Aesthetics

From "Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science"

Aesthetics is that branch of philosophy devoted to conceptual and theoretical inquiry into art and aesthetic experience.

THE DOMAIN OF AESTHETICS

We may usefully distinguish three conceptions of the domain of aesthetics, according to what is taken as the focus of attention:

The practice of making and appreciating works of art.

Aesthetic properties, features, or aspects of things.

Aesthetic attitudes, perceptions, or experiences.

There are intimate relations among these three conceptions. Thus, art might be conceived as a practice in which people aim to
make objects possessing valuable aesthetic properties, or that are apt to give subjects valuable aesthetic experiences; aesthetic
properties might be conceived as those properties saliently possessed by works of art, or those on which aesthetic experience is
centrally directed; and aesthetic perception might be conceived as the sort of perception that is central to the appreciation either
of works of art, or of the aesthetic properties of things, whether natural or man-made. Finally, it can be argued that art, in its
creative and receptive aspects, provides the richest and most varied arena for the exploration of aesthetic properties and the
enjoyment of aesthetic experiences.

The aesthetics of nature may be included in the second or third of these conceptions, if it is understood as the study of certain
distinctive properties of natural phenomena that can be classified as aesthetic (e. g. beauty, sublimity, grandeur), or of certain
kinds of experience provoked by nature, or of certain kinds of attitudes to nature. The theory of criticism may be included in the
first conception, if it is understood as the study of that part of the practice of art concerned with the reception of artworks,
including their description, interpretation, and evaluation. Craft, too, can be understood as an art-related or quasi-artistic
activity, and hence may be included in the first conception.

Art

One conception of art sees it as specially concerned with the exploration and contemplation of perceptible form for its own sake.
This view has roots in the work of the eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who thought that the beauty of
objects and phenomena, whether natural or man-made, consisted in their ability to stimulate the free play of the cognitive
faculties in virtue of their pure forms, both spatial and temporal, and without the mediation of concepts. In the early twentieth
century, the English art theorist Clive Bell took a similar line, holding that spatial form was the only artistically relevant aspect of
visual art, and that possessing ‘significant form’ was the necessary and sufficient condition of a work of art.

Another conception of art sees it as essentially a vehicle of expression or communication, especially of states of mind or
nonpropositional contents. In the early twentieth century, the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce claimed that the essence of
art is in the expression of emotion. He emphasized the indissociability, even identity, of content and vehicle in art. The English
philosopher R. G. Collingwood developed this line further, observing that making works of art was a way for the artist to
articulate or make clear the nature of his or her emotional condition. The Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy identified art with
emotional communication from one person to another by indirect means, namely, a structure of signs in an external medium.

A third conception of art sees it as concerned with the imitation or representation of the external world, perhaps in distinctive
ways or by distinctive means. This conception can be found in the earliest works in the canon of aesthetics, the Republic of Plato
and the Poetics of Aristotle. Modified so as to allow for representation of matters beyond the visible, it finds expression among
later thinkers in the aesthetic theories of Lessing, Hegel, and Schopenhauer. Some modern discussions of art as representation
regard it broadly as semiotic or symbolic in nature.

Art has also been conceived as an activity aimed explicitly at the creation of beautiful objects, including representations of
natural and human beauty; as an arena for the exhibition of skill, particularly in fashioning or manipulating objects capable of
exciting admiration (Sparshott, 1982); as a development of play, stressing the structured and serious aspects of play (Gadamer,
1986); and as the sphere of experience per se, in which attention is drawn to the interplay of active (creative) and passive
(receptive) phases in engagement with the external world (Dewey, 1934).

More recently, art has been conceived as the production of objects intended to afford aesthetic experience (Beardsley, 1981); as
the investing of objects with ‘aboutness’ in the context of a specific cultural framework (Danto, 1981); as a particular social

institution identified by its constituent rules and roles (Dickie, 1997; Davies, 1991); and as an activity identifiable only historically
institution identified by its constituent rules and roles (Dickie, 1997; Davies, 1991); and as an activity identifiable only historically
through a connection to earlier activities or objects whose art status is assumed (Wollheim, 1980; Levinson, 1990, 1996; Carroll,
2001).

