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. ROBERT HOPKINS 86 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 p.233). However, there are some complications with Wollheim's formulation. It restricts its claim to judgements of (beliefs about) aesthetic value. It draws a contrast with moral matters that, we will later see, is not obviously happy. And it signals a concession on the question of 'transmissibility' that seems to require a parallel concession with respect to whether aesthetic beliefs must indeed be 'based on first-hand experience'-a concession Wollheim fails to make. Since I do not want at this stage to commit to any of these features, our discussion will be crisper if we begin with our own statement of the norm: Acquaintance Principle: S's belief on an aesthetic matter is legitimate only if S has experienced for herself the object that belief concerns. Clearly, there is at least one route to belief that the Principle accepts-experiencing for oneself the object judged. But which other routes, if any, does it permit, at least if we interpret it sympathetically? And which does it exclude? III. It is clear that, at least in many cases, the Principle will rule out forming belief by inference from O's other properties. Suppose that, although I've never seen some object, I know by other means that it has certain properties. My knowledge might concern properties such as colour and shape, which, while not themselves aesthetic, are (often) of relevance to aesthetic features. Or it might concern properties that are themselves aesthetic, such as elegance or balance. Either way, the Principle decrees that I cannot legitimately infer on that basis that O has some other aesthetic property. Since I have not experienced O for myself, I haven't the right to the belief that pattern of inference purports to justify. If this claim is correct, it is significant. After all, for most properties of objects, inference is a perfectly acceptable way to come by knowledge of them. ROBERT HOPKINS 87 In effect, the Principle here excludes forming aesthetic belief by appeal to what Kant called 'Principles of Taste' (Kant §34). Kant thought of these as universal generalisations to the effect that anything F (where that is non-aesthetic) is G (an aesthetic property). 1 Later writers have refined the notion of a Principle of Taste, weakening it to the idea of a pro tanto link between properties, and specifying which sorts of properties stand in these relations (Beardsley 1962, Dickie 2006). But that weakening does not alter the antipathy between such generalizations and the Acquaintance Principle. They remain ways to reach conclusions about aesthetic properties without necessarily having experienced the object for oneself and, as such, they remain beyond the boundary the Principle sets. As the Acquaintance Principle stands, there are appeals to Principles of Taste that pass it. Consider a case in which, although I draw an aesthetic conclusion from a Principle of Taste, my knowledge of the properties of O that figure in the premises was acquired in experience of O. Here the letter of the Acquaintance Principle is met-I have experienced O for myself. Surely its spirit, however, is not. The problem is that, while the Acquaintance Principle only frames a necessary condition on aesthetic belief, it is presumably a condition intended to reflect some further requirement: that one sees for oneself that the belief is true. It seems, then, that we should strengthen our formulation: Strengthened Acquaintance Principle: S's belief on an aesthetic matter is legitimate only if S has experienced for herself the object that belief concerns, and on that basis grasps that the belief is true. Strengthened or not, antipathy to Principles of Taste is only part of the import of the Acquaintance Principle hereabouts. For the Principle is equally opposed to methods other than inference for reaching an aesthetic conclusion on the basis of knowledge of O's other properties. Suppose that we agree with Sibley (1959, 1965) that one reason why appeal to Principles of Taste fails to legitimate aesthetic belief is that aesthetic judgement cannot be reduced to the application of rules, but rather requires the exercise of 'taste'. Then it ought in principle to be possible, given sufficient knowledge of O's other properties, to exercise one's 'taste' to come to know some aspect of its aesthetic 1 In fact, Kant restricted the latter property to beauty. ROBERT HOPKINS 88 character. And this ought to be possible however one has come to know those other properties-including by means other than experiencing O for oneself. (Perhaps one has instead been given a comprehensive description of them. Sibley's worry was that descriptions are always too general to capture the details on which aesthetic properties depend, but we can tailor the terms to the specific properties involved in the case.) Since ex hypothesi O has not been experienced, the Principle excludes such exercises of 'taste' as routes to aesthetic belief. They fail to count for much the same reason that blocked the appeal to Principles of Taste, even though here no such Principles figure. As a final thought on these matters, note that the Principle cannot plausibly exclude absolutely all inference. As has often been remarked, if I know that two things are perfect doubles, I can, for at least some aesthetic properties, infer that one of them enjoys those features on the grounds that the other does. This may not be true for every aesthetic property, since