Aesthetic Communication

2.1 An Epistemic Demand in Aesthetics

Artworks of significant aesthetic value place a demand on us to develop sensitivity to and an understanding¹⁵ of their distinctive aesthetic character and value. Let us call this demand the “discernment demand.” Discerning aesthetic communication is a significant form of aesthetic communication because engaging in it helps us crystallize, express and share our understanding of the distinctive aesthetic character and value of artworks of significant aesthetic value. It therefore helps us and others meet the discernment demand.

I will assume throughout that the discernment demand does obtain. I will not say anything about the strength of the discernment demand and I concede that the strength of various moral demands is greater. The phenomenology of our encounters with artworks of significant aesthetic value suggests that the discernment demand does obtain. If we sit through a performance of Hamlet and merely enjoy it as we would any other play with a tragic ending, then we feel ourselves to have fallen short. The same is true if we rest content with the generic judgement that Poussin’s Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake (1648) is balanced, but do not attempt to get clear about its distinctive aesthetic character. It is plausible that the felt inadequacy of these and many other of our encounters with artworks of significant aesthetic value is due to our acknowledgement that we have failed to meet the discernment demand. That is to say, that it is due to our acknowledgement that we have failed to develop sensitivity to and an understanding of the distinctive aesthetic character of these artworks.

Meeting the discernment demand is one of the tasks of appreciators but also of art critics. In this vein Stuart Hampshire asserts that critics are “required” to “see the object exactly as it is […] [not] as one of a [general] kind, but [as] individual and unrepeatable” (Hampshire 1979: 165). This involves getting to grips with the artwork’s distinctive aesthetic character and value, rather than merely judging it to possess some widely instantiated aesthetic property. Isenberg (1949: 334) similarly points out the “absurdity” of attending to and judging artworks in relation to whether they possess widely instantiated properties or meet antecedently available criteria. The absurdity, that is, “of presuming to judge a work of art, the very excuse for whose existence lies in its difference from everything that has gone before, by its degree of resemblance to something that has gone before” (334).

One communicative task of criticism in particular, and of appreciators more generally, is to communicate about the distinctive aesthetic character and value of artworks of significant aesthetic value. This is not the only task of art criticism, to be sure, but it is a common and central one and it is strange that it has not received more philosophical attention. Art criticism is, in part, a formalized edifice of discerning aesthetic judgements. The demand that art critics succeed in specifying and communicating about the distinctive aesthetic character and value of artworks is also baked into our standards for assessing works of criticism. If a critic rests content with a generic aesthetic judgement, they will be recognized to have fallen short in relation to this task and to have failed a part of their critical mission. They will also fall short if they offer only lazy comparisons or clichés in a way that limits the incisiveness and specificity of their prose to genericity.

As amateurs (i.e. non-critics) we engage in many more generic aesthetic conversations than discerning aesthetic conversations. We regularly discuss whether we liked a movie, for example, for the purpose of seeing whether we share the same general taste as someone else or in order to recommend that they go and see it. We also regularly employ clumsy comparisons between artworks and ascribe widely shared aesthetic properties to artworks for similar reasons. The aesthetic conversations that we cherish and learn the most from, however, are almost always discerning. The rich conversations we have at our book club or in the bar after the movie, for example, are typically discerning (or, at least, have pretensions to be). In these conversations we strive to specify with precision the distinctive aesthetic character of an artwork. For amateurs this process is sometimes successful in achieving this aim and sometimes fails. It can fail for several reasons. It can fail because we fail to capture what is aesthetically distinctive about a work, because we realize that there isn’t in actual fact anything notable and aesthetically distinctive to capture, or because in spite of our capturing what is aesthetically distinctive about a work our interlocutor fails to grasp what we are saying in a suitably nuanced manner, for example. Amateur conversations often drift between the discerning and the generic. They sometimes have a confusing mixture of generic and discerning aims. I will focus on discerning aesthetic communication in art criticism from hereon in. This is because art critical communication is a more manageable object of study. Its aims and norms are more regimented and easier to identify and describe than amateur conversations. My choice to focus on art critical communication does not affect the fact that I take what I argue about discerning art critical communication to apply to amateur discerning aesthetic communication also.