Aesthetic Property

It is generally agreed that aesthetic properties are perceptual or observable, experienced in a fairly direct manner, and relevant
to the aesthetic value of the objects that possess them. Various further characteristics of aesthetic properties have been
proposed, including: having gestalt character; requiring a certain sensitivity for discernment; having an evaluative aspect;
affording pleasure or displeasure in contemplation; not being governed by conditions, or applicable by rule; supervenience on
lower-level perceptual properties; requiring imagination for attribution; requiring metaphorical thought for attribution; being
notably revealed in aesthetic experience; and being notably present in works of art.

Although the relative status of the characteristics is debated, there is substantial intuitive agreement as to which perceivable
properties of things are aesthetic. These include, for example: beauty, sublimity, grace, elegance, delicacy, harmony, balance,
unity, power, anguish, sadness, tranquility, serenity, and melancholy. It is evident that expressive properties, which arguably
belong only to works of art and not to natural objects, constitute a significant subset of aesthetic properties.

Aesthetic Experience

Among the characteristics that have been proposed as distinguishing aesthetic states of mind (whether attitudes, perceptions,
emotions, or acts of attention) from others are: disinterestedness, or detachment from desires, needs and practical concerns;
non-instrumentality, or being undertaken or sustained for their own sake; contemplation or absorbtion, with consequent
effacement of the subject; focus on an object’s form; focus on the relation between an object’s form and its content or character;
focus on the aesthetic features of an object; and centrality in the appreciation of works of art. It is still a matter of debate
whether these criteria, either individually or in some combination, adequately define aesthetic experience.

PROBLEMS IN AESTHETICS

Evidently, among the problems aesthetics addresses are the interrelated characterizations of art, aesthetic properties, and
aesthetic experience. These broad problems engender many more specific ones.

The issue of the definition of art leads naturally to many further issues: the ontology of art; the process of artistic creation; the
demands of artistic appreciation; the concept of form in art; the role of media in art; the analysis of representation and
expression in art; the nature of artistic style; the meaning of authenticity in art; and the principles of artistic interpretation and
evaluation. The philosophy of art is, in fact, sometimes conceived of as metacriticism, or the theory of art criticism (Beardsley,
1981).

The ontology of art concerns the question of exactly what sort of object a work of art is, and how this might vary between
different art forms. Philosophers have asked whether a work of art is physical or mental, abstract or concrete, singular or
multiple, created or discovered, notationally definable or only culturally specifiable; and they have asked what authenticity of a
work of art consists in.

Interest in the creative process in art concerns the question of whether the creative process can be characterized in any general
way, and the relevance of knowledge of the creative process (and more generally of the historical context of creation) to
appreciation of works of art.

Issues about artistic form include the status of formalism as a theory of art, the different kinds of form manifested in different art
forms, and the relation of form to content and of form to medium.

Among the modes of meaning that inhere in works of art, perhaps the most important are representation and expression.
Goodman (1976) argues that exemplification is an equally important mode.

Accounts of representation (usually with special reference to pictorial representation) have been proposed in terms of
resemblance between object and representation; perceptual illusion (Gombrich, 1960); symbolic conventions (Goodman, 1976);
‘seeing-in’ (Wollheim, 1987); world-projection (Wolterstorff, 1980); make-believe (Walton, 1990); recognitional capacities (Schier,
1986); resemblance between experience of object and experience of representation (Budd, 1995; Hopkins, 1998); and
information content (Lopes, 1996).

Accounts of artistic expression (usually with special reference to the expression of emotion) have been proposed in terms of
personal expression by the artist; induced empathy with the artist; metaphorical exemplification; correspondence (Wollheim,
1987); evocation (Matravers, 1998); imaginative projection (Scruton, 1997); expressive appearance (Kivy, 1989; Davies, 1994);
and imagined personal expression (Vermazen, 1986; Levinson, 1996).

