The Japanese Society for Aesthetics

Aesthetics No.28 (2024): 15-27

From an Analytic Pragmatist:
Rethinking Analytic Aesthetics *KATO Takafumi
Osaka Seikei University, Osaka
Abstract: This paper proposes an extended understanding of the discipline called ‘analytic aesthetics’, withreference to analytic pragmatism proposed by a prominent neo-pragmatist, R. Brandom. It is therefore argued
that analytic aesthetics should be reconsidered in terms of ‘analytic pragmatist aesthetics’. N. Carroll’s
philosophy of criticism is expected to offer an appropriate picture illustrating how the analytic pragmatist
aesthetics can be embodied in the actual scene. Carroll argues that (1) ‘reasoned evaluation’ comprises theessential part of criticism, and that (2) ‘success value’ should be considered as more privileged than ‘reception
value’. This paper assents to (1): the framework of analytic pragmatism, according to which semantics of certain
aspects of natural language is understood in terms of their pragmatics, can be aptly applied into the philosophyof criticism. The claim (2), however, may be in tension with pragmatists’ theory of art. Once the pragmatist
concept of experience is accepted, the privileged status of success value over reception value is no longer hardand fast: they are two sides of the same coin. This paper thus revises the philosophy of criticism and represents
it as a promising illustration of analytic pragmatism implemented in the context of aesthetics independently of
Carroll’s argument.

Keywords: Analytic Aesthetics, Philosophy of Criticism, Pragmatism, Brandom

1. Introduction: On Analysis
There is an activity of inquiry known as ‘analytic aesthetics’, but it is unclear what is meantby ‘analytic’. To trace the historical background, the methodology and tools of logical analysis
developed by B. Russell (1872-1970) and G. E. Moore (1873-1958) contributed to the formationof early analytic philosophy, which was the driving force behind logical positivism, especially inthe 1930s. For this reason, the term ‘analytic philosophy’ tends to refer to inquiry based on logicalpositivist attitudes. Before W. V. Quine (1908-2000) argued that the analytic/synthetic distinction
can no longer be maintained (Quine 1953), it had been generally assumed that there are thesynthetic, whose truth value is determined in the light of experience in the external world, andthe analytic, whose meaning and logical role are determined because of its own intrinsic nature,and that the elucidation of meanings and logical roles of the analytic is analysis. By specifying
the context in this way, it may be possible to clarify what ‘analysis’ means in each of fields of* This paper is based on the Japanese version printed in Bigaku 70, No. 1 (2019): 49-60, published by theJapanese Society for Aesthetics.

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KATO Takafumi

inquiry, even today. 1 What then about analytic aesthetics? It can be said that early analytic
aesthetics carried out research into the application of the conceptual analysis of early analytic
philosophy to fields of inquiry related to aesthetic experiences and fine arts. In the field of analytic
aesthetics, attempts were made, for example, to determine the definition of the concept of ‘art’.
Today, however, analytic aesthetics covers a wide range of research, including environmental
aesthetics, everyday aesthetics, and experimental aesthetics that incorporates the findings of empiricalsciences such as cognitive science. Due to its historical background of having developed in the UK
and the USA, analytic aesthetics tends to be reminiscent of aesthetics research conducted mainly in
the English-speaking world, but in fact it is difficult to characterise it positively any more.
In view of this situation, it is tempting to propose that the name ‘analytic aesthetics’ beavandoned and that it be simply called ‘aesthetics’ from now on. Nevertheless, the historicalsignificance of the analytic tradition in philosophy is firmly established, and the significance of thename ‘analytic aesthetics’, which implies that it is an aesthetics connected to this tradition, cannot
be so easily denied. This paper would like to apply to the discussion of aesthetics the doctrine of‘analytic pragmatism’ of the philosopher R. Brandom (1950-), who attempts to reinterpret the workof analytic philosophy from the standpoint of contemporary neo-prgmatism. In doing so, this paper
reconsiders the activity of analysis in aesthetics and proposes a form of analysis that can bemeaningfully carried out in aesthetics in the future. In other words, this paper is an attempt topresent a vision of analytic aesthetics under the attitude of ‘analytic pragmatist aesthetics’.

