Art from a Wittgensteinian Perspective: Constitutive Norms in Context

Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 72 (1):67-82 (2014)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

This article offers a detailed textual reexamination of the ‘family resemblance’ passages to reconsider their implications for understanding art. The reassessment takes into account their broader context in the Philosophical Investigations, including the rule following considerations, and draws on a realist interpretive framework associated principally with the work of Cavell, Diamond, McDowell, and Putnam. Wittgensteinian “realism with a human face” helps us discern that the primary issue is not whether certain concepts are definable, posing a stark opposition between essentialism and its denial about kinds such as language or games. What is at issue is keeping uses of language in view in their variety and their broader life contexts. Focus on rules suggests more broadly that norms and values inhere in practices and play a constitutive role in determining the entities integral to those practices. From this perspective, a Wittgensteinian framework explains art as locally overlapping practices, each with their own constitutive norms and values for the works integral to them. What makes something art has normative force specific to a practice. This recognizes the historically contingent nature of art practices in a way that relational definitions or disjunctive ‘cluster’ explanations do not

Other Versions

No versions found

Similar books and articles

Danto and Wittgenstein: History and Essence.Sonia Sedivy - 2021 - In Lydia Goehr & Jonathan Gilmore (eds.), A Companion to Arthur C. Danto. Hoboken: Wiley. pp. 281–291.
Family resemblances, relationalism, and the meaning of 'art'.Daniel A. Kaufman - 2007 - British Journal of Aesthetics 47 (3):280-297.
Aesthetic Experience at the Borders of Art and Life: The Case of the Man in Gold.Richard Shusterman - 2021 - Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture 5 (2):103-111.
Art in an Expanded Field: Wittgenstein and Aesthetics.Nöel Carroll - 2012 - Nordic Journal of Aesthetics 23 (42):14-31.
Must Aesthetic Definitions of Art be Disjunctive?Jonathan Farrell - 2008 - American Society for Aesthetics Graduate E-Journal 1 (1):1-6.
Towards a Wittgensteinian Aesthetics. Wollheim and the Analysis of Aesthetic Practices.Giovanni Matteucci - 2013 - Aisthesis: Pratiche, Linguaggi E Saperi Dell’Estetico 6 (1):67-83.
Kaufman on art, family resemblances, and Wittgenstein.Ben Tilghman - 2008 - British Journal of Aesthetics 48 (1):86-88.
Relational Theories of Art: the History of an Error.A. Neill & A. Ridley - 2012 - British Journal of Aesthetics 52 (2):141-151.
What Makes a Kind an Artifact Kind?Tim Juvshik - 2025 - Synthese 205 (66):1-28.

Analytics

Added to PP
2014-02-16

Downloads
369 (#78,253)

6 months
135 (#36,197)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Sonia Sedivy
University of Toronto at Scarborough

References found in this work

The role of theory in aesthetics.Morris Weitz - 1956 - Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 15 (1):27-35.
Pattern and being.John Haugeland - 1993 - In Bo Dahlbom (ed.), Dennett and His Critics. Cambridge, Mass., USA: Wiley-Blackwell.

Add more references