This is a post by Filippo Contesi (University of Milan), Enrico Terrone (University of Genoa), Marta Campdelacreu (University of Barcelona) and Genoveva Martí (ICREA/University of Barcelona).
If we had a penny for every time we hear the saying “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”… Since at least the 18th century, philosophers and common people alike have pondered the question of whether or not the proverb is true.
Some have answered one way, others the other. However, philosophers have typically agreed that, in general, people often claim that the proverb is true and that our aesthetic preferences are indeed a matter of individual or subjective taste. Moreover, as suggested by the use of the (gustatory) taste metaphor to talk about aesthetic matters, there appears to be something distinctly subjective to aesthetic experience. On the other hand, philosophers also typically agree that people often also do things that suggest they do not really believe all tastes are equally good. For instance, we read what film critics say before deciding what to see at the cinema, or we argue about who is the best Hispanophone novelist of our generation by trying to provide objective (or at least intersubjective) reasons. Reconciling these subjective and objective intuitions about aesthetic matters is a key question for the aesthetics scholar. Indeed, a prominent contemporary philosopher deems it as the “Big Question in aesthetics”.
An international group of scholars, led by Florian Cova, have recently questioned the traditional philosophical consensus about aesthetic matters. They suggest that, by getting up of their proverbial armchair and using more rigorous experimental methods instead, philosophers would have to accept that, generally speaking, people only ever consider aesthetic judgements as subjective. We are doubtful.
In their experimental study, Cova et al. tested 2,392 participants in nineteen countries across four continents. The participants were invited to describe something they find very beautiful and imagine someone disagreeing with them. Then they were asked to choose one among the following three options, specifying how certain they were of their choice:
1. One of you is correct while the other is not.
2. Both of you are correct.
3. Neither is correct. It makes no sense to talk about correctness in this situation.
The results show that an underwhelming number of people (7%) chose option 1. Since the endorsement of subjectivism about aesthetic judgements is very robust, the authors of the study conclude that the traditionally postulated tension between subjective and objective intuitions about aesthetic matters seen above does not exist.
In a recent paper, we point out that, in the experiment, participants are asked to choose among competing explicit beliefs about aesthetic judgements. However, the aesthetics literature on the tension has not considered explicit beliefs in intersubjective validity as the main evidence for its existence. Instead, the problem that aestheticians consider most puzzling is that people declare that they agree with a statement such as ‘de gustibus non est disputandum’, and then they display behaviour that is not in line with what they explicitly endorsed.
Thus, the experiment does not challenge the tension as it is commonly understood within the aesthetics tradition. Still, the experiment has two residual merits. First, it confirms one half of what aestheticians had assumed, that is, that folks’ explicit beliefs are generally subjectivist (although the second half of aestheticians’ predictions, folks’ commitment to objectivism, remains untested). Moreover, the test highlights the need for greater clarity on the precise characterization of the tension. Ultimately, we argue, this is not to be understood as holding between explicit beliefs in subjectivism and explicit beliefs in objectivism, but rather between the endorsement of subjectivism that explicitly shows up in beliefs and avowals and the commitment to objectivism that tends to remain implicit in behaviour.
The problem of taste, as the aesthetics tradition has framed it, is not that some people say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder whereas others say that it should be in everyone’s eyes. Rather, the problem is that people say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder but then they behave as if it should be in everyone’s eyes. This problem, which is the real problem of taste, is left untouched by Cova et al.’s experiment.
To read more about this, check out our article, “The Problem of Taste to the Experimental Test” which appeared this year in Analysis. The preprint version of the article can be freely accessed here.
Filippo Contesi is a cross-disciplinary philosopher of art, language and mind, currently a Research Fellow at the University of Milan, working in the PhilTech Research Center for the Philosophy of Technology, as well as a Senior Member of the LOGOS Research Group in Analytic Philosophy. He writes on various issues in empirically informed philosophy of affects, aesthetics, propaganda and linguistic diversity in philosophy.
Enrico Terrone is Professor of Aesthetics at University of Genoa and Principal Investigator of the European Research Council (ERC) project “The Philosophy of Experiential Artifacts”. His current research concerns the relationship between art and technology.
Marta Campdelacreu is an Associate Professor (Professora Agregada) at the University of Barcelona. Her main research interests are in metaphysics (broadly understood), metametaphysics and experimental philosophy.
Genoveva Martí is ICREA Research Professor at the University of Barcelona. She specializes in the philosophy of language, with a focus on the theory of reference, the semantics of general terms and the role of experimental philosophy in the theory of meaning.
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