A DISPOSITIONAL ACCOUNT OF AESTHETIC PROPERTIES

by

Elizabeth Ashley Zeron Compton February 23, 2012

A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of

the University at Buffalo, State University of New York in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the

degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Philosophy

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ii

Copyright by

Elizabeth Ashley Zeron Compton

2012

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my dissertation committee, Carolyn Korsmeyer, Neil Williams, and

Randall Dipert, for their inspiration, advice, and support, without which this dissertation would

not have been possible. Carolyn’s writing group and mentoring were especially critical in

getting the project off to a good start, and Neil’s long-distance phone conversations brought me

invaluable clarity in the later stages. I am indebted to Susan Callaway for organizing the faculty

writing retreats at the University of St. Thomas, and to Kimberly Eridon for her assistance in

editing the manuscript. My thanks also go to my husband, Paul Compton, for his editing

assistance, but more so for his faithful, loving support throughout my doctoral research, for

which I am grateful beyond measure. Finally, may all glory and praise be to God who blesses

beyond human wisdom or expectation, and has made everything beautiful in its time.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements iii Abstract vii Introduction 1

Backdrop: The Complexity of Aesthetic Responses and Judgments 3

My Approach: The Dispositional Model 6

The Scope and Plan of the Project 10

Chapter 1: Aesthetic Properties 12

1.1 A Functional Concept of Aesthetic Properties 12

1.2 Aesthetic Language and Sibley’s Aesthetic and Non-Aesthetic 16

1.3 Aesthetically-Relevant Properties: The Aesthetic Simpliciter and the Artistic 21

1.4 Objectivity and Realism 29

1.5 The Spectrum of Aesthetic Property Views 34

1.6 Supervenience and Emergence 43

1.7 Defending Aesthetic Property Realism 47

1.8 Emergence and Gestalt Properties 52

Chapter 2: A Theory of Powers and Dispositions 56

2.1 Recognizing Dispositional Language 56

2.2 Two Caveats Regarding Isomorphism 58

2.3 Recognizing Causal Powers at Work 61

2.4 A Model for Powers at Work 65

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2.4.1 Manifestations 65

2.4.2 Conditions for Manifestation 67

2.5 The Conditional Analysis 69

2.6 The Brentano Thesis and Physical Intentionality 73

2.6.1 Directedness: The First Mark of Intentionality 74

2.6.2 The Possibility of Inexistent Objects and Indeterminate Objects as Marks of

Intentionality 76

2.6.3 Linguistic Characteristics as a Mark of Intentionality 79

2.7 A Worry Regarding Animism and Panpsychism 82

2.8 Directedness, Reciprocity, and the Causal Essence of Powers 85

2.9 Conclusion 89

Chapter 3: Response-Dependence and Projectivism 91

3.1 Motivations For a Realist Account of Sensory Properties 92

3.2 The Prima Facie Appeal of Projectivism 94

3.3 Conceptual Response-Dependence 99

3.4 Responses, Conditions, and Objectivity 104

3.5 Ontological Response Dependence 107

3.6 Zangwill’s Non-Realist Aesthetic Response-Dependence 110

3.7 Two Versions of the Primary/Secondary Quality Distinction 111

3.8 Are Sense-Perceptible Properties Relative? 113

3.9 Are Sense-Perceptible Property Dispositions Relations? 115

3.10 Zangwill’s Argument From the Possibility of Divergence 119

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Chapter 4: Colors and Other Sense-Perceptible Properties 123

4.1 Colors and Chromatic Phenomenal Properties 123

4.2 Manifest Colors 126

4.3 The Model Applied to Color 129

4.4 Paradigmatic Colors 131

4.5 Standard Viewing Conditions and the Question of Subjectivity 133

4.6 Colors: Dispositional, Objective, and Irreducible 136

4.7 Other Modes of Sense-Perception 138

4.8 Conflation of Powers and Manifestations in Sense-Perceptible Properties 141

4.9 Revisiting Conditions and Subjectivity 143

Chapter 5: The Dispositional Account of Aesthetic Properties 145

5.1 Aesthetic Properties: A Case Study 145

5.2 Aesthetic Property Manifestations and Abundance 151

5.3 A Rival Account: Ways of Appearing 157

5.4 Revelation and Manifest Properties 165

5.5 Can the Dispositional and Ways of Appearing Models be Reconciled? 173

5.6 Reasons to Prefer a Dispositional Account 177

Conclusion 184

Bibliography 190

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Abstract

Delicacy, vibrancy, garishness, and other aesthetic properties feature prominently in

our aesthetic experiences, and we intuitively speak of them as if they were real properties of

the objects of those experiences. We also frequently disagree in our aesthetic judgments,

however, leading to worries about subjectivism. I argue that Aesthetic properties are

dispositions and genuine properties of objects in the external world in virtue of which those

objects cause aesthetic experiences for humans under the right conditions. Aesthetic

dispositions are defined by their manifestations (the characteristic qualities they impart to

aesthetic experience), by reference to which we identify and classify them. They are,

nevertheless, properties of objects rather than observers; as such, they serve an explanatory

role with reference to aesthetic experience, serve as truthmakers for aesthetic claims, and

underwrite the normative elements of aesthetic discourse.

Given the inescapable subjective elements in human aesthetic experience, some have

concluded that if aesthetic properties can be said to exist at all, they depend for their

existence on observers. On the contrary, I argue that aesthetic properties depend for their

existence solely on the objects in the external world that instantiate them. I support this

claim by arguing for a dispositional model where the aesthetic disposition is carefully

distinguished from its manifestation (the aesthetic response it causes) and the conditions for

manifestation (a qualified observer in appropriate background conditions). Aesthetic

properties, like non-aesthetic sense-perceptible properties such as colors and sounds, are

dispositions whose conditions for manifestation require the presence of a qualified observer.

The qualified observer, in turn, possesses dispositions to respond to such properties, such as

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normal color vision or hearing in the case of sense-perceptible properties, and aesthetic taste

(in Frank Sibley's sense) in the case of aesthetic properties. These observer dispositions form

reciprocal pairs with the dispositions of the objects of sense or aesthetic perception, where

each meets the conditions of manifestation for the other, and a joint manifestation event

occurs.

I contend that differences in aesthetic judgment regarding the (descriptive) aesthetic

character of an artwork or other object can in many cases be resolved by pointing to

differences in observers or conditions of observation. In other cases, however, we have little

reason to privilege one kind of response over another, and I conclude that objects may well

have multiple sets of aesthetic dispositions, only some of which will manifest to any given

observer. These aesthetic properties may even manifest themselves in nearly opposite sorts

of responses; I conclude that this does not defeat a realism about aesthetic properties because

it is possible for an object to have dispositions to bring about opposing states, relative to the

conditions that obtain. This explains aesthetic differences across times and cultures, and

allows me to maintain that aesthetic properties are genuine features of objects in the world.

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Introduction

What sort of thing is an aesthetic property? Answers to this question could range from an

overt realism at one extreme—where aesthetic properties are thought to be objective features of

things in the external world, definable without any reference to human responses—to a

projectivist error theory at the other extreme, where they are held to be mere projections of

perceivers’ responses. An overt realist would claim that aesthetic properties are mind-

independent and can be understood objectively; like triangularity or crystallinity, they are taken

to be features of the world that do not depend on perceivers for their existence or nature. The

second sort of position denies this claim, as dependence on perceivers’ responses would preclude

mind-independence and result in subjectivity. Neither extreme is satisfactory; however, they do

not completely satisfy the criteria that a suitable account of aesthetic properties should: first, it

must incorporate human experience into our understanding of what aesthetic properties are; and

second, it must explain why some judgments about aesthetic properties are more apt than others.

The answer, I argue, lies somewhere in the middle.

The first criterion, that an account of aesthetic properties should refer to human

experience, is important because our explanations of what it means to be beautiful, elegant,

melancholy or vibrant simply cannot be given without reference to our aesthetic responses. It is

telling, I think, that in the modern, Western tradition that founds contemporary aesthetics, beauty

was first analyzed as a species of pleasure enjoyed in our aesthetic experience. While the

contemporary literature often treats beauty as one of many properties of an aesthetic object to

which we respond with pleasure, in 18th-century subjectivist views, the beauty was the

perceiver’s response itself. The nature of an aesthetic property thus looks to be significantly

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different from that of such paradigmatic mind-independent properties as shape or structural

composition.

The second criterion is important because it represents a basic, commonsense intuition

apparent in our aesthetic discourse: some aesthetic judgments are apt, and some are not. It is this

latter fact, that some aesthetic judgments are not apt, that explains and justifies our surprise and

discomfort when we discover that we disagree with the aesthetic judgments of others. Hume

thus observed that it is natural for us to seek a standard of taste, in order to reconcile

disagreements in aesthetic judgment.1 A successful account of aesthetic experience should

underwrite these normative elements of aesthetic discourse.

A response-dependence account of aesthetic properties from the projectivist end of the

spectrum gives human aesthetic experience a very significant role in our understanding of what it

means for an artwork to be beautiful, elegant, melancholy, balanced, or vibrant. It goes too far,

however, if it reduces aesthetic properties to the mere projection of observers’ responses onto

objects, for how can this explain the fact that some aesthetic judgments are more apt than

others? Conversely, an overtly realist account of aesthetic properties can provide a strong basis

for explaining normativity—if beauty, elegance, melancholy, or vibrancy are real features of the

world which objects either do or do not possess, then it is easy to explain what makes judgments

about such properties apt. But such an overtly realist account (which few, if any, would actually

hold) makes no reference to human aesthetic experiences, and so fails on the first criterion.

My account of aesthetic properties treats them as dispositional properties of aesthetic

objects, that is, properties in virtue of which they cause and shape the character of our aesthetic

experiences. These causal powers, I shall argue, are rooted in the sense-perceptible properties of

1 David Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 1757.

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the objects—their colors, sounds, textures, flavors, and so on. They exist in objects even when

no perceiver is present to experience them, but when a perceiver is present and the conditions are

right, they manifest themselves by causing the relevant sort of experience. This dispositional

account thus occupies the middle ground between the two extremes I have described, as it

acknowledges the importance of human responses in the formation of our aesthetic concepts,

while at the same time it grounds the aptness (or inaptness) of aesthetic judgments in objective

properties of the aesthetic objects. Accordingly, it satisfies both of the criteria stated above,

unlike overt realism and projectivist response-dependence.

Backdrop: The Complexity of Aesthetic Responses and Judgments

While our everyday aesthetic experience may incline us towards an overt realism—we

tend to assume that the properties we experience objects as having are simply there for our

enjoyment—projectivism has its appeal as well. Accounting for differences in aesthetic

judgments is a difficult matter, and it is certainly tempting to fall back on a subjective view of

aesthetic properties to explain those differences. A single artwork can generate many different

responses, with many factors coming into play in determining those responses. Consider, for

instance, the 18th century Japanese artist Ogata Korin’s Eight-Planked Bridge, consisting of a

pair of painted screens, which depict a stylized bridge surrounded by clumps of irises. As I view

the screens, I enjoy the rich blues and greens in the irises, and the dynamic lines and contrast

created by the overall composition, and I judge the piece to be simply but dramatically

composed, vibrant, and full of sensuous beauty.2 My personal aesthetic experience and response

2 "Ogata Korin: Eight-Planked Bridge (Yatsuhashi) (53.7.1-2)". In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/53.7.1-2 (October 2006).

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to the piece, however, is only one of many possibilities; the counterfactuals generated by an

example like this are rich and complex.

Had the piece been differently composed or colored, for instance, it may have had an

overall bland or mundane quality, or have been less beautiful. If I had encountered the screens in

a different environment—say, presented in a gilded Western-style frame, under fluorescent

lighting, or against a distractingly paisley-papered wall in someone’s home instead of the

carefully lit, neutral surfaces of the art gallery—then I might have failed to recognize the beauty

of its simple composition. If I had been distracted by noises around me, suffering from a

headache, or otherwise inattentive to the piece, I might have taken its stylized depiction for

austerity. Had I been differently educated, I might have failed to recognize the visual drama

generated by the piece's composition, or I might have further noticed that it was particularly

dramatic for its genre. I might even have understood the significance of the piece as an

illustration of a Japanese literary classic dealing with love and journeying, and the symbolic use

of the iris.

Indeed, I am inclined to agree with Ellen Dissanayake’s claim that our aesthetic

responses demonstrate two “tiers” of accomplishment, an aesthetic sensitivity displayed in our

reactions to elementary sensory psycho-physiological stimuli, and a “predominantly cognitive

ability to appreciate the ways in which these stimuli are combined with each other and with other

humanly-significant features and presented as works of art.” The former, she thinks, is a

universal human ability derived from our common evolutionary heritage, while the latter ability

is typically the result of experience and familiarity with the tradition in which a work of art is

situated.3 Due to my lack of experience and understanding of Japanese artistic traditions, I

3 Ellen Dissanayake, “Aesthetic Experience and Human Evolution,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 41, Winter 1982, 145-155, p. 153.

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would have to say that my first encounter was marked more by the more basic sort of aesthetic

sensitivity, accompanied by a certain sense of novelty; later encounters with the piece were

informed by a growing understanding of its cultural context, enabling a greater appreciation of

its artistic merits.

Judgments regarding artistic or aesthetic merit are still another complication in our

responses to objects such as the pair of screens. Some aesthetic language is largely substantive,

or descriptive, such as my judgment that the screen was “simply but dramatically composed,”

while other language like “full of sensuous beauty” is much more verdictive or evaluative in

nature. Some aesthetic terms seem to have both descriptive and evaluative components:

“vibrant" has a more positive evaluative connotation than other descriptions I could have chosen,

such as the negative “garish,” or a more neutral “pulsing with activity.” While I am inclined to

follow Zangwill and Levinson in emphasizing the substantive/descriptive aspects of aesthetic

discourse apparent in our ascription of aesthetic properties, others have argued that what is

descriptive in an aesthetic term cannot be isolated from the evaluative/verdictive.

As the Eight-Planked Bridge example demonstrates, many different factors affect our

perceptions of and responses to even a single artwork. The layers of complexity included

representation in the depiction of the bridge and flowers, expression in the dramatic qualities of

the composition, a positive evaluation of the sensuous beauty of the work, a heightened interest

and sense of novelty due to my limited encounters with Japanese screens, and a growing

appreciation of the literary reference, genre-positioning, and cultural background of the piece.

Some of these factors are internal to the work, some internal to us, and some are contributed by

the surrounding conditions. The dispositional account of aesthetic properties responds to the

challenge of this complexity by carefully delineating three metaphysical components and their

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relationships in the dispositional model: First, there is the viewer with her dispositions to

perceive aesthetic properties, second, the aesthetic object and its dispositions to produce aesthetic

responses, and third, the conditions of manifestation for those two sets of dispositions. My

project is to give a clear account of the relationships between our aesthetic responses and the

aesthetic properties of the objects we experience, demonstrating the sense in which aesthetic

properties are real features of the world, external to our minds and thus objective.

My Approach: The Dispositional Model

The relationship between aesthetic properties and human responses is, I believe, well

suited to a dispositional analysis. In the most general sense, a disposition is a capacity or

tendency of an object to behave in a certain manner under certain conditions. How dispositions

are treated, beyond this, varies from theory to theory. On some views they are reduced to events

governed by natural laws, and nothing more. On other views they are treated as genuine

properties of objects whose essence is a directedness towards their defining manifestation events,

waiting only for the right conditions to unleash their power.4 It is this latter treatment, which

grounds observable tendencies and capacities in the genuine properties of objects, that will serve

to focus my account of aesthetic properties.

The model accompanying this analysis can be seen in the example of the property

fragility: an object is fragile if it has some property in virtue of which it breaks in conditions such

as smashing or dropping. Fragility is the observable disposition, and is grounded in a power of

the object that manifests itself definitively in breaking events under appropriate conditions. Note

that a fragile object has the property of fragility regardless of whether it actually breaks: a

4 See, for instance, D. H. Mellor (1974), Sidney Shoemaker (1980), and George Molnar (2003).

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wineglass can justifiably be said to be fragile without ever being dropped or smashed. Though

we are often prone to confusing dispositions with their manifestations, being fragile is not the

same as breaking—the former is a property, while the latter is an event. The third distinct

element in the model is the set of conditions for manifestation, which should also not be

confused with the disposition or manifestation.

Aesthetic properties, I shall suggest, are dispositional properties of the objects to which

they belong. They are not always manifested: we would not want to say that every encounter

with a work of art, for instance, will lead to a full awareness of all of its aesthetic properties, for

sometimes the lighting is poor, or the subject is distracted. Nor would we want to say that they

only exist when they are perceived, for surely the screen does not lose its vibrancy or beauty

when wrapped and packed for shipping, just because no one can see it. Rather, we should say

that the manifestations of aesthetic properties depend on the presence of a perceiver in the right

conditions.

Unsurprisingly enough, the dispositions of the perceivers themselves are conditions for

the manifestation of aesthetic properties. Poor eyesight, for instance, can block the manifestation

of aesthetic properties for a person, or a difference in education could result in a different set of

aesthetic properties being manifested. The dispositions of the perceiver and the dispositions of

the aesthetic object are, in fact, reciprocal dispositions, as each is a condition for the other, and

they share a manifestation event in common, the revelation of the aesthetic property’s nature via

the perceiver’s aesthetic experience. The vibrancy of a decorated screen as we experience it is

thus the manifestation of both the screen’s vibrancy and the perceiver’s disposition to enjoy such

experiences of vibrant things. Examples of reciprocal dispositions are readily accommodated by

the dispositional model I use, and are not limited to the aesthetic: a windowpane’s fragility and a

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flying rock’s disposition to smash things, for instance, will manifest together in the event that the

rock strikes the window and it breaks. Because perceivers are part of the conditions of

manifestation for aesthetic properties, on my account the identities of aesthetic properties

incorporate human experience, unlike an extreme, overt realism. The responses an aesthetic

property is directed towards might involve recognition of substantive character, recognition of

merit, or affective responses; indeed, for some aesthetic properties, the entire mental makeup of

the human audience is involved in the conditions for manifestation.

Perhaps the greatest challenge for a dispositional theory of aesthetic properties will be

accounting for the relationships of artworks to the contexts in which they are created and

presented.5 The physical environment in which an artwork is presented—the lighting conditions,

framing, or surrounding environments—have already been mentioned as factors affecting a

perceiver’s response to a piece; I believe that they can be straightforwardly incorporated into the

conditions of manifestation element of the model, and so I do not view them as factors

determining whether or not the artwork or other object actually has the aesthetic properties in

question. But what of cultural context? Can it also be accounted for as a manifestation

condition? Can we say that cultural context may help determine whether or not an aesthetic

property will manifest itself, but that whether or not an object has an aesthetic property in the

first place is independent of its cultural context? Or should we instead take the relation of an

artwork to its cultural context to be part of the base of its aesthetic dispositions?

Perhaps artworks are only vibrant or beautiful in certain contexts. But I find the

explanation invoking cultural context as part of the conditions of manifestation more plausible,

5 Indeed, this is a challenge for any aesthetic theory, though I wonder sometimes if questions about art-historical context have been elevated in the discussion to the detriment of the more basic metaphysics of aesthetic properties and experience applicable to everyday aesthetics as well.

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and for several reasons. First, it seems to me that having aesthetic properties does not always

require being situated in a particular cultural context: there are many natural aesthetic objects,

which manifest aesthetic properties without being considered in a cultural context. Perhaps there

is a minimal cultural context condition implicit in the necessary presence of a human perceiver,

him or herself a cultural being. But I don’t think one needs to see an object found in nature as a

work of art before one can perceive it as graceful, vibrant, garish, or lovely. This intuition is part

of my motivation to distinguish between artistic properties (specific to artifactual aesthetic

objects) and aesthetic properties simpliciter (found in non-artifacts as well) in chapter 1.

A second reason to favor an explanation that accounts for contextual issues as part of the

conditions for manifestation is that it is well-suited for issues of cultural context: given the

reciprocal nature of aesthetic properties and perceiver’s dispositions to experience them, the

dispositions of the perceiver are already part of the aesthetic properties’ conditions for

manifestation. I am inclined to think that cultural contextual relations are a function of a society,

and more particularly of the people who belong to it. The perceiver is typically a human being

belonging to such a society, and it is thus natural to expect a culture’s influence on the

manifestation of an aesthetic disposition to occur via its influence on the perceiver’s dispositions.

Finally, this explanation of the role of cultural context has several consequences which

may at first seem unwelcome, but which on further consideration I find quite attractive. One

such consequence is the abundance of aesthetic properties: an object’s aesthetic properties are

richer than can ever be experienced by any one person. Another is its implications regarding the

stability of aesthetic properties: the set of aesthetic properties of an object that are actually

experienced can change over time without the object gaining and losing properties. In the end, I

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think this feature is perhaps what makes the dispositional model the best realist account of

aesthetic properties.

The Scope and Plan of the Project

The properties that play important roles in our aesthetic experiences are numerous,

whether they are the abundance of ordinary aesthetic properties we encounter in our everyday

sensory experiences, or the formal or contextual features of artworks. All these I take to be

members of the class of aesthetically-relevant properties, a class that is more or less equivalent to

the aesthetic properties as discussed in the aesthetic literature generally. In order to delineate the

scope of the current project, I shall divide this class of aesthetically-relevant properties into two

subclasses: artistic properties and aesthetic properties simpliciter, with the difference between

the two being that artistic properties are found only in artifacts, while what I shall call the

aesthetic properties simpliciter are found in non-artifacts as well. In the case of an artifact, there

is a history of human intent behind the object; an artificer has contemplated and modified its

materials so that they will serve some purpose. The cultural and historical aspect of artifacts

creates a whole realm of complications not found in natural objects, such as historical and

cultural context, genre, style, and oeuvre considerations, author’s intent, and representational and

allusive functions; I shall take natural objects, by contrast, to be paradigmatic sources of

aesthetic properties simpliciter.

My primary motivation in the current project is to lay the metaphysical groundwork for a

realist account of aesthetic properties as objective features of the external world. This will

involve addressing worries surrounding subjectivism and projectivism that come into play for

sense-perceptible properties and transfer to aesthetic properties, and I shall treat them primarily

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in the context of the aesthetic properties simpliciter, these being the more straightforward cases

of aesthetically-relevant properties. I believe that a number of the issues derived from aesthetic

objects’ connections to their cultural contexts might be handled as a further complexity of the

conditions for manifestation of an aesthetic property, though I acknowledge that a more complete

account of the aesthetically-relevant likely cannot be given as a simple extension of what I will

present here.

I begin my case for aesthetic dispositions by surveying the aesthetic property landscape

in chapter one, exploring the relevant concepts of objectivity and subjectivity, a range of

aesthetic property theories from realism to projectivism, and the aesthetic/non-aesthetic property

relationship. I shall introduce the realist dispositional theory I favor and a model for powers at

work in chapter two, and use this as a basis for my critique of a rival theory of aesthetic

properties, Nick Zangwill’s response-dependence, in chapter three. In the fourth chapter I shall

apply the powers model to examples drawn from the philosophy of color and then extend it to

other modes of sense perception, drawing out various implications for the issue of objectivity in

the process. The final chapter will address a rival form of aesthetic realism and detail my

application of the model to aesthetic properties; I shall argue that on such a theory one can

justifiably hold that aesthetic properties are genuine, objective, and mind-independent features of

objects in the external world. If successful, this theory will secure an explanatory role for

aesthetic properties, illuminate aesthetic disagreement, and in so doing underwrite the

normativity of our aesthetic judgments and discourse.

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Chapter 1: Aesthetic Properties

1.1 A Functional Concept of Aesthetic Properties

Aesthetic properties, unlike shape properties for instance, are difficult to delineate as a

class by reference to their formal or material characteristics. Whereas shapes belong to surfaces,

are composed of lines, and can be further classified by such criteria as the number of their angles

and relative length of their sides, it seems one can have an aesthetic experience of nearly

anything, be it scenery, animal, person, or artwork; visual image, sound, narrative, or movement.

Even shape properties themselves can be counted as aesthetic properties due to their function in

aesthetic experience, and I think that aesthetic properties should in fact be defined by the way

they function in bringing about and determining the character of aesthetic experiences. This

function has been spelled out in a number of ways: aesthetic properties, we are told, function

uniquely as objects of a special faculty of taste and discrimination, or they serve as reasons for

attributing aesthetic value to objects, or they are those physical properties of objects with the

unique function of being culturally identified as worthy of attention.1

Various features have likewise been proposed as essential to aesthetic experience, in

terms of which aesthetic properties are thus to be defined. It has been described as being

characterized by a certain sort of fixed attention together with freedom from outside concerns,

featuring affect detached from practical ends, involving discovery, and resulting in the

integration of the self and experience; or as involving our imagination of properties as belonging

to objects and appreciating those objects for their own sakes.2 I personally favor a

characterization of aesthetic experience as essentially involving pleasure derived from grasping

and reflecting on an object’s content and character, both for itself and in relation to its structural

1 Sibley (1959, 1965), Beardsley (1973), and Eaton (1994). 2 Beardsley (1981), Scruton (1974).

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base.3 But however we identify the essence of aesthetic experience and describe the human

disposition to experience things aesthetically, I believe that aesthetic properties as a class should

be functionally unified by their directedness toward such experiences (more on directedness in

chapter 2).

It is this unique function in relation to human aesthetic experience that makes them sui

generis, a class unto themselves. Even if we could pinpoint a clear supervenience basis for these

aesthetic functions—a possibility that Sibley’s work on aesthetic conditions has rendered

dubitable (see 1.2)—they would not be reducible to non-aesthetic functions unless aesthetic

experience could itself be reduced to non-aesthetic experience. Not only is function in aesthetic

experience the unifying characteristic of aesthetic properties as a class, it is also what unifies

individual aesthetic properties. It is rather unremarkable if two prints from a woodcut or two

copies of a novel have the same aesthetic properties; this is to be expected from multiply-

instanced works. Similarly, two performances of a musical or dramatic work are also quite

likely to have the same aesthetic properties, although these art forms often allow for greater

deviation in their instances than do printmaking and literature. In these cases, we might think

that having the same non-aesthetic properties is sufficient to guarantee that two objects have the

same aesthetic properties, and perhaps it is. We expect two identical strings of text characters to

have the same literary properties, and playing a musical recording twice will produce identical

sounds and evidence identical musical properties. The covariance principle at work here—no

change in aesthetic properties without some corresponding change in non-aesthetic properties—

is the most basic sense of supervenience, in which aesthetic properties are said to supervene on

3Levinson (1996).

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non-aesthetic properties.4 But having the same non-aesthetic properties is by no means a

necessary condition for two things to instantiate the same aesthetic property. Different objects

can have the same aesthetic properties—sometimes very different objects indeed, and here it is

more obviously their powers to produce a particular sort of experience that unifies them as

instances of the same property.

Some of these cases will again seem quite unremarkable upon first consideration: in

mimetic or representative artworks, for instance, the artist frequently seeks to create something

with the same aesthetic properties as his or her subject. The Russian artist Viktor Hartmann’s

depiction of oxen drawing a wagon with enormous wheels was presumably intended to capture

the ponderousness of the plodding beasts.5 Upon viewing an exhibition of Hartmann’s work

after his untimely death, Modest Mussorgsky responded by composing his 1874 piano suite,

Pictures at an Exhibition, capturing this ponderousness in the fourth movement, “Bydlo.”

Joseph-Maurice Ravel likewise incorporated a depiction of the ponderous nature of the beasts

into his 1922 orchestral arrangement of the suite. What the “Bydlo” example illustrates is that

the same property, ponderousness, can belong to both natural objects (the oxen) and artifacts (the

artworks), to two different works in the same artistic medium (Mussorgsky’s piano suite and

Ravel’s orchestral arrangement), and to objects in different media (Hartmann’s visual art works

and Mussorgsky and Ravel’s musical works). Furthermore, the same aesthetic property can be

instantiated in both enduring objects and ephemeral performances. A functional account of

ponderousness unifies these quite different instances by pointing to the characteristic

manifestation, a particular kind of aesthetic experience, rather than focusing on the very different

4 I will discuss supervenience at length in 1.6. 5 I say presumably, because the picture is lost; we have only descriptions of it. See Alfred Frankenstein’s “Victor Hartmann and Modeste Musorgsky” in The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 25, No. 3 (1939) for a discussion of the piece.

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sets of non-aesthetic properties of objects, which ground their power to produce such an

experience.

The aesthetic functions of an object are closely connected to their non-aesthetic

functions, particularly the functions of the object’s sense-perceptible properties. In the “Bydlo”

example, ponderousness is captured in the painting in its visual properties, and in the music in its

aural properties. It is thus impossible to have an aesthetic experience of ponderousness in these

cases if one is blind or deaf, respectively. The aesthetic property of ponderousness is intimately

connected to sense-perceptible properties in the form of sights for the painting and to sounds and

haptic properties in the music; in an actual ox-cart it would primarily be a matter of haptic

properties attending the thudding sensations caused by the motions of the oxen and cart. Sights,

sounds, feels, motions, and combinations thereof are thus at the heart of our aesthetic

experiences. As Nick Zangwill notes, “delicate performances of pieces of music would not be

delicate unless they consisted of certain temporal arrangements of sounds.”6 Sense-perceptible

properties like sights and sounds are thus strong candidates for inclusion in the supervenience

base for aesthetic properties.

I would also add tastes, smells, and kinesthetic properties to the list of perceptible

properties that ground aesthetic properties, although historically they have received much less

attention than sights and sounds.7 Gustatory taste properties and the aesthetic properties they

support are subject to several factors that tend to remove them from our consideration: food and

drink are often a less exalted part of our everyday lives, they must be physically consumed in

order to be properly experienced, and this incorporation of the object into the subject’s own body

6 “Aesthetic/Sensory Dependence” in The Metaphysics of Beauty, p. 127. 7 See the first chapter of Carolyn Korsmeyer’s Making Sense of Taste for a critique of the traditional hierarchy that places the senses of taste and smell below those of vision and hearing.

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obscures the location of the taste or aesthetic property.8 The peppery taste of arugula is

experienced as located in the mouth, though it is more properly understood as a power of the

salad green to cause such a sensation. Smells are similarly difficult to locate, as are kinesthetic

properties; in the latter case, textures are typically experienced as located on objects, but

temperatures or the experience of acceleration or change of direction in a dance are more often

experienced in one’s own body.

My treatment of aesthetic properties as dispositions is thus intended to extend beyond the

familiar art forms of music and the visual arts, and to include everyday aesthetic experiences

grounded in this whole range of sense-perceptible properties, including combinations thereof. I

see an abundance of aesthetic properties in the world of everyday experience, as abundant as the

sense-perceptible properties that ground them. I will explore the connections between sense-

perceptible and aesthetic properties of objects in 1.6 when I examine supervenience and

emergence, in chapter 3 where I critique Zangwill’s conclusions regarding the objectivity of the

two kinds of properties, and in chapter 4 when I examine color and other sense-perceptible

properties. The similarities between the two kinds of properties will, finally, inform my theory

of aesthetic properties as it is developed in chapter 5.

1.2 Aesthetic Language and Sibley’s Aesthetic and Non-Aesthetic

Sense-perceptible properties such as sights, sounds, tastes, smells and feels are all sources

of examples for Sibley’s aesthetic/non-aesthetic distinction; indeed, he seems open to the

possibility that nearly any sort of bodily sensation could be the subject of aesthetic interest.9

Sensory perception is immediate and firsthand, as is aesthetic perception; for Sibley the richness

8 More on this in chapter 4. 9 Frank Sibley, “Tastes, Smells, and Aesthetics” in Approach to Aesthetics, p. 213.

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of aesthetic experience is located in this firsthand perception of properties, expressible in a

variety of aesthetic language, rather than in the emotional, imaginative, or cognitive aspects of

appreciation. I agree with Sibley that a thing’s aesthetic character results from the totality of its

relevant non-aesthetic characteristics; I hold that such non-aesthetic characteristics are not

sufficient for the manifestation of aesthetic character, however, because it can only be properly

manifested in the presence of an appropriately disposed perceiver.10

Sibley’s focus on the firsthand sense-perception-based aspect of aesthetic properties

informs my own theory, as does a shared assumption that a descriptive level of aesthetic

discourse is separable from the evaluative; like Sibley, I think that aesthetic terms are often

specific and descriptive, even though their meanings may be figurative or metaphorical.11

Jerrold Levinson follows Sibley when he argues that aesthetic attributions have a purely

descriptive, distinctively aesthetic content, “consisting in an emergent, holistic impression,

acknowledged by suitably backgrounded perceivers—or more precisely, the disposition to afford

such an impression to those perceivers,”12 a construal quite in keeping with the account I shall

give. Nick Zangwill explains evaluation as a matter of conversational implicature (in Grice’s

sense) for most aesthetic judgments, rather than it being part of the content or sense of the

10 Aesthetic properties are possessed by objects regardless of the presence of appropriately disposed perceivers, however. 11 See Emily Brady, “Sibley’s Vision”, Aesthetic Concepts: Essays After Sibley, for a discussion of these aspects of Sibley’s philosophy and also for his reasons for focusing on aesthetic language rather than aesthetic properties. 12 Jerrold Levinson, "Being Realistic About Aesthetic Properties." Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52(3): 351-354. 1994. pp. 351-352. He cites such evidence for the separability of the descriptive as 1) alternate, value-neutral descriptions, 2) agreement among critics regarding aesthetic character despite disagreement regarding value, 3) the need to explain “what competent critics with an evaluative difference of opinion could really be talking about,” and 4) the role of distinctive aesthetic impressions in explaining what appreciators’ aesthetic experiences consist in. Levinson addresses critics’ evaluative differences further in his "Aesthetic Properties, Evaluative Force, and Differences of Sensibility" in Aesthetic Concepts: Essays after Sibley, eds. Jerrold Levinson and Emily Brady. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. 61-80.

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judgment.13 In what follows I shall rely on their arguments and focus on aesthetic language as

referring to the substantive aesthetic character of the objects of our experience.

Where my approach differs significantly from Sibley’s is in focusing on the metaphysical

and ontological aspects of aesthetic properties rather than on linguistics and justification for

judgment. I take seriously Ted Cohen’s criticisms of Sibley’s aesthetic/non-aesthetic distinction

as applied to terms: “there seems to be no sensible and important way of dividing terms

according to whether taste or only normality is needed to apply them,” the problematic result

being that for any aesthetic term it seems we can find “an application of it which can be managed

by any normal man,” and “if no term invariably requires taste for its application, then what, after

all, is an aesthetic term?”14 As a methodological consideration, I believe that any study of

aesthetic properties must be sensitive to the fact that there is no strict one-to-one correlation

between aesthetic properties and the terms we use for them. While looking at the logic of our

aesthetic discourse is not without value, as Cohen points out there are many terms that seem to

have both aesthetic and non-aesthetic uses; furthermore, many aesthetic qualities have no

established names. There are also many aesthetic properties that have more than one name: a

significant difficulty with our aesthetic language is that our names for aesthetic properties are not

simply a means of referring to something in the world, but instead carry with them all sorts of

connotations arising from the metaphorical application of non-aesthetic words for aesthetic

purposes and from our typical evaluative responses to aesthetic properties. The outcome of this,

I believe, is that our language is often misleading as a guide for picking out aesthetic properties;

13 Nick Zangwill, “The Beautiful, The Dainty, and the Dumpy,” British Journal of Aesthetics 35 (1995), 317-329, p. 322. Paul Grice, Studies in the Way of Words, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989, pp. 39, 40. 14 Ted Cohen, “A Critique of Sibley’s Position: Aesthetic/Non-Aesthetic and the Concept of Taste”, from Aesthetics: A Critical Anthology, 2nd ed. Ed. G. Dickie, R. Selafani, R Roblin. NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1989, pp. 381-387.

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there are sure to be many unnamed aesthetic property types, as well as aesthetic properties with

multiple names.15

My focus on the metaphysics of aesthetic properties, in contrast with Sibley’s emphasis

on aesthetic language, leads me to apply the aesthetic/non-aesthetic distinction to properties,

rather than to terms, concepts, or judgments. Unlike Sibley, I am comfortable speaking of cause-

effect relationships between objects and experiences, and in fact I favor such language because

on my account aesthetic experiences are caused by objects in virtue of their aesthetic properties.

At the heart of Sibley’s distinction is the necessity of using taste to apply aesthetic concepts, but

not non-aesthetic concepts. Taste for Sibley is a special kind of perceptual attention or

sensitivity; the closest equivalent in my theory would be the perceiver’s dispositions to

experience aesthetic properties during the course of an aesthetic experience. For me, both

aesthetic properties and aesthetic attentiveness are identified by their functional roles in aesthetic

experience, and so taste is not the ultimate basis for the aesthetic/non-aesthetic distinction.

Where Sibley’s use of aesthetic/non-aesthetic was vulnerable to Cohen’s criticism that there are

no clear aesthetic terms, on my account there are clear aesthetic properties. I shall return to

Cohen’s critique of the aesthetic/non-aesthetic in 1.3.

Where Sibley’s emphasis was on what justification we have for judging an artwork to

have an aesthetic quality, I prefer to speak of aesthetic and non-aesthetic properties and their

relationships. Adapted for aesthetic properties, his thesis would be that there are no necessary

and sufficient conditions regarding the non-aesthetic properties a thing must have in order to

have a particular aesthetic property. This means that we cannot point to any non-aesthetic

properties as necessary for instances of aesthetic properties: a thing need not be of a particular

15 As has been noted, we also often have both value-laden and value-neutral terms that pick out the same things; where this is the case, I endeavor to use value-neutral language.

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medium or genre, or even an artwork at all, to have a ponderous quality, as the “Bydlo” example

above illustrated. While Ravel’s orchestration used the tritone, the interval between pitches most

unsettling to the Western ear, to capture the ponderous quality of the oxen, use of tritones is not

necessary for a musical work to be ponderous.16 Sufficient conditions for aesthetic properties are

as difficult as necessary conditions; painting in bright, high-contrasting colors is not sufficient

for producing a piece with a garish quality, nor is writing a musical composition in a minor key

and with a slow tempo sufficient to make it funereal. Aesthetic and non-aesthetic qualities likely

stand in supervenience or emergence relationships to one another, but it seems impossible to give

any further principles as to what non-aesthetic properties will suffice to produce an instance of

any given aesthetic property. But this is no great surprise: much of our respect for artists is due

to their creative vision and ability to work out how to instantiate aesthetic properties in the

absence of such rules. We would likely value their work less if producing aesthetically and

artistically valuable pieces were as simple as painting-by-number.

If there are any conditions or rules governing what non-aesthetic properties give rise to

what aesthetic properties, I think they are (as Sibley suggested) likely in the form of negative

conditions: in the visual arts, a piece done all in pastel colors, with no high contrast, cannot be

garish, or perhaps a musical work with slow tempo in a minor key cannot be exuberant.17 One

further kind of condition may apply to artworks, however: certain artistic properties related to

16 I see aesthetic properties as being very like artifacts with regards to their definitive functions being realized in such varying ways. A table, for instance, often has a flat surface supported by legs and is thus suitable for eating or writing on or collecting one’s mail and keys as one enters the house. It could, however, be legless (for instance affixed to a wall by brackets), and even the surface may not be strictly necessary (one could imagine a carefully-engineered force field which would serve the same function). Different thermostats likewise operate by quite different mechanisms, but serve the same function, to trigger a heat source when a particular temperature is reached. 17 Frank Sibley, “Aesthetic Concepts,” Philosophical Review 68 (Oct 1959) 421-450. Peter Kivy argues, however, that aesthetic features are such that there are open-ended classes of features where none are necessary, but some number is sufficient. See his 1975 “What Makes Aesthetic Terms Aesthetic?”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 36, 197-211, p. 202.

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genre and style are governed by conditions on the non-aesthetic properties on which they are

based. One might say, for instance, that a tango cannot be serene, or that in order to be in the

style of Beethoven something must first of all be a musical work. But these conditions apply to a

class of properties, which are unique to the artifactual aesthetic arena, the world of art.

