Beholder Beware: A Reply to Jessica Davis

Abstract

Let us first present our modernist credentials. We are both comfortably steeped in modernist aesthetics. In our view, Art worthy of the name, should be fresh. It should be based on the refinement of craft in the service of individual expression. Like all good modernists we delight in the drawings and sketches of our young children. Our refrigerators and other domestic vistas are cluttered with their latest masterpieces. And yes, as the kids grow up we note a clear loss of those very elements we value in the work of the youngest children: spontaneity, whimsy, focus, unpredictability, a celebration of the materials themselves, and in general the je m'en foutism of the little child. As card-carrying or at least fellow-traveling modernists we happily acknowledge all of this. The basic question we raise, however, is do those not steeped in our modernist aesthetics find this quality as admirable as we do? We have emphasized the preliminary nature of what was, after all, only an exploratory study to suggest future avenues of research. Thus, we would be the first to concede the possibility that we may not have trained the Montreal Chinese judges in exactly the way the Harvard researchers did, as Davis suggests. While we have followed her procedures as scrupulously as we could, the fact that the two sets of judges not trained by the same people may have had some effect. So we, too, envisage a propitious scenario in which the means would be available for all judges to be trained by the same researchers. Second, Davis is right to point to the relatively low level of agreement between the Montreal Chinese judges' assessments-what she, somewhat misleadingly, given the issues at hand, refers to as low inter-rater reliability.' This definitely suggests caution in interpreting the findings-as we readily concede in our original article. While it does not necessarily mean that something has gone seriously wrong in the application of the Davis protocol, it certainly means we have to be leery of assuming that the two Chinese judges shared a single aesthetic position. This, too, we note in the article. More importantly, however, it points to a far greater limitation of our research design. While she claims that the relatively small size of our sample of drawings is the problem, the really serious sampling issue is that of the judges. From the inception of our research, we wished to examine two independent variables:1) the development of children's aesthetic capacities, and 2) the aesthetic background of the judges. As a result of our initial findings, our emphasis shifted towards the latter. In other words, we have changed the issue from being about the nature of the drawings to concern with the cultural background of the judges. As a result, it becomes crucial that the judges be truly representative of the populations they are supposed to represent. With a haphazardly drawn sample of two, we agree, one cannot be sure of this at all. Future studies, in so far as they wish to address the issue of the judges' cultural background, will have to be based on much larger, more carefully selected samples of judges, as opposed to drawings. Now for some simple matters of fact. The fact that our sample of drawings was smaller than Davis's simply means it is harder to find statistically significant results when looking for differences between group means. As we just explained, however, since we are concerned with differences between judges rather than drawings by age group, the size of the drawing sample is pretty much beside the point. Even less relevant are the sizes of the age groups represented in the sample. Since we are dealing with mean evaluations for each age group, the difference in group size is neither here nor there. We are truly at a loss to try and understand what Davis is referring to and why she thinks it could possibly matter when she says the groups in our study were not balanced. Davis questions the Montreal Chinese judges' backgrounds. …