Experimental Aesthetics
Matthew Kieran
University of Leeds
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Philosophical Aesthetics v. Psychology

Aesthetic explanation and justification are not susceptible to low
level psychological generalization and “aesthetic questions have
nothing to do with psychological experiments, but are answered in
an entirely different way.” Wittgenstein, Lectures (1967: 17).

The results of and generalizations from experiments concerning
subject preferences or reasoning processes are irrelevant to
aesthetics and to think otherwise conflates empirical matters with
conceptual ones. Thus, for example, “experiments polling subjects
on th meaning of a passage of music are pointless since this sort of
inquiry is not a scientific one to which the collection of data is
relevant; it is a logical inquiry about language.” Dickie, ‘Is
Psychology Relevant to Aesthetics?’ (1962: 349-60).
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Aesthetic Value

It is constitutive of or at least a mark of aesthetic value that we take
pleasure in the activity of appreciation. This is defeasible due to:

Conditions of viewer and appreciation

Role of expertise (capacities, knowledge etc.)

It is a desideratum of any account of aesthetic value that it precludes
certain kinds of reasons as playing a fundamental justificatory role in
underwriting aesthetic judgements.

E.g. cost, age, class etc.

Natural presumption is that we are pretty good at recognizing when,
where and why we appreciate something as we do.
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A Distinctive Wine Tasting (Plassmann et al)

Subjects informed they would be asked to taste 5 different wines to
study the relationship between tasting time and perceived flavours.
Each putatively different wine was identified by supposed price.

Two wines were administered twice - $5 and $45 price, $90 and $10
price.

All subjects reported tasting 5 different wines and the expressed
preferences correlated to price cues.
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The Original Wine Experiments

Brochet’s wine experiments (2001):

1. 54 oenology students served the same white wine from two
bottles and in one of them dyed red. No one noticed (and used
characterisations you’d expect of red wine for the white wine dyed
red).

2. Same wine decanted into a plonk bottle and a grand cru bottle. 40
said the wine in the fancy bottle was worth drinking but only 12 said
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the wine in the cheap one was.
Cutting’s Impressionism Experiment

Cutting established independently that students generally preferred
more widely reproduced Impressionist works from those rarely
reproduced. In his Intro to Psych class he then presented for 2 sec.
at the start of a lecture slides of Impressionist works with the more
widely reproduced of a pair presented once, and the more rarely
reproduced four times).

At the module end students showed marked preferences for the
works most frequently shown during the module even though they
could not reliably recall whether they had seen the works before.
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Some Worries

Experimental subjects were not expert appreciators and there is
good reason to assume experts would be more robust in the face of
priming effects (Hume).

Appreciation and judgement conditions were atypical and
unsuitable.

The failure to recognise the usefulness of heuristics or other
possible effects on appreciation of familiarity

The possible limitations of effect. Priming might have bite only
amongst works or aesthetic objects of a certain worth (i.e. no effect
where dealing with bad works).
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A Challenge

Nonetheless there is reason to hold we are bad at recognising
where, when and why defeasibility conditions apply.

The aesthetic realm, due to the role of pleasure, refinement and the
relationality of the aesthetic, is particularly susceptible to exploitation
for social reasons

E.g. snobbery

Experiments suggest it is often hard for us to know either in first or
third person cases what is driving our judgement.

For any given subject’s aesthetic judgement it is often difficult to
know whether or not it is justified or whether we or others are in a
legitimate position to make knowledge claims.
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One Possible Way Forward

Consider aesthetic appreciation and judgement in virtue theoretic
terms.

It makes sense of why good appreciation and judgement are
achievements and makes sense of how it is achievable i.e.
grounded in the exercise of appreciative virtues.

By contrast, for example, snobs fail to appreciate works qua
aesthetic object properly since they are badly motivated and
evaluate works according to inappropriate criteria bound up with
social esteem. Hence snobs are to be condemned (i.e. manifest
appreciative vice).
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General Points

Experimental psychology can and should inform the kind of
accounts we seek to give regarding epistemic and normative issues
within aesthetics.

Attention to such research can present new challenges to traditional
accounts (e.g. of appreciation and judgement within aesthetics).

Furthermore, at least to those with anything like naturalistic
inclinations, we would surely want and expect our philosophical
accounts of the epistemic and normative nature of appreciation and
judgement to be consistent with human nature.
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