Discerning aesthetic communication is a worthy object of study then. In what follows I will analyse the following example of a discerning aesthetic judgement and consider the difficulties involved in understanding it. It is paraphrased from T. J. Clark’s account of Nicholas Poussin’s Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake (1648) in his book The Sight of Death (2006).

[Statement:] The balance which pervades the painting’s aesthetic character is centred in the depiction of the woman on the path. The beckoning lightness of her illuminated figure enables the painting’s accommodation of Nature’s darkness, as manifested in the snake’s devouring of the dead man. (Clark 2006: 217)

Clark’s judgement is typical in that it targets a particular kind of property. Let us label the specific property that Clark’s judgement targets “snake-balance.” Let us label the kind of property that Clark’s judgement targets an “idiosyncratic character property.” The first step to understanding the nature of discerning aesthetic communication and the difficulties that it faces is understanding the nature of idiosyncratic character properties.

2.2 Idiosyncratic Character Properties

Idiosyncratic character properties are properties that are idiosyncratic to a particular artwork and indicative of that artwork’s distinctive aesthetic character. They are finely individuated and are only possessed by a single artwork, in contrast to the widely instantiated properties that generic judgements target. To attribute a property like snake-balance to an artwork may often imply that the painting also possesses a widely instantiated aesthetic property (in this case the property of being aesthetically balanced). The entailment does not go the other way. That an artwork is balanced does not entail that it possesses snake-balance.

Aestheticians have often used the determinable/determinate distinction to mark out something like this distinction (see Sibley 1974). I do not do this for several reasons. One reason is that the determinable/determinate distinction puts us in mind of a particular relation between two properties, whereas I want to describe the nature of the type of property I have in mind more fully.¹⁶ Another reason is that the relation it marks is relative rather than absolute. To say that a property is a determinate of a determinable is only to state something about its relation to the determinable. The determinate property may still be widely instantiated, relatively coarsely individuated and itself determinable in relation to other properties.

A third reason is that it is not necessarily the case that idiosyncratic character properties are determinates of determinables. Nor is it always helpful to think of them in this way. Clark’s statement does happen to use the easily recognizable aesthetic term “balance” and it seems that the property he has in mind is a determinate form of aesthetic balance. However, aesthetic and critical judgements often do not employ any easily recognizable aesthetic term or pick out determinate instantiations of determinable properties (Sibley 1965: 135). Idiosyncratic character properties are distinctive partly because they are idiosyncratic to the artwork that possesses them. They are possessed only by that artwork.

Not all properties that are finely individuated and idiosyncratic are what I am labelling “idiosyncratic character properties,” however. The property “having a bottom left corner that bears the unique colour blue1234” is finely individuated and idiosyncratic but not (or not necessarily) indicative of an artwork’s wider aesthetic character in the relevant way.

Another feature of idiosyncratic character properties is that they are attributable to the work considered as a whole rather than to a part of it. It is standardly the case that the complex of properties that are responsible for an artwork’s idiosyncratic character properties are distributed over its different physical parts and over various other aspects of it. In this way the snake-balance of the Poussin painting is a function of the nature of its parts and its other aspects and the relations between these parts and aspects. The painting’s composition is one aspect and so are facts about the shading and the hue of various parts of the painting. So also are facts about how these parts and aspects relate to each other and to the painting’s theme. The way the painting establishes and deals with its theme is another aspect, as are the symbols and connotations distributed throughout it, pertinent aspects of its genesis and its place in art history, and so on. This underlying complex of properties and relations bear two significant relations to idiosyncratic character properties.

The first is that of being metaphysically responsible for the artwork bearing the relevant idiosyncratic character property. Frank Sibley famously claims that we lack the descriptive power to specify in language the precise nature of the properties that are responsible for an artwork having the aesthetic character that it has. He calls these properties “merit-responsible” properties (Sibley 1974: 94–98). He explains that it is not simply an object’s possession of some “determinable” property (having a curved line, for example) that is responsible for the object having a merit-constitutive property (e.g. for its being graceful), but rather its possession of a line of the specific determinate form of curvature that it has. Language, he thinks, cannot communicate the nature of the determinate form of curvature.¹⁷

This relation between merit-responsible properties and idiosyncratic character properties is not relevant to our discussion. This relation is of interest to Sibley because he is primarily interested in the justification question. The question of whether agents can be justified in judging that a work has a merit-constituting property (e.g. gracefulness) solely on the basis of a description of its merit-responsible properties (i.e. without having been acquainted with the artwork). In the cases Sibley discusses he deals with examples of merit-constituting properties that are coarsely individuated and widely instantiated. Our focus, by contrast, is solely on whether communication about a subset of what Sibley calls “merit-constituting” properties (i.e., idiosyncratic character properties) can ever be successful.

