Are Thick Aesthetic Predicates Assessment-Sensitive?

Abstract

In this paper we propose a dualist assessment-sensitive semantic account of thick aesthetic predicates. On the one hand, the dualism can be summarised as the thesis that those predicates have two independent meaning dimensions, namely, a truth-conditional one constituted by a multidimensional scalar property involving a measure function, and an expressive one, constituted by a global value or valence. On the other hand, assessment sensitivity amounts to the claim that those two dimensions depend on the adoption of a certain aesthetic perspective – which enforces both the aesthetic standard needed for fixing a value for the measure function involved by the corresponding property, and the global evaluative attitude required for the manipulation of the respective valence. Moreover, we crucially distinguish between experiential and theoretical TAPs, and provide some evidence for the fact that whereas the former give rise to faultless disagreements this is not the case with the latter. This evidence confirmed, to a certain extent, our initial proposal of a restriction to the assessment sensitivity of TAPs: whereas sentences containing experiential TAPs can be both true and expressively correct relative to different idiosyncratic aesthetic perspectives, those containing theoretical TAPs can only be true and expressively correct relative to the relevant canonical ones.