Year: 2016
Type: dissertation
Abstract: I aim to give an original account of how we should respond to disagreement about beauty. The recent debate about ‘peer disagreement’ in epistemology offers two rough positions for how to respond when a peer disagrees: 1) remain ‘steadfast,’ maintaining confidence in my belief due to the fact that, from my first person perspective, I take her to be mistaken, and 2) be ‘conciliatory,’ revising confidence in my belief if I find no reason to think I am more likely to be right from a third personal step back. I argue that neither of these options captures what we need for the case of beauty. What has not yet been considered is that imagining the first person perspective of another may be important for responding rationally to disagreement, and may give disagreement some other kind of epistemic significance than simply lowering or maintaining confidence in one’s judgment. First, following Kant, I argue that the first person has special importance for judging beauty; we want to judge a thing’s beauty for ourselves, and we want others to come to agree with us on the basis of their own experience. In that case, stepping back to the third person would remove us from the arena wherein we could find the kind of agreement we are looking for. This supports a ‘steadfast’ response to disagreement, but that alone is not enough. Judgments of beauty are made in the plural first person, a perspective that speaks for everyone in voicing my own pleasure. That means others are always relevant as first person perspectives who ought to feel and judge in community with me. I am under some rational pressure to help them see what they are missing when we disagree, and I will argue that this requires an imaginative effort to better understand their aesthetic experience ‘from the inside’. While our aim in this imagining is to correct one another, it simultaneously opens each of us to the possibility of unexpected insights that could revise our own judgments instead. On the two options given in the peer disagreement debate, there doesn’t seem to be much room for the idea that I could both maintain confidence in my judgment and continue to take the other’s disagreement to have epistemic significance. I argue that this combination is possible and appropriate for beauty, for in that case it is the very confidence I have in my judgment that motivates me to try to imaginatively understand the other, and opens me to the epistemic vulnerability that comes with such an exercise.
Source: TSpace (University of Toronto)
Author: Belinda Piercy
Language: English
Topic: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Art
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2618089081