1.3 Aesthetically-Relevant Properties: The Aesthetic Simpliciter and the Artistic

The class of aesthetically-relevant properties can be usefully divided into two subclasses:

artistic properties and aesthetic properties simpliciter, with the difference between the two being

that artistic properties are found only in artifacts, while what I shall call the aesthetic properties

simpliciter are found in non-artifacts as well. Stephen Davies describes these aesthetic

properties simpliciter as being “internal to the object of appreciation” and “directly available for

perception in that their recognition does not require knowledge of matters external to the object

of appreciation,” particularly knowledge of “the circumstances under which the item was made

or about its intended or possible functions.” Aesthetic properties simpliciter, he continues,

“announce their significance, as it were, through the experience they provide.”18

In the case of an artifact, by contrast, there is a history of human intent behind the object;

an artificer has contemplated it for its usefulness and modified it so that it will serve some

purpose, with the result that others can recognize its intended purpose as well. When the artifact

is an artwork, there is often a very specific sort of purpose that the artist has in mind, that of

having a certain aesthetic character so as to cause certain sorts of aesthetic experiences in its

18 Stephen Davies, The Philosophy of Art, Oxford: Blackwell, 2006, pp. 53-54. Davies distinguishes between aesthetic and artistic properties, where I prefer to speak of aesthetic properties simpliciter and artistic properties; this is because artistic properties are certainly aesthetically relevant, though not internal to artworks or immediately available from the work itself.

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audience.19 Even more so than other artifacts, artworks exist in a web of culturally significant

relationships, and in virtue of those relationships have numerous properties with important

functions in our aesthetic experience, their artistic properties. They are created to be the sorts of

things that recognizably represent and express, embody political, religious, or philosophical

ideas, and derive or deviate from previous works.

The historical aspects of artworks, along with the fact of the artists’ cultural situation,

thus create a whole realm of complications not found in natural objects, among them historical

and cultural context, genre, style, and oeuvre considerations, author’s intent, and representational

and allusive functions. Davies mentions, for instance, the conventions of religious iconography

—doves with olive branches symbolizing peace, for example, or an old man with a lion in a

desert representing St. Jerome—which are “used by artists, but not among their paintings’

perceptible content.” He also offers further examples of artistic properties such as the fact that

one work may quote from, refer to, or allude to another... It can be original, influenced by some earlier work, the first of its artist’s middle phase, the swansong of a tired genre, or unusual for its treatment of shadows. It can be intended to emulate, subvert, reject, or redirect the default art traditions, genres, and practices of its time. Some works belong to kinds with specific functions—they are elegies, portraits, or hymns, for example—and this is not apparent from their aesthetic properties alone.20

In all these examples of artistic properties, recognition and appreciation goes beyond

consideration of just the internal features of the work and into its relationships with external

objects and events.

19 My use of artifact here follows Randy Dipert’s in his 1993 Artifacts, Art Works, and Agency, except that I use ‘artifact’ somewhat loosely to include what he terms tools rather than distinguishing them from artifacts proper. There are many artifacts, of course, which are evidently the product of intentional activity and modification for a purpose but are not artworks, however we may end up defining art. Nick Zangwill has offered a functional theory of art, whereby artworks are understood as being intentionally created to function as objects with aesthetic properties, in his 2001 “Aesthetic Functionalism” in Aesthetic Concepts: Sibley and After, Emily Brady and Jerrold Levinson (eds.), Oxford University Press. 20 Davies, 2006, p. 54.

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We can turn to Frank Sibley’s work for paradigmatic examples of aesthetic properties

simpliciter: unified, balanced, integrated, lifeless, serene, somber, dynamic, powerful, vivid,

delicate, moving, graceful, dainty, handsome, comely, elegant, and garish.21 These aesthetic

qualities can be found and appreciated in non-artifacts, whereas only artifacts exhibit artistic

properties. Our aesthetic experiences of natural landscapes and seascapes often center on their

serenity, for instance, while waterfalls and thunderstorms delight us with their powerfulness;

rock formations may be unified, and skies somber. Birds’ plumage displays aesthetic properties

such as vividness and garishness, while antelope exhibit grace in their forms and movements,

cats exhibit daintiness, and ostriches appear aesthetically unbalanced. I think that these and other

aesthetic properties simpliciter are the sorts of things which can be appreciated without reference

to any particular cultural context, although the presence of a human perceiver—him or herself a

cultural being—is of course a condition on their appreciation, and introduces a minimal cultural

background. But I think there is a clear difference between such minimal cultural conditions for

perception of the aesthetic properties simpliciter and the educated taste so often demanded by

the Western art world.

Ellen Dissanayake’s bio-evolutionary view of aesthetics suggests a similar divide in our

abilities to appreciate aesthetically-relevant properties in aesthetic experience. She describes the

human response to art as representing a “two-tier accomplishment,” evident in our species’

evolutionary history and in the maturing aesthetic sensibilities of individual humans:

...the human species, like the individual child, required a certain degree of maturity before it could use in art the abilities that developed in non-art contexts. In a similar fashion, it can be argued that just as the baby’s emotional life begins in its awareness of modal/vectoral properties [such as the rhythmically patterned and dynamically varied vocalizations and gestures that make up “babytalk” or “motherese”], the infant human

21 Frank Sibley’s “Aesthetic Concepts,” Philosophical Review 68 (1959), 421-450, and “Aesthetic and Non-Aesthetic,” Philosophical Review 74 (1965), 135-159.

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species first displayed its nascent aesthetic sensitivity in reacting to elementary sensory psycho-physiological stimuli. Presumably this ability—this responsiveness—remains operative in everyone. More complex aesthetic responsiveness requires one to employ and develop a predominantly cognitive ability to appreciate the ways in which these stimuli are combined with each other and with other humanly-significant features and presented as works of art.22

Dissanayake notes that the ability to respond to art is evidenced differentially by individuals and

cultural groups, and describes examples of aesthetic experience outside of one’s cultural

background where the “untrained” response plays a greater role:

The two “tiers” are not to be separated in actual aesthetic experience, but the “untrained” response relies more on the fundamental layer. The person who knows little about, say, “classical music” may nevertheless be gloriously affected by a symphony’s rhythmic and dynamic contrasts, its flowing melody and repeated developments of intensity. An unknowledgeable Western listener to classical Indian music may respond powerfully to the performance of a raga, recognizing something of the breathtaking dexterity of the performers and reacting to the manipulated elements of rhythm and intensity.23

In such cases it seems reasonable to say that the operative aesthetic abilities—or dispositions, as

I would call them—are directed towards what I have called aesthetic properties simpliciter.

They involve apprehension of basic aesthetic character (not unlike the use of taste as Sibley

understood it) and affective responses, and give rise to verdictive judgments as well. The

responses of the “experienced listener who is acquainted with the tradition or ‘code’ within

which the performance comes to being,” by contrast, demonstrate perceiver dispositions directed

towards artistic properties, while at the same time involving responses to the more fundamental

layer as Dissanayake has described it.

According to Dissanayake, a bio-evolutionary view of human aesthetic behavior

“suggests that aesthetic experience in a general sense is universal, fundamental, and necessary to

22 Ellen Dissanayake, “Aesthetic Experience and Human Evolution,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 41 (Winter 1982), 145-155, p. 152. See her 2001 article “Aesthetic Incunabula,” Philosophy and Literature 25.2, pp. 335-346 for a discussion of the aesthetic educative aspects of baby talk or “motherese.” 23 Dissanayake (1982), p. 152.

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man.”24 This is supported by cross-cultural agreement on a number of aesthetically pleasing

properties found in nature and emphasized in various art traditions. She thinks such inherently

pleasing and gratifying elements can be called aesthetic or perhaps proto-aesthetic, “even when

they occur naturally in nonaesthetic contexts.”

These pleasing characteristics are those that would have been selected-for in human evolution as indicating that something is wholesome and good: for example, visual signs of health, youth, and vitality such as smoothness, glossiness, warm or true colors, cleanness, fineness, or lack of blemish, and vigor, precision, and comeliness of movement. Thus we find that most, if not all, societies value agility, endurance, and grace in dance; sonority, vividness, and rhythmic or phonic echoing (rhyme and other poetic devices) in language; and resonance and power in percussion... In the arts of the West, high value has also been given to skillfully made polished marble statuary, implements and ornaments of burnished metal, vivid glowing tempera and oil paintings, and ornately sumptuous or softly diaphanous textiles.25

This dual appearance in art traditions and natural, non-aesthetic contexts suggests that these

properties are a close fit for my aesthetic properties simpliciter.

Finally, my distinction between aesthetic properties simpliciter and artistic properties is

not unlike Marcia Muelder Eaton’s use of aesthetic and artistic. Eaton holds that “the class of

artistic objects is strictly included in the class of aesthetic objects,” which is to say, “all works of

art are aesthetic objects, but not all aesthetic objects are works of art.” She offers such examples

of non-art aesthetic objects as “sunsets, forests, seashells, a child’s laughter, or a bird in flight.”26

One important reason for classifying the aesthetic and artistic this way is to account for the

similarities and differences in our appreciation of art and nature. Like Kant, Eaton agrees that

24 Ibid, p. 154. She goes on to note, however, that “the type of experience presupposed by advanced Western aesthetics seems to be bound to one culture, and rare even within that.” 25 Ellen Dissanayake, Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why, New York: Macmillian, 1992, p. 54. She also suggests that “it is the obvious lack of these inherently pleasurable or ‘beautiful’ features that has made it so difficult for unsophisticated people to accept certain works of art made during the past century or so as ‘art,’ for the artists’ deliberate choices to defy traditional expectations regarding pleasing characteristics have set their works outside the pale of ‘recognizable’ art.” 26 Marcia Muelder Eaton, “Art and the Aesthetic,” The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics, ed. Peter Kivy, Oxford: Blackwell, 2004, 63-77, p. 63-64.

26

the pleasure we take in each is similar, but she follows Allen Carlson in saying that the

difference is not a matter of there being knowledge involved in our appreciation of art but not of

nature. Rather, cognitive models are required for both types of appreciation, but different sets of

cognitions are relevant in each case. “If to aesthetically appreciate art we have knowledge of

artistic traditions and styles within those traditions, to aesthetically appreciate nature we must

have knowledge of the different environments of nature and of the systems and elements within

those environments.”27 The knowledge of categories applied to art include such things as what

genre and style one is viewing (those categories addressed by Kendall Walton28) while the

categories one must know in order to fully appreciate what one sees, smells, or hears in nature

include such things as whether one is looking at a desert or a forest. For Carlson, it is a

dangerous mistake to treat nature as art, as doing so may well lead us to dismiss or minimize

what is authentic and truly “natural” in a biotic system or environment, or to misapply the

boundaries or foci of aesthetic significance found in artworks because of their artifactuality.

Eaton takes a broad view of the aesthetic (which I favor as well), extending it beyond its

historic locus of beauty and the pleasure we take in it. She defines an aesthetic property as “an

intrinsic property of x considered worthy of attention (perception and/or reflection) in culture

C.”29 For Eaton, an intrinsic property is one for which direct inspection is necessary to verify a

claim predicating the property of an object, and direct inspection is sufficient for such

verification for someone who knows the aesthetic predicate. “Looks Indian” is an example of an

intrinsic property, while “was made in India” is an extrinsic property. To know whether

something was made in India, direct inspection is not necessary, and neither is it sufficient; to

27 Allen Carlson, “Appreciation and the Natural Environment,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Spring 1979, 267-275, p.273. 28 Kendall Walton, “Categories of Art”, Philosophical Review 79, July 1970, 334-367. 29 Eaton (2004), p. 73.

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know whether something looks Indian, by contrast, direct inspection is necessary, and will also

be sufficient for someone who understands what is meant by “looks Indian.”30 In most cases, my

aesthetic properties simpliciter will correspond to Eaton’s intrinsic properties, while my artistic

properties will correspond to her extrinsic properties. Where she gives an epistemic definition

for intrinsic, I prefer to consider a property intrinsic insofar as its instantiation by an object

depends on that object alone, independently of any other thing.31 This metaphysical definition is

roughly equivalent to Davies’ use of internal to the object of appreciation as a descriptor for

aesthetic properties simpliciter.

As regards the epistemology of aesthetic experience, Eaton makes the helpful point that

we can know the intrinsic even while being aware of the extrinsic, and that knowledge of the

extrinsic often has at its focus some insight regarding the intrinsic. I take knowledge of the two

to be somewhat cyclical, with some sort of feedback mechanism at work, where recognition of

what is being represented helps us to notice intrinsic/aesthetic properties we might have missed

before. I also appreciate Eaton’s definition of aesthetic properties because it retains the

perceptual element emphasized by Kant as a core component, but also leaves room for cognitive

and conceptual abilities. I see several difficulties with her definition, however. For one, Eaton

has treated the property ‘represents so-and-so’ as intrinsic, while I hold that representational

properties are artistic properties.32 This is because I prefer to say that while natural objects may

resemble other things, only artifacts can have representative properties because they centrally

30 For more on Eaton’s intrinsic and extrinsic, see her 1989 Aesthetics and the Good Life, Cranbury, New Jersey: Associated University Presses, pp. 138-147, and her 1994 “The Intrinsic, Non-Supervenient Nature of Aesthetic Properties,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52:4, 383-397, p. 391. 31 See J. Michael Dunn’s 1990, “Relevant Predication 2: Intrinsic Properties and Internal Relations,” Philosophical Studies 60: 177-206, p. 178, and David Lewis & Rae Langton’s 1998 “Defining ‘intrinsic’”. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 58. Reprinted in Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology. Cambridge University Press, New York. 1999: 116-132. 32 Eaton (1989).

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involve pictorial or figurative representation. Someone may, of course, look at a natural object

and ascribe a representational property to it, for instance claiming that it resembles a whale. In

this case, however, if the person is contemplating the cloud for its use as a representation, it has

already progressed one step along the road to becoming an artifact.33 Another more serious

concern I have with Eaton’s definition of aesthetic properties is its implications regarding their

subjectivity. Her aesthetic properties are those intrinsic properties of objects that are culturally

selected as worthy of perception or reflection, a criterion that seems to me to suggest that an

object could gain or lose aesthetic properties simply by being viewed in different cultures. The

dispositional account I offer will allow that observers from different cultures can (and often do)

perceive and appreciate different, even conflicting aesthetic properties in the same object. I shall

argue, however, that this is not a matter of gaining and losing properties so much as it is a matter

of different sets of the object’s abundance of properties being manifested under different

conditions.

One final benefit of my distinction between artistic properties and aesthetic properties

simpliciter is its use in addressing a qualm of Cohen’s regarding Sibley’s aesthetic and non-

aesthetic. Cohen takes issue with Sibley’s intuition that one can distinguish without too great a

difficulty between terms that require taste and those that do not, and he offers a list of problem-

cases for anyone who is inclined to agree with Sibley. For reasons discussed earlier my account

does not focus on terms, so I shall take his list to be examples of problematic properties instead.

What is intriguing to note is that in many cases, the difficulty in sorting an item on the list into

the aesthetic or non-aesthetic class is due to an artifactual aspect of the property, rendering it on

my distinction an artistic property rather than an aesthetic property simpliciter. Because artistic

33 See Dipert for more on the role of contemplation for use in the creation of artifacts.

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properties have artifactual histories, they can in many cases be identified without any personal

aesthetic experience (or, for Sibley, taste). Take ‘nationalistic’, one of Cohen’s examples: I can

listen to a piece of music and recognize its incorporation of a particular set of folk melodies in a

manner which suggests patriotism or pride in one’s nation, and do so without exercising taste in

Sibley’s sense. Yet the ‘nationalistic’ properties are clearly relevant to the aesthetic experience

such a piece has the power to cause, as they partially determine the character of such an

experience. Most, if not all of Cohen’s problematic examples thus fall into what I have

described as the larger class of aesthetically-relevant properties, yet can be recognized without

taste, being condition-governed in virtue of their artifactual histories. This is in contrast to my

aesthetic properties simpliciter, which correspond more directly to Sibley’s central examples of

aesthetic properties and are recognized primarily by their manifestation in aesthetic experience.34

1.4 Objectivity and Realism

Our observations about aesthetic experience are at times conflicting, in that they

sometimes suggest it is quite subjective, and sometimes that it must be objective. First, consider

the sort of observations that suggest our aesthetic experiences have an inescapable subjective

element. Aesthetic properties, it seems, are the sorts of things that call for direct, personal

involvement in order to be understood. To judge what aesthetic properties a thing has, it is not

enough to just hear a description of a painting or musical work, or read about a dish on a

restaurant menu; one has to see the painting, hear the actual music, and smell and taste the dish.

Aesthetic claims are claims about personal experiences. In trying to describe such an experience

to others we are at times met with uncomprehending stares, and find ourselves falling back on

34 Sibley follows a similar strategy when he considers natural or non-artefactual tastes and smells in addition to artefactual ones as objects of aesthetic interest; “Tastes, Smells, and Aesthetics” in Approach to Aesthetics, p. 208.

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the line, “I guess you just had to be there.” We often find that two persons may watch the same

film or read the same novel, and have wholly different aesthetic experiences to report.

In some cases our disagreement is over the basic aesthetic character of the piece in

question—a label depicting citrus fruits on a beverage bottle might seem playful to one person,

but dull to another. In other cases the individuals might agree on the basic aesthetic character of

the beverage label (that it is playful), but while one person judges this to be an aesthetic merit

and points to the clever marketing ploy, the other finds it deceptive (say, because it contains no

actual juice), and judges it to be therefore lacking in aesthetic merit. The subjective element here

has to do with the different ways in which the observers apprehend and experience the aesthetic

properties of the label, both substantive and verdictive. In yet another scenario, two people

might agree on both the basic aesthetic character and the merit of the piece, and still disagree in

their likes and dislikes, discovering that apparently “there’s no accounting for taste.”35

Finally, there are cases in which our aesthetic experiences vary in an entirely different

sort of way. In the previous examples we saw how there is a subjective element present when

we apprehend aesthetic properties, which clearly seem to be in the object. A further

complication suggesting that aesthetic experience is inescapably subjective comes from cases

where the qualities apprehended in an experience seems instead to be projections of our own

responses, rather than genuine properties of the objects at all. I recall a situation where a

colleague and I were looking at a poster in a seminar room where a new floor had recently been

installed. The poster was a somewhat garish collage of clip-art accompanied by various slogans,

including “slippers are encouraged,” “tennis shoes are welcome,” and “high heels are strictly

forbidden.” I interpreted the poster as a humorous (albeit tacky) plea not to scuff up the new

35 Hume famously sets up the problem of taste in his essay “Of the Standard of Taste,” asking how we are to identify a universal standard allowing us to confirm some sentiments while condemning others, given the evident disagreement over aesthetic matters we observe around us.

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floor, but my colleague, focusing on the reference to high heels, interpreted it as being

discriminatory towards women, and judged it both morally offensive and lacking in aesthetic

merit. Here I was inclined to think that the discriminatory character was more a projection of my

colleague’s response than it was a genuine property perceived in the object.

Taken to the extreme, these observations about the subjective elements of aesthetic

experience seem to support an account on which aesthetic properties depend for their very

existence on the perceiving subjects. Such an account would minimize the second significant set

of observations I wish to address, those which suggest that aesthetic properties are objective

features of things in the world, existing independently of our responses.36 We commonly

believe, for example, that we are justified in not only ascribing aesthetic properties to objects in

the external world, but also in expecting others to agree with us in such judgments at least some

of the time. We act as if there is some understanding that ought to be reached, if only a person

has properly experienced the aesthetic object in question. In the beverage bottle example, while

we might disagree over whether a label is cheerful or dull, clever or deceptive, we are inclined to

discuss it and seek some point of agreement rather than pass our differences off as inexplicable

and inescapable.

Another feature of our folk aesthetics favoring an objective account is that we expect

aesthetic properties to be located in objects outside of ourselves, and largely stable. It seems odd

to suppose that when my colleague and I left the room, the poster stopped being humorous and

tacky, or that when I leave an art gallery, the paintings and sculptures lose their vividness,

somberness, stark realism, or elegance. This intuition is addressed in the next section as the

36 Where I refer to observations about subjectivity and objectivity regarding aesthetic experience, Nick Zangwill mentions experientiality and normativity as the defining features of aesthetic judgments. See his 2003 piece “Aesthetic Realism 1” in The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, ed. J. Levinson, Oxford University Press, 64-79.

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criteria of Location and Stability, which are connected with Explanation and Dependence; not

only do our repeatable experiences lead us to believe that aesthetic properties are stable and

located in objects in the external world, but also that those objects play an important causal role

in bringing about our aesthetic experiences and determining their character. The connections we

discover between our aesthetic experiences and the physical properties of objects encountered in

sense perception suggest to us that aesthetic properties depend to some degree on physical ones,

and that aesthetic properties might be objective in the same way that physical properties are.

With these observations in mind, let us say that an objective property is (roughly) one

that is located in an object in the external world. This would be in contrast to a subjective

property belonging to the observer (such as a ringing in one’s ears). Objective properties might

also be expected to belong to objects in and of themselves, and thus internal or intrinsic to the

objects they belong to, as opposed to external or relational properties (such as being to one’s left,

or the last of its kind).37 Goran Hermeren, for instance, recognizes a sense of “objective” which

involves existence in objects independently of perceiving subjects, one possessed by primary

qualities, but he thinks aesthetic qualities are phenomenal properties and “by definition

subjective in the sense that they are dependent on the human perceptual apparatus and the

conditions of perception.”38

I find helpful John McDowell’s discussion of two related senses of objectivity and

subjectivity, a conceivability sense and an existence sense.39 The first sense of subjective is

apparent in secondary qualities, which are not adequately conceivable “except in terms of certain

37 Relational properties could also be considered objective insofar as they do not depend on observers or their responses, but a relational property would not be a property of an object in and of itself. 38 Goran Hermeren, The Nature of Aesthetic Qualities, Lund: Lund University Press, 1988, pp 79-80. 39 Labeling these senses of subjectivity as conceivability and existence is my doing, and not original to McDowell’s discussion.

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subjective states, and [are] thus subjective themselves in a sense that that characterization

defines. In the natural contrast, a primary quality would be objective in the sense that what it is

for something to have it can be adequately understood otherwise than in terms of dispositions to

give rise to subjective states.”40 We can understand what it means for a stop sign to be

octagonal, for instance, because this shape property can be understood without making reference

to how it appears to us; the stop sign’s redness, on the other hand, cannot be understood without

reference to the sort of perceptual experience it affords. McDowell applies this conceivability

sense of subjective to secondary qualities like color.41

While Hermeren and McDowell would agree that secondary qualities cannot be

adequately conceived without reference to the experiences of human perceivers, McDowell

points out that this conceivability sense of subjectivity is not equivalent to another sense of

subjectivity with which it is easily confused, an existence sense. In this second sense, “to call a

putative object of awareness ‘objective’ is to say that it is there to be experienced, as opposed to

being a mere figment of the subjective state that purports to be an experience of it.” This

involves a contrast between veridical and illusory experience, for whenever we project such mere

figments of our subjective states onto the world, we are in error. McDowell concludes that it is

only acceptable to say that secondary qualities are subjective in the first sense – that is, that their

concepts necessarily involve reference to subjective states – and that “it would be simply wrong

to suppose that this gives any support to the idea that they are subjective in the second.”42 I will

address these issues at greater length in chapter 3.

40 John McDowell, “Values and Secondary Qualities,” in Morality and Objectivity, ed. Ted Honderich, Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985, 110-129, p. 113. 41 This sense of subjectivity amounts to what I call conceptual response-dependence (discussed in chapter 3). 42 Ibid, pp. 113-114.

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As if we did not already have enough possible senses of objectivity and subjectivity on

the table, I should mention one more, and draw the appropriate connections between objectivity

and realism, which will be discussed in the next section. We shall see in chapter 3 that response-

dependent concepts, those that involve necessary reference to perceivers’ responses, are more or

less subjective depending on the range of responses that are considered relevant. A rigid account

that only takes the responses of normal humans in normal conditions to be relevant, for instance,

will be more robustly realist than a non-rigid account that takes perceivers and conditions in

possible worlds to be relevant. It is important that not just any response or experience be

allowed, for epistemically, a statement might be considered objective if its truth-value can be

determined inter-subjectively by generally-agreed upon methods. In the case of the beverage

bottle, a judgment of its aesthetic character could be considered objective if we agree on a

standard of taste, but such agreement need not say anything about whether the aesthetic character

belongs to the object or is “in the eye of the beholders.” This understanding of objectivity would

be logically compatible with a systematic projectivism and an error theory; my own view aims at

a metaphysical objectivity where aesthetic properties are there to be experienced in objects in the

external world.

1.5 The Spectrum of Aesthetic Property Views

In what follows, I describe the spectrum of aesthetic property views, arranged according

to the degree of ontological realism assigned to aesthetic properties, from projectivism through

reductive phenomenalism and realism. It will be helpful, I think, to keep in mind Derek

Matravers’ list of five characteristics of aesthetic properties that we would want to be entailed by

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an account of such a property. Of the five, I will argue for a qualified version of Revelation in

5.2, but make use of the others as they stand.

i. Location: The property must ‘belong to’ its object of attribution. That is, the property should be of the ballet dancer, not (for example) of the observer’s experience or visual field.

ii. Stability: The property must be such that it can exist unobserved. iii. Explanation: The property must explain the experience we have of it. iv. Revelation: The intrinsic nature of the property must be revealed to us in immediate

perception. v. Dependence: The property depends (in large part) for its nature and existence on non-

aesthetic, perceptual, properties.43

To borrow from Matravers’ example, a lissome dancer will herself instantiate the property of

lissomness, truly having a look of graceful flexibility, rather than it being merely the way she is

perceived by an observer, and she will be lissome even if dancing alone, unobserved. When

observed, however, (at least some part of) her lissome character is revealed directly through

immediate perception, and it explains why the observer’s resulting experience has the character it

does. Her instantiation of the aesthetic property of lissomness is in part a matter of her

instantiation of lower-level sense-perceptible properties, such as athletic strength and certain

proportions of limb. I should note that while I consider lissomness an example of what I have

called a substantive (or descriptive) aesthetic property simpliciter (see 1.2 and 1.3), the historical

figures mentioned in what follows were more concerned with verdictive properties such as

beauty, making classification of their views somewhat tenuous.

Projectivism about aesthetic properties is a form of non-realism. On a projectivist

treatment, aesthetic properties are taken to be nothing more than properties of perceivers’

experiences or responses that they project onto external objects. George Santayana, for instance,

43 Matravers, Derek. “Aesthetic Properties I”, Aristotelian Society: Supplementary Volume. 79 (2005): 191-210, p. 202.

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held that “Beauty is an emotional element, a pleasure of ours, which nevertheless we regard as a

quality of things.”44 If one was a projectivist regarding substantive aesthetic properties as well as

verdictive ones, one would say of the dancer that her lissomness was likewise merely a matter of

the perceiver’s response, not an objective feature of the dancer herself.

On one reading of Hutcheson and Hume’s aesthetic theories, their treatments of aesthetic

properties amount ontologically to versions of projectivism. For Hume, taste is a “productive

faculty, and gilding or staining all natural objects with the colours, borrowed from internal

sentiment, raises, in a manner, a new creation,” namely “beauty and deformity, virtue and

vice.”45 In this he follows Frances Hutcheson’s treatment of aesthetic qualities, though he makes

beauty an impression rather than an idea: “Hutcheson holds that virtue and beauty are not

qualities of the people and things to which they are attributed. We may speak as if objects and

people have moral and aesthetic properties, but the relevant property is merely an ‘idea raised in

us’.”46 This location of beauty in the eye of the beholder, rather than the object itself, is what

leads me to classify their theories as projectivist.

A more extreme version of projectivism for aesthetic properties (and I am not certain

anyone holds it) might allow that perceivers’ experiences and responses are an indefeasible guide

for aesthetic judgment, even in the face of conflicting expert judgments, a thesis known as

Autonomy. Such a view would require a strong version of expressivism regarding aesthetic

language, since it would “[deny] the obvious: that aesthetic attributions operate in many contexts

44 1896, The Sense of Beauty: Being an Outline of Aesthetic Theory, New York: Scribner, p. 30. 45 An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, in Enquiries concerning Human Understanding and concerning the Principles of Morals, edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge, 3rd edition revised by P. H. Nidditch, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975, 294. Alternatively, Hume could be classified as a phenomenalist (see below) insofar as he draws attention to the properties of objects that prompt aesthetic appreciation. 46 Gracyk, Ted, "Hume's Aesthetics", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2008/entries/hume-aesthetics/>.

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very much like standard propositions.”47 For the expressivist, the normal linguistic referential

and truthmaking relations with objects external to the observer are replaced by expressions of

emotion, feeling, or sentiment.48 On such a view, the observer’s feeling that the dancer is

lissome or beautiful is all that is needed to justify the corresponding aesthetic judgment, and the

sentence “the dancer is lissome” would be an expression of the observer’s response, not a

declarative statement. This sort of extreme projectivism does not even countenance inter-

subjective agreement as a standard for objectivity.

Projectivism is also found in some readings of Locke on the secondary qualities (such as

Mackie’s), where secondary qualities present themselves as being out there in the world in the

same way that primary qualities are, but because there are no such objective qualities, experience

is judged to be misleading or erroneous.49 This error theory is apparent in some places in the

literature on color, where a contrast is drawn between the phenomenal colors present in our

experiences of things and the light-reflectance dispositions actually possessed by them.50 Taking

the dancer’s lissomeness to be ultimately a property of our experience, rather than of the dancer

herself (as experience leads us to believe), would give us an analogous error theory for aesthetic

properties. This turning to phenomenal properties (for either color or aesthetic properties) leaves

us with the same result: we lose location, stability, and explanation for the properties in question.

Insofar as a projectivist account locates aesthetic properties in the perceivers’ experience instead

47 Matravers, Derek. “Aesthetic Properties I”, Aristotelian Society: Supplementary Volume. 79 (2005): 191-210, p. 200. 48 Emotivism is one classic version of expressivism, much discussed in moral theory. A. J. Ayer, for instance, argued that in the sentence “You acted wrongly in stealing that money,” the literal meaning of the sentence is nothing more than “You stole that money,” because the “acted wrongly” language is nothing more than an expression of a feeling of moral disapproval. Ayer, A.J., (1946) Language, Truth, and Logic (New York: Dover Publications, 2nd Edition), p. 107. 49 Benbaji, 32. 50 See, for instance, Christopher Peacocke, “Colour Concepts and Colour Experiences,” Synthese 58 (1984), 365-382.

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of the external world, it cannot have aesthetic properties existing unobserved, and neither can it

have them serving the sort of explanatory role with regards to our experiences that a realist

account does.51

If a projectivist account of aesthetic properties treats aesthetic predicates as non-cognitive

(thus being a form of expressivism), the resulting error theory is what makes it a form of non-

realism. Not all projectivisms are expressivist and non-cognitivist, however. For instance, there

is a projective element in Kant’s view of aesthetic properties—“We speak of beauty as if it were

a property of things”52—but as Zangwill observes, Kant’s view “is not happily classed as non-

cognitive, since for Kant pleasure in the beautiful is, or is intimately bound up with, the free play

of our cognitive faculties.” While the cognitive faculties are not engaged in their “regular

business” of acquiring knowledge or holding beliefs, entertaining a thought or using the

imagination still is cognitive.53 Kant’s account is still a version of non-realism for aesthetic

properties, however, as it gives us an error theory—we are mistaken in thinking beauty is a

property there for the experiencing in the external world.

Reductive phenomenalist views make up the second class of aesthetic property views to

be considered here. According to the reductive phenomenalist, aesthetic properties are

phenomenal (as the projectivist would say) and also systematically reducible to relations between

non-aesthetic properties and perceivers’ properties. There is a sort of commonsense idea that

51 Hutcheson and Hume fought the loss of normativity this seems to entail, however, with Hutcheson pointing to uniformity amidst diversity in an object to account for the stable perception of beauty, and Hume pointing to certain qualities in objects, such as formal design, which could support a convergence of refined taste. 52 Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. James Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1928, p. 52. 53 Nick Zangwill, The Metaphysics of Beauty, Ithaca: Cornell, 2001, p. 204. Zangwill also mentions Roger Scruton’s Art and Imagination (London: Methuen, 1982) for its similarity to Kant’s view in this regard. Perhaps Zangwill is contrasting “cognitivist” here with Hume and Hutchison’s sentimentalist emphasis on taste rather than reasoned analysis, but Hume treats beauty as a cognitive pleasure, so Zangwill’s classification may be causing more confusion than it resolves.

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individual instances of aesthetic properties are in some respects reducible to non-aesthetic

properties, as when we allow that a lissome dancer is lissome in virtue of her motions and

positions, but reductive phenomenalism goes a step further than this token-identity reduction. It

claims that not only are particular tokens or instances of an aesthetic property reducible to non-

aesthetic ones, but that aesthetic property types can be reduced to the non-aesthetic and thus

eliminated from one’s ontology. The only distinctly aesthetic thing remaining, then, is an

experience of a certain kind. So reductive phenomenalism is anti-realist like projectivism in that

it denies aesthetic properties a real place in its ontology, and because it implies that experience is

misleading. It differs from projectivism, however, in that it emphasizes the non-aesthetic

properties of objects in the external world, in addition to perceivers’ properties. Though he

would perhaps not use the label himself, Derek Matravers offers what I consider to be a

reductive phenomenalist view when he says that

talk of aesthetic properties obscures rather than clarifies the issues. Aesthetic attributions are grounded in experiences of certain distinctive sorts that are caused by non-aesthetic properties, and which exhibit a wide measure of inter-subjective agreement... anti-realism is ontologically parsimonious... If there is some intuitive force to saying that grace is a property, there seems little to making the same claim for ‘gemlike fire’ or ‘marmoreal hardness’.54

Matravers would thus have it that claims such as “the dancer is lissome” are apt because there is

a distinctive sort of generally agreed upon experience of non-aesthetic properties that grounds

such claims, not because the dancer has any aesthetic property over and above the non-aesthetic

ones. Her apparent lissomeness is a phenomenon reducible to her non-aesthetic properties and

the perceiver’s response, and due to intersubjective agreement the property lissomeness itself is

reducible to the non-aesthetic, doing away with talk of aesthetic properties altogether.

54 Matravers, Derek. “Aesthetic Properties I”, Aristotelian Society: Supplementary Volume. 79 (2005): 191-210, pp. 208-209.

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Due to his emphasis on supervenience on non-aesthetic properties, I would also classify

the response-dependence view that Nick Zangwill flirts with as a version of reductive

phenomenalism, though he himself might prefer to call it projectivism: “The realist,” he tells us,

“can say that the beauty of music is where the sounds are, or perhaps that its beauty is realized in

or constituted by sounds. A nonrealist, by contrast, says that, really, there is only sound–the rest

is something projected onto it by us.”55 Though I shall discuss Zangwill’s views at length in

chapter 3, I wish to note here that his account of sense-perceptible properties presents them as

dependent upon responses and minds (apparently for their very existence), and that aesthetic

properties likewise depend upon minds if they exist at all, since they supervene on sense-

perceptible properties.56 He considers this view a sort of quasi-realism, insofar as his aesthetic

properties depend on mental states– real states, if not real features of the external world. For

Zangwill, insofar as the dancer’s lissomeness can be said to exist at all, it seems to depend for its

existence on an observer’s response, and so it is not a feature of the dancer but rather of the

relation between the dancer’s non-aesthetic properties and the observer’s mind. Insofar as

accounts like Matravers’ and Zangwill’s emphasize dependence on mental states, they sacrifice

the location consideration: beauty, as Zangwill puts it, winds up in the eye of the beholder.

Stability is likewise at risk, for if an aesthetic property depends for its existence on both sense-

perceptible properties and perceivers’ responses, it is not clear how it can exist unobserved. On

such views, aesthetic properties are both reducible and eliminable, with the explanatory work

they appear to do being performed by non-aesthetic properties and perceivers’ states.

Realism, the final category of aesthetic property views, occupies the opposite end of the

objectivity/subjectivity spectrum from projectivism, and includes those views which grant

55 Nick Zangwill, The Metaphysics of Beauty, Ithaca: Cornell, 2001, p. 186 56 This argument will be addressed at length in chapter 3.

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aesthetic properties the ontological status of genuine, irreducible, sui generis properties. One

kind of realist view would be a naive physicalist aesthetic realism, where aesthetic properties are

irreducibly constituted by, realized by, or identical to physical properties. One of the biggest

draws of such a view is that our folk metaphysics includes concepts of aesthetic properties on

which they are “causally and spatiotemporally endowed,”

The physical structure of seeds is causally efficacious in bringing about the beauty of the flowers that grow from them. Treading on flowers, on the other hand, destroys their beauty. The beauty and elegance of a work of art is brought about by the artist who creates it. The beauty of flowers and works of art cause people to dwell when gazing at them... instantiations of aesthetic properties seem to be effects and they seem to cause aesthetic reactions in human beings, a considerable causal role.57

Physicalist aesthetic realism requires strong supervenience of aesthetic properties on physical

properties; on this view the dancer’s lissomeness would be constituted by, realized by, or

identical to her physical properties. It is a naive view insofar as it does not account for two

things. The first is the way in which aesthetic properties as they are experienced are at the center

of their identity, suggesting a functional concept as I argued in 1.1. The second is the difficulty

of giving any necessary or sufficient conditions for aesthetic properties in terms of the non-

aesthetic properties that would constitute, realize, or be identical to them, noted by Sibley and

discussed in 1.2. This kind of view is generally problematic because it does not account for the

subjective elements of aesthetic experience addressed in 1.4.

Another variation on aesthetic property realism, patterned after a theory of color held by

Colin McGinn, John Campbell, and others, would make aesthetic properties primitive or basic.

McGinn allows that colors supervene on dispositions to appear, but holds that it is the color that

appears: “the dispositions control the colours, via supervenience, while not collapsing the colours

57 Ibid, p. 180.

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into the dispositions.”58 The analogous view for aesthetic properties would have it that they are

supervenient upon (presumably non-aesthetic) dispositions to appear, but not reducible to such

dispositions (thus satisfying Dependence). The dancer’s lissomeness would thus be connected to

dispositions to appear in certain ways to an observer, but would be primitive and unanalyzable.

As an ontologically basic property of the dancer, lissomeness would satisfy Location and

Stability constraints, and be well-suited for Explanation as well. Revelation would be somehow

accounted for by the connection to dispositions to appear.

Jerrold Levinson argues for a sui generis view of aesthetic properties motivated by

Revelation, one on which they are higher-order ways of appearing that depend upon but cannot

be reduced to lower-order (that is, non-aesthetic sense-perceptible) ways of appearing.59 This

way of spelling out the connection between the aesthetic and non-aesthetic is in keeping with

Sibley’s work on the difficulty of determining conditions governing the two. Treating aesthetic

properties as ways of appearing makes them akin to Mark Johnston’s manifest properties, those

properties that reveal their natures in and through their appearances.60 This view would have the

dancer’s lissomeness to be a characteristic sort of look that is directly available to the observer,

again dependent upon but not reducible to other characteristic (but non-aesthetic) looks or ways

of appearing. Levinson, like McGinn, resists the analytic collapse into dispositions; his

arguments that ways of appearing are not equivalent to dispositions to appear will be discussed

in chapter 5.

58 Colin McGinn, “Another Look at Colour,” The Journal of Philosophy, 93:11, Nov 1996, 537-553, p. 547. See also Campbell’s “A Simple View of Colour” in John Haldane and Crispin Wright (eds.), Reality: Representation and Projection (Oxford: OUP 1993), 257-268. 59Jerrold Levinson, “Aesthetic Properties II”, Aristotelian Society: Supplementary Volume. 79 (2005): 211-227. 60Mark Johnston, Chapter 5, “The Manifest”, web document. Access date: 3/29/2011 http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/courses/consciousness97/papers/johnston/chap5.html

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Matravers notes that in at least some cases primitivism has a hard time explaining how

the same non-aesthetic properties affect different sensibilities differently, because which sui

generis property the object possesses is determined by the nature of the experience had by the

observer.61 Levinson worries, for instance, that some aesthetic properties may essentially

involve reference to perceivers’ responses, with the result that they would be response-

dependent; this would imply that at least some such aesthetic properties are not primitive, after

all. Still, primitivism does a tolerable job of accounting for location, stability, explanation,

revelation, and dependence for aesthetic properties.