some are such that even perfect doubles can differ with respect to them (Goodman 1968 ch.3, Walton 1970). But it will be true for others. Elegance, harmoniousness, or beauty are examples. At least some aesthetic properties depend only on aspects of O's appearance, so that if something matches O perfectly in respect of appearance, it simply must match it in respect of those aesthetic properties too. The point generalises beyond cases of perfect doubles. Since no aesthetic property depends on every property of an object, it should always in principle be possible to find (and to know one has found) another object that shares all the relevant properties, such that if the one has aesthetic feature F, so does the other. IV. Another source of aesthetic belief that the Principle excludes is the testimony of others. In non-aesthetic matters, we get a good number of our beliefs this way. Think, for instance, of your knowledge of geography or history; or of many of the details of your friends' lives. By 'testimony' I have in mind the pure case, where we learn that p by someone telling us that p. I am not thinking of the more complex cases in which our informant backs up her claim by offering us her reasons for it. Although the matter is controversial, at least some have agreed with Wollheim that testimony is not a legitimate source of aesthetic belief. Kant was certainly sympathetic to this thought, and I think he ROBERT HOPKINS 89 was right to be (Hopkins 2000). One might deny the legitimacy of relying on aesthetic testimony without holding the Acquaintance Principle. For one thing, resistance to testimony may not be unique to aesthetic matters. Many have thought that moral beliefs too cannot legitimately be adopted in this way (Hopkins 2007). Since, as Wollheim himself notes, the Principle is hardly tempting in moral matters, it is unclear that the failure of testimony and being governed by the Principle go hand in hand. Nonetheless, the Principle does offer one way to integrate the failure of aesthetic testimony into a wider epistemology of the aesthetic. Those pessimistic about such testimony need at least to consider whether the Principle gets that wider epistemology right. Note that reliance on testimony is a possible source of aesthetic belief distinct from any considered above. We pondered the possibility that Sibleyan taste be allowed to operate on a description of O's non-aesthetic properties. That case might involve the acquisition by testimony of some beliefs, but precisely not the aesthetic beliefs that are now in question-in the earlier example, taste is our route to those. Nor does reliance on testimony amount to inference from knowledge of O's other properties. It is moot whether inference plays any role in our acquiring knowledge from testimony. But, whether it does or not, it is not inference from the other properties of the object judged. Rather, if we infer to the belief at all, we do so from such factors as the reliability of our informant on such topics, and the strength of any incentive she may have to mislead us. 2 If the Acquaintance Principle excludes both reliance on testimony and reliance on inference, one might wonder what sense it can make of the role of the critic. Critics cannot, it seems, be those with specialized knowledge of the Principles of Taste underpinning our judgements, since there is nothing for such Principles to do. And critics cannot be those issuing authoritative judgements to guide the rest of us, since no one should take her aesthetic belief on trust from another. What, then, do critics do? There is an answer, familiar from the tradition of those who have denied Principles of Taste. 2 These comments suffice to distinguish the case of testimony from another that is sometimes cited as counter-example to the Acquaintance Principle: one in which one infers to O's possessing certain aesthetic properties from its effect on others. We might, for instance, form the belief that Helen of Troy was beautiful on the basis of the passions she aroused. This is not testimony, not even if testimony does work through inference. For we do not infer to her beauty on the basis of what others say, but on the basis of what she led them to do and feel. Nor is it a case of inference from a Principle of Taste. Such Principles don't appeal to effects on others, but to the co-instantiation of the relevant aesthetic property with other properties, aesthetic or otherwise. ROBERT HOPKINS 90 Critics are those skilled at bringing us to see for ourselves the truth of the aesthetic claims they make (Isenberg 1949; Sibley 1959, 1965, 1974; Mothersill 1984). This can hardly be the last word on the matter. For as it stands the reply does nothing to make room for the idea, dear to defenders of Principles of Taste, that criticism is a rational activity, one governed by reason. It is a significant question whether the reply can be expanded to accommodate that thought (Hopkins 2006). But, whether it can or not, defenders of the Acquaintance Principle are not left in the embarrassing position of having to treat all critical talk as mere bluster. V. So much for the major exclusions the Principle imposes. What of the positive side? What does it allow, or what should it allow if we try to stick with its spirit while making concessions where necessary? As noted, the Principle treats experience of the object judged as the central legitimate source of aesthetic belief. All will agree that this is the canonical route to such belief. The Principle goes much farther, treating it (at least until concessions are forced) as the only such route. However, even here, the Principle faces questions. How are we to construe 'experience' so that it covers the full range of objects of aesthetic interest? In particular, how are we to understand it so as to allow the Principle to govern our engagement with literature? At the least, it seems that 'experience' cannot mean 'perceptual experience'. For, while we usually access literature via our senses, their role there is far less central than in the case of the musical or visual arts. It is not even clear that literature must, in principle, be so accessed-might I not compose a poem in my head, and later enjoy it in recollection? However, while it is an awkward question how to construe 'experience' so as to give the Principle both plausibility and the right scope, I will set it aside. I want to concentrate on some more straightforward potential concessions. VI. At least for those aesthetic properties that can be appreciated visually, one possible method for finding out about them is to look at a picture of the object in question. This won't work for every visually accessible aesthetic feature, but it certainly seems to work ROBERT HOPKINS 91 for some. Consider the special case of pictures of pictures. While much of Cezanne's intensity is lost in reproduction, the blandness of Hopper is perfectly preserved therein. A similar point holds for objects of aesthetic interest that are not themselves pictures. While the grandeur of a mountain scene is hard to capture pictorially, there are many things- buildings, other landscapes, cars, clothes and people-that we take ourselves to know to be beautiful, clumsy or striking even though we have only seen pictures of them. As formulated, the Acquaintance Principle threatens to force us to abandon these aesthetic beliefs. Since we have not seen these items for ourselves, we have no right to hold beliefs about their aesthetic aspects. Forced to choose between the Principle and these beliefs, we may well prefer to modify the Principle. The pressure to modify here is distinct from any encountered above. Looking at pictures of things cannot be treated as a special form of reliance on testimony. I see nothing wrong with the idea that pictures can be vehicles of testimony, as can words. However, they do not testify to their object's aesthetic properties. A picture of a beautiful object is not the equivalent of a description asserting that it is lovely. The picture doesn't demand our agreement with the claim that the thing is beautiful, for it doesn't make that claim at all. Rather, it shows us the object's other properties, and thereby puts us in a position to judge the thing's beauty for ourselves. Hence if two disagree over the beauty of what is depicted, neither need take himself to be rejecting the content of the picture, rather than the judgement his companion made on that basis. Do pictures perhaps then play the role of more discreet descriptions, giving us knowledge of O's other properties, and allowing us on that basis to discover that it is beautiful, either by inference from general principles, or by non-rule bound exercise of Sibleyan taste? They do not. For pictures do not simply put us in a position to judge their objects' aesthetic qualities-they also allow us to savour them (Hopkins 1997). They allow not merely for the formation of aesthetic belief, but for the full-blooded reactions, be they affective, cognitive or whatever, which are, in the aesthetic case, the grounds for belief. The beauty of the Taj Mahal or of one of Elisabeth Vigée Lebrun's heroines is not merely there in pictures of them as something to be noted, it can be enjoyed. Since the process of forming a judgement, by rule-bound means or not, could not be all there is to the process of engaging with beauty and other aesthetic properties, we cannot reduce the ROBERT HOPKINS 92 role of pictures in our acquisition of aesthetic belief to that of mere sources of information. However, if we are looking to reduce the pictorial route to aesthetic belief to some other, there is an obvious strategy for the Acquaintance Principle to adopt. It should claim that to see a picture of O is simply a way to experience O for oneself. That keeps down the range of candidate methods for forming aesthetic belief in such a way as to render it unnecessary to modify the Principle. Unfortunately, this strategy is in the end no easier to run than the others. It is true, of course, that to see a picture of O, unlike reading a description of O, is to have a visual experience that in some way involves O. But it is quite another matter to claim, as Wollheim has done (Wollheim 2003), that it counts as a visual experience of O. It certainly need not do so in the sense that it counts as a perception of O. Walton argued for that claim where the picture in question is a photograph (Walton 1984). However, since photographs are not the only pictures that offer us ways to explore the aesthetic aspects of their objects, Walton's claim does not cover all the cases now before us. Nor can we interpret Wollheim's claim as saying that pictures give us illusions as of their objects-experiences that, while not counting as perceptions of O, nonetheless match the phenomenology of such perceptions. For that is simply untrue. Pictorial experience differs radically from face-to-face experience, and this is something Wollheim himself knew perfectly well. But in what sense, then, is it true to describe our experience of a picture of O as a form of