2. Anatytic Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Criticism
As mentioned above, it is difficult to characterise analytic aesthetics in the present day ingeneral, but R. Shusterman (1949-), who was a leading critic of analytic aesthetics in the 1980s,
stated the following in an article entitled ‘Analytic Aesthetics: Retrospect and Prospect.2
Analytic aesthetics saw itself fundamentally as a second-order discipline engaged in theclarification and critical refinement of the concepts of art and art criticism. It neither
presumed to offer new manifestoes about what art should be nor revolutionary criteria
about how art should be evaluated. It instead sought a more logical and systematic
account of the principles of art and criticism as actually reflected in the practice of good
critics. (Shusterman 1987: 118)

1

Various philosophers have consciously asked what is meant by ‘analysis’ in analytic philosophy; the Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy has an appendix to the section on ‘Analysis’, entitled ‘Conceptions of Analysis in the
Analytic Philosophy’. There, the analyses of Frege (F. L. G. Frege, 1848-1925), Russell, Moore and Wittgenstein (L.
Wittgenstein, 1889-1951) are described respectively, followed by ‘The Cambridge School of Analysis’, ‘Carnap [(R.
Carnap, 1891-1970)] and Logical Positivism’, ‘Oxford Linguistic Philosophy’ and ‘Contemporary Analytic Philosophy’,and presents a variety of analyses in philosophy up to the present day (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/analysis/(Retrieved 28 November 2023)).
2This paper (Shusterman 1987) was contributed as an introduction to a special issue of The Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism on analytic aesthetics. This is therefore written with the attitude of summing up analytic
aesthetics up to the time of 1987 and characterising its achievement in as general a way as possible, and in that respect
it is suitable for this paper to refer to.

From an Analytic Pragmatist

17

In short, the analytic aesthetics referred to here is an activity of a second-order inquiry, carriedout in response to artistic activity and critical practice on the ground floor, and does not propose
norms or make value judgments. Shusterman sees this situation problematic and argues that weshould rather seek ways in which analysis of past practices and concepts can be used to improve
future artistic activity and critical practice (Shusterman 1987: 121-3).3
This paper generally agrees with Shusterman’s argument, but reflecting on contemporary
aesthetics, his proposed policy shift seems to have been realised in Noël Carroll’s ‘philosophy ofcriticism’ (Carroll 2009). This is because, although the philosophy of criticism is, as Carroll
himself acknowledges, a kind of a second-order inquiry, it actually involves active claims about
values and norms. In what follows, this paper provides an overview of Carroll’s conception andthen connects this with analytic pragmatism to propose a way of seeing analysis that will remain
valid in aesthetics in the future.
The basic framework of the philosophy of criticism is characterised by two claims. (1) The
essence of criticism is ‘reasoned evaluation’ and (2) criticism should focus on the ‘success value’of a work of art rather than its ‘reception value’.
Let us start with the first claim. First, while there is an evaluative discourse on artworks,
there is also a non-evaluative discourse that describes the physical properties and historicalbackground of the works. As there are evaluative discourses and non-evaluative discourses of art,
the policy of distinguishing between criticism and other discourses on the basis of whether or notthey include this evaluation makes a certain amount of sense (Carroll 2009: 15-18). On the other
hand, a possible counterargument to the first claim is that since there is no standard of evaluationthat applies to all works of art, there is no way to justify the criticism. Carroll responds that while
there may not be general evaluation criteria common to all kinds of art, there can be generalcriteria to the extent that they provide a basis for assigning a value to a work in light of thecategory to which it belongs (Carroll 2009: 28- 29).4 There is also an argument against evaluation
being ‘reasoned’. According to this argument, evaluation is a subjective act that is emotive rather
than cognitive and is not based on objective reasons derived from cognitive facts.5 Carroll’s
response is as follows. Emotion and cognition cannot be completely separated. Rather, many
emotions (e.g. fear) are based on cognitive judgements. Therefore, even if evaluation isemotionally carried out, behind the emotion there is a cognitive process, i.e. a reasoning process

