¹ Of course the fact that a large majority of people judge themselves to be above average (even where, as with the majority of these studies, this is the median average) in a domain is, strictly speaking, consistent with only a minority of people in that domain overestimating themselves. There are, however, other results in the studies I cite – concerning for example the large number of individuals who rate themselves in the top 1% – which clearly support the claim that a majority are overestimating their own abilities.

² Cross, P., ‘Not Can but Will College Teachers be Improved?’, New Directions for Higher Education 17 (1977), 1–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³ Zuckerman, J. & Jost, J., ‘What Makes You Think You're So Popular? Self-Evaluation Maintenance and the Subjective Side of the “Friendship Paradox”’, Social Psychology Quarterly, 64 (2001), 207–223, 208CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴ For our tendency to overestimate our abilities as drivers see McCormick, I.; Walkey, F. & Green, D. ‘Comparative Perceptions of Driver Ability – A Confirmation and Expansion’, Accident Analysis & Prevention 18.3 (1986): 205–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar; as teachers see Cross op. cit.; as romantic partners see Buunk, B., ‘Perceived Superiority of One's own Relationship and Perceived Prevalence of Happy and Unhappy Relationships’, British Journal of Social Psychology 40 (2001), 565–574CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, for popularity see Zuckerman and Jost op. cit. For a general overview of these results see Dunning, D.; Heath, C. & Suls, J., ‘Flawed Self-assessment’, Psychological Sciences in the Public Interest 5 (2004), 69–106CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

⁵ The most significant challenge to these claims is the growing body of empirical evidence which seems to suggest that they do not hold cross-culturally but only apply to individuals from prototypically Western cultures. There is at present a lively debate as to whether the evidence in question really does support this contention (see Boucher, H., ‘Understanding Western-East Asian Differences and Similarities in Self-Enhancement’, Social and Personality Psychology Compass 4 (2010), 304–317CrossRefGoogle Scholar for an overview) but I am happy for those convinced by this challenge to take my conclusions in this paper to be restricted to individuals from prototypically Western cultures (this concession is not unduly costly since the claims regarding aesthetic judgement that I will discuss below are ones that have arisen in just such a cultural context).

⁶ For example that ethical evaluations of a work should have no bearing on our aesthetic assessment of it or that aesthetic judgements should not take into account any instrumental function of the object judged.

⁷ Kant, I., Critique of Judgement. Trans. Bernard, J. H. (New York: Dover, 1790/2005), 94Google Scholar.

⁸ In e.g. Robson, J., ‘Aesthetic Testimony’, Philosophy Compass 7 (2012), 1–10, 6–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar and ‘Aesthetic Testimony and the Norms of Belief Formation’, European Journal of Philosophy (forthcoming).

⁹ Although Kant focuses exclusively on judgements of beauty recent discussion has tended to apply the doctrine to aesthetic evaluations more generally. I will have something to say on this subject in §4 but for now I will uncritically follow this trend.

¹⁰ My own view is that while DA reflects something important concerning our reluctance to revise our aesthetic beliefs it overstates this reticence somewhat; expressing something like the policy we take ourselves to be adopting when we introspect with respect to our own belief revision practices in aesthetics. I argue elsewhere (J. Robson ‘A Social Epistemology of Aesthetics’ Synthese (forthcoming)) that by applying such processes we typically underestimate the extent to which our aesthetic beliefs are formed on the basis of testimony and I think – though I will not argue for the claim here – that something similar applies with respect to revising those beliefs on the basis of disagreement. I will, however, largely ignore these complications in what follows.

¹¹ Hopkins, R., ‘Kant, Quasi-Realism & the Autonomy of Aesthetic Judgement’, European Journal of Philosophy 9 (2001), 166–189, 169CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹² Gutting, G., Religious Belief and Religious Skepticism (University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), 83Google Scholar.

¹³ Kelly, T., ‘The Epistemic Significance of Disagreement’, Oxford Studies in Epistemology 1 (2005), 167–196, 168Google Scholar.

¹⁴ Thanks to Matthew Kieran for pushing me to clarify this point.

¹⁵ Though, of course, it is a central claim of this paper that we will not typically assess such matters impartially.

¹⁶ For more on the distinction between first order and higher order evidence see Kelly, T., ‘Peer Disagreement and Higher Order Evidence’. In Feldman, R. and Warfield, T. (eds.) Disagreement, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, 111–174)Google Scholar.

¹⁷ For discussion of this issue see e.g. Hopkins, R., ‘Critical Reasoning and Critical Perception’. In Kieran, M. & Lopes, D. McIver (eds.) Knowing Art: Essay in Aesthetics and Epistemology, (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006, 137–154)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁸ Christensen, D., ‘Epistemology of Disagreement: the Good News’, Philosophical Review 116 (2007), 187–217CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Elga, A., ‘Reflection and Disagreement,’ Nous 41 (2007), 478–502CrossRefGoogle Scholar for example would claim that we ought to give the judgements of each of our epistemic peers ‘equal weight’ to our own judgement while Kelly (2005, 2011) and Lackey, J., ‘A Justificationist View of Disagreement's Epistemic Significance’, Haddock, A., Millar, A., and Pritchard, D. (eds.) Social Epistemology, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, 298–325)CrossRefGoogle Scholar would, for different reasons, deny this.