The second significant relation between “merit-responsible” properties and idiosyncratic character properties, and the relation that is of interest to us, is therefore of a different kind altogether. Merit-responsible properties are not only metaphysically responsible for an artwork’s possession of its idiosyncratic character properties, they also partly determine the precise nature of its idiosyncratic character properties. This is why they are of interest to us in this paper. Poussin’s Landscape with a Snake has the particular form of balance it does, for example, because it is a balance between particular parts, aspects and thematic features of the painting. Idiosyncratic character properties are largely a function of the relations between the different parts, aspects and thematic features of an artwork. This is why idiosyncratic character properties are themselves indicative of the painting’s wider aesthetic character. The snake-balance of the Poussin painting is a function of how the figures depicted, the shadings used and the theme of the painting relate to each other. In order to understand the property of snake-balance one must have an understanding of these other features of the painting and of how they combine to give the painting the aesthetic character that it has.

The foregoing discussion provides us with a working conception of the idiosyncratic character properties that are the focus of discerning aesthetic judgements. The abstract description I have offered of these properties should not estrange us from them. These are the properties that we focus on and spend time discussing because they are central to an artwork’s aesthetic character. We aim to get clear about them because doing so is a way of making sense of the artwork as a whole and of its distinctive aesthetic character and value.

The communicative optimist claims that there is no communicative difficulty particular to aesthetic communication. There are good reasons for thinking that there are difficulties attaching to discerning aesthetic communication. I will offer the standard account of these difficulties in the next section and my own account in §4.

Discerning aesthetic communication is a form of nuanced and highly specific communication. Nuanced and highly specific forms of communication in other domains may encounter difficulties that are somewhat similar to those that discerning aesthetic communication does. Things are nonetheless different in the aesthetic domain because the discernment demand means that discerning aesthetic communication is central to the aesthetic domain in a way that it is not to other standard domains.¹⁸

The arguments I advance in §§3–4 vindicate restricted communicative pessimism. The thesis that discerning aesthetic communication typically fails unless both conversational partners are (or have been) acquainted with the artwork. In §§3–4 I therefore consider whether or not discerning aesthetic communication can be successful when the recipient is not (and has not been) acquainted with the artwork. This focus is somewhat artificial because discerning aesthetic communication typically involves both conversational partners being acquainted with the artwork, for reasons that will become clear. I set out an account of how discerning aesthetic communication proceeds when both conversational partners are acquainted with the artwork in §5.

4.1 The Shortcomings of the Standard View

The argument rehearsed in the previous section is valid and there are some good reasons for thinking that its premises are true. The standard view of the nature of discerning aesthetic communication and of communicative success are nonetheless overly simplistic. There are several reasons for thinking this and these reasons motivate the development of an alternative account that captures the complexities of aesthetic communication and communicative success.

The first shortcoming of the standard view is that it reduces the communicative task of the critic to the provision of instructions for how their audience should perceive an artwork. Criticism does often provide such instructions. However, the standard view radically underplays and risks completely ignoring the fact that criticism also regularly undertakes the task of specifying the distinctive aesthetic character and value of artworks. Clark, for example, undertakes this task in his statement (and the passages surrounding it) when he describes the idiosyncratic character property of snake-balance. He does not merely assert that the artwork has a given property and instruct readers on how to perceive it. He takes pains to try to characterize the nature of this property in his critical piece. He does this because characterizing the nature of this property is a means of characterizing the aesthetic character and value of the work.

