Mark Windsor: "Beauty Unframed"

Mark Windsor, Uppsala University and MSCA: "Beauty Unframed: An Argument for Aesthetic Anti-Realism"

Abstract
Perhaps the strongest arguments for aesthetic anti-realism come from the prevalence of aesthetic disagreement. Evidently, we do not all find the same things beautiful or ugly, but rather our individual and cultural backgrounds shape the way we aesthetically experience objects. However, aesthetic realists can accommodate aesthetic disagreements by specifying requirements for the correct apprehension of objects’ aesthetic qualities; for example, that some actual or ideal audience must have certain background knowledge and expertise to be able to experience an object correctly. Yet while these strategies may work for artworks and artefacts that are intended to be experienced in a certain way, they fail in the case of a class of objects that, following Yuriko Saito’s work on everyday aesthetics, I call ‘unframed’ aesthetic phenomena. These phenomena are not constrained with respect to how they should be aesthetically engaged with. I argue that since ‘unframed’ aesthetic objects can manifest incompatible aesthetic qualities depending on how they are aesthetically engaged with, there is no fact of the matter as to what aesthetic qualities they possess. I show how this poses a challenge to three main approaches to aesthetic value that have been used to support a realist view, namely, aesthetic empiricism, aesthetic primitivism, and Dominic Lopes’s network theory.