¹⁹ Further complications arise if we introduce - as much of the peer disagreement literature does – considerations of degrees of belief or Bayesian credences.

²⁰ Hopkins 2001 op. cit. 169.

²¹ The discussion in Hopkins 2001 op.cit. 167–9) for example strongly suggest that he interprets the doctrine this way and McGonigal, A., ‘The Autonomy of Aesthetic Judgement’, British Journal of Aesthetics 46 (2006), 331–348, 331CrossRefGoogle Scholar explicitly endorses this interpretation (taking Hopkins, Kant et al as subscribing to it also).

²² Hopkins, R., ‘How to be a Pessimist about Aesthetic Testimony’, Journal of Philosophy 108 (2011), 138–157CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pettit, P., ‘The Possibility of Aesthetic Realism’. In Schaper, E. (ed.) Pleasure, Preference and Value, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, 17–38)Google Scholar; Scruton, R., Art and Imagination (London: Methuen, 1976)Google Scholar and Todd, C. S., ‘Quasi-realism, Acquaintance and the Normative Claims of Aesthetic Judgement’, British Journal of Aesthetics 44 (2004), 277–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²³ I assume throughout this paper that aesthetic judgements are beliefs but, so far as I can see, none of the arguments I put forward depend on this assumption.

²⁴ McGonigal op. cit. 338. McGonigal further concludes that I should come to believe that it is likely that things are as my opponent claims but I will not consider this claim here.

²⁵ Here and elsewhere I employ artificially precise estimates for the reliability of various belief forming processes but these are meant only as a convenient approximation for illustrative purposes rather than as a serious attempt to assess the reliability of the relevant faculties.

²⁶ For a sympathetic discussion of this methodology see White, R., ‘On Treating Oneself and Others as Thermometers’, Episteme 6 (2009), 233–250CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁷ Assuming that the reliability of my belief forming mechanisms in aesthetic cases (and thus the belief forming mechanisms of my peers) is above chance then an argument parallel to the one above can be offered. I will not consider cases where our reliability is at or below chance since my initial belief would clearly be unjustified in such cases.

²⁸ See Driver, J., ‘Autonomy and the Asymmetry Problem for Moral Expertise’, Philosophical Studies 128 (2006), 619–644CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Hills, A., The Beloved Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁹ My own preference would be to give a contextualist analysis of such claims e.g. we quite often ‘know’ such aesthetic claims by low standards but rarely do so by high standards.

³⁰ For discussion of such factors Irvin, S., ‘Is Aesthetic Experience Possible?’ In Currie, G., Kieran, M., Meskin, A. & Robson, J. (eds.) Philosophical Aesthetics and the Sciences of Mind, (Oxford University Press, forthcoming)Google Scholar, Kieran, M., ‘The Fragility of Aesthetic Knowledge: Aesthetic Psychology and Appreciative Virtues’. In Goldie, P. and Schellekens, E. (eds.), The Aesthetic Mind: Philosophy and Psychology, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, 32–43)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Lopes, D., ‘Feckless Reason’. In Currie, G., Kieran, M., Meskin, A. & Robson, J. (eds.) Philosophical Aesthetics and the Sciences of Mind, (Oxford University Press, forthcoming)Google Scholar, A. Meskin, ‘Aesthetic Unreliability’, (Manuscript) and Robson op. cit. Meskin, A.; Phelan, M.; Moore, M.; & Kieran, M., ‘Mere Exposure to Bad Art’, British Journal of Aesthetics 53 (2013), 139–164)CrossRefGoogle Scholar offer some reasons to think that our susceptibility to exposure effects may not generate sceptical consequences but even if their arguments are sound they only apply to one bias amongst many.

³¹ Ginsburgh, V., & van Ours, J., ‘Expert Opinion and Compensation: Evidence from a Musical Competition’, American Economic Review 93 (2003), 289–296CrossRefGoogle Scholar make the latter claim with regards to the rankings in a prestigious piano contest. Meskin et al op. cit. consider arguments for the former claim but do not endorse it.

³² Most comprehensively in Meskin op. cit.

³³ Meskin, A., ‘Solving the Puzzle of Aesthetic Testimony’. In Kieran, M. and Lopes, D. McIver (eds.) Knowing Art: Essay in Aesthetics and Epistemology, (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006, 109–125)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁴ Hume, D., ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, Essays: Moral, Political and Literary, (London: Oxford University Press, 1963, 167–182, 177)Google Scholar.

³⁵ Meskin op. cit. 123.

³⁶ I stipulated above that all those involved in the cases I present know their interlocutors to be their epistemic peers but this stipulation was made purely for ease of exposition and is, of course, unlikely to hold with respect to real-life cases for a variety of reasons.