This shortcoming of the standard view is significant because it is often difficult or even impossible to communicate the distinctive and idiosyncratic character of an artwork merely via directing an audience’s perceptual attention. Consider the property of snake-balance, for example. The provision of instructions for how one should perceptually attend to the perceptible surface of the painting will not enable one to adequately grasp the distinctive and rich form of balance the painting possesses.²⁰ Much more is needed in order to do that, along with some conception of how the work’s features fit together compositionally and thematically.

Critics will often share their wider interpretation and understanding of the work in order to help their audience get the idiosyncratic character property in mind. The sharing of this wider understanding of the painting is not reducible to an instruction on how the work should be perceived or experienced.²¹ The critic shares their aesthetic understanding because their task is to specify and characterize the distinctive aesthetic character of the artwork and communicating their wider understanding of the work and the nature of the idiosyncratic character property is a method of doing this.²²

One reason why proponents of the standard view might underplay these aspects of discerning aesthetic communication, and the critical task of specification, is that they are sceptical about whether the kinds of properties it picks out can be expressed in language at all. Isenberg (1949: 336) and Sibley (1965; 1974) can be read as being in sympathy with this kind of scepticism.²³ If this scepticism were well founded it would vindicate (restricted) communicative pessimism. The fact that critics like Clark attempt to specify the nature of idiosyncratic character properties in language seems to suggest that such specification is possible, however. As does the fact that we as readers take for granted that excellent critical pieces succeed in this aim. The alternative approach that I will put forward defends restricted communicative pessimism not by acquiescing in the sceptical claim rehearsed above, but by instead claiming that though the relevant properties can be specified in language it is nevertheless typically very difficult to understand a critic’s specification of them unless we are acquainted with the artwork in question.²⁴ I offer support for this view throughout the paper, but especially in §5 where I demonstrate that Clark succeeds in specifying the nature of snake-balance and where I explain how we come to understand his statement when we are acquainted with the work.

Another shortcoming of the standard view is that it associates communicative success with a reader undergoing an experience of the way of appearing distinctive of a property and associating this way of appearing with the property-attributing utterance. This underestimates and misrepresents what is required of the reader if they are to understand precisely what the critic intends to communicate in a discerning aesthetic utterance.

To understand the critic’s utterance with sufficient nuance the reader must make a careful effort to understand the critic’s wider understanding of the work and use this wider understanding in order to adopt the critic’s perspective on the work. It is from this vantage point that the critic makes their utterance and it is from this vantage point that it must be understood. Communicative success does not just involve directing one’s perceptual attention so that one can experience a way of appearing, then. It involves coordinating with the critic in their perspective on the work, being sensitive to how they understand the work and from that vantage point attempting to grasp exactly what they are predicating of the work. It is true that this process typically involves (and indeed requires) that the reader be acquainted with the artwork in question. The standard view underestimates what else is required of the reader.

In summary, the alternative approach that I will defend captures the features and complexities of discerning aesthetic communication described above. It departs from the standard view in understanding critics to express idiosyncratic properties in language rather than thinking of their words as simply directions for perceiving such properties or as labels for them. The alternative approach takes the reader to be involved in an active process of attempting to understand a critic’s specification of the nature of such properties. This process involves careful attention to the language the critic uses to describe the work, careful attention to the critic’s wider understanding of the work, and an experience of the work against the background of these things. Communicative success is not simply a matter of a reader matching a label such as “snake-balance” to the phenomenal character of an experience that the critics words prompts them to undergo. It is, instead, a matter of undertaking difficult interpretative work.

4.2 An Alternative Model of Communicative Success

We can begin to make progress in understanding the way that discerning aesthetic communication proceeds, and the standards that govern whether it has been successful, by adapting Ray Buchanan’s account of how communication proceeds, succeeds and fails to the aesthetic case. Communication is successful, on Buchanan’s view, when a hearer entertains a proposition that is relevantly similar to the proposition the speaker intended to communicate (Buchanan 2010: 359). To demand that the speaker and hearer entertain exactly the same proposition is to place the bar for communicative success too high. Buchanan offers a more liberal view on which the speaker’s utterance is associated with a “restricted proposition-type” and communication is successful when a hearer entertains “some one or more propositions which are of the restricted proposition-type” (Buchanan 2010: 359). In standard cases the nature of the restricted proposition-type that the speaker utters is determined by the language the speaker uses, the relevant conventional meanings, the context in which the utterance is made and the interests governing the communicative exchange. Buchanan acknowledges that it is not uncommon that hearers need to do some work in order to understand an utterance. He focuses on occasions when this happens in casual elliptical conversations, but a similar situation occurs in relation to aesthetic communication.