3

Thus, in this article, Shusterman argues that future analytic aesthetics should turn towards a pragmatist attitude.
In Shusterman (1992), he also proposes a ‘pragmatist aesthetics’ following Dewey's theory of art. It would be possible
for a study to question the significance of this aesthetics in relation to the neo-pragmatist thought of the time,
especially that of Rorty (1931-2007), to whom he himself frequently refers (e.g. Shusterman 1997). Nevertheless,this paper does not pursue such a direction. Rorty himself expresses a hard-line anti-representationalist and antifoundationalist attitude (Rorty 1979), so his neo-pragmatism is often regarded as an anti-analytic philosophy. This
paper proposes rather to apply Brandom’s attitude, which emphasises the continuity between analytic philosophy
and pragmatism, to the domain of aesthetics.
4
In making these claims, Carroll has in mind Kendall Walton's theory of categories of art (Walton 1970); seealso the discussion in Carroll (2009: ch.4).
5This ‘cognitive’ means that it contains a propositional judgement and that it can be true or false about its
content. Hence, cognitive facts here are supposed to correspond to facts of the world and are expressed
propositionally (e.g. ‘it is snowing’). Cognitive judgements involve propositional content and therefore involve
processes using reason, such as reasoning.

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KATO Takafumi(Carroll 2009: 29-32). In Carroll’s conception, the various (non-evaluative) tasks performed in
criticism, such as description, classification, etc., are tasks of identifying reasonably generalcriteria to refer to and explaining the reasons for evaluation. Thanks to these tasks, valuing is not
merely a subjective judgement, but an objective judgement with some normative features. This
paper would like to accept this first claim.
Let us turn to the second claim. What are the factors that make a work of art valuable? On
the one hand, there is the idea that the value of a work of art is increased by the fact that the artist
has achieved something with that work of art. The value thus increased is called ‘success value’.
On the other hand, there is the idea that the value of a work is increased by the creation of avaluable experience on the part of the recipient. The value thus increased is called ‘reception
value’. Artworks can, of course, have both of these values. However, Carroll argues that it is the
success value that should be given more weight in criticism (Carroll 2009: 52-65). Success value
is typically considered to be increased when the work achieves what the artist intended. Carroll
believes that criticism should have a generality or objectivity, and that postmodern criticism that
selfishly accords reception value to works such as Plan 9 From Outer Space and evaluates thempositively is inappropriate (Carroll 2009: 60-1). For this reason, Carroll argues, it would be more
appropriate to think that the emphasis should be on the success value that can be explained by theartist’s intention and other facts that seem objectively supportable, rather than the reception valuethat seems to depend on the subjective experience on the part of the recipient.
Since this paper attempts to link the philosophy of criticism with analytic pragmatism, it
would like to raise one concern that can be assumed on the pragmatist side. Generally speaking,pragmatists explain an object by focusing on what experience the object produces. When several
hypotheses are put forward about the object, pragmatists examine the validity of the hypotheses
in the light of experience. Applying this spirit to the case of a work of art, the value of the workof art depends on the kind of experience it generates. This seems rather compatible with the ideaof placing emphasis on reception value. Indeed, the art theory advocated by John Dewey (18591952), one of the foremost pragmatists, defined a work of art as an experience (Dewey 2005
[1934]). If this is the case, Carroll’s position, which emphasises success value over reception
value, may be in tension with pragmatism. This point is discussed again in Section 4.

3. Analytic Pragmatism
Analytic philosophy and pragmatism are often regarded as contrasting streams of thought.6
In recent days, however, there have been a number of attempts to recount the history of
Anglophone philosophy, focusing on the continuity between pragmatism and early analytic

6

One of the main reasons for this situation can be attributed to the campaign that Rorty developed from the1970s to argue for a revival of pragmatism. He characterised pragmatism and analytic philosophy as contrasting(Rorty 1979). Misak (Cheryl Misak, 1961-), a contemporary pragmatist who does not hide her dissatisfaction with
Rorty’s characterisation, states as follows. “Rorty brought it[pragmatism] back, but in a resolutely anti-analytic
version, a version despised by the ruling philosophical class. The idea is that pragmatism is set against analytic
philosophy and has suffered from challenging this wrong-deaded but domineering winner of the philosophical stakes.”(Misak 2013: 1)

