Realist M ind-Dependence?

With the more carefully worked out picture o f realism, the pair of realism and rnind- dependence seems more than an almost certainly fiactious marriage, but a marriage all the same. The two are theoretical contradictories. The burden is unequivocally on the would-be matchmaker to justify the possibility for a harmonious union between the two. Johnston writes that “precisely because o f WWependence there is no implication of content or meaning being constituted out o f die contents o f attitudes.”^*' But this is not clear. Put to one side the prejudicial use o f ‘attitudes’—it is far ftom clear that only attitudes as contrasted with beliefs can play a meaning-constituting role. Johnston’s claim is bizarre coming as it does after his assertion that RD(oe) does not give the content o f the meaning or the ontology

4 A: Rsalist Mind-Dependence?

of an aesthetic property a. Quite simply, the response-dependence account stands apart

from both meaning and any sufficiently committed ontolo^cal view. The realist who wants to marry response-dependence to realism needs some further premise.

Pettit acknowledges as much in his admission that any response-dependence treatment looks as if it compromises his Cosmocentric Thesis (C l), which again is the claim that error and ignorance are always possible with regard to the substantive propositions o f the discourse. Aside from special cases like a discourse consisting only in first-personal avowals o f beliefs, pains, and the like, CT follows by implication from the Descriptivist and the Objectivist theses. And so if CT is violated, then the joint assertion o f DT and OT will fail, and the account on offer whl fail, without further shoring up o f the arguments, to be a realist view at alL I claim now that the response-dependent account o f aesthetic properties fails to

conform to CT, and is therefore incompatible with a broader realist theory.

Pettit sees the need to deal witli two issues if realism is to be reconciled with an account o f properties that essentially implicates our responses to them. Both issues go directly to the objection that such a characterization violates CT, and both seem to function as necessary conditions on holding on to realism. The first is a condition o f ontic neutrality. Even if response-dependence introduces an anthropocentric conception o f a class o f properties, we must still be able to say plausibly that “there are certain kinds of entity we recognize that are, as we might put it, intrinsically important kinds, not just kinds that are important for the way they engage with us. [...] N ot only does it allow us to speak o f discovering independent facts, it also lets us speak o f discovering independent kinds.”^^- If ontic neutrality is to be respected for aesthetic properties, it should be plausible to imagine other species marking out a Modigliani portrait, an Edward Weston photograph (Figure 18), and the prose of Kawabata as aU exemplifying a graceful beauty. Why should we imagine this to be so? The issue is made all the more acute by the fact that these three examples, though all might be said to possess graceful beauty, exemplify it in very different ways. Graceful beauty seems less an independent kind than a linguistic label that brackets a disparate assortment of presentational features. Ontic neutrality seems even less plausible for aesthetic qualities when we consider a somewhat more complex art critical judgment. In a review o f the New

York debut o f Wayne Thiebaud’s still life paintings (Figure 19), Max K ozloff writes: Thiebaud paints with all the virtuosity of Manet or Morandi, although undoubtedly his world is harsher and less humane than theks. His surfaces are juicy (the sign o f a constant appetite for paint), but his thought is arid. As magnetic specters o f our most immediate commerce with matter, these images remain self-sufficient.

Nevertheless, he satisfies one o f the age-old principles o f the stül-îife tradition: that a practitioner discover some vktue, not in inanimate objects as such (most elements of visual experience may have that vktue), but in the

isolation o f tlie inanimate object. He invests many of our poor nutrients with a sardonic, bright pathos, partially because o f this isolation. After seeing a Thiebaud, one can no longer wallt into a hamburger stand with the same casual famüiarity.^®

If aesthetic properties are ontically neutral, then the union o f the ‘juiciness’ o f the painted surface witli tlie ‘arid’ thoughts displayed (meaning, perhaps, tlie conceptual simplicity o f the

painting qua artwork), or the sardonic, bright pathos o f the objects depicted, would

somehow be plausibly thought of as picking out features which figured in the accounts of experience o f creatures very different ftom us. Such a perspective-free salience is difficult to imagine. Appreciating Thiebaud’s paintings in this way requkes not just a sense o f kony, and a sense o f the celebratory element that coexists along with the konic, but possession of a rich sets of associations with cultural objects in specific connotative contexts. The very idea that these qualities signal independent, even natural, Idnds, looks very much lilœ the platonic account the modest realist is so labored to avoid.

The second necessary condition for maintaining realism is epistemic servility. This is tlie idea that “in trying to get things right in [an] area o f discourse, even if we are normally functioning and normally or ideally positioned subjects, we have to strive to get in tune with an independent authority: we have to do the sort o f thing that would malte no sense with trying to get [dictatorial claims as to what is the case] straight.”^^ Just what are the things we do to get in tune? Typically, we seek the judgments o f optimal critics. But what if we ourselves are optimal critics? What alignment must we undertake to bring ourselves into contact witli the sardonic, bright pathos o f Thiebaud’s still lives? It strains plausibility to imagine that his paintings have this apart firom, among other things, a certain art critical practice of approaching still lives with the background assumption that isolating an object in a painting frames its having some vktue. To find the pathos we must bring ourselves into

4.4: Realist Mind-Dependence?

line with an audioiitative convention that suggests we are to presume some virtues of the

object represented, or to presume that it has some virtues. But that is altogether different from a bringing ourselves into line with something that is the case in some mind-

independent sense. This activity would be something like detecting the virtues or valuable aspects without any appeal to convention, social or allegorical significance, or to specific art- related practices. When we approach Thiebaud’s paintings, the question “Why should I be interested in looking at just this slice o f pie, or this tray o f sweets?” suggests itself, but only for viewers situated in the right cultural context. And without a sense o f that question and its possible answers, something like the pathos of those things is not something we can hope to have any access to at all.

