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    The failure of Beardsley's account of aesthetic experienc... — Carmelics
    Home/Aesthetics
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    The failure of Beardsley's account of aesthetic experience does not mean the notion of the aesthetic should be abandoned.

    Aesthetics
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    1 reason for
    2 reasons against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.Beardsley's trinitarian doctrine (unity, intensity, complexity) cannot be maintained as necessary or sufficient conditions of aesthetic experience.
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    • 2.The failure of a single account of a concept does not warrant abandoning the concept itself.
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    • 3.Inferring that the concept of the aesthetic should be abandoned from the failure of Beardsley's account alone would be a flawed induction from a single instance.
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
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    • 1.Beardsley's failure is not isolated: every major attempt to define aesthetic experience—from Kant to Dewey to Dickie—has collapsed under counterexamples.
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    • 2.When a concept systematically resists principled definition across centuries of sustained philosophical effort, the most parsimonious explanation is conceptual incoherence rather than persistent theoretical inadequacy.
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    • 3.George Dickie's institutional theory emerged precisely from recognizing that phenomenological definitions of the aesthetic are irremediably circular, suggesting the problem is structural, not incidental.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.The supporting argument's analogy—that failing accounts don't doom concepts—presupposes the concept has a stable, theory-independent referent worth preserving.
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    • 2.Wittgensteinian family-resemblance analysis and Dutton's evolutionary aesthetics together suggest 'aesthetic experience' bundles heterogeneous phenomena with no shared essence, making the concept a nominalist convenience rather than a natural kind.
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    Topics

    Aesthetics

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    Related

    Beardsley's failure is not isolated: every major attempt to define aesthetic exp...Beardsley's trinitarian doctrine (unity, intensity, complexity) cannot be mainta...George Dickie's institutional theory emerged precisely from recognizing that phe...Inferring that the concept of the aesthetic should be abandoned from the failure...
    +4 moreShow less
    The failure of a single account of a concept does not warrant abandoning the con...The supporting argument's analogy—that failing accounts don't doom concepts—pres...When a concept systematically resists principled definition across centuries of ...Wittgensteinian family-resemblance analysis and Dutton's evolutionary aesthetics...

    Similar

    Inferring that the concept of the aesthetic should be abandoned from t...92%Beardsley's account of aesthetic experience is inadequate.90%Dewey's definition of the subject matter of philosophy of art as aesth...81%Defining art solely in terms of aesthetic experience is problematic.81%

    Source

    AI-extracted1/3 agreementValid
    SEP: aesthetic-judgment
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    As noted in Section 2.4, Beardsley claimed, heroically, that aesthetic experience is distinguished by its unity, intensity and complexity. Dickie argued, in reply, that such characteristics were either not plausibly necessary conditions of aesthetic experience, or else that Beardsley’s description of them was inadequate. Part of Dickie’s attack was completely beside the point, since he confused aesthetic experiences with the experiences of works of art; the fact that some experiences of works of
    Extraction notes

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

    Details

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