Aesthetic Realism
The goal of this brief note is to sketch a modest form of aesthetic realism. In particular, I want to defend that at least some aesthetic properties are objective or, to be more precise, that some aesthetic predicates have non-subject-dependent extensions. As example, I will work with the predicate “tasty” (and its antonym “disgusting”) to argue that its extension is fixed by an objective property: flavour. In other words, when we say of something that it is tasty, we are not saying how it tastes to us, but just how it tastes period. The structure is as follows. First I will sketch the phenomenon of using subjective, perspectival or context-dependent language for talking of objective, non-perspectival and/or context-invariant properties. I will present first the abstract general account and then illustrate it with the expression “to the left”. This is a perspectival expression, we use to talk about a non-perspectival property of objects: their location. Then, I will argue that w...