The work a hearer has to do in casual conversations is that of “fill[ing] in the details” of the speaker’s utterance “in some or other suitable way” (359). In standard cases hearers are adept at doing this. Consider the statement ‘every beer is in the bucket’ uttered at a party, for example. If an audience understood the utterance as meaning that every beer in the world was in the bucket, then communication would have failed. The statement is automatically processed by hearers as having a more restricted scope, however. Hearers intuitively understand that the scope of ‘every’ is determined by the context in which the statement is uttered and the purpose of the communicative exchange (e.g. to instruct guests on where to look for beer at the party and to provide them with a way of telling when the supply of beer has been exhausted). A variety of ways of cashing the statement out successfully instantiate the relevant proposition-type and constitute communicative success. Audiences can successfully understand the statement in each of the following ways, for example, ‘every beer [for the party / for our guests / in the apartment] is in the bucket.’

4.3 The Difficulty of Aesthetic Communication

Recipients of discerning aesthetic communication are in a somewhat similar but markedly more difficult situation when confronted with statements like Clark’s. The situation is exacerbated when they have neither seen nor developed an understanding of the artwork in question. There are at least three features of these kinds of communicative exchange that are responsible for its difficulty.

5.1 The Communication of Aesthetic Understanding

Consider how Clark shares his aesthetic understanding and contextualizes his statement about Landscape with a Snake. Clark’s case is indicative of how this element of critical communication proceeds. Clark frames the painting as a response to a question that he sees it as a pictorial reflection on. The “question Landscape with a Snake poses is this, simply: How much of death or terror can nature contain and still be posited as a value—as a world that human beings reach for, steadying themselves” (Clark 2006: 174). The “painting’s achievement,” Clark asserts elsewhere, is “that actually it manages to establish a plain way out of fear and monstrosity without that coming across as consoling (as religion, or therapy, or even philosophy as normally understood” (Clark 2006: 162).

This framing of the work’s theme immediately provides us with some resources for narrowing down the relevant form of balance. It is in part a balance between the lightness and darkness of nature. The painting’s mode of presenting the lightness and darkness of nature accommodates both elements. The painting does not attempt to compensate for nature’s darkness by offering salvation from it. It does not establish anything like a harmony between these elements either, nor does it treat the tension as simple or binary. Clark offers further clarifications on the way that the painting treats this theme and on how various symbols and figures relate to the theme and to each other in light of the theme.

This allows us as readers to begin making sense of how the painting’s composition relates to its theme. The literal light and shade mentioned in the statement embody the themes of light and darkness. Something referred to as a “beckoning lightness” is associated with a woman at the centre of the painting and is playing against the literal and thematic darkness of a snake consuming a corpse in a corner of the painting. With the relevant theme in mind, we can infer that whatever the exact role the beckoning lightness of the woman plays in the painting is, it is not offering some ethereal or Madonna-like compensation for Nature’s darkness. We can also infer that the woman’s lightness and the darkness of the snake scene are key to the painting’s balance. The painting’s balance is bound up with lightness and dark, both thematically and in terms of shade and composition.

Clark’s communication of his broader aesthetic understanding of the painting enables us to edge towards an understanding of precisely what he predicates of the painting by attributing the property of snake-balance to it. Though Clark’s sharing of his wider aesthetic understanding is helpful, it is still the case that we as readers would be limited to a superficial understanding of his judgement if we were not also acquainted with the artwork.^26,27

5.2 Acquaintance and Critical Communication

To illustrate the importance of acquaintance and precisely how it facilitates the success of discerning aesthetic communication consider how being exposed to the painting Clark targets (or the reproduction below, rather) transforms our understanding of his statement.

Nicholas Poussin, Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake, 1648. Oil on canvas. © The National Gallery, London. Permissions granted.