Concerning artistic style, attention has focused on the distinction between individual and period style, on the psychological
reality of style, on the interplay between style and representational objective, and on the role that cognizance of style plays in

aesthetic appreciation.
aesthetic appreciation.

Concerning the interpretation of art, attention has focused on the relevance of artists’ intentions; on the diversity of
interpretative aims; on the debate between critical monism and critical pluralism; on the similarities and differences between
critical and performative interpretation; and on the relationship between interpretation and maximization of value.

Concerning the evaluation of art, attention has focused on the question of its objectivity or subjectivity; on the relation between
artistic value and pleasurability; on the relation between the value of art as a whole and the value of individual works of art; on
the existence of general criteria of value across art forms; and on the relevance of a work’s historical influence, ethical import,
emotional power, and cognitive reward to its evaluation as art.

Certain concepts are relevant to the understanding of many, if not all, works of art: for example, the concepts of intention,
fiction, metaphor, genre, narrative, genius, forgery, performance, and tragedy.

There are other questions concerning the relationships between art and other domains or aspects of human life, such as emotion,
knowledge, and morality. For example, there are the questions of how we can coherently have emotions for characters whom we
know to be fictional; whether art can be a vehicle of knowledge; and whether art can contribute to moral education.

There are also questions relating to particular art forms: for example, whether photography is an inherently realistic medium;
whether poetry can be usefully paraphrased; whether the basic form of music is local or global; and whether narration operates
similarly in novels and films.

The question of the nature of aesthetic properties leads naturally to questions about realism in relation to such properties; the
supervenience relation between aesthetic properties and the non-aesthetic properties on which they depend; the range of
aesthetic properties to be found in the natural world; the special status of beauty among aesthetic properties; the difference
between the beautiful and the sublime; the degree of objectivity of judgments of beauty; the relations between artistic, natural,
and human beauty; and the relationship between the aesthetic properties of artworks and their artistic properties, such as
originality or seminality (which, although appreciatively relevant, are not directly perceivable as are aesthetic properties).

Finally, discussions of aesthetic experience open into discussions of the nature of perception, reason, imagination, feeling,
memory, and mood, in relation to art or nature.

UNDERSTANDING WORKS OF ART

Categorial Perception

Walton (1970) follows Beardsley and Sibley in taking aesthetic properties to be perceptual, gestalt-like, non-rule-governed, and
dependent on an object’s lower-level perceptual properties. But Walton insists that aesthetic properties are dependent as well on
the artistic categories (for example, of style, genre or medium) into which works of art may be said to fall. The category of a work
is partly a matter of art-historical context, including factors such as the artist’s intention, the artist’s previous work, the artistic
traditions in which the artist worked, and the artistic problems to which the artist is responding. If, as Walton argues, a work’s
aesthetic properties do not reside in perceivable structure alone, it is even more evident that its artistic properties depend on
non-perceivable factors.

Artistic Expression

For Goodman (1976), artistic expression is a matter of an artwork exemplifying or drawing attention to some property it
metaphorically possesses, in virtue of its general symbolic functioning.

For Tormey (1971), artistic expression is a matter of an artwork’s possessing expressive properties that are related to intentional
states, and which are ambiguously constituted by the non-expressive structural features underlying them.

Wollheim (1987) suggests that expressiveness in painting is a matter of intuitive correspondence or fit between the appearances
that works of art present and feeling states of the subject, which are then projected onto those works in complex ways.

Davies (1994) offers a theory of musical expressiveness in terms of resemblances between musical patterns and human
emotional behavior, and explores the variety of responses that listeners have to perceived expressiveness.

Scruton (1997) locates the perception of musical expression in our ability to inhabit ‘from the inside’ the gestures that music
appears to embody, and thus to adequately imagine the inner states correlative with such gestures.

Levinson (1996) accounts for musical expressiveness in terms of music’s ready hearability as the personal expression of an
indefinite agent or persona.

Pictorial Representation

There are various accounts of our capacity to see what pictures depict and then respond to those depictions in aesthetically
relevant ways. Currently the two most influential theories are Wollheim’s (1987) ‘seeing-in’ theory and Walton’s (1990)
‘make-believe’ theory.
‘make-believe’ theory.

