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 For

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Reason for

1.Evolutionary aesthetics explains aesthetic preferences (symmetry, landscape) by survival value, not shared perceptual essence across domains.
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2.Musical enjoyment, visual beauty, and literary appreciation engage different cognitive systems with divergent adaptive histories and mechanisms.
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3.Family-resemblance concepts like 'game' lack necessary conditions yet remain coherent; 'aesthetic experience' similarly ties disparate cases by loose overlap.
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Reasons Against

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Reason against

1.Common phenomenological structure—contemplative distance, disinterested attention, unified felt quality—persists across aesthetic domains regardless of evolutionary origin.
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2.Nominalism conflates 'lacks metaphysical essence' with 'lacks causal unity'; aesthetic responses may share neurobiological substrates despite heterogeneous triggers.
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3.Family resemblance explains surface clustering, not why we group phenomena under one term; explaining that requires identifying what unified selection pressures or functional properties constitute 'aesthetic'.
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Key Terms

Dutton's evolutionary aesthetics(as used in philosophy of art and aesthetics): A theory by philosopher Denis Dutton arguing that our sense of beauty and aesthetic preferences evolved because they helped our ancestors survive and reproduce, rather than being purely cultural or arbitrary.
Heterogeneous(as used in the statement about diverse phenomena): Made up of many different kinds of things that don't all belong to the same category or type.
Shared essence(as used in definition and categorization): A fundamental quality or feature that all members of a group must have in common—the thing that makes them all the same kind of thing.
Wittgensteinian family-resemblance(as used in philosophy of language and concepts): An idea from philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein suggesting that some concepts (like 'game' or 'art') don't have one thing all members must share—instead, they're related like family members who might share different features with different relatives.
aesthetic experience(Sulzer's aesthetics): A variety of free and unhindered activity of the representational capacity that produces pleasurable sentiments.
natural kind(Used to argue that schizophrenia fails to qualify because it is a heterogeneous conjunction of distinct pathologies, not a unified entity): A category that carves nature at its joints — a real, unified class of phenomena sharing a common underlying nature or pathology
nominalism(Metaphysics; opposed to realism about universals): The view that abstract entities such as properties or universals do not exist, and that predicative facts must be explained without appealing to such entities.

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Aesthetics1 linked

Common phenomenological structure—contemplative distance, disinterested attentio...Evolutionary aesthetics explains aesthetic preferences (symmetry, landscape) by ...Family resemblance explains surface clustering, not why we group phenomena under...Family-resemblance concepts like 'game' lack necessary conditions yet remain coh...

Details

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