A Companion to Arthur C. Danto. Группа авторов
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Notes
1 1 For a sense of the multidisciplinary breadth of recent interest in Dewey, see Fesmire (2019).
2 2 On the idea of an “analytic ideology,” see Bernstein (2010) and Rorty (1992).
3 3 Giovanna Borradori, ed., The American Philosopher: Conversations with Quine, Davidson, Putnam, Nozick, Danto, Rorty, Cavell, Macintyre, Kuhn (University of Chicago Press, 1994), 98-.
4 4 I further discuss how Dewey’s approach to understanding art and aesthetic experience differs from those of philosophers (including Danto) who retained certain key transcendental and representationalist commitments of traditional empiricist and Kantian-idealist aesthetics in Haskins (2019).
References
1 Bernstein, Richard J. 2010. The Pragmatic Turn. Cambridge: Polity Press.
2 Borradori, Giovanna. 1994. The American Philosopher: Conversations with Quine, Davidson, Putnam, Nozick, Danto, Rorty, Cavell, Macintyre, Kuhn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
3 Danto, Arthur C. 2013. “Intellectual Autobiography of Arthur C. Danto”, in Randall E. Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn, eds., 2013. The Philosophy of Arthur C. Danto. Chicago and LaSalle, IL: Open Court: 3–70.
4 ––––. 1968. Analytical Philosophy of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
5 ––––. 1989 and 1997. Connections to the World: The Basic Concepts of Philosophy. Berkeley: University of California Press.
6 Dewey, John. 1988. “Experience and Nature” (1925) in Jo Ann Boydston, ed., The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 1. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
7 ––––. 1989. “Context and Thought” (1931) in Jo Ann Boydston, ed., The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 6. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press: 3–21.
8 Fesmire, Steven C., ed. 2019. The Oxford Handbook of Dewey. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
9 Haskins, Casey. 2019. “Dewey’s Art as Experience on the Landscape of Twenty-First Century Aesthetics.” In Fesmire, Steven C., ed., The Oxford Handbook of Dewey. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 445–70.
10 Rorty, Richard. 1992. “Philosophy in America Today.” In Consequences of Pragmatism, edited by Richard Rorty. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 211–30.
11 ––––. 2007. “Holism and Historicism.” In Philosophy as Cultural Politics, edited by Richard Rorty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 176–83.
8 Thought Experiments: Art and Ethics
F.M. KAMM
In the first section of this chapter, I consider Arthur Danto’s use of a particular thought experiment to support his theory of art and Richard Wollheim’s discussion of it. In the second section, I consider a comparable thought experiment about conceptual issues in ethics. I then explore how ethics employs thought experiments to determine permissibility of acts and whether thought experiments could comparably be used to determine the merit of artworks. I finally consider Danto’s discussion of an ethical issue and how his discussion compares with Wollheim’s views about art.
1 Conceptual Issues about Art: Danto versus Wollheim
A. Among the contributions for which Danto is known is his “Gallery of Indiscernibles.”1 It includes a set of imagined red canvases that cannot be distinguished from one another on perceptual grounds. This, presumably, is not due to the limits of perception but because they are identical with respect to perceptual properties. However, they have different descriptions, which include (1) a painting of people drowning in the Red Sea, (2) a landscape of Red Square, (3) a minimalist painting (perhaps “Homage to the Red Square” by Josef Albers), (4) a canvas stretched and painted red by Giorgione that he never used for a painting, (5) a stretched red canvas that “an egalitarian” artist finds and submits as art and which is accepted as such. There are other indiscernible items described by Danto outside this red canvas set that could inspire more red canvases, such as (6) a canvas painted red by a child, and (7) the product of a puff of red paint “miraculously” (and accidentally) forming another indiscernible canvas.
These imagined red canvases involve at least two representational artworks (1 and 2). These two canvases have different subjects but cannot be distinguished physically; they could be perceptually mistaken for one another. There are also artworks that could be mistaken for things that are not artworks (e.g., 1 and 4). These thought experiments could be raised as counterexamples to the claim that (a) different artworks must be perceptually distinguishable, and (b) artworks can be distinguished from non-artworks by perceivable properties (introduced by artists). If these general claims were shown to be false by the counterexamples, there would be at least some artworks that are not artworks because of their perceptual properties alone. Assuming we could create comparable indiscernibles with other perceptual properties that other artworks have (e.g., fuzzy blue halos), if the thought experiments were successful counterexamples to (a) and (b), they would show that perceptual properties are never sufficient to distinguish between what is an artwork and what is not.
B. Richard Wollheim has counterargued2 that something like (a) and (b) could be “general truths” rather than necessary truths. The general truths, he thinks, are that “objects … made with the broad intention of being works of art will stand out from objects … not made with such an intention and works of art … made with different specific intentions will stand out from one another” (p. 35). So the fact that (5) could be accepted as an artwork does not function as a counterexample to a necessary condition on art, and that a certain assumption can be transgressed in a particular case does not show it could be universally transgressed. In addition, (i) Wollheim suggests that it might not be possible to accept (5) as a work of art if the general truths he describes did not hold (which seems to imply that it is necessary that certain truths hold at least generally) and (ii) he claims it is important that we would only “reluctantly” (p. 34) accept this atypical item as an artwork.
Consider Wollheim’s claim about reluctance. Once the barrier is breached and one atypical item is recognized as art, it may become increasingly easy to recognize other atypical entities as works of art. This shows that one might have to distinguish the particular content of general truths from the suggestion that atypical works of art depend on works of art generally having the properties they lack. If many once-atypical items get admitted to the “artworld,” it may no longer be true that the same general truths hold, and while the formerly general truths may have been necessary at one point for the then-atypical item to be art, they will no longer be necessary for other items to be art (since the others may be judged relative to the “new normal”). I will later return to Wollheim’s views to ask how they relate to possible positions in ethics.
2 Ethics and Indiscernibles
A. In this section, I consider how some thought experiments in moral philosophy do and do not resemble Danto’s gallery of indiscernibles. Danto was concerned with conceptual issues, for example, what is and is not an artwork. Perhaps the strictly comparable issue in ethics would distinguish between events subject to moral evaluation (part of the “moral world”) and perceptibly identical events that are not subject to moral evaluation (not part of the “moral world”). For example, an act (e.g., moving the hand in a particular way) might fall into the first class, while an identical bodily movement (e.g., due to a twitch) would fall into the second class. (However, acts taken to limit twitches would be part of the moral world.) This is what is called the issue of the scope of morality. Given that what distinguishes the act from the twitch is not a perceptible property, we know that there will be indiscernible events that do and do not belong in the scope of morality.
Within the realm of events subject to moral evaluation, there are, however, also conceptual issues related to indiscernibles. For example, there has been discussion of what behavior is a