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From an Analytic Pragmatist

philosophy and the close interaction that existed between the two. 7 This paper focuses on
Brandom’s analytic pragmatism, which attempts to salvage the common project of analytic
philosophy and pragmatism (Brandom 2008).
First, Brandom characterises analytic philosophy as follows. “I [Brandom] think of analytic
philosophy as having as its center a concern with semantic relations between what I will call‘vocabularies’ ”(Brandom 2008: 1). Vocabularies refer here to the various kinds of language usedin different discursive spaces. In early analytic philosophy, the semantic properties of certain
expressions of natural language (e.g. modal expressions such as possibility) were explained bydescriptive language structured primarily on the basis of formal logic, and explanations in suchlanguage were typically considered to correspond to ‘analysis’.
Pragmatism, on the other hand, focuses on use rather than meaning. In other words, it shifts
philosophical concern from semantics to pragmatics. In light of this, Brandom proposes to extend
the concept of ‘analysis’ to focus on the relationship between use and meaning, i.e. between
practice or practical ablilities and vocabularies. In doing so, he introduces two kinds of relation.
[1] Practice-vocabulary (PV) sufficiency: the relation established “when engaging in a specified
set of practices or exercising a specified set of abilities is sufficient for someone to count as
deploying a specified vocabulary”(Brandom 2008: 9).
[2] Vocabulary-practice (VP) sufficiency: “the relation that holds between a vocabulary and a setof practices-or-abilities when that vocabulary is sufficient to specify those practices-orabilities”(Brandom 2008: 9).

V
Composition of 1 and 2(VV-relation)
1: PV-sufficiency

PVʼ
2: VP-sufficiency

Fig.1 Pragmatic metavocabulary (based on Brandom 2008: 11)

7

In addition to Brandom, it is worth mentioning Misak as a contemporary prgmatist who would take a line thatswings back from the hard-line anti-analytic attitude displayed by Rorty. Misak points out that the line of pragmatismfrom C. S. Peirce (1839-1914) to C. I. Lewis (1883-1964) and Quine is still viable in contemporary analytic
philosophy, and keeps a certain distance from Rorty’s neo-pragmatism (Misak 2013).

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KATO Takafumi

With these meaning-use relations, relations between vocabularies can be represented. If V’
is a vocabulary sufficient to specify a set of practices-or-ablities P sufficient to deploy a
vocabulary V, then the relationship between V and V’ can be represented as in the diagram above(Fig.1). As shown in the figure, the relation between vocabularies (VV-relation) can be
represented by the composition of the PV-sufficiency and VP-sufficiency. Brandom states thatwhen the relations shown in the figure are established, “V’ is a pragmatic metavocabulary forV”(Brandom 2008: 10).
This scheme of explaining the relation between vocabularies via the pragmatic relations ofPV-sufficiency and VP-sufficiency is the most basic form of the theory proposed by Brandom as
analytic pragmatism. To generalise, analytic pragmatism is an idea that, in explaining V, focuses
first of all on the practices-or-abilities which deploying V is a matter of engaging in or exercising.
Semantic analysis, which was the aim of early analytic philosophy, attempted to explain themeaning of particular expressions of natural language by means of a language centred on formal
logic. This can also be regarded as a kind of explanation of the relation between vocabularies.
However, what Brandom wants to emphasise by this scheme is that, via pragmatic relations, it
becomes possible to conceive of a pragmatic metavocabulary for the vocabulary V to be analysed,
which may be different from metavocabularies referred to in traditional analytic philosophy (e.g.
formal language, language of physical science, language of empirical description, etc.) In otherwords, the work of traditional analytic philosophy can be seen as part of the consequence ofanalytic pragmatism to find out pragmatic metavocabularies. The (semantic) metavocabularies
that have been useful in traditional analytic philosophy will continue to play an important role infields such as logic and experimental science. At the same time, on the other hand, in theframework of analytic pragmatism, pragmatic metavocabularies have the advantage of being able
to envisage the way in which analysis should be conducted when the object can be more
effectively represented.
This paper proposes to see Carroll’s philosophy of criticism as an activity of analysis in thisbroad sense, or in other words, of conceiving a pragmatic metavocabulary. To simplify theargument, let us suppose that we are, in practice, sufficiently deploying a critical language if weare carrying out ‘reasoned evaluation’.8 Then the language used in criticism corresponds to V,and ‘reasoned evaluation’ to P. The next task expected in ‘analysis’ in the sense of Brandom is
to elaborate a vocabulary sufficient for VP-relation to identify the practice of ‘reasoned
evaluation’. While ‘reasoned evaluation’ consists in effect of ‘reasoning’ and ‘evaluation’, theargument developed in the chapter 3 of Carroll (2009), i.e. the argument to identify theconsequences of each task of description, categorisation and contextualisation, is an attempt toidentify the practice of ‘reasoning’. The discussion in the chapter 4 of Carroll (2009) attempts to
identify the practice of ‘evaluation’. In this light, a language that states a evaluation which
involves, for example, clarifying the classification of the artwork, adequately describing therelevant features, and stating an interpretation of the work in light of the historical context in

