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Tales of the ineffable: crafting concepts in aesthetic experience

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Abstract

Lehrer has argued that in having an aesthetic experience of an art work we come to have ineffable knowledge of what the art object is like. This knowledge is made possible by our ability to conceptualize the art object by means of a process Lehrer calls, “exemplarization”, that involves using an experience to craft a general representation of that very experience. I suggest that exemplar concepts function as vehicles of ineffable representation only if they have two features: (i) they are directly referential concepts; and (ii) they are what I call, “lucid concepts.”

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Notes

  1. Professor Lehrer does not make use of this form of words himself. His standard term for the product of exemplarization is “exemplar”.

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Correspondence to Joseph Thomas Tolliver.

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Tolliver, J.T. Tales of the ineffable: crafting concepts in aesthetic experience. Philos Stud 161, 153–162 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-9944-1

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