With the painting in front of us we are now in a better position to understand the precise nature of Clark’s statement. We can understand how the woman serves as a centre of gravity in the painting and that Clark was partly gesturing to this fact. She is hit by a light-source coming from the top left. She gestures to the running man who is the empathetic focus of the painting. Her outstretched arm and his (and the motion of the rowers in the lake behind) draw him towards her and keep him connected to the light. At the same time, the man’s gaze is held captive by the dark scene in the bottom left corner where the snake devours the dead man. The running man is suspended between darkness and light and the woman’s beckoning to him holds this tension of the painting in balance. It is in these ways that darkness is thematically acknowledged and accommodated without it either being overwhelming or being compensated for. It is in these ways that the painting has the particular thematic and compositional balance that it has.

This characterization of the painting’s balance tallies with Clark’s statement:

[Statement:] The balance which pervades the painting’s aesthetic character is centred in the depiction of the woman on the path. The beckoning lightness of her illuminated figure enables the painting’s accommodation of Nature’s darkness, as manifested in the snake’s devouring of the dead man. (Clark 2006: 217)

The fact that we have been able to paraphrase, elaborate on and contextualize what he said in a way that is consonant with his words, and his broader understanding, is evidence that we have grasped what he intended to communicate.

Readers who successfully understand Clark’s statement and his wider specification of the property of snake-balance in this way, simultaneously have their aesthetic understanding of the painting nuanced in the process. They are then in a position to judge that Clark has succeeded not only in getting us to experience the work as possessing the property of snake-balance but in specifying the nature of this property in his critical piece. This suggests that properties like snake-balance can be expressed in language—contra the scepticism associated with Isenberg and Sibley in §4—even if they cannot typically be understood by readers unless they are acquainted with the artwork in the way described above.

The fact that we have been able to paraphrase, elaborate on and contextualize what Clark said is not only evidence of communicative success. It is part of the process of, and is partly constitutive of, communicative success, on the alternative approach to aesthetic communication that I am advancing.

This is a demanding picture of communicative success, but it is in keeping with the nature and purpose of discerning aesthetic communication. Given the nature of the idiosyncratic character properties that discerning aesthetic communication targets, it is natural to think that an agent would need to have the ability to coordinate with the critic on an aesthetic understanding of the artwork in order to understand their critical statement. The broader character of a painting—the complex of properties and relations that a critic’s aesthetic understanding makes sense of—is what determinates the precise nature of an artwork’s idiosyncratic character property (or properties), after all. A reader must be able to share a critic’s aesthetic understanding of the broader character of a work, at least to some extent, if they are to successfully get the right idiosyncratic character property in mind. Snake-balance, for example, is a function of the relations between various contrasts and tensions in Landscape with a Snake. Grasping what snake-balance is requires grasping the nature of these various contrasts and tensions in the right way.

The capacity to experience the work from the vantage point of the critic’s aesthetic understanding is also necessary in order grasp exactly what a critic’s figurative uses of language mean (phrases like the “beckoning lightness of her illuminate figure,” for example) and what they are intended to indicate about the relevant property. The ability to accurately paraphrase the critic’s statement(s) is rightly associated with communicative success because it is a demonstration of the fact that creative uses of language have been successfully and precisely decoded.

On Buchanan’s view communicative success in standard (non-aesthetic) cases is a matter of entertaining a proposition that is relevantly similar to what the speaker intended to communicate. The nature of what discerning aesthetic conversations communicate and the fact that the critic’s utterances must be understood in the context of their broader understanding of the painting means that more is required of the audience in the aesthetic case. Success in discerning aesthetic communication requires that the reader coordinate with the critic on an aesthetic understanding of the artwork, experience the work as possessing the relevant property and have the capacity to paraphrase the critic’s statement(s) accurately and precisely.²⁸ When the reader has these capacities they will overcome the three difficulties with discerning aesthetic communication listed in §4 and communication will be successful.

6.1 The Testimonial Question

The testimonial question asks whether aesthetic testimony can provide reasons to believe. The pessimistic answer to this question is “unavailability pessimism” (Hopkins 2011). It is the view that testimonial reasons to believe are not provided by aesthetic testimony. It asserts an asymmetry between how testimony functions in the aesthetic domain and how it functions in other standard domains (where testimony does provide reasons to believe).