8

In this paper, this is only posited for convenience. As discussed in Section 5 of this paper, what practices andabilities are considered to be involved in the analysis is fallible and plastic, and here the norms to which the analysts
are committed at the start of the analysis should also be taken into account.

From an Analytic Pragmatist

21

which it is set, corresponds to V’. The language V used in criticism is thus described by thepragmatic metavocabulary V’.
This paper would like to suggest that Carroll’s philosophy of criticism can thus be seen as
an application of analytic pragmatism. The idea behind analytic pragmatism is that ‘the practices
of making claims and giving and asking for reasons’ (Brandom 2008: 43) are at the heart oflanguage practice, and from this position Brandom constructs his theory of inferentialism. The
practice of ‘reasoned evalation’, on which the philosophy of criticism focuses, corresponds
precisely to the practice of giving and asking for reasons. Furthermore, by stating that “normative
vocabulary codifying rules of inference is a pragmatic metavocabulary for modal vocabulary”(Brandom 2008: 101), Brandom proposes that modal expressions, traditionally seen as a subjectof representative semantic analysis, are explained via pragmatics as involving norms about
reasoning theory, and proposes to account for them via pragmatics. This way of explaination also
accords with a philosophy of criticism that explains critical practice as a normative practice ofevaluation.9

4. The Pragmatist Concept of Experience
What would be the effect of reinterpreting the philosophy of criticism under the scheme ofanalytic pragmatism as described above? The discussion in the previous section focuses on theargument in the philosophy of criticism that the essence of criticism is ‘reasoned evaluation’. On
the other hand, as discussed in Section 2, the philosophy of criticism includes the argument thatsuccess value should be more important than reception value. This paper focuses on the
pragmatist concept of experience, which Brandom embraces, and offers a different view from
Carroll’s on the latter point. This view, however, does not undermine Carroll’s position. Rather,by adopting this view and the scheme of analytic pragmatism, the philosophy of criticism comesto provide a good example of what analysis could be in the future. In the following two sections,the positive claims of this paper are presented.
Brandom suggests that pragmatism, which was established in New England around 1900,
can be regarded as the second Enlightenment (Brandom 2011: ch.1). According to his argument,
like the Enlightenment movement promoted in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, classicalpragmatism considers reason to be the essential human capacity. These pragmatists consider thatreason is “to be understood on the model provided by the form of understanding distinctive of
the natural sciences”(Brandom 2011: 36). However, the European Enlightenment andpragmatism have different images of natural sciences in mind. The former took Newtonian
physics as its paradigm of understanding, whereas the latter was based on Darwinian evolutionary
theory and statistics. Evolutionary theory led pragmatists to believe that the capacity of reason
establishes principles from situation-specific practices, just as organisms establish adaptive traits
through natural selection in their environment. Statistics also enabled pragmatists to understandreason as the capacity not only to make deductions with no exceptions, but also to account for the
probability of events and to generate order out of chaos. Thus, according to Brandom, the ““calm9These ideas of Brandom referred to in this paragraph follow those of Sellars (W. Sellars, 1912-1989).