1.6 Supervenience and Emergence

The versions of aesthetic realism discussed in the previous section make use of

supervenience to explain the connections between aesthetic and non-aesthetic properties. What

does it mean to say that aesthetic properties supervene on non-aesthetic properties? In the

supervenience relation, the supervenient properties co-vary with the base properties; this means

that there can be no difference in the supervenient aesthetic properties without a difference in

their base non-aesthetic properties. Levinson formulates aesthetic supervenience accordingly:

(AS): Two objects (e.g., artworks) that differ aesthetically necessarily differ non-aesthetically. [i.e., there could not be two objects that were aesthetically different yet non-aesthetically identical.] [i.e., fixing the non-aesthetic properties of an object fixes its aesthetic properties.]62

The greatest challenge in elucidating the relationship between aesthetic and non-aesthetic

properties is in determining what sorts of non-aesthetic properties are to be included in the

61Matravers, Derek. “Aesthetic Properties I”, Aristotelian Society: Supplementary Volume. 79 (2005): 191-210, pp. 206-207. 62 Jerrold Levinson, “Aesthetic Supervenience,” Southern Journal of Philosophy, 22:Supplement (1984) 93-109, p. 93.

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supervenience base. Structural properties are strong candidates; included in this category are

properties such as the colored regions of a Mondrian, a dancer’s arabesques and pirouettes, the

dynamic variation in the bass tuba’s part in Bydlo, and the head notes of a perfume—“roughly

any perceivable, intrinsic, but non-aesthetic feature of an object,” as Levinson says.

Changes in substructural properties—“any physical attribute that is not perceivable as

such, that is, discernible from an alternative at the same level of specificity”—would also

account for changes in aesthetic properties. Examples of substructural properties might include

specific angles in the dancer’s position, chemical components in the perfume, light-reflectance

mechanisms in the painting, or relations between pitch and volume in the music, which are not

discernible by the unaugmented human powers of perception, yet could affect the overall

aesthetic character of the work. In most cases, however, it seems that changes to the aesthetic

properties co-vary with perceivable changes in its non-aesthetic intrinsic properties, those

properties that it possesses regardless of its relations to other objects. Separating non-aesthetic

intrinsic properties into the structural and substructural is not, I think, generally necessary.

Together, the structural and substructural properties make up the supervenience base for the

aesthetic properties of non-art objects; fixing the structural and substructural properties of a non-

art object would seem to be sufficient for fixing its aesthetic properties.

In the case of artworks, however, a third dimension of non-aesthetic property changes

arguably affects aesthetic character as well. These are changes in what Levinson terms

contextual properties, where a contextual property is “an appreciatively important relation of the

object to the artistic context in which it is situated.” Contextual properties would likely include

such properties as authenticity (as opposed to status as a forgery), references or allusions to other

works, representative functions, genres and styles, and author’s intentions regarding

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interpretation. Insofar as our experiences of artworks and the responses and judgments that

result are cognitive and affected by our understanding of these sorts of contextual properties,

they look to be candidates for inclusion in a supervenience base as well. I have some

reservations about including contextual properties in the supervenience base for aesthetic

properties, however, because I prefer to trace their influence on aesthetic experience as occurring

through the appropriately disposed perceiver. I agree that contextual properties (what I have

called artistic properties) are aesthetically relevant, but I do not think they fix what aesthetic

properties a thing has so much as which ones are likely to be manifest to a given observer.63

A corollary of Levinson’s aesthetic supervenience thesis is that “two objects that differ

aesthetically, but neither contextually nor (purely) substructurally, necessarily differ

structurally.” If an artist produces two treatments of the same subject, in the same genre and

with the same influences at work, there are no physical differences at a level beyond ordinary

observation, and the two works differ aesthetically, the difference will necessarily be a structural

one. If one is sober and the other flamboyant, we should look to their particular lines, shapes,

colors, etc. for an explanation of the aesthetic differences.64

Aesthetic supervenience tells us where and when to expect covariance, but not why. One

reason to expect covariance would be if aesthetic properties were entirely reducible to non-

aesthetic properties and thus eliminable, a scenario in keeping with the sort of reductive

phenomenalism discussed in the previous section. Here and in the following section I shall argue

instead that covariance is to be expected because it accompanies an emergent relationship

between aesthetic and non-aesthetic properties, and I shall maintain that the explanatory role of

63 See Walton’s 1970 “Categories of Art,” Philosophical Review, vol. 79, and Nick Zangwill’s The Metaphysics of Beauty, Ithaca: Cornell, 2001, pp. 43-44. 64 Levinson (1984), pp. 93-94.

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aesthetic properties merits their inclusion in one’s ontology. The emergence account I favor is

thus compatible with supervenience, but not eliminative reductivism.

The motivations for an emergence account can be seen in the aesthetic literature in the

debate surrounding the possibility of conditions governing the relations between aesthetic and

non-aesthetic properties. Here, the issue is often presented as a question of whether there are any

structural conditions governing the application of aesthetic predicates. Peter Kivy answers this

question in the affirmative, defending a view whereon he takes non-aesthetic descriptions to be

sometimes sufficient to logically guarantee the applicability of an aesthetic description.65

Levinson, championing Sibley’s view that that there are no necessary and sufficient conditions

governing the relations between aesthetic and non-aesthetic properties, maintains that while the

non-aesthetic effects of a painting underlie its aesthetic effects, the aesthetic effects do not

simply collapse into non-aesthetic ones. He acknowledges Kivy’s point that we can defend

aesthetic ascriptions by pointing to the attribute-making features of the object in question, but not

simple sense-perceptible ascriptions; Levinson thinks the differences may be explicable due to

the complexity of the aesthetic compared to the sense-perceptible, however, and points out that

features which tend to make for a particular aesthetic attribute do not actually guarantee it.66 He

holds that “if a property is regarded as emergent on a given underlying basis, it will be

conceivable that it might have emerged from a different underlying basis, or that the underlying

basis that in fact generates it might not have done so.” In his example of a Mondrian having a

cool blue square and airy background, the colored regions and arrangements of lines suffice for

them to be cool and airy; the aesthetic properties of coolness and airiness, he would say, are

65 Kivy, Peter. “What Makes Aesthetic Terms Aesthetic?” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 36 (1975): 197-211. 66 Levinson (1984), pp. 96, 106-107.

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essentially tied to their characteristic ways of appearing (or functions in aesthetic experience, as I

would have it), but only contingently related to specifiable non-aesthetic conditions.67

This consideration of conditions leads Levinson to his position on supervenience,

emergence and reducibility:

Coextensiveness, even necessary coextensiveness, does not establish property identity. Furthermore, rather than being in conflict with supervenience and the coextensiveness consequence it carries, the idea of emergence seems to require a supporting and correlatable substructure out of which, and in relation to, emergent properties will do their emerging. Emergentism is not mysticism, after all.68

According to an emergence view, aesthetic properties co-vary with non-aesthetic properties

because the former are grounded in the latter. We could even go so far as to say that there is a

token identity reduction, such that particular instantiations of aesthetic properties are determined

by the non-aesthetic properties from which they emerge; the important factor for maintaining

aesthetic property realism, however, is that we do not allow for a type identity reduction. I will

return to token and type identity reduction and elminativism in the following section.

1.7 Defending Aesthetic Property Realism

A realism about aesthetic properties is certainly desirable if such a view can be justified.

It would locate aesthetic properties in objects in the external world, justifying our use of aesthetic

predicates in propositional utterances. It would explain their apparent stability, supporting our

intuition that unseen paintings, unread books, and unperformed musical works are not without

aesthetic character. Aesthetic property realism would justify our appeals to aesthetic properties

of objects in explanations of our aesthetic experiences. Finally, it would explain the normativity

67 Ibid, pp. 101-103. 68 Ibid. Levinson allows that there may be a continuum of aesthetic properties (at one end of which the properties are more wholly emergent), or that he should insist on only substantial (rather than complete) conceptual distinctness from the structural base.

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that attaches to our aesthetic discourse, wherein we judge some aesthetic ascriptions to be more

correct or apt than others.

How, then, can we argue for aesthetic property realism in the face of projectivism and

reductive phenomenalism, which hold that aesthetic properties are dependent for their existence

upon perceivers’ responses? Furthermore, if aesthetic properties are reducible to non-aesthetic

properties such that there is no point in talking of aesthetic properties at all, as Matravers has

suggested, then reductivism appears to entail eliminativism. So the proponent of aesthetic

property realism must defend his or her view on two fronts, demonstrating both that aesthetic

properties are ontologically independent from perceivers’ responses and that they cannot be

eliminated by reduction to non-aesthetic properties. In chapter 3 I shall consider Zangwill’s

treatment of projectivism and discuss response-dependence at length, arguing that we can accept

conceptual response-dependence (that is, that aesthetic concepts must be defined and understood

by reference to perceivers’ responses) without being forced to accept that aesthetic properties

depend ontologically (for their very existence) on the actual responses of perceivers.

My focus in the present section is thus on the question of whether aesthetic properties can

be effectively reduced to non-aesthetic properties. I do not, of course, wish to argue that

aesthetic properties have no connection to non-aesthetic properties; I accept Dependence, as

explained at the beginning of this chapter. What is needed, I think, is an emergence account such

as was introduced in 1.6, wherein aesthetic properties supervene on non-aesthetic sense-

perceptible ones but are not reducible in a way that makes them eliminable. We want to say that

changes in aesthetic properties track changes in non-aesthetic properties, but that aesthetic

properties cannot be collapsed into non-aesthetic ones. The lissome dancer will not become stiff

or ungainly without undergoing changes in her form, stance or movement, but lissomeness is

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more than simple rule-following where form, stance, and movement are concerned, even if it is

determined by such non-aesthetic properties in its particular instantiations.

Jerrold Levinson argues for the irreducibility of aesthetic properties to non-aesthetic ones

by appealing to the unified looks and feels he thinks we attend to in aesthetic experience and

ascribe to aesthetic objects. These unified ways of appearing, he holds, are very different from

the combinations of non-aesthetic properties that the reductivist directs our attention to: “when

we ascribe an aesthetic property it seems that what we are ascribing, at base, is an emergent way

of appearing, and not a range of ensembles of disparate traits that, it so happens, are able to

sustain such a way of appearing.”69 In the example of the dancer, the lissomeness we attend to

and appreciate would be this unified sort of look, and not merely a set of forms, stances, and

movements that support the appearance of lissomeness. This point is in keeping with Sibley’s

case for the lack of rules governing the aesthetic and non-aesthetic, and is evidenced here by the

difficulty of the beginning dancer’s imitation of the teacher, where methodically following the

demonstrated steps lays a foundation for the desired aesthetic quality but does not guarantee it.

Second, Levinson highlights the normative aspect of aesthetic discourse. For the realist,

“aesthetic attributions admit of being correct or incorrect because objects really do have or fail to

have aesthetic properties; but equally, the socio-linguistic fact of there being correct and

incorrect aesthetic attributions gives us grounds to posit corresponding properties in explanation

of that fact.” Because what we ascribe (a lissome look, for example) is more like an emergent

way of appearing than some gerrymandered disjunction of non-aesthetic properties (various

forms, stances, and movements), the most natural candidates for truthmakers (or determiners of

correctness/aptness) for our ascriptions will be aesthetic properties that correspond to those

69Levinson, Jerrold. "Aesthetic Properties, Evaluative Force, and Differences of Sensibility." Aesthetic Concepts: Essays after Sibley. Eds. Jerrold Levinson and Emily Brady. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. 61-80. p. 69.

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descriptive aesthetic predicates. So the second piece of his argument (as I have reconstructed it

here) is that aesthetic properties just are the best such explanation available of the normativity

apparent in aesthetic discourse. The reductivist alternative is problematic because “no one has

ever succeeded in elucidating how such indefinitely varying and cognitively unruly ensembles

can serve to underwrite the normativity of aesthetic judgments.”70

To draw out the further implications of Levinson’s argument here, it is not just that

aesthetic properties are better truthmakers/determiners of aptness for aesthetic claims than

disjunctions of non-aesthetic properties; more fundamentally, they are better at explaining our

aesthetic experiences because they capture the more complex, higher-level, holistic functions of

artworks and other aesthetic objects. With emergence, aesthetic properties are subject to

variable realization; this is to say that the base-level properties determine the upper-level

properties, but different instantiations of the same aesthetic property can be determined by quite

different non-aesthetic structures. Aesthetic supervenience leaves room for variable realization

insofar as it tells us that changes in aesthetic properties will be linked to changes in non-aesthetic

properties, but not that variation in the base properties entails variation in the supervenient

properties. On this point, Zangwill acknowledges that since not all of an object’s non-aesthetic

properties are relevant in determining its aesthetic properties, the challenge is to say how much

variation there can be in a supervenience base before we see a change in the supervenient

properties.71

Zangwill’s solution to the puzzle regarding the variability in the differences possible in

base properties before we see differences in supervenient properties involves a strategy similar to

70 Jerrold Levinson, “Aesthetic Properties,” Aristotelian Society: Supplementary Volume. 79 (2005): 211-227, p. 215. 71 The Metaphysics of Beauty, Ithaca: Cornell, 2001, p. 46.

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Monroe Beardsley’s;72 Zangwill distinguishes between the specific aesthetic properties an object

has and its total aesthetic character. Specific aesthetic properties can be instantiated with

remarkably different non-aesthetic bases (for instance in a painting or a musical work, which

have very different non-aesthetic properties). But where the total aesthetic character of an

artwork or other object is concerned, even small changes in the non-aesthetic properties that

make up the supervenience base are likely to change the total aesthetic character of a thing.

Chuck Close’s photo-realist paintings, which are only realist in terms of their total aesthetic

character, illustrate this point well. Close’s painting Lucas, a portrait of fellow artist Lucas

Samaras, is roughly eight by seven feet in dimension, and entirely composed of elliptical daubs

of color, which when viewed from a distance coalesce into the image of a face standing out

against a dark background. The piece has a disconcertingly dynamic quality, yet is composed of

hundreds of simple daubs of paint of roughly the same size, any of which considered apart from

the piece fails to be particularly dynamic. There is a sort of sorites paradox here: a “heap”

constituted by only a few paint daubs will not have the artistic property of realism or the

aesthetic property of dynamism, yet the whole of a Close piece is both realistic and dynamic.

The paradox works in the other direction, as well: if the painting is altered by darkening a few of

the paint daubs at the edge of the face, the dynamism would not likely be altered, but darken

enough of them and the face is lost in the background. Zangwill allows there will be degrees of

72 Monroe Beardsley, Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981, p. 86. He distinguished between local qualities (homogenous perceptible properties like patches of color) that belong to the parts of a whole, and the regional qualities that belong to the whole region but not to its parts. In some cases, the various low-level features of a thing come together to produce a whole with a quality that differs only from those of its parts as a matter of degree, but in other cases, objects considered as wholes have qualities that are not possessed by their parts.

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sensitivity to change in the subvenience base in between the extreme cases of specific aesthetic

properties and total aesthetic character, but this, he thinks, is exactly what we should expect.73

On a functional characterization of the aesthetic (such as I promoted in 1.1), aesthetic

properties are unified by the character they impart to aesthetic experience, not by their

connections to specific sorts of non-aesthetic properties. Since on my view ox-carts, paintings,

and musical works can all instantiate the aesthetic property of ponderousness, I have no problem

allowing that certain minor (and even major) changes can occur in base properties without

entailing changes in the supervenient properties. This variable realization is, in my opinion, one

of the positive outcomes of emergence, as it allows for token-identity reduction between the

aesthetic and non-aesthetic, but not type-identity reduction.

1.8 Emergence and Gestalt Properties

Emergence bears more than a passing resemblance to gestalt theory, which I shall address

before concluding my general treatment of aesthetic properties in this chapter. Because of the

parallels between the higher and lower-level classes of properties, emergentism and theories of

regional/gestalt qualities appear to have much in common. Just as aesthetic properties,

considered as emergent qualities, are dependent upon but not entirely reducible to non-aesthetic

properties, gestalt and regional qualities of the whole of a thing are understood to be dependent

upon but not reducible to the qualities of its parts. Rudolf Arnheim suggests, for instance, that

gestalt theory is at some level a reaction to and rejection of the atomistic approach to explaining

qualities of wholes as merely the sums of local effects, qualities, and isolated elements.74

73 Ibid, pp. 47-49. 74 “Gestalt and Art”

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K. Mitchells has criticized Frank Sibley for taking non-aesthetic qualities to belong to

parts of artworks that make up wholes having aesthetic properties. He proposes instead that a

whole object can be perceived in either a non-aesthetic mode (focusing on analyzing qualities

abstracted from perceptual context for information) or an aesthetic mode (focusing on an

appreciating what we perceive for its own sake, and being receptive to its character qualities).

Non-aesthetic qualities are thus potentially aesthetic, and the aesthetic mode of perception

reveals the aesthetic aspect of the object; Mitchells considers both non-aesthetic and aesthetic

perception to involve gestalt perception. Furthermore, parts often have gestalt qualities, and

parts and wholes exist in complex hierarchies; a simple property like a patch of red can be seen

either neutrally as an area of a certain hue, or aesthetically as having a certain character (warm

and expansive, for instance), and the same difference in approach will lead to differences in

perceptions for more complex qualities. In any case, Mitchells argues, recognition of the non-

aesthetic features is not required before the gestalt aesthetic qualities of an object can be

perceived; rather, the gestalt qualities are irreducible, and the parts that manifest themselves to

perception are determined by the shape of the whole as much as the whole is determined by its

parts.75

If Mitchells is right about the complex nature of perception, what are the implications for

a realist theory of aesthetic properties? Can gestalt properties be real, objective properties of

objects, or must we take them to be the subjective projections of the perceiver?76 Rudolf

Arnheim makes the case that the organizational processes involved in perception do justice to

75 “Aesthetic Perception and Aesthetic Qualities,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, Vol. 67, (1966 - 1967), pp. 53-72. 76 Harold Osborne argues that the emergent qualities in pointillism are not exemplary of the significant part-whole relationships in aesthetic structures because it is what he calls a “side effect of viewpoint:” such qualities can be altered if we stand closer to the piece. He questions whether gestalt unity can be equivalent to the aesthetic unity noticed by aesthetic formalism. See “Artistic Unity and Gestalt,” The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 14, No. 56 (Jul., 1964), pp. 214-228, p. 216.

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organization already present in nature. It is not the case that perception finds balance, symmetry,

unity, harmony, tension, and so on where it does not exist; rather, there is an isomorphism, an

identity of form, between psychological and physical processes.77 This fit is necessary for

aesthetic experience to occur, and for aesthetic properties to explain the specific character of our

aesthetic experiences.

Regardless, Levinson argues that we have good reasons not to identify emergent and

regional/gestalt properties:

The divergence comes about, basically, because regionality or Gestalthood is a feature of perceptual qualities vis-à-vis their more elementary perceptual conditions, whereas emergence, so far characterized, is a feature of qualities vis-à-vis their supervenience bases, which may not be perceptual ones. An additional reason for not insisting that emergent qualities be regional... is that there may be graspable aesthetic qualities that are not regional, but which we would presumably want to recognize as emergent on their phenomenal bearers.78 Such non-regional, emergent qualities might be qualities of simple colors and sounds, he

suggests, for instance “a uniform patch of a saturated red may have a certain vibrancy, one of

blue a certain coolness, while a violin’s high E may be steely and a bassoon’s low E flat woolly.”

Furthermore, where summative regional qualities are concerned, the regional quality is not

different in nature from the lower-level qualities it depends upon, and is conceptually reducible

to them, unlike an emergent quality:

For example, if we take two three-inch squares and conjoin them, the resulting object has an area of eighteen square inches, which neither of the two contributions possesses, though their respective areas, as related, are responsible for the area of the rectangles so formed. Such summative regional attributes as being eighteen square inches in area are

77 “Gestalt and Art,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 2, No. 8 (Autumn, 1943), pp. 71-75. 78 Jerrold Levinson, “Aesthetic Supervenience,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 22:Supplement, 1984, 93-109, p. 102.

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not happily construed as emergent on less extensive area-attributes – though they are clearly supervenient on them (together, perhaps, with positional attributes).79

Emergent and gestalt/regional qualities have some features in common, but the resemblances

only go so far, and it would be a mistake to identify the two kinds of properties.

To summarize: I hold a robustly realist view of aesthetic properties whereon they are

stable features of objects in the external world, emergent from lower-level non-aesthetic

properties but not eliminable. I will allow that our concepts of aesthetic properties necessarily

refer to the responses of perceiving subjects and are thus subjective in this limited sense, but I

maintain that they are objective in that they are genuine features of the external world, not of

perceivers’ mental states or subjective experiences. Aesthetic properties are thus ideal

candidates for explaining the existence and nature of our aesthetic experiences, justifying

aesthetic ascriptions, and underwriting normativity for aesthetic judgment. In the following

chapter I shall lay out the theory of powers and dispositions from which I shall critique

Zangwill’s response-dependence account of sense-perceptible and aesthetic properties in chapter

3, and I shall develop my own dispositional account in chapters 4 and 5.

79 Jerrold Levinson, “Aesthetic Supervenience,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 22:Supplement, 1984, 93-109, pp. 102-103.

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Chapter 2: A Theory of Powers and Dispositions

The account of aesthetic properties that I am developing is a realism that maintains that

they belong to objects in the external world, and that we are (at least sometimes) correct in

making aesthetic claims to that effect. Their essence, I have suggested, is a functional one, and it

is for this reason that I turn to powers and dispositions as a suitable model for aesthetic

properties. In this chapter I will lay out the general framework for an account of properties as

powers, demonstrating the aptness of dispositional language for both everyday experience and

more technical discourse. I will offer a series of examples of powers at work, highlighting their

functional nature, and develop a model that clearly distinguishes between dispositions or powers,

their manifestations, and the conditions under which they manifest themselves. I will touch

briefly on the conditional analysis that has been offered for dispositions and powers, rejecting it

in favor of an account of intentionality and (more particularly) directedness as the mark of the

dispositional. Finally, I will indicate how such directedness towards a manifestation type gives

the essence of a power, and explain how reciprocal dispositions manifest jointly by meeting each

others’ conditions for manifestation.

2.1 Recognizing Dispositional Language

Dispositional language is commonly used to express tendencies and inclinations of

people and objects to behave (or refuse to behave) in various ways. Consider the following three

common forms of dispositional language, introduced from the most to least obviously

dispositional idioms. First, the most obvious examples of dispositional language are those

constructions that wear their hearts on their sleeves, as it were, making prominent use of the

terms ‘disposition’ or ‘disposed’. Examples include saying that a person has a cheerful

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disposition, or that water is disposed to freeze at zero degrees Celsius. This sort of dispositional

language is easy to use as well as to recognize, as it requires no explicit reference to the

conditions accompanying the expected behavior and thus lends itself to the vague generalizations

suitable for everyday purposes.

The second common form of dispositional language is a class of adjectives created by

adding the Latin suffixes ‘-ile’ and ‘-ble’ (indicating an ability or suitability) to various verb

stems. Examples of this include ‘soluble’, ‘excitable’, ‘volatile’, and ‘agile’. We apply these

terms to persons and objects that behave in predictable ways under certain conditions: soluble

objects dissolve if placed in water, fragile objects break when dropped or knocked, and so forth.

While there isn’t always an existing term of this sort that is suited for our purposes, we

frequently take advantage of the construction to invent one that does the job: an ad for furniture

slipcovers, for instance, claims that they are removable, washable, and change-your-mindable.1

Finally, the third common idiom I will mention, the least obviously dispositional, uses

subjunctive conditionals to connect conditions and behaviors in an expanded construction, as in

the sentence ‘if placed in water, the substance will dissolve’.2 This type of dispositional

language is particularly easy to use, as conditionals can be formed from any two declarative

statements describing conditions and behaviors.3

All three forms of dispositional language mentioned here are subject to a greater or lesser

degree of specificity. The conditions under which a behavior occurs can be described in a fairly

general way—sugar dissolves ‘if placed in water’—or more specifically, ‘if placed in water at a

temperature of one hundred degrees Celsius’. (Similarly, we might describe sugar as water-

1 This construction is more common than one might expect; examples of words that don’t lend themselves familiarly to it are hard to come by. 2 See Molnar (2003) pp. 27-28 and his reference to Quine (1973). 3 More will be said about the prospects for conditionals as a tool for analyzing dispositions in section 3.3.

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soluble or boiling-water-soluble, or say that it is disposed to dissolve in water or in boiling

water.) As we can describe how objects and persons are inclined to behave under general or

specific conditions, we can also describe the behaviors themselves generally or specifically:

consider ‘if Rob is harassed constantly, he will lose his temper’ vs. ‘if Rob is harassed

constantly, he will lose his temper and hit someone’.4

To understand an object or substance in terms of its behavioral tendencies, then, is a

common, familiar practice, as well as a heuristically valuable one: witness the successes of

standard scientific methodology with its emphasis on experimentation via controlled conditions.

Dispositional language is quite common in our discourse, both everyday and technical. We use

it to describe things in terms of the (more or less specific) behaviors they demonstrate under

(more or less specific) conditions. Dispositional language is easy enough to identify, and easier

still to generate; for any tendency of an object we can specify its behavior to increasing depth,

and similarly the conditions under which that behavior occurs.

2.2 Two Caveats Regarding Isomorphism

A word of caution is in order here, however: the wealth of predicates that an object

satisfies often belies a much smaller class of properties actually belonging to the object.5 My

neighbor satisfies the predicates ‘owns a German Mastiff’, ‘owns a boarhound’, and ‘owns a

Great Dane’, but has only one dog. As is demonstrated by this example, there is no guarantee

that for every applicable predicate there exists a distinct property, or vice versa. In fact, there are

4 Note that statements making use of very general descriptions are less likely to be true than those using very specific descriptions, unless we assume an implied ceterus parabus (“all other things being equal”) clause. 5 This tends to be the case with dispositional predicates, I think, though the opposite situation (more properties than we have predicates naming) certainly happens as well, as Molnar points out.

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several reasons why we should not expect to see an isomorphism of predicates and properties,

reasons that George Molnar has summed up quite nicely:

First, although it does not flatter human vanity to admit it, there are omnitemporally unknown properties to which no predicates correspond. Second, there are predicates, such as ‘is a game’, that apply to many objects by virtue of a family resemblance among the objects and not by virtue of each of them having one member of a set of exactly resembling tropes. Third, the converse of Wittgenstein’s famous point also holds and counts against isomorphism. There are co-denoting non-synonymous predicates, such as ‘has the shape of a ball-bearing’ and ‘is spherical’, both of which can apply to the same object by virtue of a single trope of that object. Fourth… predicates can be generated out of other predicates and out of sentences, in accordance with accepted formation rules, up to many orders of infinity… Last, there are the paradoxical predicates. ‘Is a property to which no predicate corresponds’ corresponds to a property only if it does not. So it does not correspond to any property.6

Instead of looking for an isomorphism between predicates and properties, Molnar advocates the

adoption of what Brian Ellis and Caroline Lierse call the ‘Principle of Non-Proliferation’:

‘satisfaction of a predicate is not a sufficient condition for the existence of a real property

distinguished by that predicate.’7 Following such a principle can help prevent unnecessary

inflation of one’s ontology.

While it is easy enough to generate dispositional language for each behavioral tendency

we observe in an object or substance, it is more difficult to ascertain how many distinct

properties of the object actually account for those behavioral tendencies. Take, for instance, a

sandbar shark that follows prey in murky waters, but avoids bait intended for tuna and swordfish.

A single feature of the shark explains these two behaviors: its ampullae of Lorenzini, jelly-filled

nodules on its nose that conduct electricity. It uses them to detect the heartbeat of its prey, but

6 Molnar (2003) pp. 25-26. Molnar offers an additional argument, making use of the real number system and our lack of an uncountable infinity of expressions needed to describe the points of a real line segment. 7 See Molnar (2003) p. 26 and Ellis and Learse (1994) p. 9.

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avoids bait that has been specially equipped with an alloy that reacts with salt water to blast any

nearby sharks with an uncomfortable level of electrical current.8

There are many such cases where several of a thing’s behavioral tendencies, which I shall

henceforth refer to as its dispositions, are accounted for by fewer distinct, genuine properties. By

distinct here I mean numerically distinct, as picked out by whatever individuation conditions

govern the property kind; by genuine I wish to indicate roughly the properties that, at the end of

the day, will turn out to be ontologically basic and not reducible to other properties. These

distinct, genuine properties, in virtue of which an object has its dispositions, I call powers:

lodestones, for example, have both the disposition to attract iron and the disposition to attract

nickel in virtue of their magnetism, the power to create a magnetic field. We might say that the

power magnetism grounds or supports the two dispositions.

As explained in the previous section, we are not guaranteed any one-to-one correlation

between predicates and properties, and by the same token we should also not expect such an

isomorphism where dispositions and powers are concerned. What we see instead is situations

that take the form of what Neil Williams calls a hub-and-spoke model: a genuine power serves as

a hub from which radiate the various dispositions (abilities, he calls them) that the power

grounds or supports.9 I thus use the term disposition much more freely, and feel that its use is

justified whenever we think or speak of an object’s behaviors, however general or specific, and

whether verified by empirical research or not. The correct application of the term power,

however, requires that an object or substance have some distinct, genuine property that is the

cause of such behaviors.

8 See Eric Bland’s “Shark Repellent Disk Emits Electric Volts,” Discovery News, <http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/08/06/shark-repellent.html>, accessed September 24, 2009. 9 See his 2010 “Puzzling Powers: The Problem of Fit,” in The Metaphysics of Powers: Their Grounding and Their Manifestations, ed. Anna Marmodoro, Routledge.

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I should note here that I recognize that many of the functions and dispositions I discuss

may be reducible to some lower level (even microphysical) functions or powers. Insofar as I

want to maintain that these higher-level functions and dispositions are real, my understanding of

what it means for a property to be real centers on causal significance; in the case of aesthetic

dispositions and powers I allow for token-identity reduction, but not type-identity reduction, as

explained in chapter 1. Aesthetic dispositions, like the higher-level properties postulated in other

disciplines, fill explanatory roles more effectively than the lower-level properties that determine

them, and I believe that this justifies their place in my ontology.10

2.3 Recognizing Causal Powers at Work

So far I have given a sort of field guide to dispositional language, and added the caveats

that 1) we should not assume (or even expect) a one-to-one correlation between predicates and

properties, and 2) we likewise should not assume such an isomorphism for an object’s

dispositions (explained as behavioral tendencies) and powers (the distinct, genuine properties in

virtue of which objects have their dispositions). The question remains as to how we can

recognize an object’s powers. I shall make a first pass at answering this question by way of

presenting several more or less uncontroversial examples of powers and drawing attention to two

important characteristics of powers, their functionality and directedness, features that I will

examine in more detail in sections 2.6 and 2.7 of this chapter.

For my first paradigm of causal powers at work I turn to the physical sciences. If a

mechanical engineer wishes to determine how a metal product will respond to a certain kind of

physical stress, he can apply what is known as a bend test, bending a material around its axis or

10 Putnam makes a similar argument for the importance of shape properties as opposed to the microphysical ones that determine them in his 1975 piece “Philosophy and Our Mental Life,” in Mind, Language, and Reality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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an outside radius. Such a test can tell him how ductile the metal is — whether it can easily be

fashioned into a new form or not. In some applications, ductility is highly desirable (aluminum

foil, for instance) while in others (like the girders used in construction projects) it is not.

Whether desirable or not, the ductility of the metal is inescapably understood in terms of how it

behaves and what sorts of state of affairs it is capable of causing. How a thing behaves, its

function, and its tendencies to bring about certain kinds of events, its directedness at such

bending events, are central to the notion of a thing’s ductility and mark the presence of a genuine

power. Function and directedness are, I suggest, likewise central in each of the range of

properties indicated by the following list of terms: abrasive, adhesive, brittle, compressible,

conductive, corrosive, elastic, incandescent, inert, magnetic, malleable, permeable, reflective,

resonant, rigid, stable, soluble, solvent, translucent, unstable, and viscous.

A second paradigmatic example of powers at work in the physical sciences is available at

the microphysical level. The Large Hadron Collider in Geneva explores subatomic physics by

colliding accelerated proton particles; among other projects, researchers are hoping to use data

from the collision of accelerated protons to try to establish the existence of the Higgs boson,

thought to be responsible for the mass of particles. The mass of a particle is the property that

determines how strongly it creates and reacts to gravitational fields—a property described

entirely in terms of behavioral functions and the states of affairs the particle is capable of

causing. Particle mass, along with charge and spin, demonstrates that we find powers at work at

our most fine-grained level of scientific research and explanation, and not just in the realm of the

familiar, common properties of ordinary objects. Physicists seem to find themselves inevitably

speaking in the language of dispositions and powers; while this does not guarantee that

dispositional essentialism (according to which there are at least some dispositions with no further

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grounding in categorical/structural properties) is the only way of accounting for the causal

potency in the physical world, it is arguably the simplest way of doing so. 11

A third example of a causal power at work comes from the field of psychology. An

individual who is agoraphobic exhibits persistent and irrational fear of being in public or open

spaces (including ones that present no realistic danger), connected with the difficulty or

embarrassment of a hasty exit to find help should a panic attack occur. He or she behaves in

such a way as to avoid situations like elevators, bridges, shopping malls, or airplanes, and may

only feel truly safe at home. An individual’s pathological fear of public or open spaces may

cause him or her to exhibit physical symptoms similar to a panic attack, such as lightheadedness,

nausea, chest pain, or difficulty swallowing. Agoraphobia also manifests itself behaviorally in a

reluctance or refusal to enter such spaces, sometimes to the point of refusing to leave one’s

home. Agoraphobia is characterized functionally, in terms of persistent behaviors under certain

conditions, and is essentially understood in terms of the states of affairs towards which the

pathology is directed. Psychological disorders that are analyzed similarly include other phobias,

panic disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder, hypochondria, anorexia, and bulimia.

For my final example of a power at work, consider the theory of color found in John

Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. A violet growing in a forest can be

experienced visually, making us think it is blue. Locke considered color a secondary quality, an

ability to cause the idea of blue in our minds.12 A contemporary version of Locke’s theory of

color would take the flower’s blueness to be a disposition to cause in us a certain kind of visual

11 George Molnar has argued that microphysics demonstrates that causal powers are ineliminable in his Powers, Oxford University Press, 2003, p. 133. This does not guarantee that there are powers and only powers “all the way down,” however, as the very methods of physics predispose its researchers to characterize their findings in terms of behaviors and effects on instruments of measurement. See Frank Jackson’s From Metaphysics to Ethics, Oxford: Clarendon, 1998, p. 23, and Neil Williams’ 2011 “Dispositions and the Argument From Science,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 89:1, 71-90. 12 II, viii, 13 and 15, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1689/1975.

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experience—or, we might say, a directedness at that sort of visual experience. It might further

note that this ability is due to the way it reflects light in normal conditions such as bright

sunlight, a functional account that gives us the conditions under which it behaves in the relevant

way.13 As in previous examples, the evidence for a power at work here is found in the functional

understanding of the property in question, the flower’s blueness, along with the emphasis on the

state of affairs it is directed towards, a certain kind of visual experience. This analysis is, of

course, applicable to other colors as well, and it can arguably be extended to other forms of sense

perception, such as smell, taste, touch, and hearing; more will be said on the philosophy of color

in the next chapter.

These examples were not chosen arbitrarily. Together they demonstrate the ease with

which we discover powers at work across the various fields of study and human experience. I

have touched on the familiar, paradigmatic powers studied and utilized in the physical and

applied sciences, and I have introduced examples of powers at work at the microphysical level,

in the social sciences, and in situations involving human perception. In each of these examples

we see a functional characterization of the power, with an emphasis on the state of affairs it

brings about. I shall continue my discussion of dispositions and powers by developing a model

of powers at work before proceeding to examine in more depth the functionality of powers and

their directedness at the states of affairs that they cause.

13 See Colin McGinn’s 1983 The Subjective View: Secondary Qualities and Indexical Thoughts, Oxford: Clarendon Press, J. McDowell’s 1985 “Values and Secondary Qualities,” in Morality and Objectivity, ed. T. Honderich, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, and Mark Johnston’s 1992 “How to Speak of the Colors,” Philosophical Studies 68, 221-263.

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2.4 A Model for Powers at Work

In each of the four examples discussed in the previous section, we see the following

elements: an object having a causal power brings about some state of affairs when some

conditions obtain. A ductile metal is fashioned into a new form when bent around its axis; a

particle with mass reacts to a gravitational field; an agoraphobic individual feels lightheaded or

nauseous at the prospect of using an elevator; a violet viewed on a sunny day is perceived as

having a blue color. In each case the work done by the object’s power, the state of affairs that is

brought about, is called the manifestation of the power. In each case the power’s manifestation

is enabled by the conditions that obtain, its conditions for manifestation. The model, then, is as

follows:

An object with a power, P, under appropriate conditions of manifestation, C, brings about the manifestation of the power, M.

Simple though this model may be, failing to distinguish between the various elements can lead to

a number of problems, such as the erroneous assumption that the existence of a power depends

on its manifestation (which I will discuss in 2.6.2 below), or the conflation of powers and their

manifestations, which can lead to an unnecessary subjectivity (as we shall see in chapters 3 and

4). In the following sections I shall discuss the manifestations and conditions of manifestation,

examine the prospects of a conditional analysis in linking these two elements in order to give an

account of powers, and then, finding the conditional analysis unsatisfactory, proceed to discuss

powers in terms of their directedness and functionality.

2.4.1 Manifestations

The evidence of a power at work is found in its manifestation (or manifestations). The

magnetism of a lodestone is evident when it attracts steel pins or iron shavings. The fragility of a

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wineglass is evident when it shatters upon being dropped or knocked. Ontologically speaking,

the manifestations of powers are events or states of affairs, be they attractions of pins or iron

shavings, shatterings of wineglasses, or their counterparts in other examples of powers at work.

While a wineglass exists, and its crystalline structure and fragility exist by being instantiated in

it, the shattering of the wineglass is something that occurs.14 Jaegwon Kim’s theory of events,

where an event is the exemplification of a property, by a substance, at a time, works well for my

purposes; we might well call events tropes (property instances) located at spatiotemporal zones,

as does Jonathan Bennett.15 The manifestation of a power is neither an object, nor a(n abstract)

property, but the instantiation of the property by a substance.16 Many powers manifest

themselves as relations between substances, as in the case of the wineglass’s fragility being

manifested in the disarray of glass shards after it has been dropped, but Kim’s theory of events

handles this complexity with facility by allowing for n-adic relations exemplified by n-tuples of

substances in addition to simpler cases of properties exemplified by substances.

In many cases, the manifestation is an event with (more or less) clear spatio-temporal

boundaries marked by discernable changes: the shattering of the wineglass is of this sort. In

some cases, however, no discernable change marks the manifestation of a power: rather, it takes

the form of a continuing state of affairs, such as my basil plant’s remaining upright (as opposed

to wilting). The basil plant’s cells remain turgid as their fluid-content is maintained, and so long

as I care for it properly, it continues to manifest its power to stand upright without any change

14 For more on the difference between existing and occurring, see P.M.S. Hacker, ‘Events, Ontology and Grammar’, Philosophy, 57, 1982, 477-86; reprinted in Events, ed. Roberto Casati and Achille Varzi, Aldershot: Dartmouth, 1996, 79-88. 15 Kim, J., 1976, ‘Events as Property Exemplifications’, in M. Brand and D. Walton (eds.), Action Theory, Dordrecht: Reidel, pp. 159-77; reprinted in Events, ed. Roberto Casati and Achille Varzi, Aldershot: Dartmouth, 1996, pp. 117-35. Bennett, J., 1996, ‘What Events Are’ in Events, ed. Roberto Casati and Achille Varzi, Aldershot: Dartmouth, 1996, pp. 137-151. 16 Further, I take events to be ontologically non-reductive to continuants.

