Frances to William and others... The heart of our dispute likely rests with objectivity and realism versus subjectivity and antirealism. To stay in my realist camp, all the approaches selected by me turn on supporting that theory. To that end, objective relativism is used as my main thrust. It avoids the pitfalls of subjectivism both individual or personal and communal or social, but especially those of psychologism and nominalism and rationalism. There are a few terms used previously by me in prior posts that may need an explanation to clarify my stance.
The "learned expert" in any collective community need merely be any normal group of mature humans able to act accordingly, such as say in the act of perceiving an object with some tentative assurance that it is real and true. The "good end goal" is a direction that humans are fated by dispositional tendencies to seek. It is a compelling destiny prescribed by natural evolution. The agent of this telic design is an inclined trait or bent that they lean toward. The most basic need here is the will to survive. The bent to groom the self for its own sake alone, and for no other reason than to look pretty to the self for the self, is perhaps the root source of art. The bent to play in games for the sake of fun alone is also likely another root cause of art. Leaning by fate in an inclined way is not a deliberate intention. It is a disposition related to a compulsion in the interests of habitual conformity. It is why water runs downhill and why man breathes oxygen. The concept of "economy" under pragmatism applies eventually and mainly to scientific research where it entails the wise use of scarce resources in order to attain the goals sought. The idea of financial gain is but a small monetary part of realist economics. There are few "ideal absolutes" under realism but there are some. The objective continuity of freedom to evolve is perhaps the most basic absolute. The use of dead or live humans in part or whole is held to be unnatural and immoral, which grounds aesthetics in ethics. The actual making of kiddy porn and snuff porn for reasons of art or nonart are clear examples of unacceptable deviant perversion. It is the behavioral conduct of the human such as their wicked activity or evil artifact that is bad. The idea of ethics entails "ends and ways" or "goals and means" that should be right, and where all these should be good, of which morality and fairness and justice are but some ethical rights. The idea of "good" for me is mainly a method of acquiring knowledge. It broadly entails what might for example be aesthetically nice and ethically right and logically true. The good as used here is broadly a methodical umbrella, and is not only ethical. The issue of assigning "badness" to art that was already deemed with "goodness" remains a thorn for me. The solution may be to apply the phenomenal categories of pragmatism consistently to the normative methods of aesthetics and ethics and logics. To that end methodics would be a tridential trichotomy of terns, where there is one class of aesthetical goods but two classes of ethical goods yet three classes of logical goods. This approach to what is good would assign to aesthetics the monad of its sole good being say ideal, with such ideal properties as continuity and purity and unity and nicety and beauty and ugly and sublimity and so on. It would then assign to ethics the dyad of its good being wrong or right. It would then finally assign to logics the triad of its good being neither false nor true, or either false or true, or necessarily only true. This leaves the methodic opposition of any good to being bad, which would be applied across the methodic spectrum as warranted. The result could be that an ideal or a right or even a truth might be found as being methodically bad. Whether this little realist scheme might dull my thorn of methodically bad art will remain to be realized through further reflection. It of course entails that aesthetically ideal art might still be known as methodically bad art, if knowing this kind of difference even matters. -----Original Message----- From: William Conger [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, 23 March, 2011 6:33 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: "Today we often confuse certification with education. In fact our society seems to value the former more than the latter..." Frances gets into trouble when she conflates art with its uses and links qualitative judgment with those uses. There is also a problem with intentionality because of the Intentional Fallacy: whereas it may be necessary to have an intention to engage in creative activity or to have an artistic goal, those intentions are not sufficient to guarantee success. That depends on other factors. The Institutional Theory provides them. Yet even the Institutional theory is a fallacy because there's no way to assure any uniformity of outcome among authorities. It comes down to power one way or another. The most enduring form of power in culture is money. Money is rare in big amounts, and relatively stable, and thus when a lot of money is attached to a group or individual exercising the judgment according to the pragmatics of the institutional theory, it becomes the standard of quality. A criminal is determined by law, not by other means. Deviancy or perversion are societal conditions defined by societal laws. Although there are probably deep evolutionary reasons for those laws. We don't speak of the deviancy or perversion among animals but most people have seen it. Art is determined the same way we determine the value of other societal acts, albeit much more loosely than by laws. In art we speak of conventions of taste and allow for plenty of latitude in that. In the end there are no really fixed boundaries for judging human behavior or for judging human art and thus there's no real reason to seek correspondence between those classes of judgments. Their correspondence or lack thereof is coincidental or coercive. For example, Hitler made quite ordinary and nicely pleasant watercolor paintings. We can find nothing in them that reveals his propensity to evil. He did them in full conformity to artistic conventions of the era. His social actions with people and in war did not follow conventions. Artworks and all other non-human objects cannot be moral or immoral. They are meaningless things. Their meanings and morality is ascribed to them and it is always fluid, changing from moment to moment, from person to person, form context to context. Laws and other modes of coercion try to fix meanings and morality,quality, etc., for a time, as if these attributes are inherent to objects. Money does it best because money enables power. No a happy, uplifting thought but true. Maybe that's why people invented religions and gods...to have at least the belief that something was more powerful than money. Isn't it interesting that the religions' afterlife scenarios are always really affluent, bejeweled, golden, etc? ----- Original Message ---- From: Frances Kelly <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Wed, March 23, 2011 1:10:04 PM Subject: RE: "Today we often confuse certification with education. In fact our society seems to value the former more than the latter..." Frances to Armando and others... No person need likely be educated to be artistic or to be an artist or to posit good artworks. The individual person alone however cannot determine this, because they may be suffering a deluded illusion. Only a group of normal peers therefore can tentatively determine if any of this is true. This raises an issue as to whether the nice crafts of perverts and deviants and