Unavailability pessimism was at one point considered the “orthodox” position in the debate (Meskin 2004: 72), but has rapidly declined in popularity. This decline can be traced, in part, to theorists switching the focus of their inquiry to testimonial exchanges of generic aesthetic beliefs and judgements. Theorists have seen little reason to deny that generic utterances by expert practitioners—“the flower arrangement is beautiful” or “the architectural design is elegant,” for example—can provide testimonial reasons for belief in aesthetics as they do in other domains.

The argument of this paper provides a way of defending a restricted form of unavailability pessimism. Communicative failure blocks any potential provision of testimonial reasons to believe. Restricted communicative pessimism therefore implies a restricted form of testimonial pessimism. Discerning aesthetic communication cannot typically provide testimonial reasons to believe the content of discerning aesthetic judgements because it typically fails. This does not change the fact that generic communication can provide us with testimonial reasons for generic beliefs. Reasons for beliefs about which exhibition or film is worth seeing can be provided, for example, as can beliefs about whether a piece of furniture is elegant or a novel moving, and so on.²⁹

There is a sense in which discerning aesthetic communication can also sometimes provide testimonial reasons to believe. Discerning aesthetic communication can sometimes succeed, after all, as demonstrated in the previous section. This removes the communicative barrier to the provision of testimonial reasons. This only typically happens when communicative exchanges approximate the communicative structure of art criticism, however. Communication succeeds in these cases partly because the recipient is brought into a position where they experience for themselves the property the critic attributes to the artwork. It is true that there is a sense in which testimonial reasons to believe are provided in these cases. However, in these cases the testimonial reasons are always trumped by another form of evidence. This is because the circumstances that their provision depends upon involve the recipient having access to a more direct form of evidence for the aesthetic belief in question. That is, the evidence that their experience of the work as possessing the property constitutes.³⁰

In addition to establishing that a restricted form of unavailability pessimism is true, the more striking upshot of our discussion is that the testimonial question is largely irrelevant in relation to discerning aesthetic communication. What discerning aesthetic communication attempts to communicate is not something that can be communicated in a standard testimonial exchange. It requires a particular communicative structure to be in place and significant effort to be made on behalf of the critic and the reader. The chief outcome of this communicative process, when it is successful, is not the provision of testimonial reasons for a belief. It is, rather, what the recipient has learned for themselves about the artwork with the help of the critic. It is the gain in the reader’s aesthetic understanding of the artwork and in their capacity to experience it appropriately and with sensitivity to its distinctive aesthetic character and value.

6.2 The (Epistemic) Value Question

We can better understand the epistemic value of aesthetic communication in light of this response to the testimonial question. In the foregoing my focus has been on what constitutes successful communication in relation to utterances that involve discerning property attributions. With this end in mind, I have sometimes talked as if the sharing of aesthetic understanding, and the recipient’s employment of this aesthetic understanding to inform a sensitive experience of an artwork, was a mere means to the true goal and value of the communicative exchange: the comprehension of the meaning of a property attribution. This is, of course, misleading.

It is misleading partly because there is not a substantive gap between understanding the relevant kind of property attribution and aesthetically understanding the work (as the critic aesthetically understands it). It is also misleading because it is the development and sharing of aesthetic understanding, and the inculcation of the recipient’s capacity to experience the work with sensitivity to its distinctive aesthetic character, that is the overriding value of aesthetic communication. We do not seek to aesthetically understand the work and experience its distinctive aesthetic character in the hope that we might understand a critic’s property attribution about the work. The opposite is true. We attempt to share highly specific judgements in the hope that the process of doing so will enable us to share a richer aesthetic understanding of artworks and enable us to experience the distinctive aesthetic character of artworks with sensitivity. The epistemic value readers can hope to achieve from this form of communication consists in their gaining aesthetic understanding of an artwork for the first time or in their nuancing their antecedent aesthetic understanding of the work. We also hope that engaging in the communicative process described above will bring us closer together as we coordinate on a shared experience and understanding of works of significant aesthetic value.³¹ In this way the value of discerning aesthetic communication is also bound up with the fact that it helps us as individuals and as a community to do what the discernment demand demands of us.