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marking the manifestation. The earth’s mass similarly manifests itself without evident change as

it holds the moon in orbit in its gravitational field. Those who feel that change is essential to

being an event may prefer to classify such manifestations as “remaining turgid” and “continuing

to orbit the earth” as states of affairs rather than events, a possibility which my view can

accommodate easily enough, though I tend to think change is not essential to being an event.17

Some manifestations are marked by discernible changes, but exhibit them over the course of a

chain of events—a process—for which the spatio-temporal boundaries may be unclear. It is hard

to say exactly when an agoraphobe’s anxiety, for instance, begins and ends. The important point

for my present purpose is that manifestations of powers are neither objects nor properties

simpliciter, but rather occurrences—the instantiations of properties by objects.

Manifestations are important, not just because of the epistemic evidence of powers at

work that they provide, but because powers are essentially powers to manifest in some way. The

kind a power belongs to, its type, is given by the way(s) in which it manifests itself, a feature I

shall examine in more depth in 2.6.1.

2.4.2 Conditions for Manifestation

That an object has a power to bring about certain states of affairs is, by itself, rarely

sufficient for the power’s manifestation. The relatively fragile skeleton of an individual with

osteoporosis causes distinct results when a bone density test is performed in the form of a dual

energy x-ray absorptiometry scan (DXA). But the fragility of the bones alone is not enough to

bring about the x-ray results; the x-ray itself has to be performed. Similarly, the fragility of a

wineglass, manifested in a shattering event, is only manifested when it is subject to sudden force

17 For a view which insists on change as essential to events, see Lawrence Brian Lombard’s “Events”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 9, 1986, 425-460, reprinted in Events, ed. Roberto Casati and Achille Varzi, Aldershot: Dartmouth, 1996, 177-212.

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such as dropping or knocking. The conditions under which a power manifests are, like the

manifestations themselves, events or states of affairs. Most of what has been said about

manifestations in the previous section, then, applies equally to manifestation conditions: they are,

properly speaking, said to occur rather than exist; they are instantiations of properties or relations

by substances; and sometimes they are ongoing states of affairs not marked by any particularly

evident changes and lacking clear spatio-temporal boundaries. Manifestations and conditions for

manifestation are, however, dissimilar in one important respect: it is a power’s manifestation

event-type that determines its identity more so than its conditions for manifestation. At a rather

coarse-grained level, we consider fragile objects to be those that shatter under the impact of force

in everyday circumstances, such as falling off a table or being struck by a car door. Under

dropping or knocking conditions as are used in industrial shock testing, fragility is relativized

and its identity as a power is determined more by the conditions for manifestation in concert with

the manifestation event-type.

As regards change, it is at times useful to think of the conditions for manifestation as

being of two sorts: stimulus or trigger conditions, such as my dropping of a glass, appear to have

some particularly salient causal role in bringing about the power’s manifestation, while

background conditions do not. This is because what we are likely to consider the stimulus or

trigger conditions are those that change so as to bring about a manifestation at a particular time,

while the more stable background conditions do not exhibit any noticeable change in their

contributions to the causal story. The background conditions for the manifestation of a glass’s

fragility will likely include such normal conditions as the operation of the earth’s gravitational

field, standard temperatures and atmospheric pressure (such that, for instance the glass is not

slowed in its fall or melted before it has a chance to break), or there being no brilliant Jeevesian

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figure present to catch dropped glassware. Because of the ease with which we can suggest

hypotheticals, especially negative conditions like the lack of a Jeevesian figure, background

conditions are often dealt with all at once in descriptions of powers by the use of a ceterus

parabus (or “all other things being equal”) clause: all other things being equal, a fragile

wineglass will shatter upon being dropped. The dim prospects for a conditional analysis of

causal powers, discussed in the next section, are in large part due to the multiplicity of

background conditions for the manifestation of a power.

2.5 The Conditional Analysis

As was discussed in the first section of this chapter, subjunctive conditionals are well

suited to a dispositional idiom, as they link a power’s manifestation type with the conditions for

its manifestation. The conditions for manifestation are given in the antecedent of the conditional,

and the manifestation event type in the consequent: “if the substance is placed in water, then it

will dissolve,” “if the material is viewed in bright sunlight, then the viewer will have an

experience of a certain sort,” “if the individual enters an elevator, then she will have a panic

attack,” and so on. The degree to which subjunctive conditionals are suited to describing

dispositional behavior has led many to defend a conditional analysis of powers, under which

disposition ascriptions such as “the salt is water-soluble” are analyzed as more or less glossed

conditionals.18 The powers are thus thought to be reducible to events, or to relations between the

objects that bear them and the type of events in which they manifest themselves.19 Either kind of

18 Examples of this view are found in David Lewis’ 1997 “Finkish Dispositions,” The Philosophical Quarterly 47:187, 143-158, and Lars Gunderson’s 2002 “In Defence of the Conditional Account of Dispositions,” Synthese 130: 389-411. 19 See Mumford (2000) pp. 36-37. I will return to this issue in 3.9.

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reduction, if successful, would amount to the elimination of dispositions from one’s ontology at

the end of the day.

In its simplest form, the analysis focuses on the subjunctive conditional used to ascribe a

disposition to an object, a conditional that links the two events to which the disposition is

intended to be reduced.20 The conditional analysis, in pointing our attention to the connection

between the having of a disposition and the truth of a conditional statement, is the first step in an

attempt at reducing dispositions, but the project fails to get off the ground—and does so quickly

in its simplest forms. George Molnar formulates the “naïve conditional analysis” as follows:

NCA Something x is disposed at time t to give response r to stimulus s iff if x were to undergo stimulus s at time t, then x would give response r. 21

The inadequacies of NCA have been demonstrated by a number of problem cases; I will only

mention C. B. Martin’s example of finkishness, as it is sufficient for my purposes here.22

Martin proposes a scenario in which the power ascription “the wire is live” is apparently

true iff “if the wire is touched by a conductor then electrical current flows from the wire to the

conductor.” Under NCA, “the wire is live” is claimed to be equivalent to this conditional, which

links the event described as “the wire is touched by a conductor” with the one described as

“electrical current flows from the wire to the conductor.” Were the conditional analysis to

succeed here, there would be a perfect correlation between the truth of the dispositional

statement that “the wire is live” and the truth of the subjunctive conditional. For the Humean

20 It is worth noting here that even should there be a perfect conceptual alignment between the having of a power and the use of the subjunctive, this does not guarantee a reduction, since it could be that the having of a genuine power is what makes the subjunctive conditional true. 21 2003, p. 84. See also his 1999 piece “Are Dispositions Reducible?” The Philosophical Quarterly, 49:1-17. 22 Other problem cases may be found, for instance, in Mark Johnston’s 1992 “How to Speak of the Colors,” Philosophical Studies 68, 221-263, and Alexander Bird’s 1998 “Dispositions and Antidotes,” The Philosophical Quarterly, 48: 227-234.

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event ontologist or anyone else hoping to eliminate powers from their ontology, establishing this

sort of correlation is the first step towards that end.

In Martin’s scenario, an ordinary wire is connected to a not-so-ordinary machine called

an “electro-fink” that detects contact with any conductor and alters the wire in such a way that

the conditional analysis fails. The failure might be one of two sorts: first, when the wire is (in

and of itself) dead, the machine will detect contact with the conductor and instantaneously render

it live; second, when the wire is (in and of itself) live, the machine will detect contact with the

conductor and instantaneously render it dead. In the first case, the conditional is true even

though the power ascription (“the wire is live”) is false; in the second case the conditional is

false when the power ascription is true. In both problem cases, the biconditional is demonstrated

to be false; it is thus neither logically sufficient nor necessary for the power ascription it is

intended to analyze. Lacking the hoped-for correlation between the dispositional statement “the

wire is live” and the subjunctive conditional, the naïve version of the conditional analysis fails.23

To circumvent problem cases like finkishness where some external factor’s involvement

defeats analysis of power ascriptions using conditionals, David Lewis has offered a reformed

version of the conditional analysis:

RCA Something x is disposed at time t to give response r to stimulus s iff, for some intrinsic property B that x has at t, for some time t’ after t, if x were to undergo stimulus s at time t and retain property B until t’, s and x’s having of B would jointly be an x-complete cause of x’s giving response r.24

RCA differs from NCA by restricting the causal factors to an object’s intrinsic properties

together with genuine stimulus conditions, thus excluding finks from the mix, and disallowing

changes to the intrinsic factors in the interval between stimulus and manifestation events. The

23 C.B. Martin, “Dispositions and Conditionals,” The Philosophical Quarterly, 44:174, Jan 1994. 24 David Lewis, 1997, “Finkish Dispositions,” The Philosophical Quarterly, 47:143-158, p. 157.

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latter restriction, however, is still not a sufficient response to problem cases where an object can

truly be said to have a power, the stimulus event occurs, and the object does not change, but the

power’s manifestation is blocked or “masked” by the manifestation of another power of the same

object. Jet airplanes have a great deal of mass, a property which should cause them to plummet

to the earth at high speeds if they are at high altitudes, and yet this manifestation is (happily!)

blocked by their other powers. The ability of the wings to create lift combines with the engines’

ability to create thrust to provide an antidote for the plane’s mass.25

To summarize, RCA introduces a number of restrictions to the conditions under which a

power can be expected to manifest itself, but, it seems, there will always be cases in which some

additional unspecified condition or other defeats our expectations. It is tempting to make a last-

ditch attempt to defeat this hydra of hypothetical conditions and save the conditional analysis by

attaching a ceteris paribus clause to the conditional analysis: we might wish to say that if the

manifestation conditions are met, then the power will manifest itself, all other things being

equal. Unfortunately, such an attempt renders the conditional vacuously true, because it amounts

to no more than a footnote to the effect that “when the antecedent is realized then the consequent

will be realized unless something stops it.”26 The conditional analysis thus fails to reduce

powers to relations between events; in order to get a clearer understanding of the nature of

powers I shall turn instead to a discussion of functionality and directedness in the next section.

25For further discussion of antidotes, see Alexander Bird’s 1998 “Dispositions and Antidotes,” The Philosophical Quarterly, 48: 227-234, Sungho Choi’s 2003 “Improving Bird’s Antidotes,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 81:4, 573-580, and Anthony Everett’s 2009 “Intrinsic Finks, Masks, and Mimics,” Erkenntnis, 71(2), 191-203. 26Stephen Mumford, Dispositions, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 87.

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2.6 The Brentano Thesis and Physical Intentionality

As explained in the previous section, we can often pair disposition ascriptions with

corresponding subjunctive conditionals, but even a constant correlation would not guarantee that

dispositions are reducible to events. Dispositional realists hold instead that dispositions and

powers are ontologically basic, that is to say, not reducible to any other ontological category.27

Even ontologically basic entities are candidates for explanation, however, and the theories

offered by dispositional realists tend to focus on either directedness or functionality to help us

better understand powers. The first candidate, directedness, is also known as intentionality. In

this section I shall briefly restate the parallels observed by Ullin Place and George Molnar

between mental intentionality and physical intentionality, distinguish between the concepts of T-

intentionality and S-intensionality, and explain how directedness is believed by Place and

Molnar to be the mark or essence of the dispositional.

The Brentano thesis, as it is known in philosophy of mind, states that intentionality is the

feature that demarcates between the mental and non-mental (or physical); intentionality is thus

thought to be necessary and sufficient for the mental, and non-intentionality is necessary and

sufficient for the non-mental.28 What it means for a mental entity to be intentional can be

illustrated by the example of the belief that the present king of France is bald, a belief that

exhibits four “marks” of intentionality. Firstly, and most importantly, it is directed towards an

object beyond itself (it is a belief about something else); second, that object need not actually

exist; third, the object need not be completely determinate (that is, the belief need not involve

27Alexander Bird, "Dispositions and Antidotes," The Philosophical Quarterly, 48:191, 227-234, 1998. C.B. Martin, "Dispositions and Conditionals," The Philosophical Quarterly, 44:174, 1-8, 1994. C.B. Martin and John Heil, "The Ontological Turn," Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 23, 34-60, 1999. Stephen Mumford, Dispositions, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. George Molnar, Powers, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. 28 For a detailed treatment of Brentano’s thoughts on intentionality, see Dale Jacquette’s “Brentano’s Concept of Intentionality,” in The Cambridge Companion to Brentano, ed. Dale Jacquette, Cambridge University Press, 2004, 98-130.

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any further details about the object). Finally, the belief is such that a statement asserting that

someone holds the belief is referentially opaque (we cannot freely substitute co-referential

descriptions without changing its truth-value), and its truth-value does not depend on the truth-

value of the proposition believed (it may be true that someone believes France presently has a

bald king, though France has no king, bald or otherwise).

2.6.1 Directedness: The First Mark of Intentionality

Ullin Place and George Molnar hold that it is not the mental that is characteristically for

or directed towards something beyond itself, but that this is instead a mark of the dispositional.29

Place relies on three observations in claiming that physical dispositions, as well as mental

dispositions, are intentional:

1. We invariably characterize a disposition in terms of its manifestations 2. In the case where a disposition has not been or is not currently being manifested, no

manifestation exists 3. It follows that in characterizing an unmanifested disposition by reference to its

manifestations we are characterizing it in terms of its ‘relation’ to something that has all the hallmarks of an ‘intentional object.’ It does not exist, and many never do so (it is ‘inexistent’). It is vague or indeterminate in the sense that although every actual manifestation is determinate, there is always a range of possible manifestations only a tiny fraction of which actually occurs or exists.30

George Molnar also argues that we see the marks of intentionality in the realm of the physical as

well as the mental, and he joins Place in positing physical intentionality in addition to mental

intentionality. The first and most important of the four marks, directedness towards something

beyond the thing itself, is the defining feature of powers, physical as well as psychological: “Of

29 This argument was introduced by C. B. Martin and K. Pfeifer in their 1986 article “Intentionality and the Non-Psychological” in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 46, pp. 531-554. 30 Ullin Place, “Intentionality and the Physical: A Reply to Mumford,” The Philosophical Quarterly, 49:195, 1999, 225-231. See also his 1996 “Intentionality as the Mark of the Dispositional,” Dialectica 50:2, 91-120.

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the many ways of characterizing a power, the only one that reveals the nature (identity) of the

power is the characterization in terms of its manifestation. Consequently the nexus between the

power and its manifestation is non-contingent. A physical power is essentially an executable

property.”31

We simply cannot understand a power without understanding what it is a power for,

understanding the kind of event or state of affairs by which it manifests itself. Molnar thus

contends that directedness towards a particular manifestation is what constitutes a power

property: in metaphysical terms, the identity of a power type is given by its definitive

manifestation, and the numerical identity of a power trope is given by the object which

instantiates the power together with its type-identity.32 To return to my examples from section

2.3, what it is for a metal to be ductile is thus given by the sorts of bending and re-shaping events

it is capable of and directed at; we cannot understand what it is for a subatomic particle to have

mass without understanding a kind of reaction to gravitational fields; an individual’s agoraphobia

is constituted by his or her directedness towards phobic responses in public places; and we only

capture the identity of a flower’s color when we characterize it in terms of the human visual

experiences it causes. The centrality of the defining manifestation-type will be of great interest

in chapters 3 and 4 where I examine sense-perceptible properties, whose manifestations are the

responses and experiences of human perceivers.

31 George Molnar, Powers, Oxford University Press, 2003, p. 63. 32 Ibid, 60-61. We might add, however, that the conditions for manifestation also determine the identity of a power, insofar as its manifestation event-type is relativized to specific conditions, as was described in 2.4.2.

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2.6.2 The Possibility of Inexistent Objects and Indeterminate Objects as Marks of

Intentionality

The parallels between the physical and psychological in the second and third marks of

intentionality follow from the parallel found in directedness. The second mark, that the

intentional object need not exist, applies both in the case of the psychological and in the physical.

There is general agreement in the literature on mental intentionality that objects of thought need

not have any existence beyond whatever is internal to the thoughts themselves, an idea that

William Lyons articulates as follows:

…the contents of beliefs are independent of their having a referent in the world of space-time… [and] also independent of whether or not the believer knows they have no referent in space-time…. This independence of content from object gives the contents of our propositional attitudes the status of having an ‘aboutness’ which is ‘inesse’ (or ‘existing in’) and so internal to the propositional attitudes themselves.33

D. M. Armstrong’s observations on unmanifested powers also emphasize the importance of

directedness towards manifestation-types rather than tokens, as no token events exist for the

intentional objects of unmanifested powers:

A particular may have a disposition or power, but may fail to manifest that disposition or power. This, indeed, is the normal thing. One would suppose it to be the case that no particular ever manifests all its powers, and perhaps most particulars fail to manifest most of their powers during the span of their existence. When a particular has an unmanifested power, then the particular cannot be related to the potential manifestation of this power because the instantiation of a relation demands that all its terms exist. It is true, of course, that the particular still has the power…. But, by hypothesis, the manifestation does not exist, so the particular cannot be related to it.34

We can also imagine an object with the physical disposition to attract a pretzel-shaped piece of

metal, even if no such metal pretzels exist—an example of a disposition directed towards an

inexistent object. Analogous to the ‘aboutness’ which is ‘inesse’ that Lyons and others attribute 33 William Lyons’ Approaches to Intentionality, Oxford: Clarendon, 1995, p. 214. 34 D. M. Armstrong, A World of States of Affairs, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 70.

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to the mental intentional, is a causal, physical directedness at events which do not yet (and need

not at all) exist in the world; it is enough that their types are the objects of directedness,

uninstantiated though they may be.

Not only might intentional objects be inexistent—some intentional objects could also be

impossible. Anders Nes, in attacking the case for intentionality as necessary and sufficient for

the mental, discusses such impossible intentional objects as wealth in dollars greater than the

greatest prime. We can think of or desire such impossible objects, and he suggests furthermore

that directedness on inexistent or impossible objects is not a sufficient criterion for the mental.

Nes even goes so far as to suggest that there is a case to be made for physical dispositional

ascriptions directed upon the impossible:

…attributions of the same disposition directed upon the impossible to different objects sometimes intuitively differ in truth-value. For example, a house of cards but not an oil platform is disposed to be brought down by the impact of a feather. Intuitively, the colour (say) of the feather is just irrelevant to whether it’s disposed to bring something down upon impact. So, intuitively, a house of cards but not an oil platform is disposed to be brought down by the impact of a feather that’s red and green all over.35

While I agree with Nes that this example is not conclusive, I think it does reinforce the point that

the object of intentionality need not be instantiated for an object’s powers to be directed towards

it, especially as directedness is a relation to a manifestation-type.

I can thus desire wealth in dollars greater than the greatest prime, and a Ming vase that

never breaks is still fragile (that is, it still possesses a power directed at such a breaking event).

That there can be no such quantity of dollars, or that the vase never breaks, poses no problems

for an intentionality theory of powers. Though powers are linked essentially and non-

contingently with their manifestations, the manifestations need not occur, as the essential

35 Anders Nes, “Are Only Mental Phenomena Intentional?” Analysis 68:3, July 2008, 205-215, p. 210.

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connection is between the identity of the power and the type of manifestation that it is a power

for. The existence of a power is not ontologically dependent on the existence of its

manifestation; this point is illustrated by Stephen Mumford’s example of x-ray machines.

Objects passed through an x-ray machine have the capability to block the film’s exposure to

radiation in varying amounts, creating an image on the film in the process. The objects did not

suddenly gain this power when x-ray machines were invented—rather, they had the power all

along, but the conditions for manifestation were not fulfilled, and so the manifestation type was

never instantiated. It would be a mistake to say that objects do not possess powers until the time

of manifestation; intuitively, we should recognize that dense objects would have had the power

to block radiation and create an x-ray image even if the radiation emitters and film had never

been developed.36 This possibility of directedness towards inexistent objects is an important

condition of intentionality, and will come up again in section 2.7 where I address a worry of

Mumford’s about the intentionality theory of powers, as well as in chapter 5, where I note that

artworks and other aesthetic objects have the power to cause aesthetic experiences even if no one

ever sees them.

Once we’ve accepted that the intentional object need not exist (or even be metaphysically

possible!) for an object’s physical or psychological power to be directed towards it, we should

find that the third mark of intentionality follows easily: the object of intentionality need not be

determinate. As an example of indeterminacy in the intentional object of a psychological

disposition, consider a man who believes that he has a secret admirer. If the secret admirer does

in fact exist, that individual either is or is not a coffee drinker, but this does not entail that the

man believes his secret admirer drinks coffee. The nature of the object as conceptualized by the

36 Stephen Mumford, 1998, Dispositions, Oxford University Press, p. 56.

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believer may well be indeterminate on this or many other points. This indeterminacy follows

from the independence of the contents of beliefs from any referents they might have in the world

of space-time, their existence being instead “inesse”—internal to the propositional attitudes in

which they feature.

Similarly, we have the case of a man being mortal, who possesses a power directed

towards a death event. Although his death will occur in a particular manner and in a particular

location—say with the lead pipe in the billiards room—it does not follow that his mortality is per

se a disposition to die in the billiards room by lead pipe, or in any other particular manner or

location. Mortality is thus a general directedness at a death event of an indeterminate nature, an

event whose instances will have specific details though its type does not. Non-mental

dispositions and powers differ in how specific or determinate their conditions for manifestation

and their manifestation event-types are. The object of the physical intentional is again

analogous to the object of the mental intentional in that it need not be determinate.

2.6.3 Linguistic Characteristics as a Mark of Intentionality

We come, finally, to Molnar’s treatment of what he takes to be the fourth mark of

intentionality, concerning embedded declarative sentences and referential opacity. The first part

of this mark of intentionality, regarding embedded declarative sentences, is demonstrated in the

example of the sentence “The weatherman predicts that the drought will break,” which has

embedded in it the declarative sentence, “The drought will break.” Whether it is true or false

that the weatherman predicts that the drought will break is independent of the truth-value of the

embedded declarative sentence, the drought will break, because once again the intentional object

of the propositional attitude has its existence internal to the belief. Molnar offers an example of

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Martin and Pfeifer’s to make his point: “Neither is ‘The cloud seeding apparatus has the capacity

to bring it about that the drought will break’ a truth-function of ‘The drought will break.’ This is

another parallel between MI [Mental Intentionality] and PI [Physical Intentionality].” Molnar

likewise sees a parallel between the physical and psychological intentional as regards the second

part of this mark of intentionality, referential opacity. Referential opacity with regard to belief

ascriptions is, essentially, a block on the substitution of co-referential descriptions. Physical

dispositional ascriptions are similarly subject to referential opacity:

The statement (A) ‘Andrew believes that George Eliot wrote Middlemarch’, does not entail (B) ‘Andrew believes that Mary Ann Evans wrote Middlemarch’ and the statement (A1) ‘Acid has the power to turn this piece of litmus paper red’ does not entail (B1) ‘Acid has the power to turn this piece of litmus paper the colour of Post Office pillar boxes’. Extensionality fails equally in M[ental]-intentional and in P[hysical]-intentional contexts.37

Whether this fourth criterion is in fact a mark of the intentional, however, has been called

into question by Ullin Place. As I agree with Place on this point, I shall treat it here briefly and

then dismiss what he calls S-intensionality as tangential for my purposes.

The intension (spelled with an ‘s’) of a term has to do with the sense or meaning with

which it is used, rather than the object to which it refers. Place calls this S-intensionality, and as

one might expect, it plays a key role in determining the truth-value of statements about beliefs,

particularly with regard to referential opacity as was just explained. While it is thus true that as a

child I believed that Mark Twain wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, it is not true that as a

child I believed that Samuel Langhorne Clemens wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, since I

was not then aware that Mark Twain was Clemens’ pen name. The truth-values of statements

about beliefs (beliefs being T-intentional) are indeed tied to the proper use of descriptions, 37 2003, p. 64; the embedded declarative sentence example is from C.B. Martin and K. Pfeifer’s 1986 ‘Intentionality and the Non-Psychological’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 46, 531-554.

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(descriptions being S-intensional). But it is important to note that it is directedness that is the

essence of the T-intentional: though S-intensionality is responsible for the referential opacity of

statements about beliefs and dispositions which are T-intentional, S-intensionality is not essential

to an ontological characterization of T-intentionality. Although Molnar demonstrates the

applicability of the fourth mark for both psychological and physical intentionality, I believe

Place is correct to reject this fourth mark as inessential to the ontological characterization of the

dispositional, as it is more of a linguistic feature. Having distinguished between the two terms, I

shall hereafter use the term directedness (meaning T-intentionality) where possible to avoid the

confusion with S-intensionality.38

In summary, what Molnar has shown is that the essence of a power is to be directed at

something beyond itself, namely, an event type that (along with the conditions for its occurrence)

need not be fully determinate or even instantiated at all. Ductility is thus a power directed at a

bending or stretching; a metal can be ductile without ever being stretched, and its power to be

thus reshaped is indeterminate as regards the exact details of such a stretching event. Similarly,

we can imagine an individual who is agoraphobic but is somehow happily preserved from ever

suffering the manifestation of the phobia (and diagnosis too, of course); furthermore, the phobia

is a directedness towards panic-attack-like symptoms in public or open spaces, but the symptoms

may vary, and the environmental trigger event-types are likewise indeterminate. Finally, as has

been said, the color of a flower can be analyzed as a directedness towards a particular kind of

visual experience, thus giving us the example of a violet that is blue 1) even if no one ever sees it

38 One further use of intentionality that is outside the scope of the current discussion is that used by Joseph Margolis. He also argues that the intentional is not limited to the mental, but his contention is that “the ‘Intentional’ = the ‘cultural’ (or culturally significant and significative)” and so should include “the public artifacts of cultural life,” that is, speech, behavior, technology, and art. Margolis’ concern is more with the extent to which humans, having minds, shape and are shaped by the world they live in; my concern is instead with the parallels between mental and physical dispositions. Here again my focus is on the directedness that is the classical essence of Brentano’s intentionality, rather than on the mental and its pervasive effects on human endeavors.

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(a nonexistent intentional object), and 2) when seen by different viewers under a variety of

conditions (the conditions for the seeing event being to some degree indeterminate). This

directedness towards an inexistent and indeterminate object will be important in chapter 5 when I

discuss artworks that have never been appreciated.

2.7 A Worry Regarding Animism and Panpsychism

While Place and Molnar describe the relationship between the disposition and its

manifestation as physical intentionality, Stephen Mumford has taken issue with this view,

worrying that it leads to a form of animism and panpsychism (since dispositional realists see

dispositions everywhere in the universe).39 Mumford’s critique of directedness accounts, it

seems to me, was based on a unfortunate misunderstanding of the terminology employed—one

which is easily dispelled once S-intensionality is recognized as a red herring in this context. It is

worth treating here, however, because it is important to reinforce that in the context of Molnar

and Place’s theories of powers, intentionality is not equivalent to the mental, and thus powers

and dispositions are not as “spooky” as they might otherwise seem to be.

Mumford’s worry about directedness accounts is, essentially, a worry that since

intentionality is supposed to be the mark of the mental, if all dispositional properties are

intentional as Place claims, then they are all mental. He notes that objects having minds do act in

such a way as to strive and aim for events, but that such striving requires having a concept of the

event in question, desiring it, forming plans to achieve it, and refining and executing such

plans—all examples of the “inesse” existence characteristic of mental intentionality as I

discussed it in section 2.6.2. Since objects without minds do not have such choices, Mumford

39 1999 “Intentionality and the Physical: A New Theory of Disposition Ascription.” The Philosophical Quarterly, 49:195, 215-225.

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says there is no preferred or desired class of events towards which they can properly be said to

strive, and he thus concludes they cannot be intentional.40 It seems to me that Mumford’s worry

boils down to an assumption that directedness is more or less equivalent to “having intentions” in

the way that only things with minds can: a sort of resolution to act in a certain way to achieve

their goals. But Place is clear that the kind of intentionality he is concerned with is not supposed

to be the mark of the mental at all; furthermore, while S-intensional linguistic expressions turn

out to be the sort of expressions used by things with minds, the criteria treated as the fourth mark

of intentionality do not belong to the ontological essence of dispositions, as I argued in section

2.6.41 So Mumford’s argument, to this extent, does appear to beg the question on a point that

Place begins by disputing. Mumford adds, however, that what a non-animistic version of

intentionality looks like is by no means immediately obvious, and that Place does not say enough

about what he means by directedness. I shall show here that Mumford’s problem cases pose no

serious challenge for an intentionality account of powers, but I think his general criticism is

correct, and so in section 2.8 I shall continue to flesh out this notion of directedness and describe

in more detail the way in which physical intentionality exhibits directedness upon inexistent

objects in a manner analogous to the “inesse” existence of the mental intentional.

Mumford suggests two examples of non-mental directedness, examples of an arrow

directed at a target and a falling rock directed toward a road below, which he finds problematic

because they do not allow for directedness involving a nonexistent intentional object, one of the

necessary conditions for intentionality.42 If we take the flying arrow and falling rock to have

been aimed and launched by an agent having a mind, then of course the agent’s mental

40 Ibid, 221. 41 See Ullin Place’s 1999 “Intentionality and the Physical: A Reply to Mumford,” The Philosophical Quarterly, 49:195, 225-231. 42 1999 “Intentionality and the Physical: A New Theory of Disposition Ascription.” The Philosophical Quarterly, 49:195, 221.

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dispositions come into play. The notion of directedness in question is supposed to be non-

mental, though, so consider instead a rock that is falling towards a road below it, without having

been purposefully aimed and dropped. The rock is directed in a simple geometric sense, its path

of movement following a straight line that intersects the road. Place’s account allows for

dispositions such as “the way a body of any appreciable mass has a propensity, unless somehow

prevented from so doing, to fall towards the center of the earth,”43 so how might he allow for a

non-existent object of intentionality in this example? The solution to Mumford’s problem case

hinges on recognition of the ontological category to which the object of intentionality belongs.

The object of intentionality is identical to the manifestation of a power, as I discussed in section

2.4, and as such it will be an event or state of affairs. What the falling rock is directed towards,

in the relevant sense, cannot therefore be the road: it is only directed towards the road in a

geometrical sense. Furthermore, as explained in section 2.4.1, the intentional object is an event-

type, and so we should say that in virtue of its mass it is directed towards an event of the type

falling towards the center of the earth. To answer Mumford’s criticism, non-existence is

possible for this sort of event—we can imagine a world where the rock were securely embedded

in an asphalt road surface. The event type is also subject to a degree of indeterminacy, as its

instances might involve passing through a body of water, or interruption by contact with a

passing vehicle, or a collision with the road surface. Non-mental objects can thus be directed

towards event types that are subject to inexistence and indeterminacy in the same way that minds

can, and there is no risk of animism or panpsychism as a consequence.

The problem he sees for the theory, that it might lead to panpsychism or animism, I have

shown to be the result of a misplaced emphasis on the propositional attitude and accompanying

43 1996 “Intentionality as the Mark of the Dispositional,” Dialectica 50:2, 116.

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“intentions” that allow us to form resolutions and plans, instead of on the genuine marks of

intentionality. These marks, including the possible non-existence of the intentional object, are

present for physical dispositions as well as mental ones. Place thinks, and I agree with him, that

there is no reason why Mumford’s functionality account should be considered incompatible with

the intentionality theory of powers: “it turns out that the only differences between his view of the

nature and function of dispositions and my own are differences of terminology.”44 Mumford’s

own view is that “disposition ascriptions are understood as ascriptions of functionally

characterized states or instantiated properties of objects.” Disposition-talk, he suggests, is a kind

of function-talk, whereby properties or states are described “according to the causal contribution

they can make to the interaction of things that possess them,” and his version of functionalism

“allows that dispositions bring about their manifestations.”45 While Mumford’s terminology

focuses on disposition ascriptions rather than their metaphysical status, he does emphasize that

the identity criterion for a disposition are, first, its causal mediation between stimulus events and

manifestation events, and second, the specific stimulus and manifestation events between which

it causally mediates.

2.8 Directedness, Reciprocity, and the Causal Essence of Powers

An object’s powers are essentially properties with a dual modality, being both actual and

potential in nature. They are actual in that they are the genuine properties that it possesses here

and now, in many cases in virtue of its structural or otherwise occurrent nature.46 Failing to lose

44 1999 “Intentionality and the Physical: A Reply to Mumford,” The Philosophical Quarterly 49:195, 230-231. 45 1999 “Intentionality and the Physical: A New Theory of Disposition Ascription,” The Philosophical Quarterly 49:195, 222. 46 In Prior, Pargetter, and Jackson’s 1982 article “Three Theses about Dispositions,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 19:251-256, for example, it is argued that necessarily, all powers/dispositions have causal bases distinct

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sight of this leads to the sort of problems found in Colin McGinn’s views on color and other

sense-perceptible properties that I shall discuss in chapter 3. Powers are actual properties of

objects, but they are also potential in nature; in fact, they are defined in terms of their potential to

cause events, states, or processes.

This second modality, potentiality, is a function of the power’s directedness, which is

seen in the mental intentional as the aboutness of a belief, and can be defined more generally as

the relation between the power and its manifestation type. This relation is that of a potential

cause, and when the power manifests itself under the appropriate conditions it brings about the

instantiation of its definitive event type; it serves as the actual cause (partial or complete—more

on this below) of an event, state, or process. We can thus say that directedness is a second-order

property (that is, a property of a property), and it is possessed by powers but not by non-powers.

It is this causal essence that Molnar and Place are gesturing at when they argue that the

intentional, directedness towards something beyond the object itself, is the mark of the

dispositional: the properties of an object, insofar as they are categorical (or occurrent), are static

and causally impotent. Place thus holds that dispositions provide truthmakers “for all the modal,

conditional, and non-categorical aspects of the causal relation, including causal law statements

and the counterfactuals they sustain.”47 It is in virtue of the object’s powers that it has the

potential to bring about changes, cause events, and bring into being something over and above

the current state of affairs. It is this mediation between current events and conditions and as yet

unmanifested events and conditions that Mumford emphasizes when he describes dispositions as

from themselves; George Molnar argues in his 2003 Powers that many powers do have grounds, but that it is likely that at least some powers, such as those belonging to the fundamental particles, do not (see chapter 8). 47 1999 “Intentionality and the Physical: A Reply to Mumford,” The Philosophical Quarterly 49:195, 230.

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functionally characterized; concepts of dispositions and powers necessarily involve causal

connections between stimulus conditions or events and manifestation events.

One situation in which the manifesting power is a partial cause of the resulting state is

when it is one of a pair of reciprocally manifesting powers. To explore the notion of reciprocity,

I shall first consider an analogous concept from the literature on mental intentionality, aspectual

shape, and then show how this concept can be expanded into the notion of reciprocity used by C.

B. Martin and others.

Tim Crane’s version of the Brentano thesis emphasizes directedness along with what he

calls aspectual shape. All thoughts, he notes, are thoughts about something or other, and thus

directed upon an object, and whenever an object is thought of, it is done so with regard to some

particular aspect, thus having an aspectual shape.48 William Lyons recognizes something akin to

Crane’s notion of aspectual shape when he notes that propositional attitudes are intentional in a

perspectival way: our beliefs are about people and things “as known or believed to be so-and-so;

that is known or believed under a certain limited slant or description.” Our propositional

attitudes, he adds, would likely change a great deal if we were omniscient.49

Anders Nes takes this concept of aspectual shape and applies it to non-mental

dispositions as follows:

…[W]henever an object is attracted, it is attracted in a certain way: gravitationally, electrically, magnetically, or perhaps in some other way. If a metal ball, say, gravitationally attracts a metal bar, say, it attracts it as a thing having a certain mass. If the metal ball electrically attracts the metal bar, it attracts it as a thing with a certain charge. The ball attracts the bar, here, in the different cases, as an exemplar of different features. It figures in the state of attraction under different aspects.50

48 Tim Crane, Elements of Mind, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. 49 William Lyons, Approaches to Intentionality, Oxford: Clarendon, 1995, p. 217. 50 Anders Nes, “Are Only Mental Phenomena Intentional?” Analysis 68:3, July 2008, 205-215, p. 207. Nes concludes that while a refined theory of aspectual shape may provide a sufficient criterion for intentionality, it cannot be necessary as well, since it would rule out certain states that should be considered mental.

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Aspectual shape, when applied to dispositions in general, is equivalent to what was introduced as

the conditions for manifestation in 2.4.2. Gravitational attraction here is a power of the ball to

attract the bar, a power directed at an event wherein the ball and bar are brought into closer

physical proximity. The bar figures here insofar as it has a mass susceptible to the ball’s

gravitational power; in other words, insofar as it meets the conditions for the manifestation of the

ball’s powers. The conditions for manifestation thus shape the overall event in which a power is

manifested, determining the power’s identity to some degree insofar as it is relativized to a more

or less specific set of conditions or “aspectual shape.”

In any case where the manifestation of an object’s powers involve other objects—which

is to say in most cases51—the two objects’ powers will cooperate in mutual manifestation, each

meeting the conditions for the other’s manifestation. Armstrong describes this cooperation in the

classic language of active and passive powers:

Active and passive powers are manifested, if and when they are manifested, in causal processes. Characteristically, these involve the causal action of one particular upon another… the action will always be one side of an interaction. This ensures that in all such action active and passive powers of both particulars are involved.52

C. B. Martin calls the phenomenon reciprocity and lists it as one of three ways in which he says

we can categorize properties with their dispositions:

Reciprocity between properties of different things or parts of things for the manifestation that is their common product – for example, the soluble salt and solvent water for the solution of the salt in the water. The reciprocity of properties with their dispositions for the manifestations that are their common products is deep and complex… The important point remains that the manifestation of a given dispositional state will require the cooperation of some other dispositional states amongst its reciprocating partners. The

51 Radioactive decay is an example of a power whose manifestation does not involve other objects. 52 D. M. Armstrong, A World of States of Affairs, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 73.

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manifestation of the dispositional state of the match needs, amongst others, the cooperation of the reciprocal dispositional state of the enfolding oxygen. 53

Reciprocity, evident here in the examples of solubility and flammability, is also found in the

paradigmatic cases offered early in this chapter. In the ductility example, the disposition of a

piece of metal to bend is manifested together with the reciprocal disposition of the object

exerting force on the metal. The mass of a particle, its potential to create and respond to

gravitational fields, works like that of the ball and bar mentioned above. The agoraphobic’s

disposition to panic attack-like symptoms in open, public spaces has as its apparent reciprocal

partner the ability of open, public spaces to trigger such attacks.54 Finally, the color of the violet

has as its reciprocal partner the human capacity for color-vision, the two manifesting together in

the human’s visual experience.

2.9 Conclusion

In this chapter I have demonstrated the familiarity of powers from our everyday language

and experience, and also their heuristic value in our scientific research. I have explained a model

for powers at work, in which we see that the genuine powers of an object are the properties

whereby it brings about manifestation events under appropriate conditions. I have argued that

the essence of a power is its directedness towards the event-type which, relative to its conditions

of manifestation, determines the power’s identity, and that such events need not be instantiated

or fully determinate. Physical dispositions and powers, I have shown, display the same marks of

53 C. B. Martin, Power for Realists, pp. 175-194, p. 182. Martin goes on to say “This view of the interconnectedness and reciprocities of properties, largely unknown but existent still, contrasts with the simple-minded view that because nature does not lay out The Cause of each event, causality itself is mind-dependent.” Here he is critiquing the Humean view of causality, which his theory of powers is intended to replace, a discussion which is beyond the scope of this project. 54 This example, and others like it, seems to perhaps stretch the notion of reciprocity and genuine powers a little far; a similar example will be addressed in the context of aesthetic objects in chapter 5.

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intentionality as do mental entities such as beliefs. This is not, however, reason for concern, as

recognizing intentionality as a mark of the dispositional does not entail animism or panpsychism;

rather, it points us towards the causal essence of powers and dispositions, their dual modality

being that of an actual property of an object which has the power to cause events and states of

affairs which are as yet only potential. In the chapters that follow I shall use this model and

theory of powers as a basis for critiquing response-dependence accounts of aesthetic properties

and to offer my own realist, objectivist account of aesthetic properties.

