Today is I just finished Chapter 2 of Kukla and Lance's excellent Yo! and Lo!, and while I agree with all of the really cool important philosophical stuff (hope to do a post later this week), the early example from Kant's third critique made me think of a couple of weird aesthetic issues. Kukla and Lance spiel Kant's particularism in the following very helpful way:
The point here is not that no generally valid rules can predict with perfect accuracy which objects will be beautiful, though this is likely to be true too, but that even if we had such rules, inferring the beauty of an object on their basis wouldn't count as an aesthetic judgment of taste at all-what it is to make an aesthetic judgment is to aesthetically respond to a concrete, sensuous encounter with an object (43).
Then Lance and Kukla are able to represent the main dilemma Kant raises in the first half of the third critique quite beautifully in this manner:
Although they [judgments of taste] cannot pass on universal reassertion licenses, they make a universal demand upon others to judge for themselves as I judge should they encounter the same object. In other words, my singular judgment of taste has an agent-neutral output, and it makes the normative claim that others are in error if they disagree with me, thereby 'laying claim' to universal agreement. Judgments of taste are not objective truth-claims, because of the agent-relativity of their input, but they have, as Kant puts it, subjective universal validity. Kantian judgments of taste are structurally agent-neutral in the validity they claim, even as they are structurally agent-relative in their entitlement.
So the "there's no disputing matters of taste" part of the dialectic is handled by having the input be agent relative in the strong Yo! sense, and the other part by the fact that we demand that others have the same experiences, which is characteristic of the agent neutrality of the output of Yo! type judgments.
Though Kukla and Lance are just using the discussion to introduce a certain pragmatic category, and not trying to defend any controversial aesthetic claims, I think a couple of interesting aesthetic issues do arise when we look at a stereotypical way that experience and propositional judgment can come apart with aesthetic judgments.
In fact I think it's quite normal for moral norms to trump aesthetic norms when we are considering whether we ought to have certain kinds of experiences. I think most of us have had this kind of experience with respect to humor, where we find something to be hilarious but also don't think we should be having the experience of finding it to be hilarious.
A certain kind of puritanical outlook would explain away this issue by just saying that the immorality of experiencing some aestheticly positive somehow a priori entails that the aesthetic quality is not in fact there (denying that "Belsen Was a Gas" rocks). And a certain kind of hyper-antipuritanism makes the opposite error, taking the presence of positive aesthetic qualities to automatically grant a moral license to enjoy them (so what if it's genuinely morally nihilistic, it rocks!). Both end up denying that there can be genuinely immoral art, and both types can lead to bad judgments about censorship (the archetypal puritan wants to dumb down all culture to the level of what is deemed appropriate for children, and the archetypal anti-puritan can't see any even prima facie reason in making some works of art unavailable to children).
I'm too early in the book to know if there's any real purchase with this set of aesthetic issues and Kukla and Lance's full program. The null hypothesis at this point would be just that judgments of taste operate both as observatives and declaratives in Kukla and Lance's sense. But there might be a deeper point about how in some cases the distinction between judging experience and judged content arises out of contradictory norms governing the appropriateness of experiencing the judging acts (historically some like Russell and Alberto Coffa, if I remember right, accuse Kant of equivocating on the distinction between experience and content when he discusses judgment, while Brandom goes all the way on the other side and actually claims that Kant discovered the distinction and actually used it to make the Frege-Geach argument against expressivism). Or, pace the possible deeper point, the fact that that the norms are systematically different (aesthetic versus moral) may be part of explaining away the appearance of a possible problem.
Here's one more thing though. When we take some sentence X, and surround it with "It's true that X, but. . ." and then add some qualification, the truth predicate is not merely working anaphorically, but rather helps to provide a warning that some expected inference from X is going to be denied. I don't think it's too weird to describe the type of cases considered above the phrase "it's true that" works as a function to distance the speaker from the claim that the sentence is an observative in her own mouth, even as she endorses the corresponding declarative, e.g. "It's true that Frank Sinatra is a great singer, but he's not my cup of tea." So maybe in addition to its anaphoric function, the truth predicate works as a kind of observative cancellation mechanism for lexical strings that could function either as observatives or declaratives. With respect to judgments of taste in particular, this maybe allows the speaker to secure some things by implicature. On the other hand this might just have more to do with the pragmatics of conjunctions, but even there there I'd bet there are some generalizations involving the observative/declarative distinction [again, I only just finished Chapter 2; so this might either be fully investigated later in the book, or on the other hand it might not hold up to scrutiny when one learns the full theory].
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