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    Carmelics

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    Made withinDC&Austin
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    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that The failure of Beardsley's account of aesthetic experience does not mean the notion of the aesthetic should be abandoned.

    ?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.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 for 2 of 2
    ?
    • 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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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
    ?
    • 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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