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KATO Takafumi

realm of laws” of the first Enlightenment becomes for the second a dynamic population of various
habits” (Brandom 2011: 37).
The old and new Enlightenment philosophies are similar in that they both pursue knowledge
based on experience, and both are a kind of empiricism. However, the concept of experience heldby each of them is different. Brandom explains as follows.
The older empiricism thought of the unit of experience as self-contained, self-intimating
events: episodes that constitute knowings just in virtue of their brute occurrence. [...] By
contrast to this notion of experience as Erlebnis, the pragmatists (having learned thelesson from Hegel) conceive experience as Erfahrung. For them the unit of experience isa test-operate-test-exit cycle of perception, action, and further perception of the results of
the action. On this model, experience is not an input to the process of learning. Experienceis the process of learning: the statistical emergence by selection of behavioral variants
that survive and become habits insofar as they are, in company with their fellows,
adaptive in the environments in which they are successively and successfully exercised.
(Brandom 2011: 39)
In other words, in pragmatism, experience is seen as a series of learning processes that establish
adaptive habits, rather than a single event or sensory input that forms the basis of knowledge.
With this concept of experience in mind, let us look back at the discussion of success value
and reception value. First, it is no longer necessary to sustain the dichotomy of success value andreception value. For example, when an artwork is successful because it successfully realises theartist’s intentions, pragmatists can consider that behind this there may be a series of experiences
as a process of learning, in which the artist, through trial and error, has found a form of the workthat appropriately demonstrates her agency. Furthermore, the experience on the part of therecipient is not simply the experience of having some impression or emotion evoked by the work.
It can be seen as a kind of learning process in which the recipient, through engaging with thework, reflects on the artist’s agency and makes adaptive modifications to her own agency. Thus,
adopting the pragmatist concept of experience can provide a consistent basis for evaluation thatencompasses success value and reception value, with the attitude of valuing experience as aprocess of adaptation.10
Here, each of success value and reception value can be seen as one aspect of the experienceof establishing adaptive habits of practice. Both the artist’s and the recipient’s experience canthen be recognised as having an aspect of success value in the establishment of successful practiceand therefore an aspect of reception value in gaining valuable experience. In other words, theproposal of this paper is to abolish the dichotomy between success value based on thework/artist’s side and reception value based on the recipient’s side, and to start to discuss the
success value and reception value of experience in the pragmatist sense. However, as will be

10Various levels of agency are assumed in the interaction between artists and recipients. This paper has in mind
the chain of agency described by Gell (A. Gell, 1945-1997) (Gell 1998). Note that Carroll also refers to Gell whenmentioning agency (Carroll 2009: ch.2, n.3).

From an Analytic Pragmatist

23

discussed in the next section, even after this way of discussion of success value and reception
value is accepted, it is possible to take the position that success value should still be more
important than reception value. In this sense, this paper does not reject Carroll’s position.
The adoption of the pragmatist concept of experience in the philosophy of criticism brings
about one major advantage. The emphasis on the success value on the part of the work/artist may
lead to the privileging of the artist’s intentions. In other words, it is easy to come to the conclusionthat critics should evaluate with reference to the artist’s intentions which have already been
identified. However, for example, an artist may only become aware of the expressive intent of
her work after it has been exhibited and a review for the work has been published. This meansthat the intervention of criticism has changed the artist’s self-description about the work and she
has found new value in her work, or in other words, value has been created beyond the artist’s
original intention. Here, the positive significance of the criticism is recognised, which could not
be seen from the standpoint of assigning value on the basis of the artist’s intentions. The
pragmatist concept of experience is useful in depicting this kind of significance of criticism. In
this instance, both the artist and the critic are considered to be gaining experience as a learning
process of establishing an appropriate valuing practice for the work in question. By considering
criticism as valuing these experience, criticism comes to be able to take into account the value
emergence of the interaction between the artist and the critic.11
At the same time, the concern Carroll feels when he emphasises on success values rather
than reception values can be responded to a certain extent. Carroll’s concern was that reception
value is unlikely to obtain objectivity and generality, and therefore likely to lead to arbitrary
criticism. The pragmatist concept of experience, given its evolutionary conception, includes not
only the process of conscious action of organisms, but also the environment surrounding theorganisms as the subject builds up adaptive habits. Common adaptive habits are likely to beestablished between organisms that share to some extent the environment. Paraphrasing this in
the context of art criticism, agents such as artists, critics and recipients share a discursive space
related to art criticism, in which common adaptive habits are established in the form of values
and norms. In this sense, values based on experience, in the pragmatist sense, may have
objectivity and generality. In the light of these norms, it becomes possible to say that a certain
criticism is inappropriate. In other words, it becomes possible to have a non-arbitrary discussion
about the appropriateness of a criticism between agents who share an art world related to theartwork in question.

