Aesthetics

It is a truth well documented, though not necessarily well known, that aesthetics is not, and has never been, taken very seriously. The two key objections are as follows: firstly, that aesthetic propostions appear to impinge on the bounds of what can logically be said, and are therefore, as Ayer wold say, "literally senseless"; and secondly - rather less stringently - that art "speaks for itself": leaving any putative theories, if not senseless, then at least superfluous. Both of these objections I believe to be ill-founded.

The former derives from the Verificationists, and in order to circumvent their complaints we must first understand a little bit about them. Their project is summed up by the dictum, "the meaning of a sentence lies in its method of verification". The stricture was designed to lay waste to jejune speculation by determining that any statement for which experience proffered no evidence was to be condemned as meaningless. Now, I must pass over this (far from unproblematic) stipulation cursorily: to refute it would be far beyond the ken of this essay. All I wish to show is that aesthetic enquiries can pass the verification test. (In short, I will attempt to defeat the Verificationsts on their own terms). What I will say is that, on an intuitive level, it appears that some "speculations" are better founded than others. In order to maintain the empirical content of their thesis, and to at the same time leave space for inferences with no recourse to brute fact, must they assert, like Kant and Wittgenstein, that the "logical stucture" of the universe is hard-wired into subjectivity? But wouldn't this itself be, by their criteria, a meaningless assertion? - since we don't know how the universe would be if this were not the case? So that they might be forced into retreat, perhaps banking on the possibility of a sentence being true rather than hard evidence: in which case, their strictures break down, since no sentence can be absolutely denied.
This brings us nicely to the two variants of the Verification principle - which are, to wit, the weak and strong. The main difference between them is that whilst the weaker leaves open the possibility that future evidence may contradict existent evidence, the stronger demands that the facts, if they are to be bestowed that status, must be incontrovertible. This is precisely the doctrine Hume was effecting to debunk when he pointed out that the statement "the sun will rise tomorrow" is hypothetical rather than categorical. And this is to see that we do not fully undertsand why the sun rises, in the sense that we cannot ascertain a necessary connection. One might say: "We do know why the sun rises - or appears to rise. All we need to take into account is our perspective from the earth, the position of the earth in relation to the sun, and the fact that the earth spins on its axis". But the problem here is only displaced. For it remains to be shown why the earth spinning on its axis whilst orbiting the sun is a necessary state of affairs. It is possible to appeal to a higher level of generality, and ascribe this phenomena to gravity. To the question: "why does gravity exist?" one might say: "because matter curves space-time", and so on, ad infinitum. The point is this: causation, in scientific parlance, is classically thought of as a system which will eventually become a totality, as all the intermediate parts come pellucidly into view, and every effect is assigned a cause. But, as the foregoing has shown, justification defers infinitely, that is to say, no statement of empirical fact is necessary in the sense that it is its own truth-function.
There are, of course, a class of statements which are necessary, namely, those that are commonly called "analytic" statements. In Ayer's words, these "record our determination to use symbols in a certain manner". What is crucial for us is that they are not of an empirical provenance: indeed, according to Wittgenstein, they "say nothing about the world", but simply enumerate their terms in such a way that they could not possibly be wrong. Take the tautology:
"An unmarried man is an unmarried man".
This is what I call an "identity statement". It is true because any statement can legitimately be said to be equal to itself. Now, prima facie, this is not an empirical statement. It tell us nothing whatsoever about unmarried men. Indeed, we can replace the subject with an term and it will remain true.
So far so good. But, as Quine has pointed out, there is a more problematic sort of analytic statement, of the form:
"A bachelor is an unmarried man".
Quine calls this a "definitional statement". It proceeds by the supoosed synonimity of "bachelor" and "unmarried man"Quine's critique centres on the notion that two terms are only synomous if we assume anlyticity in the first place. We can render them interchangeable salva veritate if we subsume them under a single definition. And the statement is true if and only if the definition is true. More to follow.

Yes, but don't you feel that the entire practice of philosophy is a waste of time, and that you would do well to stop talking about aesthetics and more about your student loan?