Evaluating Art

Chapter Six: Instrumental Cognitivism: Goodman

CHAPTER SIX Instrumental Cognitivism: Goodman I have now arrived at a compromise of Beardsley's and Sibley's views, a view that was expressed at the end of the last chapter in terms of a variety of critical principles. I propose to amplify the compromise view by gleaning what I can from an examination of the recent work of Nelson Goodman. In 1968, at the very end of Languages of Art,! Goodman began sketching the broad outlines of an instrumentalist theory that like Beardsley's proposes to evaluate art on the basis of its ability to produce aesthetic experience. He continued sketching this theory in his 1978 article, "When Is Art?" 2 However, Goodman's conception of aesthetic experience is totally different from Beardsley's, and as a result of this difference, a dispute broke out between them.3 This dispute is a clash between two very different conceptions of the nature of the proper experience of art. Beardsley's view, which is influenced by the Schopenhauerian tradition, conceives of the experience of art as detached and insulated from the rest of experience. Goodman's view, which revives a tradition antedating Schopenhauer, conceives of art as referring to the world and the experience of art as uninsulated from the rest of experience. Goodman's views, as sketchy and 101 INSTRUMENTAL COGNITIVISM undeveloped as they are, are of the very greatest importance, because they challenge the conventional wisdom embodied in the theories of Beardsley and others that the experience of art ought to be detached and that cognitive features of art are not important in the evaluating of art. The nub of the dispute is whether works of art, when properly experienced, are experienced as referring to things outside themselves . Because Beardsley maintains that aesthetic experience has a detached character, he claims that works of art are properly experienced as the center of a detached experience and that any reference a work of art makes to anything outside itself is nullified during the course of an aesthetic experience of the work. Since the references of works of art are nullified and cannot function in an aesthetic experience, works must be evaluated on the basis of their nonreferential aspects. Goodman, in contrast, maintains that works of art are symbols and, consequently, claims that works of art are essentially cognitive and are to be experienced as standing in cognitive relation to things outside of themselves. Thus, for Goodman, art is to be evaluated on the basis of its cognitive efficacy, that is, on the basis of how well it signifies what it signifies. Beardsley begins with a theory of aesthetic experience as detached and uses it to generate an account of the evaluation of art. Goodman, on the other hand, begins with a theory of art as symbol and uses it to generate an account of the evaluation of art. Languages of Art's subtitle, An Approach to a Theory of Symbols , shows that Goodman sees the various arts as symbol systems. He wants to distinguish the art symbol systems from the nonart symbol systems, and he sees this as the problem of distinguishing the aesthetic from the nonaesthetic. Goodman rejects the traditional ways of making this distinction and makes the novel suggestion that the aestheticlnonaesthetic distinction be made on the basis of the properties of symbol systems. Goodman specifies five pairs of properties that symbol systems I02 INSTRUMENTAL COGNITIVISM have. The first member of each of the pairs is an aesthetic symptom and the second is a nonaesthetic symptom. The first pair of symbol system properties is syntactic density and syntactic articulateness. A system is syntactically dense when it "provides for infinitely many characters so ordered that between each two there is a third." 4 Oil painting is a syntactically dense system because each painting is a character in a symbol system, and, for example, given two different paintings of Socrates, it is possible to paint a third that is different from each of the others and "falls between" them. A first painting might represent Socrates as having a large nose while a second might represent him as having a small nose. A third painting could be made representing Socrates as having a middle-sized nose. Between the middle··sized-nose painting and small-nose painting there could be a painting of Socrates with a nose neither middle-sized nor small but in between, and so on. Goodman cites an...