A fitness model of evaluation

Debates about aesthetic evaluation often focus the evaluation of butcher knives: a butcher knife on the nature of evaluative standards. According is good insofar as is serves its purpose-cutto "generalists" such as Monroe Beardsley, Frank ting-and the property of being sharp makes it Sibley, and George Dickie, there are general better; hence a butcher knife is better insofar as standards about what makes an artwork good, it is sharp. This evaluative criterion is general, and any artwork that satisfies these standards is because sharpness is always a virtue for all better insofar as it does so. According to their butcher knives. "If a certain degree of sharpness "particularist" critics, on the other hand, there is a merit in knives, then to say that a knife has are no general standards: what makes an artthat degree of sharpness must always be a reawork good in one case may or may not make it son to support the conclusion that it is good, and good in the next. Every artwork, therefore, is to it must apply to all knives of the relevant sort."1 be judged on unique grounds. Neither approach Similarly, Beardsley argues, an artwork is good is satisfactory, however. There do not seem to to the extent it produces the right kind of be any good candidates for a truly general aesthetic experience. There are, he claims, three evaluative standard, but if evaluation is irreducprimary properties of artwork-unity, complexibly particular, it is hard to see how any standity, and intensity-that have the efficacy to proards at all are being applied. Evaluation would duce the right kind of aesthetic experience. seemingly be subjective and arbitrary. My claim These properties are therefore always "goodhere is that there is a third, and better, way to making" features: an artwork is proportionally conceive of evaluative standards-in terms of better if it possesses more "unity," "complexfitness. I will introduce this approach by ity," or "intensity," and proportionally worse to analogy with evolutionary fitness, which will the degree it lacks these properties. make clear, first, why standard generalist One widely recognized problem with approaches are inadequate, and, second, how Beardsley's view is that the features we typicgeneral contextual evaluative standards are ally cite as good-making do not have even the possible. Most significantly, by adopting the presumption of generality. Colin Lyas explains: fitness model we are better able to understand, clarify, and critically assess our actual evaluThe kinds of reasons we give for saying that a particuative practices. lar work is good seem not to have the required kind of generality. Take, for example, humour. It is tempting to think that one might say, "The humour contribI. GENERALIST AND PARTICULARIST APPROACHES uted to the goodness of this work," and thus to make the presence of humour a reason for thinking there is Generalist approaches to evaluation typically something good about the work that contains it. rely on a basic evaluative schema something Unfortunately the very humour that makes one work like: "Property P makes artwork A better insobetter may make another worse. The kind of humour far as A has P." Monroe Beardsley bases his that occurs in the porter scene in Macbeth, immediaccount on such a schema. According to ately after the death of Duncan, is held, controverBeardsley, the evaluation of art is analogous to sially perhaps, to mar that play.2