³⁷ And closer to that which he later defends in Meskin (manuscript) op. cit.

³⁸ See e.g. Pronin, E.; Lin, D. & Ross, L., ‘The Bias Blind Spot: Perceptions of Bias in Self Versus Others’, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 28 (2002), 369–381CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁹ Further, as Kieran, M., ‘The Vice of Snobbery: Aesthetic Knowledge, Justification and Virtue in Art Appreciation’, Philosophical Quarterly 60 (2010), 243–263, 251CrossRefGoogle Scholar points out, those of us not inclined to such humility about, say, subatomic physics constantly run the risk of having our claims exposed as poppycock by a genuine expert whereas it is typically not so easy to provide a straightforward demonstration that an aesthetic claim is mistaken or poorly grounded.

⁴⁰ See Kruger, J., & Dunning, J., ‘Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 77 (1999), 1121–1134, 1123CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

⁴¹ For a fascinating and amusing discussion of the predicament of those in this condition see Elga, A., ‘On Overrating Oneself …and Knowing it’, Philosophical Studies 123 (2005), 115–124CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴² See e.g. Benight, C. & Bandura, A., ‘Social Cognitive Theory of Posttraumatic Recovery: The role of perceived self-efficacy’, Behaviour Research & Therapy 42 (2003), 1129–1148CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴³ Matthew Kieran has pointed out to me (in conversation) that a belief's having this kind of evolutionary etiology and thus being insensitive to evidence is consistent with its being eliminable by other means; perhaps paralleling the ways in which Kieran op. cit. suggests we eliminate problematic motivations such as snobbery. I tend to think that the beliefs in question are hard-wired to such an extent that these other methods will also prove ineffective but I will not argue for this further claim here since the beliefs in question displaying an unusual insensitivity to evidence is all that my argument requires.

⁴⁴ Of course in real-life cases our capacities as aesthetic judges are nowhere near this homogeneous (as I will discuss at length below) and, even restricting ourselves to the first-hand judgements of non-experts regarding complex artworks, our reliability is likely to vary greatly from case to case (though, if I am right, we non-experts will never be especially reliable in these kinds of cases).

⁴⁵ Though, of course, this is vastly more likely than with respect to ten systems which are 98% reliable.

⁴⁶ Doubtless the slot machine analogy oversimplifies things in various other respects but I will not explore these here. Again, see White op. cit.

⁴⁷ McGonigal op. cit. 338.

⁴⁸ Ibid., 331.

⁴⁹ Ibid., 345.

⁵⁰ Ibid., 346. Of course some may doubt whether there can be genuine disagreements between those with differing sensibilities but I will not pursue this issue here (for discussion see Baker, C., ‘Indexical Contextualism and the Challenges from Disagreement’, Philosophical Studies 157 (2012), 107–123CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

⁵¹ McGonigal op. cit. 345–346.

⁵² As Matthew Kieran has pointed out to me (in conversation) we can accept that people's aesthetic sensibilities differ in some sense without embracing relativism. I will, however, ignore this possibility in what follows since McGonigal's account clearly requires something like the relativistic framework he appeals to.

⁵³ McManus, C., ‘The Aesthetics of Simple Figures’, British Journal of Psychology 71 (1980), 505–524, 505CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

⁵⁴ Although such a view could conceivably be proposed, perhaps paralleling the colour-relationist view in Cohen, J., ‘Color Properties and Color Ascriptions: A Relationalist Manifesto’, The Philosophical Review 113 (2004), 451–506CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁵ Assuming we are not also relativists about e.g. colour.

⁵⁶ McGonigal op. cit. 345.

⁵⁷ See e.g. Ibid., 340.

⁵⁸ For arguments to this effect see Shelley, J., ‘The Problem of Non-perceptual Art’, British Journal of aesthetics 43 (2003), 363–378CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁹ See Walton, K., ‘Categories of Art’, The Philosophical Review 79 (1970), 334–367CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁰ Though we may, perhaps, do so a little more often with works of mass art of the kind discussed in Carroll, N., A Philosophy of Mass Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶¹ The two are by no means intended to be exhaustive.

⁶² See Kieran op. cit. for a discussion of such factors.

⁶³ I owe this point to Matthew Kieran.

⁶⁴ Though see Irvin, S., ‘Forgery and the Corruption of Aesthetic Understanding’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 37 (2007), 283–304, 284CrossRefGoogle Scholar for reasons to think that such ‘bootstrapping’ methods may not be so problematic after all.

⁶⁵ For some excellent general tips for a non-expert seeking to identify experts see Goldman, A. I., ‘Experts: Which ones should you Trust?’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 63 (2001), 85–110CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁶ Work on this paper was supported by a generous grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the United Kingdom. Earlier versions of the paper were presented at the work in progress seminar at the University of Nottingham and the Centre for Aesthetics at the University of Leeds. I offer my thanks to the audiences at those meetings for useful feedback and special thanks to Carl Baker, Greg Currie, Matthew Kieran, Gerald Lang, Aaron Meskin and Margaret Moore.