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A social epistemology of aesthetics: belief polarization, echo chambers and aesthetic judgement

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Abstract

How do we form aesthetic judgements? And how should we do so? According to a very prominent tradition in aesthetics it would be wrong to form our aesthetic judgements about a particular object on the basis of anything other than first-hand acquaintance with the object itself (or some very close surrogate) and, in particular, it would be wrong to form such judgements merely on the basis of testimony. Further this tradition presupposes that our actual practice of forming aesthetic judgements typically meets, or at least approximates, this ideal. In this paper I target this descriptive claim and argue—by appeal to some empirical work concerning belief polarization and echo chambers in aesthetics—that our actual practice of forming aesthetic judgements is heavily dependent on social sources such as testimony. I then briefly consider what normative implications this descriptive claim may have.

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Notes

  1. Similar thoughts are expressed in Coady (1992: 6–14) and Hopkins (2011: 138).

  2. In this paper I will assume that aesthetic judgements (that is judgements of aesthetic or artistic value) are beliefs and that they are differentiated from other judgements by their content rather than by some special mode of judging. For defences of these claims see Hopkins (2011: 140–141), Meskin (2004: 69) and Livingston (2003: 267–271).

  3. Hopkins (2007: 611) introduces ‘optimism’ and ‘pessimism’ as terms for normative positions regarding moral testimony.

  4. Defences of normative pessimism include Hopkins (2011) and Wollheim (1980: 233). Defences of normative optimism include Meskin (2004 and manuscript), Laetz (2008) and Robson (2013). For discussion of the descriptive view see Meskin (2004: 66) and Laetz (2008: 361–362).

  5. I borrow the term from Sperber (1990).

  6. This strikes me, for instance, as being the case with respect to the study by Ginsburgh and Ours (2003) which illustrates all of my key points with respect to echo chambers in aesthetics.

  7. Hopkins (2011: 139–142) appears to take appeals to such principles as constitutive of pessimism but I think this further claim is mistaken (for reasons outlined in Robson 2012: 2–3).

  8. Note that the Acquaintance Principle requires not only that individuals have first-hand experience of a work but that their judgements are based on that experience. In a number of the cases I will consider below subjects meet the first condition but fail to meet the second.

  9. McGrath (2011: 115) presents a parallel argument with respect to deference in the moral realm.

  10. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/mar/25/arts.artsnews.

  11. A sign proclaiming as much, accompanied by a dead shark formerly displayed in a London electronics shop, was prominently displayed in the Stuckist International Gallery.

  12. For detailed accounts of belief polarisation see Kelly (2008) and Lord et al. (1984).

  13. For a more complete description of the experimental set up see (Ibid. 340–344).

  14. Even the normative pessimist will typically allow that others praising a work can legitimately give me some-perhaps, as Hopkins (2011: 154) claims, only pro tempore-reason for thinking that it will be superior to a work which others have condemned.

  15. The fact that the highest and lowest ranked songs were downloaded most is significant since subjects tended to listen to many more songs than they downloaded and to give the songs they downloaded ratings (on a ‘love it’ to ‘hate it’ scale) which were significantly above average (Ibid. 345).

  16. For more detailed accounts see (Jamieson and Cappella (2008): 75–90) and Gilbert et al. (2009).

  17. All quotes from Bredius are taken from Werness (1983: 31).

  18. Something similar holds in other cases of artistic fakery; it was, for example, no coincidence that Max Harris was chosen as the recipient of the Ern Malley poems (see Heyward 1993: 10–27).

  19. Joseph Duveen quoted in Wynne (2006: 152).

  20. Similarly Harris’ initial praise of the Malley poems could hardly have been more unrestrained (see Heyward 1993: xvi).

  21. Kilbracken quoted in Werness (1983: 51).

  22. Nor a more modest version of descriptive pessimism which permits, as many versions of normative pessimism e.g. those of Hopkins (2011: 154) and Wollheim (1980: 233) do, some limited exceptions.

  23. Most of the literature (e.g. Loftus 1975) focuses on misinformation but, as Michaelian (2013) discusses at length, a parallel phenomenon arises with accurate testimonial inputs.

  24. Work on this paper was supported by a generous grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the United Kingdom. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the fourth Lund/Copenhagen Workshop in Social Epistemology and I offer my thanks to the audience at this meeting for their extremely helpful feedback. Special thanks go to Frank Zenker and Carlo Proietti for useful discussion (and exemplary organisation) at the workshop and for subsequent comments on later versions of the paper. Thanks also to Carl Baker, Greg Currie, Aaron Meskin and two anonymous referees.

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  1. University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK

    Jon Robson

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Robson, J. A social epistemology of aesthetics: belief polarization, echo chambers and aesthetic judgement. Synthese 191, 2513–2528 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0437-y

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