A Modest Defense of Aesthetic Testimony

Abstract

Like many interested in the history of ballet, I have read various things about the life and career of Vaslav Nijinsky. And I happen to accept much of what I have read. Among other things, I believe that he was born in Urkraine, had an affair with Sergei Diaghilev, starred in Petrushka, choreographed The Afternoon of a Faun, suffered from mental illness, and died in 1950. 1 accept all of this, and much else, solely on the basis of testimony, and most would think that I am warranted in doing so, indeed, even that I thereby know these things about Nijinsky. And it is clear that I stand no chance of knowing them otherwise.1 But I believe other things about him as well, among them, that he was a brilliant performergraceful, dynamicone of the greatest danseurs of Russian ballet. This too, I accept on nothing more than the word of others. And, again, it is clear that I could have no other basis for doing so. But are these beliefs similarly warranted? Do I know that Nijinsky was a great dancer through accepting the testimony of those who witnessed his performances, now so long ago? Many would hesitate to think so. In everyday life, we often exhibit a resistance to aesthetic testimony, quite unlike our instinctive credulity regarding nonaesthetic reports. And there is a formidable tradition in the philosophy of art that is deeply sympathetic to this attitude. Many philosophers flatly deny that we can learn from aesthetic testimony.2 And even those who resist this sweeping assessment still urge that we should exercise special caution in assessing such reports or conclude that we learn from them only very rarely.3 In short, the asymmetry thesis, or AT, that aesthetic testimony is epistemically inferior to nonaesthetic testimony, is firmly entrenched in both common sense and philosophical tradition. There is, however, an important distinction to be drawn among proponents of the thesis. On many defensible positions, aesthetic testimony fails to transmit knowledge, unlike nonaesthetic reports, simply because no one has any aesthetic knowledge to begin with. This includes expressivist views that deny aesthetic claims are truth-apt and the error theory, which maintains that aesthetic claims are all false.4 A modest sort of realism, which accepts that there are aesthetic truths but ultimately despairs the possibility of knowing them, similarly dismisses aesthetic testimony. AT is just an afterthought on these forms of aesthetic skepticism. More interestingly though, other philosophers embrace the possibility of aesthetic knowledge, but still urge that aesthetic testimony is uniquely problematic. Indeed, it is these philosophers who make a point to single out aesthetic reports as epistemically handicapped. In this article, I focus exclusively on their position. My aim is to defend aesthetic testimony in an important, but limited, way. Specifically, I suggest that if one accepts aesthetic knowledge via other means, it is difficult to maintain that there is any interesting epistemic contrast between aesthetic and nonaesthetic testimony. In short, if one rejects aesthetic skepticism, then AT seems unwarranted. I will not pretend to decide the much greater issue of whether aesthetic skepticism, in its various guises, can be rejected. To be sure, the ultimate fate of aesthetic testimony clearly hinges on this. The point I stress here is just that this is all it hinges on. I begin by examining the three asymmetrical positions currently found within the literature. I present the arguments given on their