Papers on concepts
Authenticity and Implicature
Title: Authenticity and Implicature
Authors: Joint with Jon Robson
Publication: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 81, Issue 3, September 2023, Pages 387–391
Date: 14 July 2023
Link: https://doi.org/10.1093/jaac/kpad016
Abstract: In her book Things, Carolyn Korsmeyer argues that authenticity or what she often calls “genuineness” is “an aesthetically salient property” (2019, 34), a property “that commands attention in itself” (35), a “valuable” property (57). We will argue that authenticity is none of these things. A picture by Vermeer and a forgery of Vermeer by van Meegeren certainly differ in value—financial and artistic. But it would be false to say that the one is authentic and the other is not. As Denis Dutton noted, “a Han van Meegeren forgery of a Vermeer is at one and the same time both a fake Vermeer and an authentic van Meegeren” (2003, 258).1 Indeed, as far as what is true of both pictures, authenticity drops out altogether. The authentic Vermeers are exactly and necessarily the Vermeers, and similarly for the van Meegerens.2 After all, if we want to know whether this is an authentic Vermeer, we need only to find out whether it is a Vermeer; there is not an additional fact that we need to check. Facts about a picture’s history, such as who painted it, matter to its value; so far as authenticity goes, all pictures are equal. It is true that being an authentic Vermeer is an aesthetically salient, valuable property that commands attention; that is because it is the same property as being a Vermeer, and that is an aesthetically salient, valuable property that commands attention. Unfortunately, being an authentic Currie and being an authentic Robson are none of those things; that is because being a Currie and being a Robson are properties that rightly interest no one.
Standing in the last ditch: on the communicative intentions of fiction-makers
Title: Standing in the last ditch: on the communicative intentions of fiction-makers
Publication: Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 72: 351–363
Date: 2014
Link: https://doi.org/10.1111/jaac.12109
Abstract: Some of us have suggested that what fiction makers do is offer us things to imagine, that this is what is distinctive of fiction and what distinguishes it from narrative-based but assertive activities such as journalism or history. Some of us hold, further, that it is the maker’s intention which confers fictional status. Many, I think, feel the intuitive appeal of this idea at the same time as they sense looming problems for any proposal about fiction’s nature based straightforwardly on the identification of fiction with the to-be-imagined. I formulate a very weak version of the proposal which is not vulnerable to some objections recently presented. My formulation is in terms of supervenience. But while this version is weak, it is also quite precise, and its precision brings into view certain other problems which have not so far been attended to. To the extent that these problems are serious, the prospects for an intentional theory of fiction look, I am sorry to say, poor; the version susceptible to the objections is weak, and anything weaker still but not so susceptible could hardly be thought of as a theory of fiction, though it might supplement such a theory.
Emotions fit for fictions
Title: Emotions fit for fictions
Publication: S. Roeser and C. Todd (eds) Emotion and Value, Oxford University Press, 146-168
Date: 2014
Link: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/emotion-and-value-9780199686094?cc=gb&lang=en&
Abstract: This chapter discusses an apparently simple idea. Emotions are appropriate in just the way that beliefs are: when they get things right. Of course more needs to be said, and some of that will complicate matters. What is it for emotions to get things right? The main aim of this chapter is to answer that question in a way which respects the difference between the emotions we have in response to real situations and those provoked by fictional or imaginary ones. The chapter argues that one must also bear in mind that, for emotions of both kinds, there is more than one way to be appropriate. Throughout, this chapter leans heavily on the idea of representations: emotions represent, and the emotions of fiction represent representations.
Aliefs Don’t Exist, Though Some of their Relatives Do
Title: Aliefs Don’t Exist, Though Some of their Relatives Do
Author: Joint author with Anna Ichino
Publication: Analysis, volume 72, issue 4, pages 788–798
Date: 28 September 2012
Link: https://doi.org/10.1093/analys/ans088
Abstract: Tamar Gendler argues that some of us have too easily assuming that, if belief cannot explain a class of human behaviours, imagination will do the job. She gives a number of examples of problematic behaviours (“Gendler cases”, as we shall say), which in her view can be explained only by appeal to a previously unrecognised mental state: alief, different from belief and from imagination, and from any other mental kinds we are familiar with.
We argue that it’s a mistake to explain Gendler cases in terms of a single mental state of the kind alief is supposed to be; we should appeal instead to a variety of representational states, including familiar ones such as belief, desire, imagination and perception. While a few of these cases do plausibly require us to acknowledge representations at different levels, none require us to acknowledge the existence of aliefs, at least as those states are officially characterised by Gendler. We then turn to one of Gendler’s more general arguments for the new category of alief: the argument from hyperopacity. We reject that argument. But all this is not simply die-hard conservativism: we conclude by elaborating the idea (somewhat in the spirit Gendler’s proposal) that various representational states not acknowledged by folk-psychology have a role to play in explaining behaviour, emotion and cognition.
Actual art, possible art, and art’s definition
Title: Actual Art, Possible Art, and Art's Definition
Publication: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 68, Issue 3, August 2010, Pages 235–241
Date: 4 August 2010
Link: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6245.2010.01415.x
Abstract: Levinson’s historical theory of art is the most elaborated version, and the most clearly committed to the project of defining art. Much of the dispute about this theory has centred on how precisely it is to be formulated. I will be careful to distinguish ways of formulating the theory’s central claim. No formulation I come up with provides a satisfactory definition. I characterize Levinson’s attempt to avoid circularity by means of a technique of collapse. I show that using collapse makes the definition offered by the historical theory unacceptably parochial. I suggest a way in which a new historical definition might be crafted that is a bit more cosmopolitan, though not, perhaps, cosmopolitan enough. I also note that the historical theorists need to take a stand on what seems to me a difficult question concerning how we are to interpret our intuitions about what would, in counterfactual circumstances, be art.
