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    Bullot and Reber's appeal to psychological essentialism t... — Carmelics
    Statements
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    Perspectives
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    Home/Aesthetics
    HistoryEditSee Inverse

    Bullot and Reber's appeal to psychological essentialism to explain historical appreciation of artworks is unnecessary.

    Aesthetics
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    2 reasons for
    1 reason against

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.Dickie's institutional theory and Levinson's intentional-historical account explain art appreciation through social and relational facts, not hidden essences.
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    • 2.If relational accounts fully explain why history matters to appreciation, positing psychological essentialism adds an unexplained and unfalsifiable explanatory layer.
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    • 3.Occam's razor demands we prefer the relational account when it achieves equal explanatory power without invoking essentialist cognitive mechanisms.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
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    • 1.Wittgenstein's family resemblance model shows that categories can be psychologically robust without any underlying essence binding their members.
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    • 2.Medin and Ortony's own psychological essentialism research distinguishes placeholder essences from genuine causal essences, and art history fits only the weaker placeholder reading.
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    • 3.A placeholder essence that merely marks 'there is something important here' does no explanatory work beyond what a relational-causal history already provides without essentialism.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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    • 1.An inclination to look beyond an artwork's appearance need not depend on essentialism.
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    • 2.The interest or value of a thing may sometimes reside in its relational and contingent properties rather than its essence.
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    • 3.Valuing a work on account of its history of making no more implies an essential connection between the work and its history than valuing an object because it was a gift implies an essential connection between the object and the giver.
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    Topics

    AestheticsSkepticism

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    Truth & Knowledge2 linked

    Related

    A placeholder essence that merely marks 'there is something important here' does...An inclination to look beyond an artwork's appearance need not depend on essenti...Dickie's institutional theory and Levinson's intentional-historical account expl...If relational accounts fully explain why history matters to appreciation, positi...
    +5 moreShow less
    Medin and Ortony's own psychological essentialism research distinguishes placeho...Occam's razor demands we prefer the relational account when it achieves equal ex...The interest or value of a thing may sometimes reside in its relational and cont...Valuing a work on account of its history of making no more implies an essential ...Wittgenstein's family resemblance model shows that categories can be psychologic...

    Similar

    An inclination to look beyond an artwork's appearance need not depend ...79%Bullot and Reber's psycho-historical model is flawed because a work's ...76%Lessing treats painting and sculpture as belonging to a unified catego...75%Expression of emotion is neither sufficient nor necessary for defining...75%

    Source

    AI-extracted1/3 agreementValid
    SEP: aesthetics-cogsci
    View source passageHide passage
    Studies such as these may be thought valuable in their capacity to explain persistent features of aesthetic artefact-making but are unlikely to provide more than a general background against which aesthetic preferences and judgements, debates and disagreements concerning particular artefacts are played out. Saturated blue will be the right colour in a certain context, while muddy brown will be right in another. We cannot say that the presence of saturated blue in a picture is in general a reason
    Extraction notes

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

    Details

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