Supervenience and True Judgments

I shall argue in this section that if supervenience is granted as an a priori truth, at most one

comprehensive aesthetic judgment o f any artwork can be true. Here I ignore the preceding difficulties with supervenience to show that any aesthetic judgment can be true only if it is comprehensible within a single ‘total’ judgment o f the work. If this is true, then in cases of critical disagreement, no more than one o f the disputants can be correct. Any disagreement must be accounted for in terms o f some epistemic shortcoming—either ignorance,

inattention, or insensitivity. Such a conclusion bars a position that holds great appeal for the realist, namely critical pluralism.

Aesthetic judgments may register an evaluation in a thin sense— a painting is good, for example. Many more judgments employ ‘thick’ predicates with both an evaluative aspect and a descriptive one—holding a melodic passage to be delicate or effete, say. In a different sense, any predicates, even ‘thin’ ones, are descriptive o f some real state o f affairs, on the realist account. And of course not all aesthetic judgments are o f the form o f directly

predicating somethiug o f an artwork (i.e. ‘This x is F’), but instead highlight various features o f the artwork in order to form some indirect attribution (e.g. the Rothko criticisms above). Any realist theory (and some antirealkt ones) take aesthetic sentences in the indicative mood

3.3: Supervenience and True Judgments

to describe states o f affairs, or to pick out particular properties. Now, some judgments may describe only parts o f an artwork, wliile others instead attribute ‘overall’ qualities, to the work as a whole. The former should be conjoinable or comprehensible witliin a single judgment (schematically, something like ‘x is F’ and ‘x is H’ and ...). This ‘total’ or

‘comprehensive’ judgment will then be a Idnd o f inventory of all tlie aesthetic qualities o f the artwork. Why does supervenience legitimize at most one comprehensive aesthetic

judgment? Grant that the account o f supervenience formalized in SI (and also 82) may yet be salvaged. In order to avoid the counter-intuitive consequence that all o f the aesthetic properties o f some artwork will supervene on any one o f that artwork’s unique non-aesthetic

properties, we must stipulate that any supervenience claim will concern the total or complete

set o f non-aesthetic properties. That ^ves

ST: oV p [(3x)( {p} X A afi) (Vy)( {p}y ay )]

which is to say that any particular aesthetic property supervenes on the total non-aesthetic property set o f x. Alternatively, the stipulation might be expressed as

81”: □ V p V a [(3x)( {p}x A {a}x) —> (Vy)( {p} y —> {a}y)]

stating that the complete set o f aesthetic properties supervenes on the complete set o f non­ aesthetic properties o f x Either version may be a plausible way to avoid the unique property objection. Both are trivial in just the way identified at the end of section 1. Because 81’ and 81” botli require the subvenient base to be the total set o f the artwork’s non-aesthetic properties, and because independent considerations necessitate a base widened beyond just the physical properties o f the artwork, there will be no common way for numerically distinct artworks to instantiate the same aesthetic properties. This, of course, is one o f the central explanatory desiderata o f the supervenience claim. So if supervenience (either 81’ or 81”) is true it is explanatorily impotent.

There is at least this significant consequence: at m ost one comprehensive judgment of an artwork can be true. Because aesthetic judgments are truth-apt descriptions o f particular

o f the present aesthetic properties. Presumably, this k the metaphysical analog of a

judgment’s being responsible to the artwork. Judgments should only attribute to the artwork qualities that it has. In particular, they should not attribute a quaUty and its complement (in exactly the same way). Although supervenience is not identification or reduction, it cannot

be the case that the right-hand side o f the main conditional be both ^ > a and p —> ~a.

And since the account we have after reckoning with the unique property objection, SI’ or 81” specifies that the entaihnent obtains only between the total non-aesthetic property set and one or all aesthetic properties, a judgment must be internally consktent. That is, the comprehensive judgment cannot incorporate both the claim that a certain property obtains and tliat is does not.

This is hardly a surprising thought if aesthetic discourse k a descriptive one, but it imposes a constraint on the range o f aesthetic judgments that can be taken as true. If two judgments (total, or o f the same part o f an artwork) are contradictory, at most one of them can be true. The other must be disqualified as fake, the result o f error or epistemic shortcoming, or the disagreement must be explained away as a merely apparent one. Thk k a basic commitment o f realkm (in fact it is ako a commitment o f platonic realism and reductive realism as wek). The consequence of this commitment k that, for the realist, endorsiag a plurality of

divergent aesthetic judgments of an artwork will only be possible with significant theoretical overhaul.