Learning Aesthetic Concepts and Justifying Aesthetic Judgments

Abstract

There is no more important and perplexing issue in the philosophy of art than that of explaining whether we can ever be justified in our beliefs about aesthetic value. I shall argue here that an important connection exists between the problem of aesthetic justification and the problem of aesthetic concept-learning, and that a better understanding of the process by which we learn aesthetic concepts will provide us with a better understanding of how we can be justified in certain of our aesthetic beliefs.