Wollheim’s theory is a development of Wittgenstein’s idea of aspect perception, or ‘seeing-as’, for example, seeing a gnarled tree
as an old woman. ‘Seeing-in’ applies to the parts of a picture as well as to the picture as a whole; and it involves simultaneous
(‘twofold’) awareness of the picture’s surface and the depicted content.

For Wollheim, seeing-in is a primitive visual capacity, at first exercised on natural phenomena, like stained rock faces, and later
deliberately harnessed for making images. A large part of the aesthetic interest in pictures is due to the twofoldness of seeing-in,
whereby we appreciate what is depicted, in a virtual three-dimensional space, in relation to the real two-dimensional pattern of
marks before us.

Walton understands pictures as props in visual games of guided imagining, or make-believe. The configuration of marks that
constitutes a picture prompts us to imagine we are seeing an object, and we imagine that our seeing those marks is a seeing of
the object. Pictures generate fictional worlds; and what it is correct to imagine seeing in a picture is determined by implicit rules
and conventions. In addition, in interacting with a picture visually, the viewer generates transient fictional worlds specific to him
or her.

It is not yet clear whether Wollheim’s and Walton’s proposals are reconcilable. For Walton, Wollheim’s seeing-in is to be analyzed
in terms of imagined seeing, whereas for Wollheim, seeing-in is an activity prior to and more fundamental than imagined seeing,
however important such seeing is in later phases of pictorial appreciation.

AESTHETICS AND COGNITIVE SCIENCE

Underlying aesthetic experience are certain mental states and processes: those involved in creating, perceiving, understanding
and appreciating works of art. Accordingly, much recent work in aesthetics has taken into account empirical research on the
human mind.

Pictorial Perception

Schier (1986) appeals directly to facts about ordinary visual processing in support of a theory of pictures. He proposes that a
representation is pictorial just insofar as it recruits the visual recognitional capacities subjects already possess for familiar
objects, so that a picture represents an object O if it triggers in subjects who view it the same capacities for recognition that
would be triggered by the sight of O in the world. Schier emphasizes that pictorial competence, unlike language learning, is
characterized by ‘natural generativity’, whereby once a subject can decipher a few pictures of a given sort, he or she can
generally decipher any number of such pictures, however novel.

Lopes (1996) maintains that the essence of pictorial representation is the furnishing of similar visual information by picture and
object. He proposes an ‘aspect-recognition’ theory of depiction, according to which successful pictures embody nonconceptual
aspectual information sufficient to trigger recognition of their objects in suitable perceivers. Developing a theme of Gombrich
(1960), Lopes proposes that the essence of depiction as a mode of representation is its inevitable selectivity, so that a picture of
whatever style (unlike a description) is explicitly noncommittal about certain represented properties of its object, precisely in
virtue of being explicitly committal about others.

Lopes (1997) argues for the possibility of purely tactile pictures (though he overlooks certain experiential asymmetries between
tactile and visual pictures (Hopkins, 2000)). And Lopes (1999) draws on color perception theory to demonstrate how pictures
depict the colors of the world without actually replicating them.

Musical Comprehension

Raffman (1993) investigates aspects of the apparent ineffability of music in terms of facts about the mental processing of music.
She sketches a cognitivist account of music perception that draws on the work of Jackendoff and Lerdahl, whereby an
experienced listener unconsciously assigns a structural description to heard music in accordance with internalized rules
governing musical parameters. Though a subject may become aware in an inarticulate way of how he or she is parsing the music,
the representations involved elude verbal grasp. Raffman calls this ‘structural ineffability’.

‘Feeling ineffability’ is a result of the fact that knowledge of music is sensory-perceptual: to know a piece is to know how it
sounds. Knowledge of music depends on knowing what, say, a minor third actually sounds like.