One way m which the modest aesthetic realist might give a plausible account both o f ontic neutrality and epistemic servility is by insisting that, though perhaps many o f our aesthetic concepts are culturally-bound in some sense, the properties they pick out ace supervenient on something more plausibly conceived o f as independent of our thoughts. Indeed, it seems that tlie only way for the advocate o f response-dependence requites a supervenience thesis to effect the marriage with realism. Natural (or at least non-aesthetic) properties are, most of us take it, independent o f our individual and cultural perspectives, and are the sort o f thing which legitimates talk about ‘getting something right’ in representing them in our discourse. Though there are strong scientific arguments against conceiving our color discourse as robustly representative, the intuition that it is nevertheless is quite strong. But this is because we do understand color to be dependent on a wide range o f physical factors— so some kind o f property dependence thesis seems intuitively rather plausible. On the other hand, the supervenience o f the aesthetic on the natural is closer to an article o f faith. In the color case we can conduct scientific experiments to discover the relations between physical properties and our experiences, but such relations in no way enter into our judgment-giving practices. Conversely, the features o f our reasons-giving practices constitute the only motivation for advancing a supervenience claim for aesthetic judgments. O f course, this claim is made more plausible by the fact that most o f us are good physicalkts—we wish to avoid positing occult properties wherever possible. And the worry is that we cannot have objectivity without some stable set o f mind-independent properties, so the supervenience o f aesthetic

false. If it is false, then, response-dependence loses its anchor in a mind-independent realm. Pettit’s CT fails and by modus toUens the joint assertion o f DT and OT fads to be true. If supervenience is trivial but true the results are no less disappointing for the realist. Recall

that the trivialized supervenience thesis came to the claim that the aesthetic properties of Just

this artwork supervene on the non-aesthetic properties o f Just this artwork. N o claim is made,

tlien, that graceful beauty indicates either the same property or the same subvenient base for the Modigliani portrait and the Weston photograph. Wedding this supervenience claim with RD(ôe) infects response-dependence with the same triviality. The response-dependent account, then, merely marks out, say, graceful beauty of this unique sort as being picked out under opttmakty constraints that very Idœly will vary from artwork to artwork. Response- dependent aesthetic properties, then, would become strongly indexical. There would be no principled talk about the reasons we apply the same language to artworks by Weston, Kawabata, and Modigliani.

The need for a workable supervenience claim is all the more acute in light o f criticisms of

the alleged a priori nature of the conceptual structure o f secondary qualities. The point of

asserting these concepts to have such a nature is to rule out the possibility o f global error— the truth o f judgments about secondary qualities cannot outrun ideal dispositions to judge.

But the role played by the a priori claim in RD(oj) is considerably stronger. Paul Boghossian

and David VeHeman argue that such formulations “misappropriate whatever aptioii truth

there may be in the relevant biconditionals.”'*® Even if there are privileged conditions for judgments o f secondary qualities, that fact alone supports only the much weaker

biconditional

X is to be described as F iff x would look F to standard observers under standard conditions.

“Even philosophers who regard colour experience as globally false, for example, wdl

nevertheless want to say that some colour experiences are correct in the sense tliat they yield the colour attributions tliat are generally accepted for the purposes o f describing objects in a public discourse.”'** The point is that tlie stronger biconditional might seem true only because it is mistaken for the weaker one involving description. In any case there is good reason to think that that fact about our concepts and the way they figure in our thought and discourse license at best the weaker biconditional above about descriptions and not the

4.4: Realist Mind-Dependence ?

stronger about “the way things really are”. The point is much, like the one about

supervenience—inasmuch as supervenience claims are grounded in reflection on the nature of our judgment-giving practices, supervenience should be understood as (as best) capturing a feature of that practice. A further premise, that our discourse represents real properties, is required to move from the claim about practice to the claim about property dependence. So

too with the move ftom describing color e2q)eriences to marking them as properties of

things. Though the weak conditional has some intuitive appeal as an a priori claim, there

seems to be no good reason, without further argument, for taking the property claim as an

priori truth. If Boghossian and Velleman’s criticism is not met ditectly, a further premise about property dependence— supervenience—is needed to move us from a claim about talk to a claim about properties.

The conclusion, then, is that without supervenience there is no independent justification for

asserting response-dependence as a realist account o f aesthetic properties. I argued in

Chapter 3 that supervenience is either incoherent or trivially true. If incoherent, then