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Chapter 3: Response-Dependence and Projectivism

In my first chapter I noted that the aesthetic property realist faces a dual challenge: to

establish that aesthetic properties cannot be eliminated by a reduction to non-aesthetic properties,

and to establish that they do not depend for their existence on the responses of observers. I

addressed elimination in 1.7, and in this chapter I shall return to the dependence concern, arguing

that the existence of aesthetic properties is independent of the existence of perceivers and their

minds/responses. I believe that that even if we allow that the nature or essence of an aesthetic

property is determined in part by perceivers’ responses, this does not entail that the property’s

existence is dependent. The separability of these two issues has not always been clear in the

response-dependence literature, and Nick Zangwill in particular offers a response-dependent

account of aesthetic properties that conflates the two issues with unfortunate results.

While discussing the issue of response-dependence, it is thus instructive to ask whether it

is the property’s very existence that is thought to depend on our responses, or whether we mean

that the property’s essence is to some degree determined by responses, leading to a situation

where our ability to understand or form a concept of the property depends on responses. Where

existence is in question, I shall specify the issue as one of ontological response-dependence

(ORD), and where the emphasis is on our concepts of such properties, I shall speak of conceptual

response-dependence (CRD). My thesis in this chapter can thus be stated as follows: aesthetic

properties are arguably conceptually response-dependent, but this does not entail that they are

ontologically response-dependent. This is because although their natures or essences are in part

determined by our responses, their existence depends on the objects to which they belong. On

my account we should expect that the nature of an aesthetic property is determined in part by our

responses (a concept of such a property must reference responses) because the manifestation-

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type towards which a disposition is directed is what determines the disposition’s identity (see

2.6.1), and the manifestations of aesthetic dispositions are the aesthetic responses of perceivers.

Response-dependence accounts, like the dispositional account I favor, aim to occupy a

sort of middle ground among theories of sense-perceptible properties. In the course of this

chapter I shall explore their potential for navigating and reconciling the observations discussed in

section 1.4 regarding the subjective and objective elements of aesthetic experience. I shall

introduce response-dependence as a feature of concepts and go on to explore its potential as a

feature of properties. I shall argue that accepting response-dependence for the concept of a

property, be it sensory or aesthetic, does not entail accepting an ontological response-dependence

for the existence of the property itself. I shall then critique Nick Zangwill’s treatment of

aesthetic properties, according to which they are ontologically response-dependent and mind-

dependent, if they exist at all.

3.1 Motivations For a Realist Account of Sensory Properties

Zangwill’s argument that aesthetic properties cannot be mind-independent rests heavily

on his argument for the same claim regarding the properties involved in sense perception,

particularly colors and sounds. I will likewise begin by discussing these non-aesthetic

properties, recognizing that if I am to successfully argue for an objective, realist account of

aesthetic properties, I must begin by securing the possibility of an objective, realist account of

properties like colors and sounds.1

While the explanations of much of what goes on in the world can be traced to

microphysical properties, the world as we experience it features shapes and colors, sounds, tastes

1 A note on terminology: Zangwill consistently refers to colors, sounds, etc. collectively as sensory properties; I will speak of sensory language, concepts, and experiences, but intentionally deviate in speaking of sense-perceptible properties, as this is more in keeping with my own account.

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and smells, and sensations of temperature, texture, and movement. This is taken by some to

support a projectivism about sense-perceptible properties. Projectivism is a kind of error theory:

it suggests that the world of our day-to-day experience is not the objective world, but is rather a

world colored (and flavored, and so on) by our experiences of it. This projection of our

experiences onto the external world is thought to lead us to make aesthetic claims that are

inevitably in error, since the properties involved in sensory experience are regarded as nothing

more than the subjective responses that we have projected onto the “real” world.

This latter suggestion is one that I wish to resist. Motivated as I am to provide a realist

account of aesthetic properties, and given the intimate connections between sense-perceptible

and aesthetic properties, it is prudent to lay the foundations for such an account by first

developing a realist account of the properties involved in sensory experience. In fact, I think

such an account is desirable in its own right for sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and textures

because like aesthetic properties, they occupy important causal and explanatory roles. When I

note and enjoy the spiciness of my food, the softness of a set of bed linens, the smell of an

evergreen tree, or the color of a ripe apricot, it is the sense-perceptible properties and not the

underlying microphysical properties that I point to as the causes of my delight. Sense-

perceptible properties also explain many social and cultural practices. Taste properties, for

instance, have led to the development of many culinary traditions, while texture properties have

resulted in dedicated textile industries. I take these cultural practices to be engaged in a process

of discovery of pleasing sense-perceptible properties rather than fabrication of the same:

experimentation, I think, leads to the fuller realization of the possibilities inherent in their

materials, not the ex nihilio creation of new sensory experiences. The materials, I suspect, would

neither lack nor lose those inherent possibilities if they were suddenly forgotten, or had they

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never been discovered: this leads me to believe that the existence and nature of colors, sounds,

tastes, smells, and feels are rooted firmly in objects in the world. These are the objects that serve

as the focus of such experimentation, being adjusted, manipulated, or wholly recombined in a

way that tasters and testers can enjoy and appreciate, rather than it being the human subjects that

are manipulated.

3.2 The Prima Facie Appeal of Projectivism

While we might desire a realist account of sense-perceptible properties, are they in fact

suited for such an account? Our sensory experiences are determined by the qualities of the

objects we experience and the conditions under which we encounter those objects, both of these

arguably objective features of the world, but, the projectivist will continue, are they not equally

determined by our own subjective natures? Sense-perceptible properties are traditionally

considered dissimilar enough to physical properties like structure and movement that a

categorical divide between the two is warranted: colors and other sense-perceptible properties

have been treated as secondary to such primary properties as shape and size, considered

inescapably tainted by the subjectivity of the perceivers who experience them, and judged

reducible to primary properties and perceivers’ responses. Since my aim is to resist this sort of

treatment, I believe it will be valuable to identify here the reasons that make subjectivism appear

inevitable for sense-perceptible properties, reasons that I shall address in chapter 4. I believe

there are three main sources of projectivism’s appeal: the anthropocentric problem, the

importance of direct, personal experience of sense-perceptible properties, and a certain set of

intuitions regarding the implications of extreme changes in our perceptual mechanisms.

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How we understand sensory properties is determined, it seems, as much by our

perceptual abilities as by the physical natures of the objects of our experience, a situation we can

refer to as the anthropocentric problem. Taking colors as an example, we can give a fairly

sophisticated account of the science of color perception, recognizing the eye’s mechanistic

ability to detect specific ranges of the light spectrum that are reflected by surfaces. This would

seem to indicate that particular colors (red, green, etc.) can be identified with particular ranges of

electromagnetic radiation; as it turns out, however, color perception is not so simple. For one

thing, the human brain interprets various combinations of reflected wavelengths as being the

same color, so for instance there is more than one way to appear yellow. For another, certain

colors like magenta don’t correspond directly to any particular range of electromagnetic radiation

at all: magenta is instead how the brain handles simultaneous perception of wavelengths from the

short and long ends of the spectrum (violet and red, respectively), in effect recognizing a new

color altogether. So in some of these problem cases, our use of color terms picks out

disjunctions of properties of light-reflectance, and in other cases, it picks out complexes of such

properties, and in both sorts of situations it seems to be the nature of the color perceiver that

determines to which physical properties the color terms apply.2

The anthropocentric problem is not limited to color, but also applies to tastes, smells,

feels, and sounds. Flavor substitutes exemplify the anthropocentric problem in the area of

gustatory taste: when baking, a dish might just as easily be “vanilla flavored” due to the chemical

in imitation vanilla as to the use of genuine vanilla extract. The physical substances are quite

different, but they affect us in the same way, and here again we find that our understanding of a

sense-perceptible property, the flavor vanilla, is determined as much by our own perceptual

2 For a discussion of the disjunctive nature of colors like yellow, see Edward Wilson Averill, “Color and the Anthropocentric Problem,” in The Philosophy of Color, ed. A. Byrne and D. Hilbert, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1997.

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capacities (which respond similarly to the two substances) as by the physical properties of the

two flavoring agents. Scented candles mimic familiar smells, and we refer to them as berry,

pine, or cookie scented, though the waxy substance is quite dissimilar to fruit, trees, or baked

goods, except in the way it smells to us. Many textiles created with artificial materials feel just

like their natural counterparts—imitation dupioni silk made from polyester, faux fur, microfibers

that are indistinguishable from suede, and so on.3 When we listen to a string ensemble’s

performance, what we perceive as a very loud sound coming from a violin is, physically

speaking, a waveform with much less energy than the waveform produced by a bass, which we

are likely to perceive as equally loud. This is because the human ear is less sensitive to lower

sounds than it is to mid-range or higher sounds; we are thus at times inclined to judge two sounds

with markedly different decibel levels as being equally loud, and our understanding of ‘loudness’

is shaped by the peculiarities of the human ear’s abilities as much as by the physical properties of

the sounds themselves.4 The color terms and other sensory property terms we use, then, appear

to have extensions determined by our natures as much as by those of the objects of our

experience. I will address the anthropocentric problem in section 3.10 and in chapter 4, arguing

that the role of the human perceptual apparatus can be reasonably understood on a powers model

to determine in part the nature of a sense-perceptible property, that is its identity or essence, but

that the property’s existence is objective in the sense that its existence is wholly determined by

the object that possesses it.

The second source of appeal for Projectivism is the apparent necessity for an individual

to experience sense-perceptible properties directly for him or herself in order to actually

3 Texture examples are perhaps less subject to the anthropocentric problem than are other sensory property examples, as their sensual similarities are more likely to be accounted for by microphysical, structural properties. 4 Interestingly, apparent similarities in most other properties of sound are very much determined by actual physical similarities: a CD sounds like the original music group in terms of pitch, timbre, etc. because the waveforms produced by playing the recording are (very nearly) physically identical to the original.

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understand such properties. This point can be illustrated by a personal olfactory example: as a

child I had frequent sinus infections, greatly impairing my sense of smell. It wasn’t until I was

diagnosed and treated for allergies that I began to experience (and thus could fully comprehend)

certain odors, among them those associated with gas grills and overheating computers. These

odors now cause distinct behaviors in me—concern, and often a need to investigate of the source

of the smell—as well as in others who detect them. This causal role would seem to indicate that

such smells are an objective feature of the world, and yet it wasn’t until my own abilities were

developed and I had formed the appropriate concepts that they became “real” for me. One

likewise does not expect individuals who have never seen any colors or heard any sounds to be

capable of fully understanding those properties, let alone of responding to them; they may well

have electromagnetic radiation or vibration of matter explained to them, but to fully understand

what it means for a thing to be colored or make a sound one needs to experience it oneself.5

Not only does direct, personal experience seem necessary to a complete understanding of

sense-perceptible properties, but our commonsense understanding of colors suggests that direct,

personal experience may in fact be sufficient to fully reveal the nature of the properties in

question. Mark Johnston thus notes that it is often believed that “the intrinsic nature of canary

yellow is fully revealed by a standard visual experience as of a canary yellow thing.”6 If this

were true, then “once one has seen canary yellow there is no more to know about the way canary

yellow is.” But we know from the psychophysics of perception that our experiences of canary

yellow are subject to further explanation in terms of the surface reflectance properties and non-

5 See, for example, Frank Jackson’s example of Mary, the color scientist who has only ever experienced things in black and white, in his “Epiphenomenal Qualia,” Philosophical Quarterly 32, 1982, 126-136, and “What Mary Didn’t Know,” Journal of Philosophy 83:5, 1986, 291-295. Locke also discusses this in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book 2, chapter 2, section 2, and considers Molyneux’s Problem in chapter 9, section 8 — whether a man born blind who learned to identify geometrical solids could, if he gained vision, later identify them through sight alone. 6“How to Speak of the Colors,” p. 138.

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dispositional microphysical properties of objects.7 This means that direct, personal experience

does not fully reveal the nature of a color, even if it is necessary to fully understand the color. I

shall say more about the direct involvement needed for sense-perceptible properties in 3.8, and

address the question of revelation in 4.2 and 4.3.

The third feature of sensory experience that makes projectivism attractive is our intuition

that if our perceptual mechanisms were to change enough, things in the world could give us

sensory experiences that would be drastically different from the ones we have now. In the case

mentioned above, the treatment of my allergy symptoms led to a drastic change in my ability to

detect certain odors, and the world seemed to me to take on a whole new range of properties as a

result. One might imagine such a change on a larger scale: perhaps whole populations might,

over time, become more or less aware of certain sense-perceptible properties, or even begin to

experience things as having drastically different colors or tastes than previously. Where a certain

portion of the reflected light spectrum was previously identified with the color green, we can

imagine that a change in our perceptual mechanisms might lead to its identification with the

color blue. Or we might consider animals with perceptual abilities different from our own: if I

were to experience the world as does a dog, would it lack distinct reds and greens, or have smells

of which I am now unaware? What is the world like for bats and other animals that use sonar?

Hypothetical situations involving such perceptual differences lead us to suspect that the

properties involved in sensory experience are not straightforwardly objective features of the

world. But they do so, I think, because they rely on the anthropocentric nature of our

commonsense understanding. I shall consider the possibility of divergence in sensory experience

in 3.10.

7“How to Speak of the Colors,” p. 140.

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If the properties involved in sensory experience are uncertain candidates for a realist

theory, aesthetic properties are doubly so. Not only do they inherit all of the problems of the

sense-perceptible properties upon which they supervene, but they have unique difficulties of

their own. If there are many ways (microphysically speaking) for a thing to be such that we

experience it as yellow, there are many ways (with regard to sensory properties) for a thing to be

garish or elegant, let alone beautiful or ugly. And although aesthetic properties are determined at

least in part by sense-perceptible properties, as Sibley has argued, this relationship does not seem

to be one governed by rules. Keeping this in mind, I shall postpone further discussion of

aesthetic properties and continue with my discussion of response-dependence for the properties

involved in sensory experience. Our intuitions about the latter, I have claimed, are conflicting:

on the one hand, they appear to play important causal and explanatory roles, suggesting that their

ontological status is that of real, objective features of the world; on the other hand, they are

closely tied to our own natures, and conceptualized in terms of our subjective experiences, with

the result being that a certain degree of subjectivism seems inescapable.

3.3 Conceptual Response-Dependence

Response-dependence theories such Mark Johnston’s aim at a middle ground between

objectivity and subjectivity by allowing that our sensory property concepts essentially track the

experiences of perceiving subjects, while leaving open the possibility that those concepts pick

out objective features of the world. For Johnston, a concept associated with the predicate ‘is C’

is response-dependent when it is a priori true that something is C if and only if it is such as to

produce response R in subjects S under conditions K. Such a concept is thus dependent on

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concepts of the responses of subjects, hence the label response-dependent.8 For Johnston, the

concept red will (roughly speaking) be response-dependent if it is true that things are red if and

only if they are such as to look a certain way to normal perceivers under normal lighting

conditions. Other concepts which Johnston takes to be straightforwardly response-dependent

include concepts of the nauseating and dizzying, the tasty or titillating, the shymaking or

embarrassing, the agreeable or irritating, and the plausible or credible. In all these cases he

thinks that what it means to be nauseating, dizzying, tasty, and so on is explained in terms of

human responses; these concepts are thus said to be interdependent with or dependent upon

concepts of subjects’ responses.9 He holds that such a response-dependence account of a

concept will be a “qualified realism:” realist because it allows that genuine instances of the

concept exist, but qualified because it denies the independence of the concept in question from

concepts of the subjects’ responses under specified conditions.10

Johnston’s account illustrates two important features of response-dependent concepts:

first, they are dispositional, and second, they are response-privileging. I have addressed

dispositions at length in chapter 2, so I shall simply note here that a concept is dispositional when

it represents something as a disposition to bring about a certain type of state of affairs under

certain conditions. In Johnston’s account, the language “being such as to φ under conditions K”

makes the dispositional nature of response-dependent concepts apparent. The φ in response-

dependence accounts is filled in as “produce response R in subjects S”, and this introduces the

second key feature of response-dependent concepts, that they are response-privileging.

8 Mark Johnston, “Dispositional Theories of Value”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes, 63 (1989) 139-174, 145. 9 Ibid, 146. 10 Ibid, 148.

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According to Philip Pettit, a concept is response-privileging when it leaves no room for

either ignorance or error in the corresponding responses under the appropriate conditions. If red

is a response-privileging concept, for instance, then

It is a priori knowable that if something is red then it will look red in normal circumstances to normal observers, so ignorance is ruled out in that situation. And it is a priori knowable that if something looks red in normal circumstances to normal observers then it is red, so error is equally ruled out in that situation. The sensations are not judgments but they lead observers to make judgments, and the point is that in appropriate conditions they will neither fail to lead, as in allowing ignorance, nor mislead, as in generating error.11

This response-privileging feature is what makes response-dependence a qualified realism.

Response-dependent concepts are thought to be objective insofar as they rule out some

conditions and responses as irrelevant, thus making it possible that we are sometimes in error.

When the relevant conditions and responses obtain, however, we are supposed to have a

guarantee of successful judgment, so that not every judgment is in error. Ruling out the

irrelevant responses is what keeps a response-dependent concept from falling into subjectivism;

privileging the relevant responses is what keeps it from devolving into an error theory.

This attempt at finding a middle way between the objective and subjective is apparent in

response-dependence accounts of moral and other normative concepts as well, as Peter

Vallentyne explains.

[It appears] to incorporate the plausible elements of each of subjectivism and objectivism without their corresponding implausible elements. Like subjectivism, response-dependent accounts ground normativity in the concerns and attitudes of mental beings—and thus avoid postulating mysterious objectively prescriptive attributes. Like objectivism, plausible response-dependent accounts deny that normativity is grounded in the concerns and attitudes that we happen to have—it is only certain sorts of response of certain sorts of mental being under certain sorts of condition that are relevant. Because we may not

11 Philip Pettit, “Realism and Response-Dependence,” Mind, 100:4, Oct 1991, 587-626, p. 597; emphasis mine.

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meet these conditions, our responses may well be in error—both individually and collectively.12

If Vallentyne is correct, then response-dependence appears plausible for sensory concepts and

moral concepts for the same reason: it bridges the divide between the subjective and objective

features of those concepts. Whether our concepts of red and right are more or less correct is

keyed to the way humans experience redness and rightness, so a certain level of subjectivity is

automatically incorporated into a response-dependent account. But not just any response or

experience is thereby deemed correct, and this is of the utmost importance because leaving room

for error is what allows a response-dependent account to be an objective account.

Barry C. Smith deals with a version of this question—to what extent our subjective

experiences can be a guide to a thing’s objective properties—in an essay on wine-tasting, where

he concludes that “…the fact that tasting sensations are the conscious experiences of individual

tasters does not thereby prevent them from providing information about the objective

characteristics of the wines tasted.”13 According to Smith, “it is only when there is room for a

contrast between opinions and what makes them true that we are dealing with objective matters,”

and “we do admit a gap, on occasions, between how things strike us and how they are. We

distinguish, for example, between the way a wine tastes, and how it tastes to us after sucking a

lemon.”14 Here the conditions under which a subject tastes a wine are essential to determining

whether that experience is a suitable guide to the wine’s taste properties, and some responses can

be ruled out as irrelevant because they involve errors in judgment. Setting limits on which

conditions and responses are relevant is what allows for the possibility of error and thus

12 Peter Vallentyne, “Response-Dependence, Rigidification, and Objectivity”, Erkenntnis, 44:1, 101-112, 101. 13 Barry C. Smith, “The Objectivity of Tastes and Tasting,” Questions of Taste: The Philosophy of Wine, ed. Barry C. Smith. Oxford: Signal Books, 2007, 41-77, 48. 14 Ibid, 46-47.

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objectivity, guarding against an extreme version of subjectivism. But delineating a class of

relevant responses and conditions also serves to rule out an error theory, as we shall see in the

following section.

It should be noted that the two key features of response-dependence concepts can come

apart and are thus independent: our concepts may be dispositional without being response-

privileging, or they may be response-privileging without being dispositional. One example of a

dispositional concept that is not response-privileging involves a simplistic physicalist concept of

the color red, where red is identified with a disposition to emit or reflect a certain range of

wavelengths of light, measurable by scientific instruments. This way of conceiving of the color

red does not involve human responses, and we should not take it for granted that because a

concept is dispositional, it will be a disposition to produce a response. An example of a

response-privileging concept that is not dispositional can also be given for the color red,

following a schema provided by Pettit. Suppose that we form a concept of the color red by

having red things presented to us under certain conditions—apples, fire engines, and so on,

presented in bright sunlight. We then find it primitively salient to extrapolate from those

exemplars to other cases that look appropriately similar to us under the same lighting conditions.

According to Pettit, conceiving of red this way will rule out both ignorance and error; red things

so conceived will reliably present themselves as being saliently similar to our exemplars, and

anything that presents itself as saliently similar to our exemplars will be red. This means that

such a concept is response-privileging, but note, it is not dispositional: this is because in the

scenario described red is never identified with a disposition to evoke the relevant responses,

though we do rely on our responses in recognizing the similarities.15

15 Pettit, 1991, p. 598.

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3.4 Responses, Conditions, and Objectivity

In a response-dependent account of sense-perceptible properties such as Mark Johnston’s,

then, we are supposed to find a middle ground between objectivism and subjectivism: the

account is objective and realist because it allows that genuine instances of sense-perceptible

properties exist, but it is subjective to the extent that it recognizes that our sensory property

concepts are essentially bound up in our sensory experience concepts. But the degree to which a

response-dependence account is subjective depends on what sorts of responses are deemed

relevant, a point which I shall elaborate here.

In the scheme “being such as to produce responses R in subjects S under conditions K”

that is used to describe a response-dependent property, there are several possibilities for how we

fill in S and K. To capture our everyday concept of color, it is natural to restrict the relevant

subjects to humans with normal vision (ruling out the color-blind, for instance), and to restrict

the conditions to situations with good lighting—bright sunlight or its equivalent, say—and an

absence of obscuring objects. Edward Wilson Averill’s account, however, extends the lighting

conditions to include all possible sources of light, with the color of an object being identified

with the whole class of resulting ways it reacts to those light sources.16 And Nick Zangwill

includes non-normal subjects and discusses possible worlds in which the perceiving subjects are

aliens or humans with perceptual mechanisms drastically different from our own (a topic to

which I shall return in 3.10).

Response-dependence theorists have distinguished between two ways of limiting the

conditions and responses privileged in their accounts, with the result being that a response-

16 “Color and the Anthropocentric Problem” in The Philosophy of Color, ed. A. Byrne and D. Hilbert, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1997. Averill also allows for the inclusion of non-human animal observers in the subjects whose responses are deemed relevant.

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dependence account can be classified as either rigid or non-rigid. In a rigid response-

dependence account, the subjects and conditions whose responses are relevant are restricted so

that they are the same across times and worlds. Such a restriction is typically generated by fixing

on the actual world: we could say, for instance, that a wine in any possible world should be

judged as having a smooth finish if it would taste a particular way to an ideal wine taster from

the actual world under normal tasting circumstances for the actual world. Or we could say that a

fire engine is red if ordinary perceivers in normal conditions for the actual world experience it as

red. Rigid accounts can thus limit the relevant subjects to “normal” persons from the actual

world, or perhaps a more limited pool of ideal observers.

A non-rigid response-dependence account, by contrast, does not fix concepts by reference

to the actual world: subjects very unlike those in the actual world, under conditions very unlike

those in the actual world, are included in such an account. This approach allows that in some

worlds our red fire engines could legitimately be judged green due to looking a certain way to

those worlds’ occupants (be they aliens or humans with differing perceptual mechanisms than

ours), or due to being seen in conditions unlike those found in the actual world.17 If response-

dependent concepts result in a qualified realism because they depend on concepts of our

responses and experiences, then the degree of qualification for a realist view will be greater or

lesser depending on the range of responses considered relevant. A rigid account that only takes

the responses of normal humans in normal conditions to be relevant will be more robustly realist

than a non-rigid account that takes perceivers and conditions in possible worlds to be relevant.

The issue of rigidity affects the objectivity of a response-dependent because of the way in

which the constraints on the subjects and conditions affect the possibility for error. As explained

17 See Vallentyne 1996 for further explanation and examples of rigidification on response-dependence accounts; the ‘rigid’ language is also used in Zangwill 2000.

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in the previous section, response-dependence accounts are response-privileging in that our

responses are deemed reliable in certain conditions: under many a rigid account, the normal

perceivers and conditions found in the actual world are taken to be the reliable ones. Any

responses that do not live up to this standard will be considered in error, and because there is a

possibility for error, the account is considered objective, as Smith’s wine-tasting examples

illustrated. By contrast, a non-rigid account results in response-dependent concepts with a lesser

possibility for error because the pool of perceiving subjects and conditions deemed relevant are

greater and more varied. If objects may be justifiably judged red only so long as they look a

certain way to someone under some conditions or other, then it becomes quite difficult to say

when a judgment—that US interstate highway exit signs are red, for instance—is in error.

What should be clear from this discussion of rigidification and response-dependence is

that it is possible to maintain an important role for the perceiving subject and his/her responses in

one’s theory of sense-perceptible properties while not privileging responses to a degree that just

anything goes. An error theory is not inevitable, and we can judge some claims about sense-

perceptible properties to be right or wrong, particularly if we individuate sense-perceptible

properties in a sufficiently fine-grained manner. On my account this is explained by the fact that

colors and other sense-perceptible properties are dispositions whose identities are keyed to their

manifestations and conditions for manifestation, but are ultimately grounded in the nature of the

powers of the objects that possess them. While avoidance of an error theory is a necessary

condition for an objectivist theory of sense-perceptible properties, the account I favor meets a

higher standard for realism because of its use of a realist ontology of powers and dispositions.

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3.5 Ontological Response-Dependence

I have, so far, limited my discussion of response-dependence to concepts. I now wish to

ask the question, what do advocates of response-dependence accounts mean when they say that a

property is response-dependent? Two possibilities, at least, present themselves: firstly, they

might simply be claiming that the conceptual response-dependence (CRD) discussed above

applies, thus that our concepts of the property in question are inescapably bound up with

concepts of our responses. Secondly, they could be making the more serious ontological

response-dependence claim (ORD) that the property in question depends for its very existence on

our responses. This second, ontological claim entails mind-dependence for the properties in

question, to the extent that the responses in question are mental: put simply, the reasoning goes,

if the property cannot exist without the appropriate responses existing, and the responses depend

for their existence on minds, then the property’s existence will also be dependent on the mind’s

existence.18

One might, of course, accept both claims, but what I wish to point out is that accepting

the conceptual claim does not entail acceptance of the ontological claim. CRD is one way in

which we might understand the relation between a property and our responses, and ORD a very

different way. The two may well both apply in the same cases, such as in the value of monetary

currency, where a five dollar bill has only as much buying power as our responses give it, and

both an understanding of the value and its having of that value depend quite heavily on the

existence of persons having the appropriate responses, namely the relevant beliefs and judgments

regarding its value. But CRD does not entail ORD: there are also clear cases where the concept

of a property is bound up in concepts of responses, but the property itself does not depend for its

18 Mental responses would include beliefs, judgments, etc., but not, for instance, purely somatic responses.

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very existence on those responses. When I pick up a box of books, for instance, I experience its

mass as gravitational pull. My naïve concept of mass is thus very likely to be bound up with

concepts of this sensation of weightiness, a type of human response. This makes CRD plausible

for mass, yet we would not want to say that an object’s having mass depends on the existence of

human responses, and I think we would be quite loathe to call mass a mind-dependent property.

Whether a property is ontologically response-dependent and potentially mind-dependent,

then, is determined not by fact that it is merely related to our responses, but by the nature of the

relation, and in particular the kind of dependence involved, if there is any. The two claims have

very different consequences for the ontological status of response-dependent properties: to

borrow Zangwill’s way of framing the difference, someone who accepts ORD for sense-

perceptible or aesthetic properties would seem to be accepting that a world without humans and

their responses is colorless and without grace or beauty. Indeed, with the sort of anti-realism he

discusses, a world with humans in it is still, in itself, colorless and lacking grace and beauty, as

these are located in the eye of the beholder. But if an account only holds that CRD applies to

such properties, it is not thereby committed to this ontology; something further must still be said

about the ontological status of response-dependent properties in relation to humans and their

responses.

Which claims the response-dependence theorist is willing to make depends, in large part,

on what subjects and conditions he or she considers relevant to the response-dependent property

in question. A rigid response-dependence, for instance, does not entail acceptance of the

ontological claim, as Peter Vallentyne explains in the context of normative/moral concepts:

The core point has been that rigid response-dependent accounts are not genuinely ontologically response-dependent. They are rather forms of objectivism. They do not track in any interesting sense the responses of the specified beings. Rigid response-dependence accounts merely appeal to responsive dispositions and conditions to rigidly

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identify certain non-response-dependent attributes as normative attributes. Although this point is implicitly recognized by many, there is still a tendency to view rigid response-dependent accounts as non-objectivist theories. For example, rigid response-dependent accounts of moral properties are thought to be non-objective in contrast with “Cornell realists” accounts. If the above argument is correct, however, rigid response-dependent accounts may be simply picking out dispositionally the sort of objective moral attribute the realists believe in.19

The sort of rigid response-dependence account that Vallentyne describes here makes use of

concepts that are both dispositional and response-privileging, and so may be classified as

response-dependent. But it demonstrates a coherent way in which a response-dependence

theorist might accept CRD but not ORD for normative properties, and analogously for sense-

perceptible and aesthetic properties.

Allowing that sense-perceptible or aesthetic properties are conceptually response-

dependent may, in fact, say nothing at all about their ontological status. For it may just be the

minimal claim that we have a property under a certain sort of description, such that the property

can exist even in a world without people; the lack of minds means only that the description is not

available, while the objective property is. It is thus very important to be clear about exactly what

a response-dependence theory means when it involves the claim that sense-perceptible or

aesthetic properties are response-dependent: is it saying that they depend for their very existence

on human responses, or just that our concepts necessarily involve reference to such responses?

In the context of response-dependence accounts, we must remember that CRD does not entail

ORD, and this means that any argument for subjectivism or mind-dependence about sense-

perceptible or aesthetic will have to do more than demonstrate that our concepts of such

properties depend on concepts of our responses. In the broader context, the important point is

that although the identity or nature of a sense-perceptible property is determined in part by

19 Peter Vallentyne, “Response-Dependence, Rigidification, and Objectivity”, Erkenntnis, 44:1, 101-112, 109.

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manifestation-type and conditions of manifestation, thus involving perceivers and their

responses, the existence of the property is a matter of its possession by an object in the external

world.

3.6 Zangwill’s Non-Realist Aesthetic Response-Dependence

According to Nick Zangwill, if aesthetic properties exist at all, they are a certain kind of

mind-dependent property, and “not part of the ‘objective world’—a world that is left over when

we subtract human beings.” This conclusion is the result of two theses: first, that if aesthetic

properties exist, they must supervene on sensory properties such as colors and sounds; and

second, that those sensory properties are response-dependent. For Zangwill, sensory property

response-dependence is equivalent to mind-dependence, indicating that he has ontological

response-dependence in mind, with the result being a projectivism or non-realism for sensory

properties. His understanding of supervenience is such that if the base sensory properties are

mind-dependent, so also must the supervenient aesthetic properties be mind-dependent. 20

Granting Zangwill his supervenience thesis, I shall focus my critique on his argument for

a non-realism or projectivism about response-dependent sensory properties, addressing three

different threads of his argument: the particular version of the primary/secondary quality

distinction that he employs, the resulting claim that sensory properties understood as dispositions

are relations, and the possibility of divergence from the normal correlations between our sensory

experiences and the properties of the objects that cause them. I find two major difficulties with

his argument for sensory property response-dependence: first, an unjustified move from CRD to

ORD, and second, a conflation of the sense-perceptible property dispositions and their

20 Nick Zangwill, “Skin-Deep or in the Eye of the Beholder” in The Metaphysics of Beauty (Ithaca: Cornell, 2001) p. 176-200.

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manifestations. If my assessment is correct, Zangwill’s argument only succeeds in making

conceptual response-dependence plausible for sensory properties, and he has not ruled out the

possibility of realism for both sense-perceptible and aesthetic properties.

3.7 Two Versions of the Primary/Secondary Quality Distinction

Zangwill’s pessimism regarding realist accounts of sense-perceptible properties begins

with the claim that sensory properties are secondary qualities, a claim that requires some

unpacking in light of Locke’s primary/secondary quality distinction. According to Locke, an

object’s secondary qualities just are its powers to operate on our senses, producing in us the ideas

of colors, sounds, smells, tastes, etc. These powers to affect our senses depend on its primary

qualities, such as mass, structure, and motion. Changes in the secondary qualities of an object

are effected by changes to its primary qualities: pounding an almond, for example, changes its

color from a clear white to a “dirty” color by changing its texture, a structural quality.21 Locke’s

discussion emphasizes two criteria for the primary/secondary quality distinction that are

important for my purposes here. Michael Jacovides explains that

Because Locke believes that primary qualities are explanatory and that secondary qualities are not, he concludes that our ideas of primary qualities resemble and that our ideas of secondary qualities do not. Because our ideas of primary qualities resemble and our ideas of secondary qualities do not, he concludes that our ideas of primary qualities represent intrinsic, mind-independent, real qualities and that our ideas of secondary qualities represent powers to produce ideas in us.22

21 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Bk. II, Ch. VIII, § 20-25. 22Michael Jacovides, "Locke's Distinctions between Primary and Secondary Qualities," The Cambridge Companion to Locke's "Essay Concerning Human Understanding", ed. Lex Newman, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 101-156, 2007. Emphasis mine.

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I shall refer to these as the resemblance criterion and the mind-independence criterion,

respectively, and I suggest that an account of secondary qualities will be more or less realist

depending on how it handles the mind-independence criterion.

Now according to Zangwill, a secondary quality “depends on the experiences of normal

human beings under normal conditions,” while a primary quality does not:

Colors, sounds, tastes, and smells are all secondary qualities, it is said, because they depend on the specific character of the sensory experiences of normal human beings in normal circumstances. What it is to be red, loud, sweet, or pungent depends on what it is for normal human beings to experience them as red, round, sweet or pungent in normal conditions.23

On Zangwill’s account, then, it appears to be the independent existence criterion that is supposed

to distinguish primary from secondary qualities, and he takes the result to be that secondary

qualities are mind-dependent and so unsuited to a realist account. He notes that this distinction is

purely stipulative, however, and references Colin McGinn’s comment that it is left open

“whether there are in fact any qualities of objects falling under either characterization; it is thus a

substantive question whether (say) colour is a secondary quality.”24 Stipulative, indeed, for one

could just as easily formulate a primary/secondary quality distinction as being based on the

resemblance criterion: primary qualities, one could say, are those that are essentially as we

perceive them to be (for Locke, that our ideas resemble what is in the object), while the

secondary qualities are not.

If one formulates the primary/secondary quality distinction on the basis of the

resemblance criterion, rather than jumping straight to the mind-independence criterion, then

secondary qualities remain candidates for inclusion in a realist ontology, because there would be

an open question regarding whether secondary qualities depend on minds for their existence, 23 2001, 186-187. 24 The Subjective View, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), 5.

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natures, or both. Furthermore, as I shall argue in 3.10, understanding secondary qualities

functionally as powers (as described in the previous chapter) avoids mind-dependence as an

outcome. My own account, given in chapter 4, will treat sense-perceptible properties as

dispositions using the model laid out in the previous chapter, where dispositionality is explained

in terms of directedness; it leads to an understanding of sense-perceptible properties of objects

that exist independently of perceivers and do not resemble the sensory experiences they cause in

us.25 As I have indicated previously, I hold that the identity or natures of sense-perceptible

properties are in part determined by the kinds of responses in which they are manifested, but not

their existence.

3.8 Are Sense-Perceptible Properties Relative?

The primary/secondary quality distinction for color theory that Zangwill utilizes finds its

strongest statement, I think, in the account of Colin McGinn’s that Zangwill references.

According to McGinn, “It is… entirely proper to speak of objects as red with respect to perceiver

x and green with respect to perceiver y… it is just to say that what it is for a secondary quality to

be instantiated is for a certain relation to obtain between the object and some chosen group of

perceivers.”26 If the properties involved in sensory experience are relations, and if some of the

relata in question are mental entities—the responses of perceivers—then ontological dependence

on these responses entails the mind-dependence that leads Zangwill to his sensory property non-

realism. McGinn actually makes two claims about the relational nature of sensory properties in

25 My preference in addressing sense-perceptible properties is to follow the contemporary dispositional literature in speaking of a categorical/dispositional distinction. Categorical properties correspond roughly to primary qualities, and dispositional properties correspond roughly to Locke’s secondary and tertiary qualities taken together. The rough correspondence between secondary qualities and dispositions is evident in Zangwill’s practice of using “secondary quality,” “disposition,” and “response-dependent property” more or less interchangeably. 26 1983, The Subjective View, Oxford University Press, 10.

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this passage: first, that they are relative to the perceivers in question (“red with respect to

perceiver x”), and second, that they are instantiated as relations between the object and the

perceivers in question. I shall respond with a qualified acceptance of the relativity claim, and

then dispute the instantiation claim.

McGinn holds that colors (as well as all other sense-perceptible properties, presumably)

are subjective in a specific sense, namely that their analysis involves experience: “to grasp the

concept of red it is necessary to know what it is for something to look red,” and “this knowledge

is available only to one who enjoys those kinds of experiences… sensory experiences which we

have only from the first-person perspective.”27 This point is illustrated by our expectation that

blind persons cannot fully conceive of color, since they do not have experiences of things as

looking colored. I allow that sense-perceptible properties are relative in the sense that they are

understood as dispositions to produce responses in normal perceivers—those who experience

things as looking colored, being scented, making sound, and so on—in normal conditions. I

allow that the manifestation event-types that sense-perceptible properties are directed and

defined by are necessarily conceived relative to these perceivers. But as I have argued, this alone

does not entail that the very existence of sense-perceptible properties is relative to human

responses. My acceptance of McGinn’s relativity claim is thus qualified because I reject

relativity as entailing the sort of ontological response-dependence that Zangwill espouses,

leading to projectivism or anti-realism.

A second qualification I would add is that it is not just sense-perceptible properties that

turn out to be relative when understood as dispositions. Our concepts of physical dispositions

like flammability and fragility are also relative insofar as their identities are given by

27 Ibid, 8-9.

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manifestation event-types occurring in “normal conditions,” though perceivers and their

responses are not typically part of the relevant conditions for these dispositions. Most things are

flammable, given high enough temperatures, but our use of the term ‘flammable’ is typically

restricted to things that ignite easily and burn quickly at normal temperatures. Similarly, we use

‘fragile’ for things which are easily broken or destroyed when dropped or knocked under normal

conditions; although marshmallows shatter easily after being frozen in liquid nitrogen, they are

only fragile in this relative sense. So it is not just sense-perceptible properties where we find it

entirely proper to speak of an object having a property with respect to some specific conditions,

be they “normal” or highly specific.

3.9 Are Sense-Perceptible Property Dispositions Relations?

So much for the relativity claim, but what of the instantiation claim? Are secondary

qualities indeed instantiated as relations between objects and perceivers, in the form of

experiential facts such as color sensations. Here I believe that my dispositional model can

illuminate the major shortcoming of McGinn’s theory, the way in which it oversimplifies things.

In particular, McGinn’s claim that secondary qualities are relations does not distinguish clearly

between a disposition, its manifestation, and the conditions of manifestation. All three of these

components are present in the model I introduced previously and in Mark Johnston’s

formulation, where for a dispositional concept C, something is C if and only if it is such as to

produce response R in subjects S under conditions K.28 Confusing any two of the three elements

in a dispositional analysis—the disposition, its manifestation, and its conditions for

manifestation—leads to problems. In this case, McGinn holds that sense-perceptible properties

28 Note that in the case of dispositions to provoke responses, the responses are the manifestation of the dispositions, and the subjects themselves are part of the conditions for manifestation.