Raffman also sketches a psychology of musical nuances – those highly specific values of pitch, rhythm and timbre that
characterize any musical event – and shows how this underpins what she calls ‘nuance ineffability’. Nuance ineffability arises
from the fact that in aural experience we are conscious of differences, say, in pitch more subtle than we can inwardly label or
classify: we are unable to remember and judge of such nuances. The basic problem is one of memory: reporting a perception
requires retention of information in a manner that allows for stable association with verbal labels, but our ability to register
musical nuances exceeds the mental schemata we seem to have available for storing them. Nuance ineffability in the reception of

musical events poses a problem for those accounts of consciousness that identify it with sentential episodes: if we consciously
musical events poses a problem for those accounts of consciousness that identify it with sentential episodes: if we consciously
experience aural nuances but cannot represent them propositionally, then there must be more to consciousness than
sentential-type representation can allow.

DeBellis (1995) discusses statements of the form ‘S hears x as F’. He takes the meaning of such ascriptions to be given by the
content of the mental states that ground or justify them; and he takes these mental states to be ones in which passages of music
are represented, correctly or incorrectly, as having certain properties.

DeBellis argues that the music-hearing of an ordinary (experienced but untrained) listener is both weakly and strongly
nonconceptual. Weak nonconceptuality is the claim that the ordinary listener’s hearing of music does not involve those concepts
in terms of which an analyst might describe that hearing. Strong nonconceptuality is the claim that the ordinary listener’s
hearing of music does not involve concepts of any sort, even narrowly perceptual ones. A consequence of both theses is that
ordinary musical perception is not a process of acquiring beliefs, since beliefs presuppose concepts. Rather, the comprehending
ordinary listener represents the music being heard as having some qualities or features, without thereby believing that it has
those qualities or features.

DeBellis’s argument for strong nonconceptuality is as follows. Current psychological theory suggests that ordinary listeners
represent all heard sound events of a given kind K in the same way. Yet they generally prove unable to discriminate between K
and non-K events, and generally fail to judge two K events to be similar. This suggests that such listeners lack even a perceptual
concept of K, and that the conversion of ordinary listeners into expert listeners is in large part the acquisition of perceptual
concepts for musical features which ordinary and expert listeners register alike.

Robinson (1994) explores the relevance of recent research on emotions to theories of musical expression.

Jackendoff (1991) proposes an explanation of musical affect in terms of discrepancies between conscious knowledge of musical
progression and unconscious states of a postulated musical parser.

Levinson (1998a) questions the extent to which basic musical understanding requires a grasp of large-scale form.

Fictional Appreciation

Feagin (1996) uses simulation theory to help understand what responding appropriately to a work of literary fiction might
involve. She proposes that appreciation of a literary text typically involves mental shifts in response to the flow of the text. Such
mental shifting is a prerequisite to empathizing with fictional characters. Empathizing involves simulating another’s mentality, in
effect conforming one’s own mind to that of one’s target, by putting one’s mind ‘offline’ and then ‘inputting’ what one takes to be
the experiences of one’s target, thus generating an affective ‘output’ in oneself. This account might explain how, in responding
empathically to a work of fiction, one may thereby be acquiring real knowledge – knowledge of ‘what it is like’ to be a certain
person in a certain situation – which is often said to be one of the rewards of reading imaginative literature.

Currie (1995a) criticizes meta-representational theories of pretence, according to which pretending involves decoupling inner
symbols from their normal semantic implications or flagging such symbols with special ‘pretence’ markers. He suggests that
such views confuse mental contents and psychological attitudes towards them, and make it hard to explain the specific character
of individual pretendings.

Currie questions whether, as has been claimed, empirical studies of autism and related cognitive disorders support
meta-representational theories of pretense. He argues instead that such studies support the identification of imaginative
pretense with simulation. He suggests that imagination is an ‘internal simulator’, a part of our mental equipment that evolved for
the purpose of strategy-testing. This hypothesis can explain some aspects of appreciation of literary fiction, in particular our
capacity to be affected by the plights of fictional characters: empathizing with characters involves the same process as
empathizing with real people, taking on their beliefs and desires in imagination. The only additional requirement is that we first
imagine them to exist.

