Journal of Philosophy 108 (3):138-157 (2011)
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Abstract |
Is testimony a legitimate source of aesthetic belief? Can I, for instance, learn that a film is excellent on your say-so? Optimists say yes, pessimists no. But pessimism comes in two forms. One claims that testimony is not a legitimate source of aesthetic belief because it cannot yield aesthetic knowledge. The other accepts that testimony can be a source of aesthetic knowledge, yet insists that some further norm prohibits us from exploiting that resource. I argue that this second form of pessimism has certain advantages over the first. I offer two candidates for the non-epistemic norm that, on this view, stands in the way of our taking aesthetic testimony. And I argue that this form of pessimism meets a challenge to pessimism in general – that of explaining why, if testimony cannot be a legitimate source of aesthetic belief, we can nonetheless rightly rely on the aesthetic recommendations of others.
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Keywords | Testimony Aesthetics Norms of belief Acquaintance |
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ISBN(s) | 0022-362X |
DOI | 10.5840/jphil201110838 |
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Cognitive Islands and Runaway Echo Chambers: Problems for Epistemic Dependence on Experts.C. Thi Nguyen - 2020 - Synthese 197 (7):2803-2821.
Aesthetic Rationality.Keren Gorodeisky & Eric Marcus - 2018 - Journal of Philosophy 115 (3):113-140.
Trust and Sincerity in Art.C. Thi Nguyen - 2021 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 8:21-53.
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