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    Art cannot be defined by necessary and sufficient conditions — Carmelics
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    Art cannot be defined by necessary and sufficient conditions

    AestheticsPhilosophy of Language
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    1 reason for
    2 reasons against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.Some concepts, such as sports, are essentially contested and do not admit of definitions in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions
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    • 2.Art is best understood as one of these essentially contested concepts
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
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    • 1.George Dickie's institutional theory successfully defines art as any artifact on which some person acting on behalf of the artworld has conferred the status of candidate for appreciation.
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    • 2.If even one coherent definition in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions succeeds, the claim that art *cannot* be so defined is falsified.
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    • 3.Dickie's definition has withstood decades of critical scrutiny without being shown to be logically incoherent or empirically false.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.Gallie's notion of 'essentially contested concepts' presupposes genuine evaluative disagreement about paradigm cases, but theorists broadly agree on central cases of art such as Beethoven's symphonies or Rembrandt's paintings.
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    • 2.A concept is only essentially contested if disputes about its application are irresolvable in principle, yet historical artworld consensus regularly resolves borderline cases over time.
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    • 3.Therefore, art lacks the constitutive contestedness Gallie requires, undermining the analogy between art and paradigmatically contested concepts like democracy or justice.
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    Topics

    AestheticsPhilosophy of Language

    Connections

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    Truth & Knowledge1 linked

    Related

    A concept is only essentially contested if disputes about its application are ir...Art is best understood as one of these essentially contested conceptsDickie's definition has withstood decades of critical scrutiny without being sho...Gallie's notion of 'essentially contested concepts' presupposes genuine evaluati...
    +4 moreShow less
    George Dickie's institutional theory successfully defines art as any artifact on...If even one coherent definition in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions ...Some concepts, such as sports, are essentially contested and do not admit of def...Therefore, art lacks the constitutive contestedness Gallie requires, undermining...

    Similar

    The necessity of a condition does not entail its sufficiency.85%A notion for which no adequate necessary and sufficient conditions can...83%The conditions Ginsborg identifies are sufficient for meaning.81%Knowledge requires conditions beyond those required for belief.80%

    Source

    AI-extracted1/3 agreementValid
    SEP: conceptual-art
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    There have been no shortages of attempts to define art in this manner. Most prominently perhaps, it has been suggested that art ought to be defined in terms of its aesthetic character, so that, roughly, x is an artwork if and only if x gives rise to an aesthetic experience (e.g., Beardsley 1958). Notwithstanding the difficulties that this particular suggestion entails (we shall return to this in §3.3), the advent of a kind of art that is as profoundly revisionary and difficult to classify as con
    Extraction notes

    Validity: Extracted via Max plan + API grounding/validity checks

    Details

    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (1 for, 2 against)
    Edits
    1 edit