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such as colors are only instantiated as sensations, which on the dispositional model would be the

manifestations of the properties, not the properties themselves; the effect of his account is thus to

conflate dispositions and their manifestations.

To see the dangers of conflating the elements in the dispositional model, consider the

disposition of fragility: we say that an object is fragile when it has some property (a disposition)

in virtue of which it will break (manifestation) when dropped or knocked (conditions of

manifestation). When a glass is dropped and breaks, the breaking event is the manifestation of

its fragility, but should not be conflated with the dropping event which causes it; the dropping

here is one of the conditions of manifestation, not the manifestation itself. In the case of color-

perception, the presence of a subject with normal color vision and the use of that ability, together

with appropriate lighting conditions, make up the conditions for the manifestation of the color,

which involves the perceiver’s response. It would be a mistake to conflate the perceiver’s color

vision or the lighting conditions with the color itself, though McGinn avoids this more obvious

error.

Where McGinn errs, however, is in giving an account that effectively conflates the

manifestation with the disposition itself. Dispositional realists typically hold that the existence

of a disposition is distinct from and in no way ontologically dependent upon the existence of its

manifestation. Stephen Mumford’s example of the disposition to produce an image on an x-ray

machine, which I discussed in 2.6.7, illustrates this point.29 Objects did not suddenly gain this

power when x-ray machines were first invented; rather, one of the conditions of manifestation

was finally met. The objects would have had the power to produce x-ray images regardless of

whether the machine had been invented, though it is highly unlikely that we would have had

29 1998, Dispositions, Oxford University Press, 56.

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concepts of x-ray images. Having the power to produce x-ray images is thus not ontologically

dependent on actually manifesting the power at any given time (or ever at all). As I explained in

2.6.1, powers are like mental entities in that they are directed at something beyond themselves,

without requiring that the something in question actually exists. While the manifestation event-

types towards which powers are directed give their identities, the powers are not ontologically

dependent upon their manifestations.

In the case of physical dispositions like fragility, it is obvious to the casual observer that a

glass’s fragility is distinct from and exists independently of any breaking event that happens to

it—ideally, one handles the glass carefully, before it ever breaks, knowing that it continues to be

fragile (and hoping to prevent the fragility from manifesting). In the case of sense perception,

however, the manifestation events are perceivers’ experiences of sense-perceptible properties,

and this leads to a certain ambiguity in our color terms, which I shall explore in greater detail in

4.1 and 4.2. If we are to accurately analyze colors and other sense-perceptible properties

dispositionally, we must distinguish between objects’ powers to create sensory experiences and

the experiences thereby created.

Keeping this distinction in mind, we begin to see the difficulty inherent in the secondary

quality account used by McGinn and Zangwill. We can agree that a dispositional analysis of

color and other sense-perceptible properties involves an important causal relation between the

sense-perceptible properties and perceivers’ responses; the properties are causal powers and

bring about the responses, which occupy the role of manifestation events in the powers model.

The relation between the powers and responses is only a potential one, however, until the

manifestation occurs.30 McGinn’s claim that response-dependent properties such as colors are

30The relation that obtains outside of instantiation is that of directedness, but this relation stands between the power and its manifestation-type, not manifestation instances.

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instantiated as relations between objects and perceivers entails that those properties have no

stable, continuing existence. Their existence would instead depend on the responses of

perceivers as well as the objects said to be colored, these being the relata. This metaphysical

claim, that response-dependent properties are relations, is what makes McGinn’s secondary

quality account entail mind-dependence for colors and other sense-perceptible properties.

McGinn’s account of sense-perceptible qualities effectively conflates dispositions and

their manifestations, and in doing so completely bypasses the alternative reference of our color

terms, the objects’ powers themselves. By contrast, a dispositional theory of color such as

Johnston’s has color terms referring to properties located in the “colored” objects, with the

ontological role of perceiving subjects accounted for as part of the conditions for manifestation.

In this latter kind of account, the powers to produce such responses exist independently of their

manifestation, and there is no reason to think that colors depend for their existence on responses

or minds; the same would be expected to hold for other sense-perceptible properties. A

sufficiently sophisticated dispositional theory of sense-perceptible or aesthetic properties such as

I shall develop in the next chapter is thus well-placed to account for our intuitions about the

subjective nature of sense-perceptible properties, while maintaining that they are real properties

of objects. That powers are like mental entities, in being directed without requiring that the

intentional object actually exist (see 2.6.2), is further evidence that they are properties rather than

relations.31

31 Even when dispositional realists such as Ullin Place refers to the characterization of the disposition in terms of its ‘relation’ to its manifestation, the disposition is not itself construed to be a relation.

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3.10 Zangwill’s Argument From the Possibility of Divergence

As far as I can tell, Zangwill does not consider the objects’ powers themselves as a

candidate for the reference of our sensory property language. He does, however, make an

argument intended to rule out the possibility of mind-independent realism for sense-perceptible

properties. An adequate response to his position, then, must not only present a metaphysical

alternative for the reference of our color terms, as I have done in the previous section, but also

demonstrate that this alternative is not blocked by his argument that sensory properties, if they

exist at all, are mind-dependent.

Zangwill’s argument begins with the possibility that beings with perceptual mechanisms

different from ours perceive colored things such that their experiences are systematically

qualitatively different from ours (though equally fine-grained). He presents a thought

experiment in which Martians systematically experience things with the color of healthy grass as

appearing (what we would call) red, and systematically experience things with the color of

London buses as appearing (what we would call) green. Although the difference between the

Martians’ experiences and ours is due to a difference in perceptual mechanisms, it cannot be

explained away as a deficiency in color vision such as red-green color blindness.32

Now, because these beings with different perceptual mechanisms have different color

experiences, it is quite reasonable to expect that they would apply their color concepts differently

32 One of the difficulties with this thought experiment is that it is rather difficult to imagine the Martians actually having systematically different experiences. This is, I think, because use of our color concepts is tied up with an introspective recognition of similarity to what we consider paradigmatic colored objects. We can imagine a London bus that had been painted green, but then it would no longer be London-bus colored but rather grass-colored, and any Martian would agree with us that it was now grass-colored: the systematic nature of the color-reversal suggests that we would never know that we experienced things differently from the Martians. Zangwill acknowledges this difficulty when he offers the possibility of intrasubjective color-experience divergence, a change in a single subject’s experiences over time. If it is difficult to imagine inter-subjective color-experience divergence such as that of the hypothetical Martians and ourselves, we can imagine instead that a single individual’s perceptual mechanisms change over time such that the things he used to recognize as London-bus-colored now systematically appear grass-colored to him.

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and make different color judgments than we do. What Zangwill wishes us to take away from the

thought experiment is that if we were fully aware of the situation of these beings, we could not

justifiably judge them to be in error in the application of their color concepts, or mistaken about

the objects’ true colors. He holds that assuming that we are right and the other beings are wrong

would be an arbitrary and thus baseless arrogance, since there is an exact symmetry between our

situation and that of the Martians; they would be equally justified (or unjustified) in thinking our

concepts and judgments erroneous. Zangwill thus concludes that a norm of tolerance is built into

our concept of color. Thus far, so good; I agree with him.

Zangwill’s conclusion goes a step further, however, as he takes the possibility of

divergence to rule out the possibility of a mind-independent realism for sensory properties:

“a real property cannot both attach to a thing and not attach to it... If redness were a real mind-independent property, we would have to be intolerant and claim the Martians were mistaken. But surely we would not… It is not just that we would be tolerant, but that we should be, for intolerance could have no basis.”33

The argument hinges as much on this claim that a real property cannot both attach to a thing and

not attach to it as it does on the claim that we ought to be tolerant. I agree, in fact, with both

claims. My difficulty is with the fact that Zangwill’s color properties are insufficiently

individuated: he does not make the necessary distinction between the powers or dispositions and

their manifestations. If a response-dispositional property is that property in virtue of which an

object produces responses in subjects under certain conditions, then it is the specification of

responses, subjects, and conditions that allows us to distinguish between different dispositions.34

And in the case of possible divergence, it was clear all along that the diverging color experiences

were due to differing perceptual mechanisms, rather than to any instability in the properties of

33 Skin-deep, 192. 34This was explained in 2.6.1. The manifestations of the powers, in particular, give their identities.

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the grass or London buses. For Zangwill, the grass and London buses were not changing, but

they were experienced as both red and not-red at the same time, suggesting that redness both

attached and did not attach to them. This suggestion is one we do not have to accept, because the

difference in the perceivers’ perceptual mechanisms marks the presence of two different color

dispositions when they are individuated in a sufficiently fine-grained manner. One of the

dispositions is to produce responses of type A in normal humans; the other is a disposition to

produce responses of type B in normal Martians. I explained in 2.6 that the identity or nature of

a disposition is determined both by its manifestation-type and by the conditions under which it

manifests.

It is not at all odd to recognize that objects often have powers to produce different, even

opposite, responses under different conditions. This is an expected outcome of the hub-and-

spoke connection between powers and the dispositions they ground, as explained in 2.2. A

magnetically charged object, I noted, is capable of both attracting objects with opposite charges

and repelling objects with like charges, and of doing both simultaneously. Magnetism is the

power that grounds both of these dispositions, but how it manifests itself will depend on which

conditions are satisfied. Similarly, the London bus can appear red to humans and not-red to

Martians because the two different groups of perceivers satisfy different conditions for

manifestation. It can thus appear red and not-red at the same time, and we can be tolerant of our

neighbors’ divergent color concepts and color judgments, because it has two distinct

dispositions, each grounded in a real power. I shall return to this topic again in my discussion of

colors as powers in 4.5 below.

To conclude my discussion of Zangwill’s claim that sensory properties are mind-

dependent, if they exist at all: If we treat colors and other sense-perceptible properties as

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dispositions, individuate them sufficiently, and distinguish between the powers and their

manifestations, then Zangwill’s claims regarding the possibility of divergence and the need for

tolerance do not force us to accept his conclusion. There is still room for a realist theory of color

and other sense-perceptible properties. In the following chapter I shall demonstrate what such a

theory looks like.

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Chapter 4: Colors and Other Sense-Perceptible Properties

If one wishes to work through the subjective aspects of perceptual experience that pose a

challenge for a realist theory of aesthetic properties, the philosophy of color is an excellent place

to start. We as humans rely heavily on our visual abilities, and artworks and other aesthetic

objects that give rise to aesthetic experience by visual means are frequently the paradigm

examples in our study of those experiences. In this chapter I shall demonstrate the suitability of

a dispositional account for sense-perceptible properties, apply the powers model developed in

chapter 2 to color, and account for several features of color experience that suggest it is

subjective in nature. I shall then compare my findings for color to other modes of sense-

perception, including hearing, taste, smell, tactile and temperature sensations, and the vestibular

sense (responsible for sensations of velocity and change in direction of movement).

4.1 Colors and Chromatic Phenomenal Properties

Let us begin by agreeing that experiences as of red are those which are more like our

visual experiences of fire engines and ripe tomatoes in broad daylight than they are like visual

experiences of healthy lawns, school buses, or United States Postal Service mailboxes. The term

red is an ambiguous one, however, as it can be used (at the least) to mean or refer to either 1) the

property of an object which causes such experiences to occur, or 2) a property of one’s visual

field caused by an experience as of a red thing.

An example of the first use, the property of an object which causes an experience as of a

colored thing, is found in the physicalist claim considered by J.J.C. Smart that “color is a

physical state of the surface of an object, that state which normally explains certain patterns of

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discriminatory reactions of normal human percipients.”1 This use would encompass any of the

three options for external explanatory causes of our color experiences that Mark Johnston says

psychopysics has given us: “non-dispositional microphysical properties, light-dispositions

(reflectance or Edwin Land’s designator dispositions or something of that sort) or psychological

dispositions (dispositions to appear colored) with microphysical or light-dispositional bases.”2

The second use of the term is present in Christopher Peacocke’s discussion of the claim

that “when a normal human sees a red object in daylight, there is a certain property possessed by

the region of his visual field in which that object is presented to him,” a property that Peacocke

would label red' in order to contrast it with the red of the object causing the experience.3 I shall

speak of the properties of the perceiver’s visual field during color experience as chromatic

phenomenal properties, reserving “color” for the properties of objects external to the perceiver.

One of the difficulties in analyzing color concepts arises from the recognition that while

the chromatic phenomenal properties are often correlated with certain properties of objects’

surfaces, this is not always the case. Not all instances of phenomenal red are caused by instances

of a single kind of physical surface property of objects: if one stares at a bright green object for a

minute and then looks at a neutral surface, one experiences a red afterimage, but this property of

a region of one’s visual field does not indicate the presence of an object with the sort of surface

properties that normally cause red color experiences. Some non-illusory instances of

phenomenal red are not caused by surfaces at all: examples of this would include translucent

volumes, such as a glass of wine, or radiant sources such as LED’s.

1 J.J.C. Smart, “On Some Criticisms of a Physicalist Theory of Colors,” The Philosophy of Color, ed. Alex Byrne and David R. Hilbert, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1-10, p. 3. 2 Mark Johnston, “How to Speak of the Colors,” The Philosophy of Color, ed. Alex Byrne and David R. Hilbert, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 137-176, p. 139. 3 Christopher Peacocke, “Colour Concepts and Colour Experiences,” Synthese 58 (1984), 365-382, p. 373.

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The correlation breaks down in the opposite direction as well: physical surface properties

of objects do not always cause the same properties in our visual fields. The property of an object

that would normally cause an instance of phenomenal red may fail to do so, as when a red car is

viewed under the yellowish sodium-vapor lighting used on many city streets. These divergences

from the normal correlations between the color of objects’ surfaces and the chromatic

phenomenal properties of visual fields is what makes the red-green color change thought

experiments discussed in 3.10 intelligible. We can imagine a world where there is a systematic

change in the colors things appear to have: fire engines and ripe tomatoes appear green, interstate

highway exit signs and healthy lawns look red, and so on.

In this chapter, then, I will use the term red (and likewise color) to mean the properties of

distal objects of visual perception, including surfaces, volumes, and radiant sources. Surface

properties often serve as a paradigm for understanding colored things, and I take a surface’s

color to be the result of its having one of a class of spectral-reflectance profiles, that is,

dispositions to reflect a certain portion of the light spectrum.4 A red surface is thus disposed to

reflect the longest portion of the visible spectrum of light; wavelengths in the same portion of the

spectrum are transmitted by a volume of red liquid (say, the contents of a glass of wine), and

emitted by the red LED’s in an alarm clock. I will reserve phenomenal red (and likewise

phenomenal chromatic properties) for the properties of our visual fields.

4Joseph Tolliver analyzes the relationship between the colors and the dispositions of physical objects to cause color experiences in perceivers as one of causal roles (the colors) and their occupants (the physical states). See his “Revelations: On What is Manifest in Visual Experience,” in Knowledge and Skepticism, ed. Joseph Keim Campbell, et al., Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010, p.185.

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4.2 Manifest Colors

Which of these two uses of color language are emphasized and given definitional priority,

generally speaking, marks the divide between experientalist and non-experientialist color

theories.5 My own preference is to give phenomenal chromatic properties definitional priority,

as I favor the use of introspectively recognizable similarity to paradigm color experiences as a

means of identifying and classifying the colors of objects. We type-identify the colors according

to our experiences of them as similar to/different from each other and our paradigms; this is why

we apply our color concepts to volumes and radiant sources as well as surfaces with diverse

underlying microphysical structures.

While I give phenomenal chromatic properties definitional priority, I take the more

ontologically basic entities to be the color properties of surfaces, volumes, and radiant sources

that causally explain the existence of the chromatic properties belonging to our visual fields.

Joseph Tolliver’s description of the connections between the properties of objects and the

properties of perceivers is illustrative in this regard:

“Sense impressions, as I understand them, are mental representations that employ phenomenal properties as constituents of sensory representations of objects and properties. A visual sense impression of a surface incorporates a chromatic phenomenal property produced while perceiving that surface. The sense impression represents the surface as possessing some intrinsic property relevantly similar to the chromatic phenomenal property it includes. Corresponding to the representational content of the sense impression of the surface is some objective property that would have to exist for the world to be as the visual sense impression represents it as being.”6

Tolliver thus connects the chromatic phenomenal properties with the objective properties of

surfaces that cause them, and which they represent. Chromatic phenomenal properties do not

5See Christopher Peacocke’s discussion of experientialist and non-experientialist concepts in his “Colour Concepts and Colour Experiences,” The Philosophy of Color, ed. Alex Byrne and David R. Hilbert, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 51-65. 6Tolliver 2010, 197-198. Emphasis mine.

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represent the colors of objects in toto, however, as science can tell us a great deal about color

which is not revealed in color experience.7

Tolliver takes the “objective properties represented in experiences of colors” to be

members of yet another class of color properties: the manifest colors, which are the “public face

of the colors,” as they reveal the looks of the colors to us. They are higher-order properties

objects possess in virtue of having color properties that fill certain kinds of differential roles in

visual perception.8 The manifest colors are nothing over and above the roles filled by the colors

in our visual experiences, and so their intrinsic natures are fully revealed in those experiences.9

The type of role that defines the manifest colors is that of “[rendering] object-surfaces and

volumes manifestly similar to and different from each other.” Manifest red, for example, is “a

quality that, when present in experience, affords the possibility of differences in mode of

presentation between...lemons and oranges beyond their differences in shape and location.”10

While manifest colors such as the manifest yellow and orange of a lemon and orange are directly

presented in experience, the colors proper are present indirectly (red, for instance—the quality

7E.g. the relationship between color and the underlying physical and chemical make-up of colored things, the psychophysics of the perception of color, the neurophysiology of the encoding and exploitation of color information in the brain, and the semantics of color categorization and color naming systems. See Tolliver (2010), 183. 8Tolliver, 2010, 197-198. Mark Johnston also argues that colors are manifest properties, but describes his position as a form of hylomorphism where colors are qualities constituted by light dispositions and surface lattice structures; I will return to his theory of manifest properties in chapter 5. 9If we think that the nature of color is completely laid bare in our color experiences, as discussed in 3.2, we must take color to be nothing over and above the manifest colors. For more on Revelation, see also Mark Johnston’s 1997 article “How to Speak of the Colors” in Readings on Color, ed. A. Byrne, vol. 1. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 10Tolliver, 2010, 192.

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that defines one way in which the lemon and orange differ—is presented indirectly in an

experience of the two fruits).11

I thus take our concepts of colors of objects to be defined by reference to the colors as we

experience them (that portion of their natures which is manifest to us and thus represented in

color experience), while our visual experiences (including the phenomenal chromatic properties

that constitute them) are causally explained by the properties of the surfaces, volumes, and

radiant sources presented to us in those experiences. To summarize, then, the manifest colors are

roles filled by the colors of things, and their type-identities are given by the phenomenal

chromatic properties of our visual fields. One of the consequences of type-individuating the

manifest colors by reference to phenomenal chromatic properties, as Tolliver explains, is that

“objects can have many manifest colors, one for every type of visual sense impression its color

properties can play a role in producing.” This consequence will be treated further in 4.5 below.12

In the sections that follow, I shall show how the model for powers that I introduced in

chapter 2 can be applied to the discussion of color. A note on terminology is in order here: the

sense of manifestation used in the powers model is a metaphysical one, referring to a role played

by events, while the sense in which the manifest colors are called “manifest” is an

epistemological one, having to do with the knowledge we have of the colors through visual

experience.

11Tolliver (2010) offers the analogy of an experience of birdsong: the song is present to us directly in the experience, while the bird is present indirectly. He clarifies the notions of Presentation and Revelation, demonstrating that they are not equivalent: Presentation is necessary but not sufficient for Revelation. 12Ibid, 197-198. I suspect that of the three uses of “color” I have covered in this section and the previous one, the concept of manifest color is most in keeping with Zangwill’s conclusions about color as discussed in chapter 3, as I take him to only allow colors to be properties of objects in the sense that they are secondary qualities whose identities are given by reference to our experiences.

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4.3 The Model Applied to Color

The model for powers at work, introduced in chapter 2, includes the following elements:

a causal power belonging to an object, a state of affairs brought about by that power and known

as its manifestation, and a set of conditions under which the power is manifested. Examples of

the model included a ductile metal being fashioned into a new form when bent around its axis; a

particle with mass reacting to a gravitational field; an agoraphobic individual feeling lightheaded

or nauseous at the prospect of riding in an elevator; a violet viewed on a sunny day being

perceived as having a blue color. In each case the work done by the object’s power, the state of

affairs that is brought about, is called the manifestation of the power. In each case the power’s

manifestation is enabled by the conditions that obtain, its conditions for manifestation. I

explained how directedness towards something beyond the object itself is the mark of the

dispositional: powers are essentially powers for something, powers to cause events and states of

affairs. This directedness is the essence of powers and dispositions, and the kind of event or

state of affairs whereby a power manifests itself is what determines its identity. I also noted that

in many cases powers manifest reciprocally, with each of a pair of powers playing a role in

satisfying the other’s conditions for manifestation.

Of the paradigm cases discussed in chapter 2, I now wish to return to Locke’s example of

the flower called the violet, which we can say has the disposition to cause an experience as of

blue13 in a suitable human perceiver. The “blue” here is subject to the ambiguity discussed in the

previous sections: when the human perceiver looks at the flower under bright sunlight, he

experiences a property in his visual field, a phenomenal blue. This is causally explained by a

physical property of the flower, the color blue. The manifest color blue is the functional role

13 We would actually say the flower is purple, but here I am following Locke’s description of violets as blue.

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occupied by the flower’s color, the role of having a “look” that is relatively similar to clear sky,

and different from ripe tomatoes, healthy lawns, lemons or oranges, etc. The look of the flower

reveals the intrinsic nature of manifest blue entirely, though it is not revelatory of the whole

intrinsic nature of the flower’s blue (for instance, it doesn’t tell us what the microphysical

structure of its light-reflectance dispositions is). The blue of the flower (not just the features of

blue that are laid bare in visual experience) is what causes and therefore explains the perceiver’s

experience.

The causal language here demonstrates the suitability of the powers model, hence my

inclusion of color properties as a paradigmatic example. In this case, a color experience involves

a property in the visual field of a human being, and it has as its cause a property of the flower.

The perceiver’s color experience is a manifestation of the violet’s power, involving its

microphysical structural qualities and corresponding light-reflectance profile. The presence of a

human perceiver with normal color vision is one of the conditions of manifestation, but the

capacity for color vision is itself a power that manifests when presented with an object such as

the flower. The violet’s color and perceiver’s color vision are thus reciprocal powers that

manifest together. Other conditions of manifestation include a source of light such as the sun, a

lack of obstacles in the individual’s line of sight, and so on.

When Locke called the violet blue, he meant that it caused an idea of blue in his mind,

and he argued (rightly, I think) that the idea of blue can only mistakenly be attributed to the

flower itself. Locke’s idea of blue corresponds roughly with what I have described as a property

of the perceiver’s visual field (the phenomenal blue)—the manifestation element in the powers

model I have been using—and his point is akin to the one made in 3.9, that the manifestation is

non-identical with the power that causes it. Conflation of powers and their manifestations is an

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easy enough error to fall into, but one to be avoided. What we can truthfully ascribe to the violet

is the color blue, understood as a particular spectral-reflectance profile that grounds the flower’s

disposition to cause experiences as of blue in normal human perceivers under normal viewing

conditions. The violet’s blue is presented to us in a visual experience of the flower, though only

its role as manifest blue is revealed by that experience.

4.4 Paradigmatic Colors

Of the various color experiences we have, we find it useful to collect and identify those

experiences had under normal conditions which are similar in character. Paul Boghossian and

David Velleman thus describe our ordinary referential use of phrases such as looks colored and

looks blue as follows: “...one learns to associate these phrases directly with visual experiences

that are introspectively recognizable as similar in kind to paradigmatic instances.”14 We know

that clear skies, calm water, United States Postal Service mailboxes, classic denim, and Crayola

brand crayons with “blue” on their labels share an introspectively recognizable similarity when

viewed under normal conditions. This reliance on paradigmatic instances and standard

conditions is a natural way to understand and use color terms, and draws our attention to two

features of color experience and language that I wish to discuss further in this section and the

next: the intentionality of our color concepts, and the normative element found in our use of

standard conditions as a reference point.

The first of these, that our color concepts are intentional, can be seen in their grounding

in the colors as we experience them. We type-identify colors as revealed to us in visual

experience by reference to the chromatic phenomenal properties of our sense impressions. The

14Paul A. Boghossian and J. David Velleman, “Physicalist Theories of Color,” The Philosophy of Color, ed. Alex Byrne and David R. Hilbert, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 105-136, p. 106.

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properties presented in our visual fields in color experiences are the ones we thus take note of

and categorize as being of one hue or another, red or blue or what have you. Experientialist

theories of color thus take color as we experience it as conceptually prior to color understood as

physical properties of surfaces such as light-reflectance dispositions. This is because we

typically identify color instances based on our immediate experiences of them.15

Similar chromatic phenomenal properties are often caused by very different

microphysical configurations in surfaces. The surface properties of a dandelion and of a color

plate of it in a book are very different, but produce the same phenomenal yellow in our visual

fields by reflecting only wavelengths in the yellow portion of the light spectrum. However, if the

picture is viewed on a computer screen, the phenomenal yellow is not caused by means of yellow

light at all, but by a mixture of red and green light. As a result of this asymmetry between the

instances of phenomenal color on the one hand, and the various kinds of powers that ground

dispositions to cause phenomenal color on the other hand, our concept of color winds up being a

concept of a disjunctive property. This is to say, for example, that yellow can be realized by a

particular spectral-reflectance profile, or a power to emit a certain mixture of red and green light,

or by some other physical property or properties.16 Yellow, as Tolliver concludes, could be

either a disposition to be manifest yellow under standard conditions of observation, or a

disposition to produce experiences as of a manifest yellow under such conditions. In either case,

the manifest yellow is type-identified by reference to phenomenal yellow, yellow as it features in

our visual fields during color experience.

15Another means of identifying instances of various colors is by referring to the data gathered by a spectrophotometer, as when we analyze paint samples in order to create a color match. 16J.J.C Smart makes a case for the disjunctive nature of colors being no barrier to their objectivity in “On Some Criticisms of a Physicalist Theory of Colors,” pp. 3-5.

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Accepting that the colors as we experience them are causally connected to the

microphysical properties of surfaces and volumes (or radiant sources) we encounter through

visual experience does not change the fact that we pick out and classify those causal powers by

reference to our experiences of them. Furthermore, our experiences of color are determined by

our perceptual apparatus and not just by the microphysical properties of the objects we perceive,

which gives rise to the anthropocentric problem discussed in 3.2.

But all of this is to be expected on the powers model: intentionality is the mark of the

dispositional, and the essence of color properties on this model, understood as the powers of

objects to cause certain visual experiences, just is their directedness towards those sorts of

experiences. Furthermore, the manifestation type toward which a power is directed is what

defines its identity, along with the conditions in which it manifests—conditions determined in

part by our perceptual apparatus, in this case. So the powers model is well-suited to account for

the conceptual priority of phenomenal colors over colors understood as the causal powers of

object surfaces, volumes, and radiant sources. This is not, however, to say that we must be

subjectivists about color, or that color manifestations are ontologically or causally independent

of the causal powers of objects; I will return to this issue in the next section.

4.5 Standard Viewing Conditions and the Question of Subjectivity

The second feature of color experience deserving further consideration is the normative

element of our references to standard conditions. The most obvious of the standard conditions

has to do with the quality of the light under which we view a colored surface. Frank Jackson and

Robert Pargetter use the example of a white wall viewed under a blue light: “The blue light may

actually change the relevant physical properties of the wall’s surface, in which case the right

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thing to say is that the wall under blue light is blue...Acknowledging this does not, of course,

prevent us from saying, as speakers of English typically do, that the wall is really white.” They

go on to observe that it is a convention in the English language “that the colour an object has in

white light is given, for reasons of convenience, a special label.”17 This convention encodes in

our language the commonsense idea that if we want to know what color an object really is, we

ought to view it in white light. Sunlight, being the original source of light on our planet, sets a

natural standard for full-spectrum or “white” light for us. If our sun were a red giant, we might

find it more convenient to use the colors as seen under reddish or orange light as our standard,

and adjust our norms for color viewing accordingly. But even sunlight is not a perfect standard,

as it varies in quality at different times of the day and under different atmospheric conditions:

one may thus notice on an overcast day how the greens in the landscape appear more vibrant, or

in late afternoon how the landscape takes on a golden hue.

Suppose that we allowed two different sets of conditions to be equally “normal”—say,

viewing conditions in both bright sunlight and in incandescent light. I once purchased a shirt

that looked to be a uniform shade of green in sunlight; later, however, I discovered that its trim

had the appearance of a rather ugly brown when viewed under incandescent light. This

phenomenon, known as metamerism, can be explained using Neil Williams’ hub-and-spoke

analogy, which I introduced in 2.2. The microphysical surface properties of the material did not

change between viewings, but the conditions did, and so its powers were manifested in a

different way in each set of viewing conditions. For a society of beings who spend as much time

under incandescent lighting as they do under sunlight, there does not seem to be a non-arbitrary

answer as to whether the shirt’s trim was brown or green or both. In this example, the material’s

17Frank Jackson and Robert Pargetter, “An Objectivist’s Guide to Subjectivism About Colour,” The Philosophy of Color, ed. Alex Byrne and David R. Hilbert, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 67-79, p. 73.

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genuine powers (the hub) are grounding multiple dispositions (the spokes). The material’s light-

reflectance dispositions, grounded in the microphysical structure of the material’s surface, thus

give rise to multiple manifest colors—as many manifest colors as there are phenomenal

chromatic properties the objects plays a role in producing.18 The asymmetries between a few

powers and colors of objects, on the one hand, and their multiple-realizations in the form of the

supported dispositions and manifest colors, on the other hand, are opposite to the asymmetry

which leads us to think of colors as disjunctive properties, where a single phenomenal property

can be produced by any of a number of underlying microphysical properties.

Our standard for normal conditions also involves reference to the visual capacities

specific to the human eye, as exemplified in the case of the computer screen that essentially fools

the human eye into “seeing yellow,” when in fact only red and green light are reaching it.

Should our species’ biology have been such that fire engines and ripe tomatoes (with the same

spectral-reflectance profiles they have now) appeared green, and interstate highway exit signs

and healthy lawns (again, having the same physical surface properties) looked red, we would, I

expect, have considered normal perceivers to be those individuals whose color vision led to the

direct opposite of the experiences we actually do have in our world. We can imagine “new

normals” for both lighting conditions and the operation of our color vision, each resulting in

different correlations between objects and the colors we experience them as having.19 In either

“new normal” thought experiment, however, the results are as we should expect on a powers

model. Like magnets that both attract and repel, and elastic materials that both stretch and snap,

colors understood as causal powers of objects are multi-track in that their manifestations can take

18Tolliver, 2010, 198. 19 Tolliver holds that this is because the manifest colors, type-identified by reference to phenomenal colors, do not have connections to specific microphysical properties as part of their intrinsic natures: it is a contingent matter which manifest colors turn out to be the roles occupied by the colors of things. See his 2010, pp. 195-198.

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any of a number of routes, and how they manifest themselves at a given time will depend on the

surrounding conditions. Both lighting conditions and available perceivers are part of the

conditions of manifestation for colors understood as powers.

I allow, then, that it is possible that instances of phenomenal red and phenomenal green

could diverge from or even be completely reversed from what we normally take to be the

corresponding red and green surfaced objects. I also allow that the same object can be both

green and brown at the same time, meaning by this that its powers ground both dispositions, to

produce experiences as of manifest green and of manifest brown. This is not, of course, to say

that both will manifest to the same perceiver in the same conditions, at the same time. In

conclusion, I do not think that the fact that the normal correlation between objects with physical

properties and instances of chromatic phenomenal properties is not a conceptually necessary

correlation entails that color is subjective. Rather, I agree with Jackson and Pargetter: “colours

are objective properties of the world around us, but it is a subjective matter which objective

properties are which colours to which persons in which circumstances at which times.”20

Instances of phenomenal color are causally dependent on the physical properties of surfaces,

volumes, and radiant sources, as all other manifestations are causally dependent on the powers

that bring them about.

4.6 Colors: Dispositional, Objective, and Irreducible

To summarize the previous sections, I take colors to be dispositional because as sense-

perceptible properties, the way they are presented to us during visual experience is their defining

characteristic, and these presentations are the manifestations of the causal powers that occur

20“An Objectivist’s Guide to Subjectivism About Colour,” p. 79.

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under appropriate conditions. Insofar as the colors of things are made available or manifest to

us, they occupy functional roles in having “looks” with recognizable characters, characters that

stand in similarity and difference relations to the looks of other manifest colors. These manifest

colors, we have said, give the type-identities for the phenomenal colors, those instances of

colored regions in our visual fields that are the manifestations of objects’ powers to reflect,

transmit, and emit certain portions of the light spectrum. I consider colors to be best conceived

as sense-perceptible properties because our primary mode of learning about them is visual

experience; visual experience is likewise the mode of direct experience required for aesthetic

experiences based on the visual appearances of things. I thus favor an experientalist account of

color, where color as experienced has definitional priority.

My treatment of colors is not subjectivist, however: referencing a standard for normal

conditions and normal perceivers guarantees that not every property presented in one’s visual

field counts in justifying our judgments about color. Standards for normal conditions and normal

perceivers serve as boundaries within which our color experiences track the spectral-reflectance

profiles21 that cause them, and so a sophisticated dispositional account is well-suited to explain

the aptness of some judgments about color over others. Furthermore, when the colors as we

experience them are understood as the manifestations of genuine causal powers of objects, they

remain rooted in objective properties of the external world (even if conceived with reference to

the experience of perceiving subjects). The manifestations are ontologically dependent upon

perceivers, being properties of perceptual experiences, but the powers that cause them are

ontologically independent of perceivers and their minds.

21(or spectral-transmission or emission profiles, in the case of volumes and radiant sources.)

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A sophisticated dispositional account of color can thus take into account 1) an essential

reference to perceivers’ experiences in defining colors, 2) manifest colors as paradigms which

are type-identified by reference to chromatic phenomenal properties, and 3) the resulting

disjunctive concept of color. While doing so, such an account can still maintain ontological

mind-independence for the causal powers of objects that ground our color experiences in

objective properties of the world.

One further question remains to be addressed, however: if we treat colors as causal

powers of objects that are manifested in our color experiences, and allow that colors have

microphysical or light-dispositional bases, must we be reductivists about color? My answer to

this question is no: ontological dependence and causal explanation do not entail conceptual

reduction. Necessarily defined as our color concepts are in the complex, higher-level properties

of our perceptual experiences, they cannot simply be reduced to microphysical or light-

dispositional properties, even when we understand them to be a function of those properties of

objects. It is only in the higher-level emergent functions involving the complex nature of human

perception that we find the materials to give a complete explanation of the human behaviors and

cultural significance attending color discrimination.22

4.7 Other Modes of Sense-Perception

In sections 4.3 through 4.6 I explored the powers model as applied to color vision, one of

the better-studied modes of sense perception. In this section I will discuss the ways in which

other modes of sense perception involved in aesthetic experience differ from color vision,

including hearing, taste, smell, tactile and temperature sensations, and the vestibular sense

22For arguments as to why dispositions aren’t reducible to categorical properties more generally, see C.B. Martin and John Heil, “The Ontological Turn,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 13, 1999, p. 47.

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(responsible for sensations of velocity and direction of movement). The features explored in the

discussion of color fall into roughly two groups. First, there was a set of ontological features,

including the entities occupying the roles of power, manifestation, and conditions for

manifestation in the model, as well as asymmetries as seen in disjunctive properties and multi-

track dispositions. Second, there were a series of factors affecting our concept formation,

including the possibility of divergence from the normal correlations between sense-perceptible

properties as experienced and the physical properties that cause them, and the perceiver’s role in

the manifestation conditions; felt proximity is another such factor, but one which is less

noticeable until color vision is contrasted with other modes of sense perception. I will address

each of these factors in this section, and then discuss their contribution to the likelihood of our

conflation of powers and their manifestations in the next section. Finally, I will revisit the

connections between conditions of manifestation involving our subjective experiences and the

more general question of subjectivity about sense-perceptible properties in section 4.9.

Consider, then, what the powers model looks like in the modes of sense perception other

than color vision. In hearing, certain events and processes create and modulate vibrations in a

medium, transmitting them to the human ear’s internal structure, and bringing about an

experience of sound. In taste, the chemical properties of an object affect receptors in the tongue,

bringing about sweet, sour, salty, or bitter sensations (or combinations thereof). In smell, inhaled

molecules of a substance affect receptors in the nose and mouth, bringing about distinctly

recognizable experiences of hundreds of different substances. In touch, the physical properties

of objects, such as shape, density, and temperature cause corresponding felt sensations when the

object comes into direct contact with the person’s body. The changing physical properties of

certain events and processes (such as heavy machinery) also create felt sensations, often without

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direct contact. Finally, in the use of proprioception and the vestibular sense, we experience

sensations of movement as a result of acceleration, deceleration, and change in the direction of

our bodies’ movements.

In each of these cases, I take the manifestation of the sense-perceptible property to be the

sensation as experienced. This stands in contrast to the object or event’s powers to cause those

sensations; often these same powers also manifest themselves in such a way that we can describe

them in quantifiable physical terms. These powers are multi-track in that they ground both the

dispositions at the center of our sense perception (manifesting as felt sensations) and physical

dispositions (manifesting as physical events). Considered as sense-perceptible properties, sound,

texture, and temperature manifest themselves in ways analogous to phenomenal color

(phenomenal color being a property of our visual fields). Considered as physical properties, the

same phenomena can be considered with regard to their structural aspects (in the case of texture)

or in terms of measurable energy patterns (as in sound and temperature).

My reason for treating the dispositions manifesting in sensation as conceptually prior to

the physical dispositions for the whole range of modes of sense perception is the same as it was

for color: aesthetic properties are properties of objects and events as we experience them, and the

sense-perceptible properties with which they are intimately connected need to be conceived of

accordingly. I thus consider the powers that manifest themselves in our sense-perception and

aesthetic experience as intentional properties, defined by the relevant manifestations.

Furthermore, color vision is not the only mode of perception where there is a possibility of

divergence from the normal correlations between the sensation as we experience it and the

physical properties of the object that normally cause that type of sensation. We can imagine

worlds where sweet and sour flavors are reversed; we sometimes hear ringing in our ears; we

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know that vertigo induces false sensations of movement, and that anesthesia prevents texture and

temperature sensations.

4.8 Conflation of Powers and Manifestations in Sense-Perceptible Properties

In color vision it is very natural to project the colors as experienced in our visual fields

(the phenomenal colors) onto the objects themselves. This is due, I think, to the tendency to

conflate the color manifestations with the powers that cause them, the latter being the physical

surface properties of the objects. This conflation is in turn traceable to the combination of what I

call felt proximity together with the ease with which we forget our role as a condition of the

colors’ manifestation, as we generally take our vision for granted. By felt proximity I mean

perceivers’ experiences of their distance, both spatial and temporal, from the source of

sensations. Other sense modalities differ from color in interesting ways as regards felt proximity

and whether we intuitively recognize the perceiver’s role in the conditions of manifestation. But

where conflation of powers and manifestations occurs, and projection of felt sensations onto the

objects that cause them follows, we are inexorably drawn into subjectivism about our sense

perception. This in turn translates into subjectivism about aesthetic perception, as demonstrated

in Nick Zangwill’s theory of aesthetic properties, which I dealt with in chapter 3. In order to

leave the door open for the objectivist, realist theory of aesthetic properties that I favor, in this

section I shall review the likelihood of conflation of powers and their manifestations for modes

of sense perception other than color vision.

If we were to rank the various modes of sense perception in terms of the perceiver’s felt

proximity, I think we might get something like the following result. In taste and touch, the

perceiver makes direct bodily contact with the object experienced, and this direct contact results

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in a very close felt proximity. In color vision there is a felt proximity (or access, perhaps) to the

object even though direct contact is not part of the experience; this is probably due the fact that

temporal delay is not normally detectable in vision the way it sometimes is in taste or the

sensation of temperature. In the use of proprioception and the vestibular sense, the proximity is

more a matter of participation in an event than contact with an object, but the internal bodily

nature of the experience takes felt proximity to an extreme high. In hearing and smell, at the

lower extreme, no direct contact is required with the object causing the sensation, and delays can

be quite noticeable.