experience of O? Until we are told, the strategy saves the Acquaintance Principle from modification only at the cost of rendering it obscure. We do better, I think, to acknowledge the differences between pictorial and direct experience, and to modify the Principle so as to allow for either. Should this concession extend beyond the visual case? Are there analogues of pictures for the other sense modalities? These would be representations, belonging to the broader family of icons/mimetic symbols, that offer a legitimate route to aesthetic belief, for aesthetic properties that cannot be appreciated visually. Although the question is interesting, I set it aside. We have forced a concession. We can worry another day about how extensive it should be. ROBERT HOPKINS 93 VII. The last method on our list is the use of the sensory imagination. If I can judge O's beauty (or clumsiness or harmony) in a picture of it, or in seeing it face-to-face, then why, one might wonder, should I not do so in visualizing it? After all, these are the three forms in which things can be presented visually: seeing, seeing pictures, and visual imagining. What the first two can do, one might suspect, so can the third. If so, another concession is in the offing. For it is clear that visual imagining is distinct from seeing. This is so even if we want to group them, along with pictorial seeing, in a wider class called 'visual experience'. Since our understanding of that wider class remains intuitive and vague, again we would do better to modify the Principle so as explicity to allow for imagining as a route to aesthetic belief. And this time the concession should extend readily to other modalities. For if I can judge the elegance of a face in visualizing it, surely I can equally judge the beauty of a melody in imagining how it would sound, and likewise for whatever aesthetic properties figure in the 'baser' senses. I am inclined to accept the concession thus pressed. In the past, I thought that visualizing was precisely on a par with pictorial seeing, in terms of the access it offers us to beauty and other aesthetic properties (Hopkins 1997, 1998). That is, visualizing offers a way to judge those properties, because it offers a way to savour them. Nowadays, I am much more sceptical about the latter claim. It is very easy to think of imagining as a perfect substitute for perception, at least in terms of its ability to elicit affect. However, I now think it a mistake to think of the two as equivalent in this way. In the perceptual case, affect is a response to what we perceive. In the imaginative case, affect, rather than being a response to what is imagined, is at least often also part of what we imagine. If this is true of the responses that constitute our savouring beauty and engaging with other aesthetic properties, then sensory imagining does not, after all, offer a new means by which we can savour the aesthetic aspect of things. Savouring does not occur, it is at most imagined as occurring. However, my change of heart on the issue of savouring leaves the issue of judging untouched. Even if we don't judge beauty (etc.) in imagining by savouring it, it doesn't follow that we don't judge it at all. And it seems we are indeed able to make such judgements. How else do we know how to decorate a room, which clothes to wear with ROBERT HOPKINS 94 others, or what to add to the mix to improve the music we are making? Of course, trial and error is sometimes an option. But sometimes it is not; and, even where it is, often it is not the method we use. In the absence of Principles of Taste to guide us, we have few resources beyond our own powers to summon the prospective combination imaginatively. Thus we need a second modification to the Acquaintance Principle. Incorporating the concession argued for in the last section and the earlier strengthening (§3) at the same time, the result should be something like this: Modified Strengthened Acquaintance Principle: S's belief on an aesthetic matter is legitimate only if (1) S has either (i) experienced for herself, (ii) seen a picture of, or (iii) sensorily imagined, the object that belief concerns and (2) grasps in experience (of the relevant form) that the belief is true. This still excludes a good deal: reliance on the testimony of others; inference from Principles of Taste (however one knows of the minor premises of such arguments); and exercises of Sibleyan taste, in cases where the role of (i), (ii) or (iii) is limited to giving one access to the properties that provide the basis for that exercise. VIII. Thus far I have considered how best to formulate the Principle, the obvious concessions to make to keep it plausible without abandoning its spirit, and which of the various candidate routes to aesthetic belief it lets in or keeps out. However, there is a deeper issue of interpretation we have yet to consider. The Acquaintance Principle is a norm governing the legitimate sources of aesthetic belief. But there are two quite different roles such a norm might play. Although those advocating the Principle have not noticed this distinction, which role they have in mind makes an enormous difference to their position. The Acquaintance Principle might be offered as a norm governing the epistemology of aesthetic belief. So read, it purports to govern which beliefs count as knowledge. ROBERT HOPKINS 95 'Legitimate belief', on this reading of the principle, is belief which meets a necessary condition on knowledge. Illegitimate belief is belief the source of which already