Realism, Supervenience, and Irresolvable Aesthetic Disputes

Three familiar and widely endorsed aesthetic theses get us into trouble, I will argue here; trouble, at least if we desire to avoid subjectivism regarding the ascription of aesthetic properties. Some of us have been trying to have our cake and eat it too, and the only plausible resolution of the problem puts us on a notably different diet whose palatability needs testing. The three theses are: (1) the relational analysis of aesthetic properties, (2) the supervenience of aesthetic properties upon purely descriptive, nonaesthetic properties, and (3) the existence of irresolvable disputes, even among experts, concerning the aesthetic features of artworks. The relational analysis of aesthetic properties claims that a work's having an aesthetic property, F, such as grace, power, or starkness, is for it to have some set of (other) features and relations which makes the work evoke in some relevant class of perceivers or critics certain responses and judgments, including the judgment that it is appropriate to call the work F. Difficult details aside, the plausibility of viewing at least many aesthetic properties as higher order relational properties connecting the evaluative responses of a class of standard or ideal perceivers to lower level properties and relations of the work has long been acknowledged, especially in the empiricist tradition of aesthetics. Supervenience has a shorter (though hardly less BritishI) history. It is usually construed as a metaphysical dependency relation between two sets of properties, but it also has obvious epistemological implications for the rational ascription of the properties that supervene on the "base" set. The idea can be informally stated as, "No difference in supervenient properties without a difference in base properties." More clearly, and specifically about aesthetic properties, we can say that if the aesthetic properties of a work supervene on sets of base properties, then it is impossible that the work should have been different in its aesthetic properties without having been different in some of its base properties.2 It could also be said, following Simon Blackburn,3 that supervenience amounts to a ban on "mixed" aesthetic worlds, worlds in which some objects with identical base properties have F while others do not. Supervenience has been thought by many writers to be importantly related to the logic of aesthetic justification, since it both explains why certain properties of works are cited in defense of one's aesthetic ascriptions and also seems to lend metaphysical respectability to aesthetic properties, much in the way that mental or moral properties seem less occult if tied by supervenience to physical properties of various sorts. The third thesis is one that experience indicates is difficult to deny. Among the many and variously caused types of aesthetic disagreements, there are some at least which cannot be explained by citing a lack of attention, care, knowledge, sensitivity, openness, or taste on the part of at least one of the disputants. Some disagreements are fully informed but just as fully irresolvable, as when two expert critics disagree whether a given painting is playful or merely trite, daring in its color treatments or just gaudy, serious or only self-absorbed, and so forth. Often such disputes arise because there is not complete agreement between the disputants over values, or more subtly, because they "weight" mutually recognized values somewhat differently. In short, their tastes, even if reasonably congruent, are not identical. I am confident that I am not alone in finding these claims plausible, and I also confess to rea-