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    Carmelics

    A reasoning platform. Break down any belief into clear reasons, explore both sides, and weigh the evidence honestly.

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    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Expressiveness is a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for dance as art

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.Formalist accounts of art (e.g., Clive Bell's significant form) hold that aesthetic value resides in structural relations, not expressive content.
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    • 2.Certain dance traditions—such as Balanchine's neoclassical ballet—were explicitly designed to eliminate narrative and emotional expression in favor of pure form.
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    • 3.If a recognized art form can achieve canonical status while deliberately rejecting expressiveness, expressiveness cannot be a necessary condition for dance as art.
      ?

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    Reason for 2 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Cohen's observation that expressiveness is universally present in dance conflates a contingent empirical generalization with a necessary conceptual condition.
      ?

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    • 2.Wittgenstein's notion of family resemblance (Philosophical Investigations §66-67) entails that art categories need share no single property across all instances.
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    • 3.The inference from 'present in all observed instances' to 'necessary condition' commits the same error Wittgenstein diagnosed in essentialist accounts of games.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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    • 1.Expressiveness is present in all dance, as held by dance historian Selma Jean Cohen
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    • 2.A property present in all instances of a category is a candidate necessary condition for that category
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