11

However, it might be questioned whether this is an example of the artist realising her own intentions increating the work, rather than the creation of new value, even if this is revealed by the criticism, and whether thework has success value because those intentions have been achieved. In fact, Carroll defends a moderateintentionalism, taking the position that anything other than the artist’s preconceived intentions can be recognised as
the artist’s intentions (Carroll: 145-6). This paper acknowledges that such an understanding of intention is possible.
However, this paper takes the position that such intentions of the artist can exist only because of the artist’s experienceof the process of coming into contact with criticism and learning appropriate self-description. In other words, only
after accepting the idea of the success value of experience, can the success value of the work in this instance beclaimed. Therefore, positive reasons for accepting the pragmatist concept of experience can be pointed out here.

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KATO Takafumi

5. Analytic Pragmatism and Normative Factors
Even after accepting the above arguments, it is possible to argue, as Carroll does, that weshould continue to focus on success value. Adopting the pragmatist concept of experience may
change the way we see the issues about success value and reception value, but it is a different
matter to re-question the norm of valuing. This paper would like to emphasise that it is precisely
with regard to this questioning of norms that the picture of analytic pragmatism becomes viable.
As above mentioned, this paper accepts Carroll’s argument that the essence of criticism isreasoned evaluaion. This means that this paper accepts the PV-sufficiency which states that if weengage in the practice of ‘reasoned evaluation’, we are deploying the language of criticism.
However, the sufficiency of this PV-relation is not always confirmed on the basis of formal logic.
It can also be a tentatively but rationally assumed sufficiency based on conventional criticalpractice. According to Carroll’s argument, it can be accepted as reasonable to make the inclusionof evaluative requirement of the discursive practice of criticism, since some discourses on art
include evaluation and some do not. The fact that evauation is ‘reasoned’ is also a non-negotiable
point for Carroll, who believes that criticism should be a general and objective practice in which
the workings of reason operate. This paper also accepts these points and posits a tentative PVsufficiency between ‘reasoned evalation’ and the language of criticism.
However, depending on what is the object of analysis, it may be the case that the artist’s
intentions can be clearly identified and that it may be appropriate to refer to the degree to whichthese intentions are successful as a criterion for evaluation. In this case, the range of practices
corresponding to P in the diagram would be narrower, and ‘reasoned evaluation’ that focuses onwhether the artist’s intentions are successful would be at the heart of P. The norm that the successvalue based on the success or failure of the artist’s intention should be the central basis forevaluation is thought to be at work behind these practices.
Importantly, in analytic pragmatism, attention is paid to the pragmatic dimension ofpractices and abilities as a medium for analysing the object, but these practices and abilities havebeen established through previous adaptive learning processes and therefore carry withthemselves some kind of normative factors. In other words, when we carry out this analysis andfocus on practices and abilities, we become aware of and come to disclose to fellows what norms
we are committed to. Analytic pragmatism therefore creates an opportunity for those engaged in
the analysis to disclose the norms they have implicitly accepted. In analytic pragmatism, eachinquirer carries out the analysis after undertaking a commitment to his or her own norms. Even
those who engage in analyses in the same subject matter, for example, the critical discourse of anart genre, may have different norms, and they disclose these norms to each other in the pursuit ofa better analysis. It thus becomes possible to realise that the practices and abilities one has been
focusing on in analysis have been biased, and to modify the norms one has assumed. In this way,
analytic pragmatism suggests an attitude of analysis in which the community of inquirers pursues
a better analysis by bringing their own norms and, with a spirit of fallibilism, focusing on whatpractices and abilities provide an appropriate metavocabulary for the analysis. This paper would
propose that it is such analysis that aesthetics should continue to pursue in the future.
Would such a proposal be too moderate? In a sense, this paper only presents a decent pictureFrom an Analytic Pragmatist25

