What’s wrong with Aesthetic Empiricism. An experimentalstudy

Résumé En

According to Aesthetic Empiricism, only the features of artworks that are accessible by sensory perception can be aesthetically relevant. In other words, aesthetic properties supervene on perceptual properties. Although commonly accepted in early analytic aesthetics, Aesthetic Empiricism has been the target of a number of thought experiments purporting to show that perceptually indiscernible artworks may differ aesthetically. In particular, this literature exploits three kinds of differences among perceptually indiscernible artworks that may account for aesthetic differences: categorical (relative to Waltonian categories of art), provenantial (relative to the historical circumstances of production), or generative (relative to means of production). Like in all philosophical thought experiments, the reliability of the elicited intuitions remains an empirical question that we address here with the methods of experimental philosophy. We report a study conducted to see whether the intuitions elicited by anti-empiricist thought experiments are robust and, in particular, which of the alternative kind of properties (categorial, provenantial, and generative) are more suited to be included in the base of a valid aesthetic supervenience thesis (if any). Our results show overall that anti-empiricist intuitions are much less robust than previously believed, particularly when aesthetic evaluations are carefully distinguished from judgments of artistic value.