The experiment runs counter to two old saws: familarity breeds contempt,
and people love mystery in art. However, these two sayings are applied
primarily to the people involved in the arts, not to the masses.
The aesthetic tradition generally recognizes that training is essential
to being able to make aesthetic judgments. The average person is not
competent to determine which of two musical performances sounds better.
The experiment appears not to take this into account.
The proper response to "which do you like better" is "like better for/as
what?"
The experiment is flawed if it assumes that everyone understood the
question the same way, if it assumes that trained people in the arts will
respond the same way untrained people will, and if it assumes a number of
other variables as constants. Now, maybe it did not do this, this is just
a response to what was reported.
The point, though, is that these differences are germane to the question
of aesthetic value, if not to "which one do you like better for any
reason at all and assuming your ability to make aesthetically relevant
perceptual distinctions has not been enhanced by training."
And of course I do not think "which do you like" has anything to do with
aesthetic value, though everything to do with what you like. But were the
question put differently, it could raise the same possibility for
aesthetic value as for being liked, or so it seems.
The question is, if aesthetic judgments, whatever they really are about,
were shown to correlate 100% with the presence somewhere of some
non-aesthetically relevant property or relation, outside or inside of us
or both, what would this show?
Perhaps it would show that people who think they are judgeing something
for its aesthetic value actually not doing this, but are instead behaving
as they are in virtue of something about the world (or them) that has
nothing to do with aesthetics. Thus it might turn out that humans cannot
make aesthetic judgements. This would, in turn, call into queston our
notion of aesthetic value.
- George
>Well, that's a subtle point, and I'm not sure it's germane. Your average
>person would wonder why you were splitting between which they preferred
>and which they thought looked better. "Why would I prefer it if I didn't
>think it 'looked better'?"
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