3 Philosophy of art and empirical aesthetics: resistance and rapprochement

The philosophy of art and empirical aesthetics are, to all outward appearances, natural bedfellows, disciplines bound together by complementary methodologies and the common goal of explaining a shared subject matter. Philosophers are in the business of sorting out the ontological and normative character of different categories of objects, events and behaviors, squaring up our conception of the nature of things, and clarifying the subject matter of different avenues of intellectual exploration through careful conceptual analyses of often complex conventional practices. Psychologists have developed careful empirical methods for measuring and modeling behavior, methods that are fruitfully used in practice to test and evaluate hypotheses about the nature of our cognitive and emotional engagement with the world. So, for all appearances, philosophy and psychology share in the common task of sorting and testing theories about the nature of art and artistic practices (e.g., what is an artwork, what is the nature of the productive practices involved in creating these kinds of artifacts and what is the nature of a consumer’s artistic engagement with these artifacts). Unfortunately appearances can be deceptive. Despite common calls for rapprochement, the two disciplines rarely meet. There are both methodological and ideological reasons for this rift, and not surprisingly they are related. In what follows, I will explore and evaluate some of the central sources of resistance on both sides of this divide, introduce a model for the possibility of rapprochement, and briefly sketch the promise and pitfalls of current research in two areas, dance and film, where an active attempt at bridging the divide between philosophy and empirical aesthetics is underway.