Currie (1995b) considers a number of central issues in film theory from a cognitivist perspective, such as how films represent,
what cinematic content consists in, and how we interpret cinematic narratives. He argues that the essence of cinematic
experience is not seeming to see, or even imagining seeing, the objects and events represented in a film, but rather ‘impersonally
visually imagining’ those objects and events. Since imagining is construed as a form of simulation – whether of others’ states or
of one’s own states on other occasions – the essence of cinematic experience is thus simulated perceptual belief.

Currie accounts for the special ‘realism’ of film in terms not of its capacity to induce perceptual illusion, but of its mode of
representation, whereby temporal properties are represented by temporal ones and spatial properties by spatial ones, which
makes cinematic experience of objects similar to experience of those objects in the world.

References

Beardsley, M (1981) Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. [First published 1958.].
 Budd, M (1995) Values of Art. London, UK: Penguin.

Carroll, N (2001) Beyond Aesthetics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Currie, G (1995a) Imagination and simulation: aesthetics meets cognitive science. In: Davies, M and Stone, T (eds) Mental

Simulation, pp. 151-169. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

Currie, G (1995b) Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Danto, A (1981) The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Davies, S (1991) The Definition of Art. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Davies, S (1994) Musical Meaning and Expression. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

DeBellis, M (1995) Music and Conceptualization. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Dewey, J (1934) Art as Experience. New York, NY: G. P. Putnam.

Dickie, G (1997) The Art Circle. Chicago, IL: Spectrum Press. [First published 1984.].

Feagin, S (1996) Reading With Feeling. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Gadamer, H (1986) The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Goldman, A (1995) Aesthetic Value. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Gombrich, E (1960) Art and Illusion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Goodman, N (1976) Languages of Art, 2nd edn. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. [First published 1968.].

Hopkins, R (1998) Picture, Image and Experience. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Hopkins, R (2000) Touching pictures. British Journal of Aesthetics 40: 149-167.

Jackendoff, R (1991) Musical parsing and musical affect. Music Perception 9: 199-230.

Kivy, P (1989) Sound Sentiment. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Levinson, J (1990) Music, Art, and Metaphysics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Levinson, J (1996) The Pleasures of Aesthetics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Levinson, J (1998a) Music in the Moment. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Lopes, D (1996) Understanding Pictures. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Lopes, D (1997) Art media and the sense modalities: tactile pictures. Philosophical Quarterly 47: 425-440.

Lopes, D (1999) Pictorial color: aesthetics and cognitive science. Philosophical Psychology 12: 415-428.

Matravers, D (1998) Art and Emotion. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Raffman, D (1993) Language, Music, and Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Robinson, J (1994) The expression and arousal of emotion in music. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52: 13-22.

Schier, F (1986) Deeper Into Pictures. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Scruton, R (1997) The Aesthetics of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sparshott, F (1982) Theory of the Arts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Tormey, A (1971) The Concept of Expression. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Vermazen, B (1986) Expression as expression. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 67: 196-224.

Walton, K (1970) Categories of art. Philosophical Review 79: 334-367.

Walton, K (1990) Mimesis as Make-Believe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Wollheim, R (1980) Art and Its Objects, 2nd edn. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. [First published 1968.].

Wollheim, R (1987) Painting as an Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Wolterstorff, N (1980) Worlds and Works of Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Further Reading

Beardsley, M (1982) The Aesthetic Point of View. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Currie, G (1989) An Ontology of Art. London, UK: Macmillan.

Currie, G (1990) The Nature of Fiction. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Kivy, P (1990) Music Alone. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

 Lamarque, P (1996) Fictional Points of View. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Levinson, J (1998b) Wollheim on pictorial perception. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56: 227-233.

Scruton, R (1974) Art and Imagination. London, UK: Methuen.

Sibley, F (2001) Approach to Aesthetics. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Stecker, R (1997) ArtWorks: Definition, Meaning, Value. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press.
Walton, K (1987) Style and the products and processes of art. In: Lang, B (ed.) The Concept of Style, pp. 72-103. Ithaca, NY:

Cornell University Press.

JERROLD LEVINSON
UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND, COLLEGE PARK, , MARYLAND, USA

Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

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