Where felt proximity is low, I would suggest, we are less likely to conflate powers and

their manifestations. In the case of sound, we find it very natural to distinguish between the

sounds we hear and the objects that cause them—the noises and the noisemakers, as it were. We

are accustomed to sounds starting and stopping, and we are familiar with the conditions under

which hearing takes place: an available medium for sound to travel in (air is better than water),

an appropriate acoustic environment, a human being whose physical ear structure is intact and

unimpeded, and so on. While we often do attribute sounds as we hear them to the objects that

make them (an alarm sounds shrill, or a coworker sounds like a frog), the fact that no immediate

physical proximity is required to hear a sound makes it easy to experience sounds as distinct

from the objects and agents who produce them (as with the bark of a distant dog, otherwise

unobserved, or our recognition that while the concertmaster can get a lovely sound from his

violin, we personally are unable to do so).

Recognition of the perceiver as a condition of manifestation also affects the likelihood of

conflation of powers and their manifestations with color vision, where we find it easy to forget

our role as a condition of the sense-perceptible property’s manifestation. In tasting and smelling,

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however, the differences in individuals’ sensitivity to flavors keeps the perceiver’s role as a

condition of manifestation more noticeable. I think the felt close proximity involved in taste,

however, balances this out, leaving us sometimes inclined to project the flavors as we experience

them to the object, rather than recalling that flavor sensations are had by people and not the foods

that cause them. This conflation of the powers and manifestations is, I think, curiously just as

common for smells; this is perhaps due to the association of smells with the surrounding

environment rather than the objects that cause them. With the vestibular sense, however, the

perceiver is intuitively understood to be a condition for the manifestation of the sense-perceptible

property: one only properly feels changes in movement while one’s person is undergoing such

changes, as is evidenced in how easily one forgets just how intense a particular roller coaster

really is.

4.9 Revisiting Conditions and Subjectivity

As we have just seen, recognizing that the human perceiver is a condition of

manifestation helps us to separate conceptually the powers and their manifestations for sense-

perception, leaving the door open for an objectivist theory. At the same time, however, it

reminds us that the normal conditions for manifestation are human-relative for all modes of

sense-perception, and necessarily so. When we define a disposition by the manifestation-type

towards which it is directed, and that manifestation-type is a type of human experience, we

define the disposition relative to human experience. This is why we can have a sensation of a

vanilla taste caused by either real or imitation vanilla, feel the texture of suede in both leather

and a synthetic textile, and hear a brassy sound produced by a trumpet or a recording of one, as

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well as have a phenomenal yellow region appear in our visual fields because of yellow light

reflected by a dandelion or a mixture of red and green light emitted by a computer screen.

In all of these cases, not only are human perceivers conditions for the manifestation of

sense-perceptible properties understood as powers, human physiology and psychology also

constrain the other conditions for manifestation. Our concepts of smells and sounds are relative

to our noses and ears, not those of dogs. We have no proper concepts of the various feels and

sensations that our species does not experience, such as echolocation or the sensation of

electrical fields. As I explained in 3.8, however, this relativity does not entail subjectivity. That

the manifestation event-types that sense-perceptible properties are directed towards and defined

by are necessarily conceived relative to human perceivers does not entail that those properties

depend for their existence on human perceivers. The powers in the objects and manifestation

events in perceivers are ontologically independent. Insofar as we understand sense-perceptible

properties to be the physical properties of the objects that cause these sensory experiences, we

can maintain an objectivism about sounds, tastes, smells, tactile sensations, and felt changes in

movement as well as color. In the following chapter, I shall argue that aesthetic properties

should be understood as dispositions much like the sense-perceptible properties upon which they

depend, and that certain objections to the dispositional account of aesthetic properties can be

dismissed because of the difference between the aesthetic dispositions and the roles they fill in

our aesthetic experience.

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Chapter 5: The Dispositional Account of Aesthetic Properties

Having addressed projectivist challenges to realism and applied the dispositional model

for sense-perceptible properties, I shall turn in this chapter to what a dispositional account of

aesthetic properties has to offer. I shall argue that in the case of what I have termed aesthetic

properties simpliciter, the dispositional model can illuminate errors and disagreements in

judgment; I also allow that some disagreements in aesthetic judgment may be the result of two

legitimate, varying responses due to differences in perceivers’ backgrounds and the fulfillment of

two different sets of manifestation conditions for two different dispositions. I hold that in such

cases, the two different aesthetic functions will still be grounded in the object’s causal powers,

with the outcome being that they are objective features of the external world that are available to

different types of observers. I shall address some objections to a dispositional model that have

been raised by Jerrold Levinson and conclude that, while his ways of appearing account can be

reconciled with my dispositional account to a certain degree, my own account is to be preferred

because it gives a richer explanation of the metaphysical underpinnings of the objects of

aesthetic experience.

5.1 Aesthetic Properties: A Case Study

Randolph Rogers, a nineteenth-century American expatriate neoclassical sculptor,

modeled The Lost Pleaid in 1874 in his studio in Rome. It was very popular, with somewhere in

the neighborhood of a hundred marble versions created by his Italian teams of artisans during his

lifetime. The statue is composed of a life-sized female figure leaning forward with a hand lifted

to shade her eyes, supported by a circular base of cloudlike forms. A loose drapery falls from

her shoulder down her torso and wraps around at the waist, leaving most of her torso bare, along

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with her arms and a foot showing beneath the garment. The pitch of the figure (about thirty

degrees from the vertical axis) and the way its lines spiral around and upwards in her

outstretched limbs are wonderfully dynamic, and the suggestion of movement is increased by the

windswept hair and drapery, which give the statue an evanescent quality well-suited to its aerial

theme. The overall effect is one that is difficult to achieve in marble, and evokes a sense of

wonder in the viewer, and perhaps pensiveness at the fleeting delicacy captured in such a

durable, weighty material.

An idealistic work, The Lost Pleiad depicts Merope, one of the seven sisters of the

constellation known as the Pleiades, who is described in Ovid’s Fasti:

When the night has passed, and the sky has just begun to blush, and dew-besprinkled birds are twittering plaintively, and the wayfarer, who all night long has waked, lays down his half-burnt torch, and the swain goes forth to his accustomed toil, the Pleiads will commence to lighten the burden that rests on their father’s shoulders; seven are they usually called, but six they usually are... six of the sisters were embraced by gods... the seventh, Merope, was married to a mortal man, to Sisyphus, and she repents of it, and from shame at the deed she alone of the sisters hides herself....1

Rogers’ Merope is depicted wandering the heavens, seeking her mythological family after

having forfeited her place with her six sister stars due to her marriage. The Lost Pleiad contrasts

the ephemeral and the eternal and captures the tension of Merope’s hope mingled with regret.

I have chosen this piece in part because its realist style features a number of aesthetic

qualities that I believe can be appreciated without reference to its artifactual history or cultural

context; put a different way, I believe it provides several examples of what I have called

aesthetic properties simpliciter. To be sure, we cannot fully appreciate The Lost Pleiad as a

historical piece without understanding, for instance, its literary reference and situation in the

neoclassical genre, the way in which its title would have made its semi-nude figure acceptable in

1 Ovid, Fasti, IV, trans Sir James G. Fraser, London, 1931, lines 175ff

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the minds of an audience possessing Victorian sensibilities, and perhaps its status as the artist’s

favorite of his works. It possesses these latter features in virtue of its artifactuality, and they are

the sorts of aesthetically relevant artifactual properties that I have called artistic properties. I

wish to focus here, however, on the aesthetically-relevant properties of The Lost Pleaid that do

not derive from its artifactual status.2 Because projectivist and non-realist accounts regard even

what I have called the aesthetic properties simpliciter with suspicion, I feel it is important to

show how they are objective features belonging to aesthetic objects despite the disagreements in

judgment and differences in responses among perceivers.

Consider, then, the properties of dynamism and ephemerality belonging to The Lost

Pleiad. They are aesthetic properties simpliciter, for they are present in non-artifacts as well as

artifacts. Dynamism, for instance, can be found in bodies in motion throughout the animal

kingdom, and ephemerality in such objects as spider webs, cloud formations, and spring

blossoms. In The Lost Pleiad, these properties emerge from a mix of sense-perceptible

properties, including the polished surfaces, rippling and curling lines, and elongated, twisting

forms. The statue is dynamic and ephemeral because of its lower-level sense-perceptible

properties, but it cannot be reduced to non-aesthetic properties; while dynamism is connected to

a display of energy or force, and ephemerality with a fleeting existence, such aesthetic properties

are not condition-governed except (perhaps) in a negative sense.3 Something that looks

overwhelmingly stable and still, for instance, might be thought incapable of being ephemeral or

2 As I have defined it, the artistic/aesthetic-simpliciter distinction can only be expected to be as clear as the artifact/non-artifact distinction on which it relies. If there is a continuum rather than a sharp distinction between artifacts and non-artifacts, then there will be a continuum between artistic properties and aesthetic properties simpliciter as well. Such a continuum is suggested by Randy Dipert’s action-theoretical account of artifacts, with its various degrees of appropriation, modification, and recognizable modification for a purpose in the creation of an artifact. I think, however, that there are at least some clear examples to be had of artistic properties and aesthetic properties simpliciter, even if there are others that admit of confusion. 3 See 1.2.

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dynamic, but for all that The Lost Pleiad is in fact a weighty marble piece, its aesthetic character

is dynamic and ephemeral. This is because it does not look like a four-to-five hundred pound

mass of marble—rather, it affords us the impression of the fleeting motion of a female figure in

flight. For an appropriate observer, viewing the statue under the right conditions—with calm

attentiveness, in the American Art gallery at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, say—will result in

apprehension of its dynamic, ephemeral character. This response is where we see The Lost

Pleiad’s aesthetic powers at work: dynamism and ephemerality are dispositions of the statue,

properties directed towards manifestation events wherein their particular ways of appearing are

revealed. Like the ductility of a metal, certain conditions must obtain for the dynamism and

ephemerality to be manifested: like the color of a flower, an appropriately disposed observer is

part of those conditions, since the statue’s dispositions manifest reciprocally with the observer’s

aesthetic response dispositions.

What constitutes an appropriate observer, in this case? Insofar as The Lost Pleiad was

executed in a neoclassical style, it depicts its subject realistically, with close attention to detail.

An everyday understanding of the human figure and its movement would probably be sufficient

for a Western observer, even a young, uneducated one, to apprehend its dynamic qualities, and I

suspect these qualities would be accessible for most non-Western observers as well. Similarly,

the round base of cloud-like forms that supports the figure is easily recognizable as such, as is

the depiction of wind-blown clothing and hair that helps determine the overall ephemeral

character of the piece. Because the piece’s ephemerality is based in the use of natural weather

elements present in different climates around the world, it seems to me that the qualifications for

an observer of the statue’s ephemerality can be fairly easily met, even across cultures and times.

To borrow from Ellen Dissannayake’s use of tiers of aesthetic response, The Lost Pleiad’s

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dynamism is probably available to the more basic tier, the “aesthetic sensitivity in reacting to

elementary sensory psycho-physiological stimuli” that is possessed by infants and (presumably)

“operative in everyone.” Dissanayake recognizes the similarities between the early development

of this more basic aesthetic response and of emotional responses, and as closely linked as the

aesthetic and affective are in aesthetic experience, I think it is to be expected that human

perceivers’ aesthetic and affective dispositions are often both called for as part of the conditions

for such an experience to occur.4 In viewing The Lost Pleiad, for instance, the perceiver’s

affective response is likely to involve feelings of wonder, excitement, or delight at the statue’s

dynamism, and wistfulness in the apprehension of its ephemerality, responses not unique to any

one culture.

The second tier of aesthetic response that Dissanayake identifies comes into play along

with what I have termed artistic properties in a more complex kind of aesthetic experience, one

where we “appreciate the ways in which these [elementary sensory psycho-physiological] stimuli

are combined with each other and with other humanly-significant features and presented as

works of art.”5 In viewing The Lost Pleiad, for instance, our attentiveness to and appreciation of

the dynamism and ephemerality will be increased by an understanding of the narrative reference;

these aesthetic properties simpliciter become more significant in the context of a mythological

figure in search of her lost family, home, and high status. While the searching component is

readily available to the viewer who recognizes a hand shading eyes that are gazing into the

distance, the mythological reference is not directly accessible, though someone who recognized

the style and was aware of the period fascination with classical mythology might infer that such a

4 Ellen Dissanayake, “Aesthetic Experience and Human Evolution,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 41, 145-155, Winter 1982, p. 145. 5 Ibid.

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reference is involved. The title at least is helpful in this regard, though it only hints at the

background necessary for interpretation and a complete understanding of the subject.6

The viewer who does understand the narrative reference, however, is enabled to respond

to the artistic qualities, including its representational and expressive properties, and to begin to

appreciate its artistic merit as regards Rogers’ choice and treatment of his subject. Responding

to the artistic properties of The Lost Pleiad thus requires more from the viewer than responding

to its dynamism or ephemerality; the viewer must not only see the statue as a human-like figure

with an aesthetic character that captures the attention, but as the product of an artist’s intentional,

creative activity. Randolph Rogers’ purpose in producing The Lost Pleaid included what

Randall Dipert has described as “the articulation of complex, subtle, and intrinsically valuable

emotional or cognitive content.”7 In this case, I believe Rogers’ purpose involved presenting the

viewer with Merope’s situation in a way that evokes an attitude of both wonder and melancholy,

but one that is so particular that it cannot be adequately described in words—one must view the

statue for oneself to grasp its subtlety. But for someone who is capable of observing and

appreciating The Lost Pleaid’s artistic properties, its ephemerality and dynamism become

something more; the aesthetic properties instantiated by the work of art are transformed and

manifested as artistic properties under these conditions.

While I shall continue to focus on addressing the metaphysical challenges for aesthetic

property realism that apply even at the more basic level of aesthetic properties simpliciter, I

anticipate that laying this groundwork would not only shore up the prospects for a wider

6 At the time of its creation, The Lost Pleiad’s literary title would have been helpful only for the most widely read viewers in its audience, though it almost certainly functioned to make the partially-nude figure acceptable to Victorian sensibilities. See Millard F. Rogers, Jr., Randolph Rogers: American Sculptor in Rome, University of Massachusetts Press, 1971, pp. 140-142. 7 Randall Dipert, Artifacts, Art Works, and Agency, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993, p. 178.

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aesthetic property realism, but also indicate how one might usefully proceed with a more

complete theory of aesthetically relevant properties, including the representational and

expressive. This groundwork is also useful for the evaluative and verdictive qualities of

artworks, which are arguably determined in part by their lower-level descriptive or substantive

aesthetic properties, in addition to being essentially related to the artifactual and contextual

backgrounds of such works.8 Because such higher-level properties are like descriptive aesthetic

properties in that they are not manifested every time the work is viewed, but only when the

viewer is qualified (in this case, has an appropriate cultural background), I believe that a

dispositional analysis would shed light on more complex aesthetic properties even if it cannot be

straightforwardly extended to include them. Insofar as the lower-level sense-perceptible

properties aesthetic properties simpliciter are essentially dispositional in nature, and the higher-

level evaluative and artistic properties build on them as a foundation, a more complete account of

aesthetic properties would also do well to incorporate the dispositional model where appropriate.

5.2 Aesthetic Property Manifestations and Abundance

Whether or not a particular viewer will respond to the ephemerality and dynamism of

Rogers’ The Lost Pleiad depends in part, as we have seen, on the viewer’s background and

qualifications. We can imagine various cases in which someone would not be adequately

qualified: Living one’s whole life in an artificial, enclosed environment on a planet with no

atmosphere, for instance, might well result in an inability to grasp the ephemerality of the piece,

expressed as it is via the windswept quality and the base of cloudlike forms. As familiar as the

changing weather is to us as Earth’s surface-dwellers, life would be very different for someone in

8 Nick Zangwill argues that verdictive aesthetic properties depend on substantive ones in “The Beautiful, The Dainty, and The Dumpy,” British Journal of Aesthetics, 35:4, October 1995.

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the self-sustaining environment of an enclosed habitat. A proponent of associationist aesthetics

would likely explain this individual’s inability to enjoy the aesthetic qualities of the statue by

noting its inability to initiate a chain of associated ideas provoking an emotional response. I

would agree that this associationist analysis helps explain such a viewer’s lack of qualifications,

insofar as it points out a particular way in which the aesthetic properties’ conditions of

manifestation are not met, but I do not think an associationist aesthetic provides a complete

explanation.9 In a more obvious way, it would be a challenge for a blind person to respond to

these qualities, insofar as The Lost Pleiad is primarily experienced as a visual medium. If direct

visual experience is not possible, then the statue’s aesthetic properties cannot be manifested for a

person. There is, perhaps, a spectrum of more and less qualified viewers, with a work’s “ideal

audience” at one extreme, and individuals who cannot respond to its aesthetic properties at all at

the other extreme.10

Even for members of an “ideal audience,” however, the aesthetic properties of The Lost

Pleiad may fail to be completely manifested at times. The conditions of aesthetic property

manifestation include more than just the presence of a qualified viewer; it also matters whether

the viewer encounters the object in an appropriate environment. As I noted in the introduction,

viewing a tranquil Japanese screen against the paisley-papered wall of someone’s parlor is not

likely to result in a complete manifestation of its aesthetic and artistic properties, even for the

most ideal viewer. Adequate lighting, freedom from sensory distractions, and so on all

9 Archibald Allison’s 1811 Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste proposes such an associationist aesthetic, for example. 10 It does not make sense, I think, to talk of an ideal audience in the case of non-artifactual aesthetic objects; insofar as no artist has considered and intentionally modified them for some purpose, there is no reason to single out one audience as better suited than another to engage with the object’s purpose. We may, of course, draw attention to the aesthetic properties of a “natural” object, perhaps even removing it to an art museum for contemplation; in doing so, however, we have intentionally used it and thus taken the first step along the path of creating a true artifact. See Dipert 1993, pp 23-27.

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contribute to meeting the conditions for aesthetic property manifestation. Varying degrees of

success in meeting such environmental conditions can, I think, explain a great deal of our

differences in aesthetic judgment, as the failure to meet such conditions contributes to our errors

in judgment; I believe that a good deal of further differences should be traceable to variations in

our cultural backgrounds and understandings of artistic context. Sometimes the differences in

response are explicable as a matter of degrees from an ideal audience’s qualifications: my limited

understanding of Japanese art, for instance, removes me several degrees from belonging to an

ideal audience for Ogata Korin’s Eight-Planked Bridge, and my response to the screens is very

likely different from a knowledgeable person from the Japanese culture. My lack of

understanding of the context and genre of Wassily Kandinsky’s work likewise makes my

response to his paintings different from someone who possesses such an understanding.

Differences in observer types also result in differences in responses in a rather more

interesting way than what I have described so far, however. One implication of viewing

aesthetic properties as dispositions directed towards particular manifestation event types (i.e.

paradigmatic responses) is that in some cases we will find that artworks and other aesthetic

objects possess a variety of aesthetic properties, not all of which will be accessible to every

viewer. In the same way that our concepts of colors and other sensory properties are

anthropocentric—their natures being defined in terms of their effects on viewers with certain

perceptual abilities—our concepts of the aesthetic properties that emerge from sense-perceptible

properties are also anthropocentric. We conceive of and identify aesthetic properties as

introspectively similar or dissimilar to other, paradigmatic examples of aesthetic properties as we

have experienced them. So when we see different groups of viewers with systematically

different responses, using different paradigms, it seems reasonable to me to say those varying

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responses may be justified insofar as they are the results of different aesthetic properties that are

being manifested. We should, however, expect the dispositions to be unified by the more basic

powers that ground them: for instance, if one viewer experiences an aesthetic object as garish

while another experiences it as vibrant, the two dispositions are likely both grounded by a

fundamental causal power which gives rise to different responses in the different viewers insofar

as they each meet a different set of manifestation conditions. In the case of The Lost Pleiad, the

original audience’s Victorian sensibilities contributed an extra degree of intensity to their

responses to this semi-nude female figure, where a contemporary viewer’s response is likely to

be informed by a different set of expectations regarding the use of nude figures in art. We might

thus say that a different set of aesthetic dispositions has manifested for each audience. Similarly,

while the nineteenth century tourist sought the picturesque in natural landscapes, more recently

environmental aesthetics has emphasized ecological qualities in natural environments.11 One of

the advantages of the dispositional account I have been advocating is that in such cases we need

not speak of objects gaining and losing aesthetic properties over time; rather, we can say that

different audience sensibilities are enabling different dispositions to manifest, different aesthetic

properties that have been present in the object all throughout its history even when unmanifested.

The result of this is that, on my view, the objects that feature in our aesthetic experiences

have what I consider an abundance of aesthetic properties—sets of aesthetic dispositions that

give rise to a variety of justifiable aesthetic responses, not all of which may be available to any

single viewer. Now, this might look as if it would lead us to logical contradictions, especially

11 See, for example, J. Baird Callicott’s 1994, “The Land Aesthetic”, in Ecological Prospects: Scientific, Religious, and Aesthetic Perspectives, C. K. Chapple (ed.), Albany: State University of New York Press, and Marcia Meulder Eaton’s 1997 articles, “The Beauty that Requires Health,” in Placing Nature: Culture and Landscape Ecology, J. I. Nassauer (ed.), Washington, D.C.: Island Press and “The Role of Aesthetics in Designing Sustainable Landscapes,” in Real World Design: The Foundations and Practice of Environmental Aesthetics, Y. Sepänmaa (ed.), Helsinki: University of Helsinki.

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where it encompasses a certain amount of disagreement in aesthetic judgment. It allows that

some disagreements could be the result of two legitimate responses, even where a single object

possesses two seemingly opposite or mutually exclusive aesthetic qualities: perhaps, for instance,

the same work will be justifiably judged sensuous by one viewer and austere by another. The

reason this is not a logical problem on my account is that attributing a disposition to an object is

saying something about what it is disposed to do under certain circumstances, and the different

types of observers that would be involved in such a scenario would meet the conditions for both

aesthetic dispositions to manifest, one for each of the viewers. As I explained in 3.10, objects

are quite often capable of producing quite opposite results under different circumstances—think

of magnetism, for instance, which can result in either attraction or repulsion. It would, however,

be problematic to claim that the same object produces opposite results for the same viewer in the

same circumstances, and I do not wish to allow for this much variation in response. I do not

think that allowing for different types of observers along cultural lines as I have been describing

imperils a realism about aesthetic properties, though having aesthetic properties relativized to

multiple observer-types with the same cultural qualifications but different aesthetic sensibilities

would be a problem for realism.12

One might wonder whether this aesthetic property abundance thesis trivializes the

concept of an aesthetic property, or whether we can hold it and consistently maintain any sort of

objectivity. Does any and every aesthetic response count as evidence for a corresponding

aesthetic property? Is the theory promiscuous in this respect? While I see an abundance of

aesthetic properties, and hence room for allowing for some justifiable disagreement, I wish to

12 Levinson defends aesthetic realism against this latter prospect in his 2001 "Aesthetic Properties, Evaluative Force, and Differences of Sensibility” in Aesthetic Concepts: Essays after Sibley, eds. Jerrold Levinson and Emily Brady. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 61-80, pp. 74-75.

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maintain that not just any response is a sign of a genuine aesthetic property. I think that in most

cases, disagreement in aesthetic judgment is due to a lack of qualifications on the part of one or

both viewers or an unsuitable viewing environment, and dialogue about the aesthetic object’s

sense-perceptible properties and contextual issues can clear up a great deal of the disagreement.

Furthermore, the reason I allow for what I have termed an abundance of aesthetic properties is

that I see the more fundamental powers of objects grounding varying functions relative to

varying conditions of manifestation, resulting in a variety of aesthetic dispositions that are

unified by their ontological bases. I believe that, in such cases, the underlying unity of

apparently disparate aesthetic dispositions can be discovered through careful analysis, and I take

such situations to be exceptions rather than the norm.

Furthermore, as I explained in 1.4, we can categorize something as objective or

subjective based on whether it is there to be experienced in the external world or not (“as

opposed to being a mere figment of the subjective state that purports to be an experience of it,”

as McDowell put it). Though we make use of the subjective states we have in aesthetic

experience as grounds for talking about aesthetic properties, we do so in order to reference the

object and those of its properties that such states are specially focused on. So what I wish to

argue here is that the properties themselves are true features of objects in the external world, not

all of which are guaranteed to be operative in any one given aesthetic experience. In some cases

trivialization can be avoided by reference to an ideal observer, artists’ intentions, or cultural

agreement on the meaning of an aesthetic term and paradigmatic instances of it. Furthermore, as

I shall continue to argue in the remainder of this chapter, there is a deeper story to tell about the

genuine causal powers of objects that support and explain the abundance of aesthetic dispositions

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they manifest to us under various conditions. This story takes us beyond the surface level of our

experiences of aesthetic property manifestations to their metaphysical underpinnings.

5.3 A Rival Account: Ways of Appearing

While I am not aware of any other serious attempts to give a dispositional account of

aesthetic properties at this time, Jerrold Levinson has considered the possibility of such an

account and raised an objection to which I ought to respond. A contrast class for the

dispositional has traditionally been found in what I shall refer to as the occurrent (sometimes also

called the categorical or the qualitative); Levinson’s objections imply that aesthetic properties are

better understood as belonging to this category than to that of the dispositional. 13 The question

of whether we have something occurrent or dispositional comes up in our consideration of sense-

perceptible properties as well as aesthetic ones, and even for such a paradigmatically occurrent

property as the geometric straightness of a line, at least when it is considered visually. “What is

it for a line to be straight, visually speaking?” asks Levinson. He allows that there are conditions

of visual straightness “in terms of molecular facts, or at a grosser and more readily expressible

physical level, in terms of positions and relations of chemically specified mini-regions of

pigment.” But he thinks that as a visual feature of a line, straightness is not equivalent to the

satisfaction of various physical conditions. Rather, when we come to understand and apply the

concept of a visual straight line, “what we do is record a certain kind of visual appearance,

cognize a certain variety of visual impression, and it is this that provides the core meaning of

straightness for visible lines.” (This inevitable reference to our experiences of sense-perceptible

13 Note that I am not asking whether aesthetic properties are primary or secondary qualities; I prefer the dispositional/occurrent distinction because it is not as mired in confusion of metaphysical and epistemological criteria. Strictly speaking, however, I do not endorse this as anything other than a conceptual distinction, because I hold that the same property can be viewed in either a dispositional or occurrent light.

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properties is what leads us to conceive of them anthropocentrically.) The dispositional/occurrent

distinction comes into play in how we construe that characteristic appearance or impression of

“looking-straight:”

...straightness in lines can be understood as either the capacity to look-straight to a normal viewer in various standard and non-deceptive conditions, or else as that directly perceivable feature of a line that the sensation of looking-straight registers (and informs one of, given standard, non-deceptive conditions).14

Levinson sees these two construals as the basis for two models for sense-perceptible and

aesthetic properties, a dispositional effect model (such as I favor) and a manifest appearance or

ways of appearing model. As I already speak of manifestations on the dispositional model I

favor, I shall refer to the second model by the label he uses for his own version of it, as a ways of

appearing model. On the dispositional model, we can say that aesthetic properties are

dispositions to afford the relevant aesthetic looks, feels, impressions, etc.; on Levinson’s

account, we would say instead that they are occurrent “ways of appearing” that are only related

to (not identifiable with) such dispositions.

The model Levinson favors analyzes them as ways of appearing, a subclass of ways of

being, because ontologically speaking “the ways things standardly appear are in effect a part of

how they are.” They are supposed to be roughly equivalent to what Johnston and others have

called manifest properties, properties whose natures are revealed in and through their

appearances. On Levinson’s view, aesthetic properties are connected to sense-perceptible

properties because they are higher-order ways of appearing in modalities such as the visual,

aural, or tactile, and are “dependent in systematic fashion on lower-order ways of appearing”

such as colors, sounds, textures, etc. When a perceiver interacts with an object and one of its

14 Jerrold Levinson, Aesthetic Supervenience, Southern Journal of Philosophy, 22: Supplement (1984) 93-109, pp. 97-98. Emphasis mine.

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ways of appearing, he tells us, the result is “an event, what one can call an appearing.” (He does

not think, however, that there are “appearances, in the sense of introspectable mental things,

existing within the mind.”15) The appearing events of the higher-order aesthetic ways of

appearing, Levinson suggests, are constituted by the appearing events of lower-order ways of

appearing, i.e. their colors, sounds, and so on.16

In the example of The Lost Pleaid, Levinson would presumably say that the statue’s

dynamism is a directly perceivable feature, a way that it appears to human observers with an

“appropriate sensory-perceptual-cognitive apparatus” under appropriate circumstances, the

foremost of which would be adequate lighting (such as one finds in art galleries).17 The

dynamism depends on lower-level non-aesthetic properties, including its lines, contours, and

shadows and the microphysical structure and light-reflection dispositions of its smooth surfaces.

So far, this discussion of conditions and appropriate observers in Levinson’s ways of appearing

account is compatible with my discussion of dynamism as a dispositional property. The

difference is that Levinson’s account focuses on what is directly perceived—the aesthetic

property as it is manifest to us—and hence the aesthetic looks that we ascribe to objects. But

dispositions, as we have said, are perceived indirectly, including the disposition to appear a

certain way aesthetically (or to cause certain characteristic aesthetic responses in appropriate

viewers under appropriate conditions). The manifestations of dispositions are known directly,

however, so it is tempting to identify Levinson’s ways of appearing with the manifestations of

the aesthetic dispositions I have described. But such a reading of Levinson’s account will not do

for maintaining realism: if ways of appearing are identified with aesthetic dispositions’

15 Aristotelian Society: Supplementary Volume. 79 (2005): 211-227. 217-218. 16 This is because he questions the application of a composition or constitution relation to properties, taking them to be abstract entities. 17 Levinson, 2005, pp. 217-218.

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manifestations, then they will not be stable properties of objects but rather events that necessarily

involve observers’ minds. This would make aesthetic properties mind-dependent and subjective.

Furthermore, Levinson is adamant that the concept of a way of appearing does not involve

reference to conditions or kinds of observers.

The question, then, is whether the essence of an aesthetic property is a static way of being

or a matter of an object’s function and power to cause aesthetic experiences. So far I have been

suggesting that aesthetic properties are objects’ capacities for affording us aesthetic experiences,

rather than static ways of being and appearing, but Levinson’s objection deserves some

consideration. The dispositional/occurrent category distinction is itself a matter of debate, and I

believe that rather than dividing the world into two kinds of properties, we should instead view

the dispositional/occurrent distinction as a merely conceptual one; the result is that I allow that

aesthetic properties can be considered in an occurrent as well as a dispositional light, though I

take the latter to more accurately represent their true character. C.B. Martin and John Heil argue

that for any property that is intrinsic and irreducible, “what is dispositional and what is

[occurrent] are one and the same property differently considered: considered as what the

property exhibits of its nature, and considered as what the property is directive and selective for

as its manifestations.”18 In the case of dynamism, a dynamic statue could be considered as

having the disposition to give an appropriate observer an aesthetic experience marked by a

particular definitive aesthetic character. In this case, when the observer meets the conditions of

manifestation (e.g. normal vision and depth perception), the manifestation event is the resulting

aesthetic experience. On the other hand, considered as an occurrent property, the statue’s

dynamism could be characterized by what it exhibits of its nature, a distinctive look as of

18 C.B. Martin and John Heil, “The Ontological Turn,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 23 (1999), 34-60, p. 47. Emphasis mine; Martin & Heil use the term ‘qualitative’ rather than ‘occurrent.’

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movement in the object. Martin and Heil suggest that the inseparability of the occurrent and

dispositional is analogous to the inseparability of a two-faced coin, or of the old lady and the

young woman in Leeper’s famous ambiguous figure. I favor applying their analysis to aesthetic

properties because I think it can account for the pull towards occurrent in our intuitions. I shall

argue that while epistemic considerations often direct our attention towards the occurrent,

manifest “public face” of aesthetic properties, we can have only an incomplete account if we

ignore their fundamentally dispositional natures.

As I believe it is a mistake to construe the dispositional/occurrent property distinction as

anything more than a conceptual one, I do not see the dispositional and ways of appearing

models as being necessarily at odds with each other or mutually exclusive. Rather, I think each

emphasizes a different consideration with respect to aesthetic properties: the ways of appearing

model highlights the nature of the property as we experience it, and the dispositional model fixes

on the virtues of the property that determine its manifestations. Thus, if one is primarily guided

by the epistemological question of the extent to which aesthetic properties are knowable in

aesthetic experience, the ways of appearing model will be very attractive; the dispositional effect

model comes into its own, however, when we consider the metaphysical question of how

aesthetic properties give rise to and explain aesthetic experience. Now if the relation between

the dispositional and occurrent is as I have been describing, any apparent tensions between a

dispositional model and a ways of appearing model should be resolvable; I shall thus describe

the way in which Jerrold Levinson’s ways of appearing account emphasizes the occurrent, and

the extent to which I think it is compatible with my own dispositional account. First, however, I

wish to consider the undesirable consequences of taking aesthetic properties to be purely

occurrent, a set of consequences of Levinson’s account which I found objectionable.

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In 1.5 I listed five characteristics of aesthetic properties that Derek Matravers has

identified as desirable entailments of an aesthetic property account. The first two, Location and

Stability, involve actually belonging to the objects they are attributed to (rather than to the

observer’s experience or visual field, as a projectivist would have it) and existing independently

of observation, respectively. If aesthetic properties are genuine properties of objects in the

external world, then they will be well-suited for Explanation, which says simply that an aesthetic

property should explain the experience we have of it. The final two criteria concern the

perceptual character of aesthetic properties: according to Revelation, the intrinsic natures of

aesthetic properties are revealed to us in immediate perception, and Dependence says that

aesthetic properties largely depend on non-aesthetic perceptual properties for their natures and

existence.

Any account of aesthetic properties that construes them as purely occurrent will, I think,

face undesirable consequences for Location and Explanation. If aesthetic properties were purely

occurrent, they would have to belong to perceiving subjects, objects in the external world, or

(perhaps) aesthetic experience events, and as we saw in Zangwill’s response-dependence view

(discussed chapter 3), treating aesthetic properties as non-dispositional qualities leads to

subjectivism, as they are left “in the eye of the beholder.” But the Location and Explanation

constraints give us reason to rule out this possibility that aesthetic properties are occurrent

features of perceiving subjects, because what we are inclined to ascribe to objects on the basis of

our aesthetic experiences would not be located in the objects at all: we would have an error

theory and a form of projectivism on our hands, and aesthetic properties could do no explanatory

work. The two remaining possibilities, that aesthetic properties belong to objects in the external

world or aesthetic experience events, are also problematic if purely occurrent. In either case, the

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static, occurrent nature of the properties would raise difficulties surrounding their causal

significance, and it is thus hard to see how they could explain our aesthetic experiences of

them.19 In the debate regarding whether the dispositional or the occurrent should have

metaphysical primacy, for instance, those who favor the dispositional argue that non-

dispositional properties can have no causal significance for the objects that possess them: “A

nondispositional property would be, like God or the number two, ‘in pure act,’ incapable of

anything further,” as Martin and Heil put it.20 And if aesthetic properties are features of aesthetic

experiences, how can they be purely occurrent? Aesthetic experiences are events with

beginnings and endings, they involve change (unlike “pure acts”), and they are contingent on the

presence of appropriate human perceivers. This would seem to make their existence dependent

upon actual observation, contradicting the Stability consideration. For these reasons I believe we

must recognize that aesthetic properties are dispositional, not purely occurrent, if we want a

robustly realist account of aesthetic properties.

Now, there is a prima facie worry about construing aesthetic properties to be wholly

dispositional, since our experiences of aesthetic properties are such that they do not typically

look dispositional: rather, they look like static, occurrent qualities, ways of being rather than

capacities for appearing. It is not that some lines strike us as tending to appear straight; they

look like they just are straight. Certain paintings and articles of clothing do not strike us as

appearing garish, so much as being garish. A wolf’s howl does not just seem to have a capacity

for sounding eerie, it is an eerie sound. Fine chocolate does not seem to just afford a rich taste,

19 They might underwrite the normativity of our aesthetic discourse, however, by serving as truthmakers for aesthetic claims. Also, Levinson is aware of the difficulty regarding aesthetic properties and explanation, as evidenced by his (2005) pp. 214-215. 20 Martin & Heil (1999), p. 46.

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its taste is rich, and so on.21 If aesthetic properties were dispositions, the worry goes, then they

would look like dispositions, and this is not in keeping with what we know of them from direct

perception. Perhaps if aesthetic properties are dispositions that are directly perceived, then when

we enter an art gallery and turn the lights on the aesthetic properties of the artworks should seem

to us to be activated, and not merely revealed. When we turn the lights off again, they would

“look as if they were becoming dormant,” rather than being concealed or shrouded in the

surrounding darkness.22 Now, I suspect that in sense modalities other than the visual, a number

of aesthetic properties do in fact seem to us to be activated and then allowed to returned to

dormancy: examples of this might include the sounding of cathedral bells or the performance of

a concerto, the lighting of incense or baking of a pie, and the percussive footwork of a flamenco

dance. But aesthetic experience often does seem to reveal the actual, occurrent, intrinsic natures

of aesthetic properties to us, though I shall ultimately argue that this is only a phenomenological

side-effect.

What can the proponent of a dispositional account say to defend an understanding of their

natures as dispositional? Firstly, powers and dispositions (as explained in 2.8) are in fact actual

and occurrent in that they genuinely belong to objects in the present, while being defined by their

potential for causing manifestation events at other times in addition to the present. So my

account of aesthetic properties has no need to construe them as purely potential. The

manifestations of aesthetic dispositions are also actual; whenever we experience a disposition’s

21 This insight is apparent in Levinson’s classification of ways of appearing as ways of being. “Aesthetic Properties II”, Aristotelian Society: Supplementary Volume 79 (2005): 211-227, p. 217-218. 22 This is how Boghossian and Velleman express the same worry with respect to color in their 1989 “Colour as a Secondary Quality,” Mind, 98:81-103, p. 85.

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manifestation, that manifestation is, of course, an occurring event.23 Secondly, holding that

aesthetic properties are essentially dispositional does not force me to discount the role of their

experienced character or “public faces.” We identify aesthetic properties by the way their

manifestations are introspectively similar to paradigmatic instances, and we typically gain

knowledge of an object’s causal powers indirectly, via their manifestations (we might also infer

their existence in virtue of the object’s membership in a class of things that we know to have

such powers). The intersection of this epistemic fact about dispositionality and Revelation’s

emphasis on the knowledge gained via immediate perceptual experience is the locus of the main

tension between the dispositional and ways of appearing models. The appeal of a ways of

appearing model lies largely in its emphasis on our direct experience of aesthetic properties and

the purportedly complete revelation of their intrinsic natures in experience. In the next section,

however, I shall dispute this assumption and the extent to which the intrinsic natures of aesthetic

properties are revealed in aesthetic experience.

5.4 Revelation and Manifest Aesthetic Properties

Because I agree that aesthetic properties are manifested to perceivers during aesthetic

experience, I would not want to flat-out reject the association of aesthetic properties with ways of

appearing. I do think, however, that a ways of appearing analysis such as Levinson gives does

not do complete justice to the nature of aesthetic properties. I believe that we have no need to

limit our notion of aesthetic properties to those aspects that are completely revealed in

experience when a more complete account that addresses their dispositionality can both explain

23 Manifestations were discussed in 2.4.1. Insofar as events can be said to have properties (though I would prefer to say that they are the instantiations of properties) I suppose that events could be both occurrent and dispositional in nature.

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our aesthetic experiences and underwrite the normativity of aesthetic claims. In this section I

shall discuss the Revelation criterion and introduce a distinction between aesthetic properties

and manifest aesthetic properties; I believe that the only way a ways of appearing account can

preserve Revelation is to limit its treatment to the manifest aesthetic properties.

