Abstract
This paper is an attack on the widely held view that judgments on works of art are irremediably subjective. Subjectivism, as it will be called, has its attractive and its less attractive sides. It is simple; it plausibly explains why there is so much disagreement in criticism of the arts; and, while arguments for and against it can be deployed, none of the arguments against is conclusive. This latter quality may be thought by some to be unattractive, and even a reason for rejecting subjectivism.1
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Notes
Impregnability against rational argument, a common feature shared by scepticism, idealism, irrationalism, and so on, is often admired. But it is important to distinguish intact positions which as far as is known have not succumbed to criticism—this is what we want of our own positions—from positions which one knows in advance are immune to criticism. Since all immune positions are intact positions, it is easy to confuse them, but to want the latter is unexceptionable, while to want the former is to want certainty even at the price of irrationality. See W. W. Bartley III, ‘Rationality versus the Theory of Rationality’, in M. Bunge (ed.), The Critical Approach to Science and Philosophy, Glencoe, 1964.
Novum Organum Book I, Aph. xlix, I, liv, lviii, lxvii-ix.
In Chapter I of his Conjectures and Refutations K. R. Popper discusses some of these questions.
See J. Agassi, ‘Towards an Historiography of Science’, History & Theory, Beiheft 2, 1963, § ‘The Continuity Theory’.
Since drafting this I have come across a similar view in T. S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolution (Chicago, 1962) where puzzles involved in articulating the paradigm are seen as a normal task of scientists (see Chapter IV).
This has been affirmed by Hesse (discussing Harré), ‘we are quite sure that we have shown that there are bacteria...’, Brit. J. Philos. Sci., 13, 1962, p. 236, and Alexander, ‘... scientific laws at a comparatively simple level are usually not regarded as worth further testing. The hypothesis that the melting point of gold is 1063o C, the hypothesis that the tides on any one coast recur at constant intervals, the hypothesis that ice floats on water: all these and countless others are so well confirmed that scientists no longer go on to testing them...’, Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume, 34, 1960, p. 136. Other frequently cited examples are the disputes over the heliocentric hypothesis and over phlogiston.
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© 1986 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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Jarvie, I.C. (1986). The Objectivity of Criticism of the Arts. In: Thinking about Society: Theory and Practice. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 93. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-5424-3_17
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