access Journal of Philosophy |
| Online Access: | https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/6159/ |
| Tags: |
Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
|
| Summary: | Aesthetic statements of the form ‘X is beautiful’ are evaluative; they indicate the speaker’s positive affective attitude regarding X. Why is this so? Is the evaluative content part of the truth conditions, or is it a pragmatic phenomenon (i.e. presupposition, implicature)? First, I argue that semantic approaches as well as these pragmatic ones cannot satisfactorily explain the evaluativity of aesthetic statements. Second, I offer a positive proposal based on a speech-act theoretical version of hybrid expressivism, which states that, with the literal utterance of ‘X is beautiful’, we perform two illocutionary acts simultaneously, an assertive and an expressive one. I will specify this theory in detail and argue that it can satisfactorily account for the evaluative content of aesthetic statements. I will also discuss the advantages of the theory over other variants of expressivism in meta-aesthetics. |
|---|---|
| ISSN: | 2330-4014 |