of a community of inquirers. However, it can at least be said that we must be particularly awareof the situation of analytic aesthetics, which is becoming more and more inclusive of anincreasingly diverse range of inquiries. Today, a great variety of analyses are conducted under
the name of analytic aesthetics, each of which brings with it a variety of norms. For this reason,
analytic aesthetics, while continuing the tradition of analytic philosophy, is no more able thananalytic philosophy to make a systematic characterisation of the analyses it performs. Herein lies
the significance of applying analytic pragmatism to aesthetics. The scheme of analytic
pragmatism can be used as a framework for scholars of analytic aesthetics to self-describe theanalyses they are conducting. In other words, by describing the various analyses currently being
conducted, what practices and abilities they focus on, what metavocabularies they manage toprovide, and what norms they undertake, each analysis can be characterised within the same
framework. In this way, a basis for communication between various kinds of scholars ofaesthetics can be acquired.
According to Brandom’s characterisation mentioned in Section 3, analytic philosophy has
been concerned with the semantic relations between vocabularies. In other words, analysis there
is an account of VV-relations, which typically involves describing facts about the semantic
properties of particular expressions of natural language in reductive metavocabularies. There, thelanguage of formal logic and the language of the physical sciences are also used as central
semantic metavocabularies. Brandom’s proposal, however, is to extend the very notion ofanalysis by bringing a pragmatic metavocabulary to the VV-relations that analytic philosophy
had in mind. It is beyond the scope of this paper to discuss the consequences of such a proposal
for analytic philosophy, but by applying it to analytic aesthetics, the following can be said. By
extending the notion of analysis in a pragmatic way, it is possible to revitalise the notion ofanalysis, which has been losing substance, in an adaptive way to the increasingly diverse realities
of analytic aesthetics. It can also provide a basis for plausible communication within thecommunity of inquirers of analytic aesthetics.12

6. Conclusion
This paper proposes a way of analysis that analytic aesthetics should continue to follow in
the future, by seeing Carroll’s philosophy of criticism as an application of analytic pragmatism.
The positive claims of this paper can be summarised in two points. First, by accepting thepragmatist concept of experience, success value and reception value can be seen as two aspectsof the value of experience, each of which is recognised by both artists and recipients. Thus, it can
now be taken into account that the intervention of criticism can result in value creation beyond
the artists’ intentions. However, depending on the context, a position that emphasises the successvalue of the work, such as Carroll’s, is also acceptable. Second, analytic pragmatism provides an
12

While there is no space here to elaborate on the details of this community of inquirers, or how it might
adaptively develop, this paper agrees with the proposal of Haskins (2011) which views aesthetics as an intellectual
network. According to this proposal, aesthetic inquiry is about promoting the self-organisation of holisticcollaborative networks, and the evolutionary ideas of pragmatism to which this paper refers are in line with suchideas.

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KATO Takafumi

opportunity to draw attention to the normative dimension of inquiry. In a community of inquiry,
each participant brings his or her own norms from the background of the practices he or she hasdeveloped, and each discloses those norms to each other, while welcoming their modification. In
this way, the community of inquiry in analytic aesthetics is open to derive better norms and to
explore better analyses, in that they can even work together with others whose background norms
differ from their own ones at the start of the inquiry.
Finally, this paper would like to add a point of view that takes a step back from the previous
discussion. The proposals in this paper take on Brandom’s proposal to rethink the historicalactivity of analytic philosophy in a reflexive way. This paper, therefore, follows the attitude ofanalytic philosophy, whose new development is suggested by Brandom, and suggests toreinterpret it as a proposal for aesthetics. In this sense, this paper makes a claim for an analytic
aesthetics in line with the historical development of the analytic tradition. If we accept this claim,
the various exploratory activities of analytic aesthetics can be considered as the activities ofanalytic aesthetics that perform analyses proposed by the scheme of analytic pragmatism. The
philosophy of criticism discussed in this paper can also be seen as one of the activities of analytic
aesthetics, which, independently of Carroll’s intentions, continues the analytic tradition in thissense. This paper expects that in the future, in addition to the philosophy of criticism, various
other activities of analytic aesthetics, such as empirical aesthetics, will utilise the scheme ofanalytic pragmatism and improve self-description of the analysis they perform.

Acknowledgement
This paper was supported by JSPS Fellowships (16J04078 and 18K12181).
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