A commitment to Revelation, according to which the intrinsic nature of a property must

be revealed to us in immediate perception, seems to me to be the impetus for Levinson’s ways of

appearing account; he resists a dispositional model of aesthetic properties because he holds that

they are directly perceived, unlike dispositions. 24 Joseph Tolliver addresses Revelation “as a

doctrine about (explicit or tacit) beliefs about the nature of the colors that are acquired as a result

of experiences as of those colors. Understood this way, Revelation entails that a person familiar

with a color should have no false beliefs about what that color is in itself.”25 Analogously, if

Revelation is true for aesthetic properties, then a person familiar with dynamism should have no

false beliefs about what that property is in itself, because its intrinsic nature will be completely

revealed through direct experiences as of dynamic things. But Tolliver concludes that,

understood this way, Revelation is false for the colors.26 He argues that the intrinsic natures of

the colors are presented rather than revealed in our experiences of them, a finding that I think

holds true for aesthetic properties as well. One reason a person who has directly experienced an

aesthetic property could still have false beliefs about that property is that by their natures

aesthetic properties are essentially involved in structured similarity and dissimilarity relations to

24 Revelation, as used here, traces back to Mark Johnston’s 1997 “How to Speak of the Colors” in A. Byrne and D. Hilbert, eds. Readings on Color, volume 1, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. 25 Joseph Tolliver, “Revelations: On What is Manifest in Visual Experience,” in Knowledge and Skepticism, ed. Joseph Keim Campbell, et al., Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010, p. 188. 26 Tolliver’s argument is that colors must be complex because they essentially involve structured similarity and dissimilarity relations to other colors; his counterexample is the relation of desaturation between salmon pink and orangish red. A person can experience salmon pink without acquiring the belief that salmon pink is similar to orangish red in hue, but dissimilar in saturation, and so he or she would have an incomplete knowledge of the intrinsic nature of salmon pink.

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other aesthetic properties (though they are not as easily specified by coordinates as are colors on

a color map). Dynamism, for instance, stands in similarity relations to liveliness, sprightliness,

and vigor, and in dissimilarity relations to lethargy, frailty, and torpidity; ephemerality is similar

to delicacy, but dissimilar from stolidity; garishness is similar to vibrancy, but dissimilar from

sobriety. In a direct experience of a dynamic statue such as The Lost Pleaid, the dynamism is

certainly presented to the appropriate viewer, but he or she is not thereby inoculated against all

false beliefs about what dynamism is in itself. If relations to other aesthetic properties are part of

the intrinsic nature of an aesthetic property, then the entire intrinsic nature is not completely

revealed through direct experience of an object instantiating the property: the viewer is by no

means guaranteed a complete understanding of how dynamism is situated in relation to

sprightliness or torpidity.27

Now, although we should resist the idea that the intrinsic natures of the aesthetic

properties are completely revealed in aesthetic experience, we can say that aesthetic experience

reveals entirely the intrinsic natures of the manifest aesthetic properties, which are the roles

played by the aesthetic properties in such experience. (These roles are not to be confused with

the manifestations of dispositions; though similar language is used, the roles are labeled

“manifest” insofar as they are supposed to be revelatory, while the manifestations of dispositions

are the events in which we see their power at work.) The ways things look aesthetically and the

possibilities afforded for looking similar to or different from paradigmatic aesthetic looks are

revealed in direct experience of the aesthetic properties, and a ways of appearing account can 27 I argued in chapter 3 that sense-perceptible dispositions are not relations but rather intrinsic properties of objects in virtue of which they are directed towards their manifestation event types. I would say the same is true for aesthetic properties; the complex natures and essential similarity relations discussed here are, more properly, relations between the manifestation event types. Since directedness towards such manifestation event-types is what defines a power or disposition, however, the identity criteria of the powers involve these structured relations, even though they themselves are not relations but rather intrinsic properties of the objects that instantiate them. Directedness was discussed in 2.6.1.

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preserve Revelation if it limits itself in this regard. These “manifest aesthetic properties” are

what we reference when we identify and classify aesthetic properties, and they account for the

subjectivity mentioned in 1.4 whereby aesthetic properties involve essential reference to

perceivers’ states. But I think we should follow Tolliver’s lead and say that while the manifest

aesthetic properties are roles occupied by aesthetic properties, there is more to an aesthetic

property than what is manifest in aesthetic experience. As I shall argue in the next section, a

ways of appearing account of aesthetic properties such as Levinson favors cannot be a complete

account of aesthetic properties for this reason: there is more to the intrinsic nature of an aesthetic

property than that which is manifest or revealed in direct perceptual experience of it.

Tolliver’s treatment of manifest properties addresses them both epistemically and

metaphysically, and I have adapted it here for multiple sensory modes and aesthetic experience.

First, epistemically, manifest properties are what we know about how things must be intrinsically

similar to and different from each other to conform to the distinctive character of our visual or

other sensory experiences of the world. The various modes of sensory experience reveal distinct

ways that things must look, sound, smell, taste, feel, etc. in order for objects to be present to us in

the relevant sensory mode. The content of the knowledge gained through revelatory experience,

Tolliver argues, is not a set of beliefs but rather a concept, acquired via sensory experience, of

ways things can appear to the senses. In the case of a visual experience of a canary, for instance,

“the perceiver acquires the ability to see the canary, and other things, as manifestly canary

yellow.” In the experience of The Lost Pleaid, we can say that the perceiver acquires the ability

to see the statue as dynamic. “When the conditions of observation are favorable,” Tolliver

concludes, it “contains a distinctive mode of the presentation of canary yellow, one wherein

canary yellow things look like themselves... [it] lets us know what canary yellow and canary

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yellow things both look like. This is the knowledge acquired in a revelatory experience.”28

Similarly, what is revealed under the appropriate conditions for viewing The Lost Pleaid is what

dynamic things look like. For Tolliver, the epistemic difference between sense-perceptible

properties and manifest sense-perceptible properties is that the knowledge gained in a revelatory

experience exhausts the intrinsic nature of the manifest properties, but does not exhaust the

intrinsic nature of the sense-perceptible properties qua themselves. So Revelation is true for the

manifest colors, but not the colors themselves, and analogously it will be true for the manifest

aesthetic properties, but not the aesthetic properties themselves.

Second, Tolliver lays out the metaphysical difference between properties and manifest

properties in the case of color, which I shall explain before discussing the metaphysical

difference between aesthetic properties and manifest aesthetic properties. “The manifest colors,”

he explains, “are role-fillers for differentiative roles of the colors–that is, they are properties the

colors have in virtue of visually presenting objects in experience as intrinsically similar or

different from each other in certain ways...they are properties of properties of first-order things.”

For colors (and presumably other sense-perceptible properties as well), the manifest properties

occupy roles, though not causal ones:

Rather than filling functional roles such as, tending to bring about x and tending to be brought about by y, manifest colors fill roles such as: x is intrinsically similar in way RcO to y and intrinsically dissimilar in way R/cG from z, where “RcO” is a way that red things appear similar in color to orange things in circumstances C, and “R/cG” is a way that red things appear dissimilar in color to green things in circumstances C.29

28 Ibid, p. 194. 29 Ibid, p. 195. For Tolliver, which manifest colors fill which differentiative roles is a contingent matter–“they might have occupied different roles had the nature of the colors been different–for instance, had there been more or fewer colors than there are, or had there been different, novel colors.” For this reason, manifest properties like the manifest colors cannot be defined in terms of the roles they occupy. Tolliver does think, however, that the manifest colors can be type-identified “by means of their essential connection to the types of phenomenal properties involved in their perception...each manifest color is the objective property represented by all the sense impressions that incorporate the same chromatic phenomenal property.” (pp. 197-198)

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In the example of a yellow canary, the difference between the color yellow and the manifest

color yellow is as follows: the bird instantiates the property yellow, which we can say is a

disposition to be manifest canary yellow under standard conditions of observation.30 The

manifest yellow is the role played by the property yellow in visual experience, that of revealing

some part of the property’s intrinsic nature to us: it reveals the look of the color yellow (its

public face, as Tolliver says), and also a way of appearing in which canaries look similar to

goldfinches but different from bluebirds. The intrinsic nature of the color yellow, however, goes

beyond what is revealed in visual experience (while the intrinsic nature of the manifest yellow

does not). To summarize Tolliver’s explanation of the difference between sense-perceptible

properties and manifest properties, then, the sense-perceptible properties themselves are the

objective, intrinsic basis for an object’s contribution to the content and structure of sensory

experience, while the manifest properties are the “simple properties that manifest that content

and present that structure.” Sensory experience presents us with both, but only the manifest

properties are truly revealed in that experience.31 I shall continue by developing an aesthetic

example that illustrates the metaphysical differences between aesthetic properties and manifest

aesthetic properties.

Instead of considering the canary in terms of its iconic yellow coloration, let us note its

aesthetic qualities. It is a cheerful, lively little bird, its movements delightful and at times

comical. Its body is slender and graceful, its delicate wings exquisitely feathered. Its dark eye is

sober, its grasping feet twiglike, its song famously sweet. Taking its delicacy as an example,

30 On a functionalist understanding, the intrinsic nature of the colors would be their nature as “higher-order properties, powers if you will, of physical states involving primary qualities, to cause certain types of responses in observers in certain circumstances of observation.” Tolliver suggests that on this view, “the colors are involved in the explanation of chromatic experience, not as causes but as causal roles that the physical states fill.” (p. 185) 31 Ibid, pp. 194-195.

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metaphysically, the bird is an object that instantiates the aesthetic property of delicacy; delicacy

in turn has the second-order property of manifest delicacy in virtue of presenting objects in

aesthetic experience as intrinsically similar or different from each other in certain ways. In

particular, the differentiative role that manifest delicacy fills is one in which the delicate bird is

presented as being aesthetically similar to paradigmatic delicate things (butterflies, soap bubbles,

orchid flowers, or wineglasses, for instance) and also aesthetically similar to dainty things and

different from ungainly things. Epistemically, the bird’s delicacy is only presented to the

observer in aesthetic experience; what is revealed is manifest delicacy, the “look” or “public

face” of delicacy. This revelation of manifest delicacy gives the viewer a concept of how the

delicate object is capable of appearing similar to, for example, mocking birds and snowy egrets,

but different from toucans and pelicans. While this differentiative role of delicacy is completely

revealed, the viewer is not thereby inoculated against erroneous beliefs about delicacy itself: he

or she can come away from the experience without understanding, for instance, that delicacy in a

canary is very unlike ungainliness in a pelican. In sum, the manifest delicacy is fully revealed in

an aesthetic experience, but the intrinsic nature of the property delicacy itself is not completely

revealed. It is for this reason that I dispute Revelation for aesthetic properties: it is true for the

manifest aesthetic properties, but not for the aesthetic properties in the entirety of their intrinsic

natures. Unlike manifest aesthetic properties, the aesthetic properties themselves have a deeper

nature that is not revealed completely in aesthetic experience.

So while an aesthetic experience of a delicate canary lets the viewer know what delicacy

and delicate things both look like, there is more to delicacy than this. More can be said about

delicacy than is revealed in aesthetic experience, including how it causes an aesthetic experience

of delicacy. Its dispositional nature can be described, as can the many of the details of its

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conditions of manifestation, such as the nature of human vision and perception. Empirical

research can discover the physical properties of the bird, its bone structure, musculature, and

feathering, from which its delicacy emerges; it can also discover a whole range of candidate non-

aesthetic properties from which delicacy might emerge in an object, and perhaps even some

negative conditions governing emergence for delicacy. In the case of an artwork, there is even

more to be learned about the aesthetic properties than is directly available in aesthetic

experience, particularly as the aesthetic properties of artworks are influenced by contextual

matters such as genre, location within the artist’s oeuvre, literary reference, or representational

qualities. These are all important aspects of aesthetic properties which are not revealed in

aesthetic experience, aspects which are lost if one limits one’s account to ways of appearing for

the sake of preserving Revelation.

In 5.3 I explained that properties can be considered as dispositional or occurrent, but that

it is a mistake to think that the two aspects are mutually exclusive. In the present example, I

would say that the canary’s delicacy is an occurrent property in that its power to produce

aesthetic experiences of manifest delicacy is present regardless of actual manifestation; it

supervenes on but is not reducible to the bird’s occurrent structural properties. It also manifests

itself in an occurrent characteristic look or way of appearing. That the delicacy is dispositional,

however, can be seen in that it manifests itself only when a suitable perceiver is present and the

right conditions obtain. Now, the manifest delicacy of the bird, which certainly looks like an

occurrent property to the perceiver during an aesthetic experience, is an occurrent property, and

this is the focus of Levinson’s account as I understand him. I take his ways of appearing, which

are directly perceived, to be equivalent to the manifest aesthetic properties. I think such ways of

appearing cannot be identified with aesthetic properties in toto, however, because they only

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correspond to the “public face” of aesthetic properties, and as I have argued, there is more to the

intrinsic nature of an aesthetic property than what is manifest during aesthetic experience. That

the public face seems to reveal the whole of the aesthetic property’s nature is a misleading

phenomenological side-effect.

5.5 Can the Dispositional and Ways of Appearing Models be Reconciled?

If there is going to be any reconciliation between a ways of appearing account and my

own dispositional account of aesthetic properties, it cannot be because ways of appearing just are

the manifestations of aesthetic dispositions. Instead, I have suggested that Levinson’s ways of

appearing are roughly equivalent to the manifest aesthetic properties described in 5.4. These are

the roles that aesthetic properties play when they present their characteristic looks in aesthetic

experience—looks that afford introspectively recognizable similarities to and differences from

other paradigmatic aesthetic looks. On this reading, the manifest dynamism of The Lost Pleiad

is that aspect of dynamism that is directly available to the perceiver in aesthetic experience. It is

entirely revealed during aesthetic experience, though the complete nature of the aesthetic

property that fills this role (dynamism itself) is not. This is why Levinson’s concepts of ways of

appearing only make implicit reference to conditions and kinds of observers: the knowledge of

aesthetic differentiative roles gained in aesthetic experience is exhaustive of their natures, but not

of the deeper natures of the aesthetic properties themselves, which I have been arguing are

dispositional and would essentially involve conditions and observers.32 Recognizing this

32 Levinson allows that “in order to properly judge of a given way of appearing, such as a colour/look, timbre/sound, flavour/taste, the conditions of observation have to be apt, and you have to be an apt sort of observer.” This is to say, he continues, that “such properties are inherently indexed to such parameters or implicitly relative to them.” But neither the conditions of observation nor the types of observers, he thinks, are part of the concept of the way of appearing, since the way of appearing is “that which is both directly perceived and ascribed to the object that presents it.” Dispositions, on the other hand, are supposed to explicitly include such parameters, and be (he thinks)

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distinction between a property and a manifest property, aesthetic dispositions and the roles they

play in experience, allows a degree of reconciliation between the dispositional account and a

ways of appearing account. The relationship between the properties and manifest properties

explains why manifest ways of appearing are directly perceived, while aesthetic dispositions are

presented as ways of appearing when they manifest themselves in these roles in our aesthetic

experience. However, the ways of appearing account remains incomplete.

While I hold that this model for properties and manifest properties is sufficient reason to

think that Levinson’s account can be subsumed under what I am offering as a more complete

account of aesthetic properties, Levinson has stated a few objections to a dispositional account.

He worries, for instance, that ways of appearing or manifest properties are too unlike dispositions

for aesthetic properties to be analyzable as dispositions. I do not see this as an insurmountable

problem, however, because I do not think his concept of ways of appearing adequately captures

the essence of an aesthetic property. His contention is that an object can have such a way of

appearing without having the disposition to appear that way to the relevant observers, and so he

tries to prove that an object can have an aesthetic property without having the relevant aesthetic

disposition. He borrows a color example from Mark Johnston to motivate this claim:

We can imagine special cases in which something will have a color but not have the disposition to appear that color. One such case is the radiation zone, the region inside the sun immediately surrounding its core. From the conjectured physical character of its contents the radiation zone is thought to emit spectral red light. It is thus conjectured to be a radiant red region. However the radiation zone is encased within the convection zone, which is exceedingly hot; so hot that it is physically impossible for any sighted

relational properties. Typically, dispositions and powers are understood in terms of both conditions for manifestation and a manifestation event type, as is demonstrated by the appeal of attempts to give a conditional analysis of dispositions. I suspect that a vague concept of a way of appearing may only involve implicit reference to conditions of observation, but the more clear it becomes, the more explicit those conditions will be. I thus find that the concept of a way of appearing is sufficiently similar to a dispositional concept where conditions of observation are concerned, and I see no difficulty in taking “appearing events” of manifest properties to be equivalent to the manifestation of a disposition on the dispositional model.

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being to pass through it and so see the radiation zone. On any reasonable account of dispositions...it is implausible to regard the radiation zone as having the disposition to appear radiant red.33

The red of the sun’s radiation zone is considered an example of a way of appearing or a manifest

property here because its nature is revealed in and through its appearance. Typically, part of

what it means to be manifest red is to have the disposition to appear red, but in this example the

two seem to come apart: the radiation zone of the sun is believed to be red because its physical

properties should emit spectral red light, but it is physically impossible for us to observe that it

actually does emit such light. This means that while we have reason to believe it appears red, it

cannot actually appear red to us; there can be no interaction between an observer and the

radiation zone’s way of appearing that would give rise to an appearing event.

Johnston and Levinson judge this to be a case in which we are justified in attributing a

manifest property to the object, but not a disposition to appear in the relevant way: because the

radiation zone’s behavior doesn’t typically involve appearing red to the relevant perceivers, it

would seem we can’t justifiably say it is disposed to do so. As a judgment about the radiation

zone’s “typical behavior,” this seems to me to be fair enough. But if by dispositions we mean all

the genuine capacities of an object (as I think we should), not merely those which have been

activated, then I think there is a very real sense in which the radiation zone of the sun is disposed

to appear red. On a conditional analysis, the relevant conditional would be “If a suitable

observer were present, then the sun would appear red to that perceiver.” That the condition

described in the antecedent of the conditional has never obtained (and indeed cannot, given our

current technology) does not falsify the conditional. Dispositions can in some cases be

33 The example is borrowed from Mark Johnston, Chapter 5, “The Manifest”, web document. Access date: 3/29/2011 http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/courses/consciousness97/papers/johnston/chap5.html I take Johnston’s limitation of his discussion of color to the manifest colors to be problematic, for reasons outlined in chapter 4.

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justifiably attributed to an object even if they have never (or will never) been manifested. In

fact, the dispositional account I favor explains that directedness towards an inexistent object

(even an impossible one) is one of the marks of physical intentionality, as explained in 2.6.2.

What I think we should say here is that the radiation zone’s conjectured ability to emit spectral

red light is a power of the sort that grounds being red, one of several ways in which a thing can

look red (or appear red, or be manifestly red). The manifestation of this power is blocked or

masked by another of the sun’s dispositions, however, that of producing such an extreme heat

that relevant observers are unable to approach. (Johnston himself allows elsewhere that an

object can truly be said to have a disposition even though its manifestation is masked.34) The

conjecture that it is a radiant red region is an intelligible one because it refers to the condition

under which the region would appear red, namely, if a sighted being were able to see it; that this

condition does not currently obtain (and may never obtain) does not make it any less a

disposition to appear red. So I think Levinson cannot use this example to say that an object can

have a way of appearing without having the relevant disposition.

The masking of the radiation zone’s disposition to appear red, while unproblematic for a

robust dispositional account, does seem to present a problem for the ways of appearing account.

Insofar as we infer that an object has a disposition to appear red because we judge it to belong to

a kind having such powers, or to have the physical properties known to ground such a

disposition, we are justified in calling it red even if it cannot appear red to us. But how can

Levinson justifiably say an object has a way of appearing if it is specifically not disposed to

appear that way to the relevant observers? If the intrinsic nature of a way of appearing just is

34 “How to Speak of the Colors.”1997. 146-147. While Johnston only considers extrinsic maskers, others have offered plausible cases of intrinsic maskers, situations where it is another of the object’s own dispositions that leads to the failure of a disposition to manifest. See section 2.5 for an explanation of masking as a problem for a conditional analysis, but not for the sort of dispositional theory I endorse.

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that which is revealed in immediate perception during an “appearing”, and such appearing events

are physically impossible, then I do not see how he can justifiably say the sun’s radiation zone is

manifest red or has a way of appearing red. A ways of appearing model attempts to define

aesthetic properties by reference to their “public faces,” which are revealed in immediate

perception, and the radiation zone can have no public, and hence no public face.35 I conclude,

then, that contra Levinson, objects cannot be said to have ways of appearing without also having

the disposition to appear the relevant ways to the observers. Not only are the ways of appearing

and dispositional models compatible, but ways of appearing and dispositions to appear are quite

difficult to separate; this is to be expected if the manifest properties are in fact the roles played

by the properties in experience, as I have described them.

5.6 Reasons to Prefer a Dispositional Account

Having addressed the aforementioned objections to a dispositional account of aesthetic

properties, I would like to draw attention to the merits of such an account. The first of these is

the way it allows us to accommodate the anthropocentricity of our aesthetic property concepts.

If we grant that aesthetic properties supervene on or (as I hold) emerge from lower-level sense-

perceptible properties, we are faced with the notoriously difficult fact (discussed in 4.5) that our

concepts of sense-perceptible properties are concepts of colors, sounds, textures, etc. as they

35If there were in fact a case where an object could be said to have a manifest property without having the disposition to appear the relevant way, it would presumably have to be one where it appeared some other way instead. Johnston offers, for instance, an example where there might have been a ray emitted from the center of green objects, a ray that acted directly on our visual cortices so that green objects always would look red to us in any viewing situations. (See his “How to Speak of the Colors,” Philosophical Studies 68 (1992), pp. 221-263.) Here it seems we might want to say that the objects are green (perhaps because we can measure the green spectral light reflected by their surfaces with scientific instruments), but the associated conditional (“if suitable observers were to look at the objects, then they would appear green”) would be false. Here, the antecedent is true because we suppose that suitable observers are present (unlike the case involving the sun), but the consequent is false because objects are not disposed to look green to us due to the ray’s activity. In such a case I do not see how the manifest appearance model comes out ahead, as no green would be directly perceivable, manifest, or apparent in our experiences of such objects: the public face of the “green objects” would not be green at all.

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appear to normal human perceivers. We have seen how our color concepts are

anthropomorphically centered: the unifying feature of the yellow surface of a dandelion, the

yellow of a color plate of a dandelion in a book, and the yellow of a digital image of the

dandelion viewed on a screen is the similar way in which they appear to observers with normal

human color vision. In addition, our color concepts are of properties relative to paradigmatic

viewing conditions, and unperceivable in the absence of light.36 Even if our unexamined folk

concepts of color do not reflect the anthropomorphic center demonstrated in the example of

dandelion yellow, I think they do involve reference to human observers and normal conditions,

and only a little examination is needed to make that relativity explicit. We know that the world

seems to be drained of its color at dusk or in deep shade; as our color experience increases, we

become aware of the acuity of our color vision compared to that of other individuals.

The recognition that aesthetic properties are dependent on sense-perceptible properties

suggests that if concepts of colors thus involve reference to observers and conditions, then

concepts of aesthetic properties—including conceptions of aesthetic properties as ways of

appearing—will as well.37 On a dispositional account we can allow that our concepts of

aesthetic properties make explicit reference to conditions and observers, while maintaining that

the properties are instantiated by objects in the external world independently of observers’ minds

and responses. This is because the conditions and observers are necessary for manifestation, but

not instantiation: The Lost Pleaid will be dynamic regardless of whether its dynamism is ever

recognized or appreciated. A manifest property account of aesthetic properties, on the other

hand, focuses on what is revealed in aesthetic experience; in Zangwill’s case this seems to lead

36 Levinson recognizes this; see his 2005, p. 218. 37 I addressed this in my discussion of Zangwill in chapter 3, and argued there that the solution is to allow for a conceptual response-dependence but not an ontological one.

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to a subjective projectivism. (Levinson, however, claims that his concepts of aesthetic properties

as ways of appearing are only implicitly perceiver- and condition- relative.38)

I think a dispositional account is also better positioned to explain the conceptual

connections between non-aesthetic sense-perceptible properties and aesthetic properties.

Levinson’s ways of appearing account handles this connection by invoking a constitution

relation, though he does not say that it is a relation between the properties themselves: “we might

suggest instead... that the event which is the manifesting of such an aesthetic property is

constituted by, or made up of, the events which are the manifesting of the non-aesthetic

perceptible properties on which it depends.” On a dispositional account, the type of

manifestation event towards which the disposition or power is directed is what gives its identity.

So it is not just that the manifestation events or “appearings” of, say, the muted colors of a

painting will constitute the manifestation events or appearings of its aesthetic tranquility; rather,

emergence can be elucidated as a relation between the properties themselves.

Another weakness of a ways of appearing account that is addressed by allowing for a

dispositional element is the ability to explain aesthetic properties that involve dispositions to

occasion certain feelings in perceivers.39 This affective element is perhaps not present in all

aesthetically-relevant properties; Levinson mentions stylistic properties (which I would call

artistic properties), for instance, “such as correspond to the labels ‘impressionist’, ‘fauvist’,

38Levinson, 2005, 227. His concept of a higher-order way of appearing is one that depends on lower-order ways of appearing, which will be specific to various sense modalities and thus already involve references to suitable perceivers. Furthermore, the appearings are defined as the upshot of the interactions between the perceiver, the object, and one of its appearance properties. I think the perceivers in question will have to be of a specific type (human, having the necessary capacity for sense-perception, and so on) in order for the appearing events to be properly specified. Insofar as ways of appearing are ways of appearing and not just ways of being, the concept seems to me to involve a more essential reference to types of observers than he allows. 39 Conceptual response-dependence alone, recall, does not entail ontological response-dependence, as argued in chapter 3, so allowing for response-dependence in the concept of a way of appearing would not in and of itself prevent the ways of appearing analysis from explaining aesthetic experiences, normativity in aesthetic judgments, etc. as we would expect a realist account to do.

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‘cubist’, ‘futurist’ in painting,” and he suggests they are “easily understandable as visual looks of

a high-order, ones that are often detectable at twenty paces, presumably before any feelings

consequent on their perception could announce themselves.” In contrast to these stylistic

properties, he admits that aesthetic properties such as human beauty and ugliness seem to be

relative to human sensibility, and even to a specific ethnic or cultural sensibility.40 This causes

problems for his account, because he maintains that aesthetic properties are ways of appearing

and concepts of ways of appearing do not involve references to types of observers; he leaves it

an open question as to whether even properties like gracefulness and garishness can be

straightforwardly understood as higher-order ways of appearing.

Admitting that some aesthetic properties may essentially involve reactions of pleasure or

displeasure from specific types of observers is not a problem for my view, however, for two

reasons. The first is that on my account an object’s aesthetic properties manifest reciprocally

with the perceiver’s aesthetic dispositions, and so the conditions for manifestation of many

aesthetic properties presume the entire mental makeup of the human audience to a greater or

lesser extent, including the affective makeup. Second, because aesthetic properties on my

account are defined by the manifestation event types towards which they are directed, I have no

difficulty explaining aesthetic properties that essentially involve emotional responses in their

manifestations; our aesthetic response dispositions, which are the reciprocal dispositions, will

also involve emotional components in these cases. A dispositional account can thus handle

aesthetic properties that essentially involve the affective responses of perceivers, including the

evocation of responses of disgust, fear, delight, awe, etc. It allows for the genuine powers of

objects to occupy a number of dispositional roles, manifesting themselves in aesthetic

40 Levinson, 2005, 224. Even for the stylistic properties, which he highlights because the perceivers’ feelings are not essential, it looks as if the percievers’ qualifications (possessing awareness of distinct genres and styles, for instance) will be essential.

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experiences involving both the distinctive looks and appearances of the aesthetic property and

the attendant affective responses they cause for perceivers. If garishness, for instance, is a

property which essentially involves not just a particular “look,” but also an affective response,

then it is unsuited for a ways of appearing account: my feeling of discomfort upon viewing a

garish painting is attendant upon and caused by its garishness, but it is not the “public face” of

garishness. On the dispositional account, however, we can understand the garishness to be a

power at the center of a hub-and-spoke style model: it causes various kinds of manifestations,

including both my experience of the look of the painting and my affective response.41

Finally, I think a dispositional account fairs better overall than a ways of appearing model

in the two major explanatory tasks for aesthetic realism: explaining the normativity of aesthetic

claims and our aesthetic experiences. As regards the normativity of aesthetic claims, that such

claims are more or less correct or apt is explicable by reference to objects’ having aesthetic

properties, and disagreements can be settled by investigation into their objective features.42 The

concept of an aesthetic property should include reference to types of observers, for it is of the

utmost importance that the object’s way of appearing is understood as a way of appearing to a

qualified observer, since we recognize cases in which an aesthetic claim is inapt or incorrect for

reasons having to do with the observer’s lack of qualifications. Allowing any and every way of

appearing to any type of observer to serve as the grounds for application of an aesthetic predicate

would render aesthetic claims correct or apt in only a trivial way. Including relativity to

qualified perceivers in the concept of an aesthetic property is thus an important part of explaining

41 The hub-and-spoke model for powers and dispositions was mentioned in 2.2. 42 Levinson, 2005, 214-215. He takes this to be a sort of inference to the best explanation, and thus unproblematic although the existence of correct and incorrect aesthetic attributions is often used as a reason to posit such aesthetic properties; he thinks the parallel between objects having aesthetic properties and correct attributions of those properties to the objects is just what we should expect.

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the normativity of aesthetic claims, one which is answered for by a dispositional account but not

explicit enough in a ways of appearing account.

Considering the explanation of aesthetic experience by reference to aesthetic properties,

Levinson states:

We can explain someone experiencing a dancer’s movement as graceful by appealing to the fact that the movement really has the way of appearing graceful, the conditions being right for such a way of appearing to manifest itself, and the person’s being an apt subject for that way of appearing, that is, the sort of subject to which that way of appearing is implicitly relative. And we can proceed similarly if called upon to explain someone’s experiencing a passage of music as anguished, or a painting as garish, or a design as balanced. Such explanations at least seem to be ordinary causal explanations.43

If aesthetic properties are dispositional, as I have been arguing, then they are perfectly well-

suited to providing causal explanations of aesthetic experience. Aesthetic experiences occur and

have the qualities they do because of the presence of suitable perceivers, the obtaining of the

conditions for manifestation, and most of all because the objects of aesthetic experience have

properties whose intrinsic natures involve the power to manifest themselves by causing

experiences of those sorts. Aesthetic properties are occurrent in that they are possessed by

objects even when they are not manifested, but they cannot be reduced to their occurrent aspects

because they have functional essences relative to human perceivers and their aesthetic

sensibilities. Aesthetic properties also cannot be reduced to the non-aesthetic properties upon

which they supervene/from which they emerge; on a functionalist understanding aesthetic

powers are higher-order properties of physical states (states which themselves can be viewed as

occurrent or dispositional) to cause certain types of responses in observers in certain

circumstances of observation.

43 Levinson, 2005, 220.

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The explanatory power of aesthetic dispositions as regards aesthetic experience also

contributes to their suitability for justifying the normative aspects of aesthetic discourse. Some

aesthetic judgments and ascriptions, we can say, are more apt than others because they are

ascriptions of properties that are in fact possessed by those objects. There is room for error in

aesthetic judgment due to inappropriate conditions for manifestation, including both

environmental conditions and the suitability of the viewer. There is also room for disagreement

among viewers, especially where differences of cultural background and understanding of art-

historic contexts are concerned, because on the dispositional model we can allow that the

aesthetic powers of an object ground an abundance of dispositions with different manifestation

conditions. In the case of artworks that must be considered in context to be properly appreciated,

we can favor the sensibilities of an ideal audience as best suited to produce an appropriate

response.

The dispositional account I have offered holds that there is more to the natures of

aesthetic properties than what is directly revealed in aesthetic experience. It accommodates our

intuitions regarding the subjective elements in aesthetic experience and explains aesthetic

difference while still maintaining that aesthetic properties are objective in the following sense:

they are clearly located in the objects of our experience in the external world, and do not depend

for their existence on our responses. They are there to be experienced rather than being

projections of our responses, and they can explain both our aesthetic experiences and the

normative elements of our aesthetic discourse.

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Conclusion

In the foregoing chapters I have argued for a realism about aesthetic properties, that

they are objective features of the world external to human minds. Although their natures are

determined in part by reference to human aesthetic experience, their sheer existence is

independent of our experiences of them. That aesthetic properties exist independently of our

experiences means they are well-suited to serve in an explanatory role for our aesthetic

experiences: they belong to objects in the external world, existing even when unobserved.

This realism stands in contrast to views that would allow aesthetic properties to be explained

away as responses or mental states that are erroneously (even if systematically) attributed to

objects to the external world. Their independent existence leaves room for error in aesthetic

judgment: we can err in our aesthetic claims by judging objects to possess aesthetic

properties they do not, not merely by going against whatever intersubjective agreement there

may be about how to express our responses to aesthetic experience. Preserving room for

error in this way allows us to justify aesthetic discourse in the face of disagreements in

judgment, and the dispositional account identifies some of the ways in which judgments

exhibit error, such as when the conditions for observation are inadequate, and when the

perceiver lacks the appropriate background conditions.

In providing a dispositional analysis of aesthetic properties, my goal has been to give

an account that is in keeping with such a realism and that illuminates the structure of the

many factors that contribute to aesthetic experience and judgment. Some of those factors are

internal to the person who experiences and judges an artwork or other aesthetic object, some

of them are internal to the object itself, and some are found in the background conditions in

185

which the aesthetic encounter occurs. Since I hold that the resulting aesthetic experience and

judgment centers on the recognition and appreciation of some aesthetic quality of the object,

my account aims to both 1) maintain the primacy of aesthetic properties in explaining

aesthetic experience and, 2) explicate their natures in terms of the characteristic experiences

they cause.

The three key elements of the dispositional model I have given are the dispositions or

powers themselves, the manifestation events they cause, and the conditions under which

those events occur. I have argued that aesthetic properties are best understood as objects’

aesthetic dispositions, genuine properties in virtue of which objects can and do cause

aesthetic experiences in observers. Those aesthetic experiences are the manifestations of the

aesthetic properties; while the aesthetic properties themselves exist regardless of whether

they are actually manifested (as do dispositions generally), the manifestations depend for

their existence/occurrence on the presence of certain conditions. The foremost of these

conditions for manifestation is the presence of a suitable aesthetic perceiver, one who

possesses the disposition(s) to recognize and appreciate the aesthetic properties in question

and so is able to undergo the resulting aesthetic experience. The aesthetic perceiver and

aesthetic object thus each possess dispositions whose manifestations are enabled by the

presence of the other, and are what are known as reciprocal dispositions. Each satisfies a

necessary condition for the other’s manifestation, and the paired dispositions manifest jointly

in aesthetic experience.

The dispositional framework I have used allows me to maintain that aesthetic

properties belong to objects independently of whether anyone experiences them, and

therefore that they need not ever be manifested to exist. Their natures, however, are

186

determined by the types of manifestations towards which they are directed; in this respect,

what it is to be graceful, delicate, garish, or vibrant has everything to do with the sort of

characteristic manifestations these aesthetic properties give rise to, and how they appear to us

in aesthetic experience. Aesthetic properties are experienced as higher-level emergent or

holistic qualities that are dependent upon lower-level sense-perceptible properties, but are not

experienced as the product of simple rule-following combinations thereof.

I have applied this model first and primarily to what I have labeled aesthetic

properties simpliciter, those properties which are found in non-artifacts as well as artworks

or other artifacts. My reasons for distinguishing these from artistic properties are as follows:

first, I am interested in giving a dispositional account of aesthetic properties that extends

beyond the realm of the artworld into the everyday aesthetic experiences which go so easily

unnoticed. Second, I believe that although the world of art and art history raise important

issues about interpretation and the objectivity of aesthetic properties, the most fundamental

challenges for a realist account are found even in cases where there are no artists’ intentions

or cultural references involved. These have to do with accurately distinguishing between

aesthetic dispositions, manifestations, and conditions for manifestation, and are intimately

connected with how we understand our experience of the sense-perceptible properties that

underlie aesthetic properties.

As I explained in chapter 3, the conflation of dispositions or powers and their

manifestations leads to the sort of anti-realism or projectivism seen in Nick Zangwill’s

treatment of sense-perceptible and aesthetic properties. The dispositional account answers

his argument from the possibility of divergence in perceptual mechanisms because a careful

specification of the conditions of manifestation involved allow us to pinpoint the different

187

dispositions leading to divergent responses; a subjectivist, mind-dependent account can be

avoided if the properties are sufficiently individuated. I thus agreed that aesthetic

dispositions are relative in that the manifestations that define a disposition are relative to

certain conditions, but maintained that aesthetic dispositions are intrinsic properties of

objects in the external world, not relations between those objects and perceivers. The latter

position would also involve a conflation of the dispositions and their manifestations.

I applied the dispositional model to sense-perceptible properties in chapter 4, treating

colors and then by extension the properties accessed through our other sense modalities. I

argued that our concepts of sense-perceptible properties are anthropocentric, insofar as we

identify them by the phenomenal chromatic properties of our perceptual experiences. I

allowed that colors are multiply-realizable, with very different microphysical explanations

being unified by their similar manifestations. I also allowed that our color concepts are

relativized to standard conditions for observation, including normal human color vision.

Though we can imagine other species having experiences involving different phenomenal

sensory properties from ours, the unifying nature of the underlying powers that ground both

the dispositions that manifest for us and the dispositions that would manifest for them place

constraints on what can be legitimately ascribed to the objects, preventing the dispositional

account from falling into an unnecessary subjectivism. I adopted Joseph Tolliver’s

distinction between the colors (which I take to be dispositions belonging to the objects), and

the phenomenal chromatic properties they produce (roles that are fully revealed to us in

experience), I argued that phenomenal sensory properties do not exhaust the natures of the

sense-perceptible properties; they do, however, give us grounds for attributing sense-

188

perceptible properties to objects when we are qualified observers and the requisite conditions

for manifestation obtain.

I likewise argued that in the case of the aesthetic, the ways in which aesthetic

properties appear to us do not exhaust their natures; I thus disputed the criterion of

Revelation. If anything is entirely revealed in aesthetic experience, then it is something

analogous to the “manifest properties” (differentiative roles) that Tolliver identified for the

colors. I suggested that the ways of appearing account that Jerrold Levinson advocates

should be understood as a treatment of the “manifest aesthetic properties” if it is to preserve

Revelation, but that as such it would still amount to only an incomplete account of aesthetic

properties, and I responded to Levinson’s objections to a dispositional account. I developed

my own account with a case study, demonstrating the ways in which the dispositional model

illuminates various kinds of disagreement in aesthetic judgment. One of the implications of

the dispositional model as I explained it was that objects may have an abundance of aesthetic

dispositions unified by the more basic powers that ground them, and so there might be cases

of disagreement where both responses are justified. I explained that this feature does not

lead to subjectivism because although there may be a wider range of properties belonging to

objects than appear at first glance, such properties are still objective features of the external

world.

In this project I have dealt mostly with aesthetic properties simpliciter, found in non-

artifacts as well as artworks and other artifacts, and with the lower tier of human responses

involved, which come prior to the operation of our cognitive ability to appreciate the ways in

which sense-perceptible and basic aesthetic properties are manipulated and presented as

works of art. I recognize that issues of artist’s intentions, interpretation, and cultural context

189

(which I have not dealt with here) mean that the dispositional account I have given is

unlikely to be straightforwardly transferable to a wider range of aesthetically relevant

properties of works. I believe, however, that dealing with the metaphysical challenges

arising from the connections between the aesthetic and the sense-perceptible covers

important groundwork and leaves one in a much surer position from which to answer

questions about realism and objectivity in a more complete account. I also believe that

developing the dispositional model at the more basic level provides useful insights into how

we might expect the more complex conditions surrounding our responses to and judgments

of artworks to operate.

190

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