prevents it from counting as knowledge, however other issues (such as its truth) come out. On this way of taking the Principle, in effect it claims that aesthetics is an area in which there are only rather limited routes to knowledge. Elsewhere, inference, reliance on testimony and the like can yield knowledge. Here, only one's own experience, in one of the three forms identified above, will do. The other sort of view gives the Principle a very different role. For all this position claims, aesthetics is an area in which the routes to knowledge are as various and as reliable as in any other. Testimony, for instance, can make knowledge available to one, whether the issue in question is aesthetic or otherwise. Not, of course, that that means that testimony can be a legitimate source of aesthetic belief. That it is not is, after all, one of the consequences of the Principle, and this position too is defined, in part, by its allegiance to the Principle. How can testimony be a source of knowledge without being a legitimate source of belief? It can only if the norms governing aesthetic belief govern more than simply its epistemology. The Principle, in particular, is a further norm, one that might be infringed even when the epistemology of the situation has worked out right. In effect, it tells one that, whatever the possible sources of aesthetic knowledge, only some of those sources are ones it is legitimate to exploit. We might think of these two approaches as differing over whether or not the Principle is an epistemic norm. However, in at least one respect that terminology is unhelpful. Whatever its role, the content of the Principle concerns legitimate belief-just look at any of the formulations above. That gives it some claim to be epistemic, whatever we intend for it. I think it more lucid to describe the two positions as differing over whether the Principle is a norm of Availability or a norm of Use. For they differ over whether the Principle tells us which methods for forming aesthetic belief make knowledge available, or which methods, of those that make knowledge available, are ones we may use in forming aesthetic belief. Note that the view on which the Principle is a norm of Use does not deny that legitimate aesthetic belief must have a chance of counting as knowledge. That is necessary to the belief's legitimacy, but not sufficient. Perhaps all this talk of ROBERT HOPKINS 96 'knowledge' will sound unappealingly cognitivist. Personally, I think knowledge comes cheap-we can use the notion without undertaking any significant commitments on the metaphysics or semantics of aesthetic judgement. If so, the distinction as I have framed it should be available to all, whatever their meta-aesthetic views. But even if that is wrong, it should be relatively easy to draw the distinction within a subjectivist framework. It's obvious that there can be these two roles for the Principle. If your framework can't accommodate it straight off, you'd better hope it can with a little finesse. As I noted, no one has drawn the distinction between Availability and Use. Go back to the quotation from Wollheim from which we began. He simply does not tell us which role the Principle he articulates is to play. Is the 'must' equivalent to 'must, to have some chance to count as knowledge' or is it 'must, if it is to meet all the norms governing aesthetic belief'? Nor is Wollheim alone. Kant never formulates the Principle explicitly, but a good deal of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement is devoted to exploring very similar thoughts. Yet nothing he says commits him to advocating a position on Availability, rather than on Use. Perhaps it is natural to take those who did not explicitly draw the distinction to have Availability in mind. After all, the idea of norms governing knowledge is familiar; that of further norms governing belief rather less so. Nonetheless, it is surely an open question whether at every stage earlier writers kept their eye firmly on the epistemic ball. Not noting the alternative possibility, they may easily have slipped between discussing the Principle in one guise and in the other. The point is more than exegetical. Once one sees the distinction, one surely needs to reckon with it at every stage. Consider the debate over aesthetic testimony (Hopkins 2000; Meskin 2004). Those optimistic about the legitimacy of taking our aesthetic beliefs from others often ask how, if there's something to know in the aesthetic case, it could fail to be possible, at least in the right circumstances, to pass it on through testimony. That's a fair question, but one that only engages with the Principle as a norm of Availability. If we offer it as a norm of Use, the question is simply irrelevant. And the moral is surely more general. Arguments for or against the Acquaintance Principle will only succeed if they are directed at the right target. Now that we see there are two roles the Principle might play, we need to revisit the whole debate with that distinction firmly in mind. I will not attempt to settle here which role the Principle is best deployed in filling. I will not, ROBERT HOPKINS 97 therefore, retreat even in part from my promise not to defend the Principle. What I hope to have done is to persuade those interested in the Principle, be they hostile or sympathetic, to consider the horizons that open up, once we see that behind one formula two quite different positions lie. ROBERT HOPKINS 98 REFERENCES BEARDSLEY, M. 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