conceptual

Recent work in analytic epistemology, philosophy of language and of science has brought back forward the distinction between the objective and the subjective (MacFarlane forthcoming), ( Gallison  &  Daston  2007), (Wright 2003),   ( Kölbel  2003, 2000), ( Daston 2001), (Searle 1995). As Searle (1995, 8) has clearly stated, the distinction works at different levels and as ( Daston  2001) has also stressed, these senses have historically evolved. In the following section, I will offer a taxonomy of senses and applications of the distinction, trying to make justice to the contemporary literature on the topic, but also necessarily diverging from all previous accounts of this  polysemy .   My starting point is  Daston’s  claim that our current understanding of the distinction is based on the identification of particular subjective  factors , like perspectives, linguistic conventions, psychological architecture, etc. These facts...

Hacer 'click' en la imagen para verla de tamaño completo. Cuando hablamos de realismo y anti-realismo desafortunadamente solemos presentarlos como una dicotomía cuando en realidad hay muchas cosas a las que llamamos realismo y muchas maneras de no ser realista. Ser realista es pensar que las cosas son realmente como se dice que son, pero decir esto es claramente circular pues depende de qué pensemos que es lo real. Por eso yo prefiero usar la palabra "realista" para aquellos que piensan que las cosas son como decimos que son independientemente de que digamos que son así y, en general, independientemente de nuestra subjetividad, nuestras construcciones sociales, convenciones y otras contingencias históricas. En otras palabras, ser realista es creer que a lo que decimos le corresponden hechos objetivos. A mucha gente no le gusta llamar sólo a esta posición "realismo" porque presupone que nuestras convenciones, instituciones, construcciones históricas, etc....

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...