Tag: Essentialism

The Folk Concept of Art

Posted on by Elzė Sigutė Mikalonytė

What makes an object art? Many different answers may come to mind. Works of art are typically beautiful or possess different kinds of aesthetic value. We may seek them out when we want to satisfy our need for aesthetic experiences. Works of art are usually the result of creative actions guided by artistic intentions. Some of us would emphasize historical and institutional conventions in determining what is worthy of being called art. At other times, we engage with art to fulfill a need for emotional experiences, choosing objects that are emotionally expressive. Many would argue that a work of art must be intellectually challenging or convey complex meanings, or that it must demonstrate a high degree of skill on behalf of its creator. Others would emphasize certain formal qualities, such as complexity. The list of possible factors that make an object art is far from exhaustive.

Philosophers aiming to find the best definition of art defend one of two approaches. The first sees the concept of art as definable in terms of individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions. These definitions often emphasize one condition that must be met for an object to be considered art – for instance, being intentionally created, being capable of providing people with aesthetic experiences, or being institutionally recognised by art critics or art historians. Philosophers who support this view offer essentialist theories of art.

The second approach denies that it is possible to define art through individually necessary conditions. It draws on the Wittgensteinian idea of open concepts, where members of a category are instead united by family resemblances. The list of properties that make an object art is seen either as a long disjunction, or a cluster where the list of properties may change over time. This second approach can be called non-essentialist theories of art.

Which of these approaches is more compatible with the folk concept of art? In our new paper, we present evidence that the folk concept of art resembles more the second type of art theories, that is, the folk concept of art is an open rather than closed concept.

Our Studies

Across two studies, we explored two questions. First, as already mentioned, we were interested in whether the folk concept of art is an open or a closed concept. We also examined the role of three factors – intentional creation, aesthetic value, and institutional recognition – in art categorisation judgments. These three factors are not only among the most frequently mentioned properties in the philosophical literature, but also have some support from psychological research.

In Study 1, which was a 2 × 2 × 2 between-subjects design study, we manipulated all three of the above-mentioned features: whether an object was created intentionally, whether it is beautiful, and whether it received institutional recognition. Each participant was assigned to one of eight conditions composed of the following elements (+ for presence, – for absence of each feature):

Intention

  • [+] A person decides to create a painting. She takes an empty canvas and applies paint onto it.
  • [–] A person accidentally brushes against some jars of paint that spill onto an empty canvas.

Beauty

  • [+] The resulting object looks beautiful, featuring an elegant interplay of different lines of paint. It captures the viewers’ attention and evokes awe and wonder.
  • [−] The resulting object looks ordinary and uninteresting. It leaves the viewers bored and unimpressed.

Recognition

  • [+] Soon this object gets recognized by art critics, finds its way into a museum and some years later it appears in art history books.
  • [−] This object never gets exhibited in art galleries or museums, and it never receives any attention from art critics.

We asked the participants the extent to which they agreed (on a Likert scale from 1 (completely disagree) to 7 (completely agree)) with the following statements:

  • “The object is art.” [Art]
  • “The object was made by an artist.” [Artist]
  • “The person wanted to make a painting.” [Desire]
  • “The person believed they were making a painting.” [Belief]
  • “The person intentionally made a painting.” [Intent]

We found that the presence of each of the three factors increased the likelihood that the painting would be called art. Beauty alone was considered a sufficient condition – that is, beautiful objects were considered art even if they were created accidentally and not institutionally recognised. Intentional creation alone was also considered sufficient by itself. Institutional recognition, however, was not.

People were more likely to consider the creator an artist if the painting was made intentionally rather than unintentionally; however, beauty or recognition did not have an influence on these judgments. We also found that all three mental states (intention, desire, and belief) correlated with both “art” and “artist” ratings.

In Study 2, we used an almost identical scenario, except that in this case, we explored people’s intuitions in the context of music. Vignettes were composed of the following elements:

Intention

  • [+] A person decides to compose a piece of music. She opens a blank stave sheet on a music notation software, writes notes on it, and carefully chooses instrumentation.
  • [−] A person uses a new music notation software for the first time. She opens a blank stave sheet, writes random notes on it, and chooses random instrumentation.

Beauty

  • [+] The result sounds beautiful, featuring an elegant interplay of parts. It captures the listeners’ attention and evokes awe and wonder.
  • [−] The result sounds ordinary and uninteresting. It leaves the listeners bored and unimpressed.

Recognition

  • [+] Soon the piece gets recognized by music critics, is performed in concert halls and some years later it appears in music history books.
  • [−] The piece never gets played in concert halls, and it never receives any attention from music critics.

The results of Study 2 were largely the same as before, except that in this study, institutional recognition by itself (in the absence of beauty or intention) was also considered sufficient for an object to be art. The presence of each of the three factors increased the likelihood that the creator would be considered an artist. Both intentional creation or beauty were sufficient for the creator to be called an artist.

Our results show that none of the three factors are considered by the folk to be individually necessary for an object to be art. However, each of them (with the exception of institutional recognition in the visual domain) was considered sufficient. Our results therefore suggest that the folk concept of art is a non-essentialist concept. We examined only three features in our studies – these results should be confirmed with a larger number of potential properties.

Surprisingly, our results go against a widely held position in aesthetics: the idea that artworks, just like other artifacts, must be intentionally created. We found that in some cases, people are willing to call objects art even if they came into being without intention. Moreover, they are sometimes willing to consider an object art even if they do not consider its creator an artist.

To see full results and discussion, you can access our paper here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-024-04812-8

Literature

Mikalonytė, Elzė Sigutė, and Markus Kneer (2024): “The Folk Concept of Art,” Synthese 205, 2. (Link)

Second-Order Desires Are Not What Matters

Posted on by Joshua Knobe

Here’s a classic philosophical thought experiment: Sandra is struggling with an addiction to heroin. She desperately wants another hit, but she wishes she didn’t. She wishes that she could stop craving heroin and that she could start living a very different life. Faced with this thought experiment, many people have the intuition that Sandra’s desire to do heroin is not part of her true self – that Sandra’s true self is entirely on the other side of this inner conflict.

Now consider a reversed version of the classic thought experiment: Sandra has a visceral aversion to using heroin, but she wishes that she didn’t feel that way. Many of her friends are using heroin, and it’s clearly the easiest way to fit in with the people in her social group, so she wishes that she could stop feeling this aversion and just start using heroin like all her friends are. In this reversed case, do you have the same intuition? Does it seem like Sandra’s aversion to doing heroin is not part of her true self – that her true self is entirely on the other side of this inner conflict?

Within the philosophical literature, the usual view about the original version of this thought experiment is that the agent’s desire does not count as a part of her true self because she completely rejects this desire. Then a lot of the literature is about precisely how to cash out the broad idea that she is somehow rejecting a part of her own self (in terms of second-order desires, or in terms of identification, or in terms of her values, and so forth).

But none of this stuff has anything to do with the actual reason why we have this intuition! The reason we have the intuition that her desire isn’t part of her true self has nothing to do with the fact that she herself rejects this desire. Instead, it has everything to do with the fact that the desire in question is a desire to do heroin. There’s something about this specific desire that makes people think it is not part of the agent’s true self, and if we want to understand the way people ordinarily understand the true self, we need some way of making sense of this.

Within the literature in experimental philosophy and psychology, the usual view is that people think an agent’s true self is drawing that agent toward things that truly are good. Thus, if one part of the agent’s self is drawing the agent to use heroin and another part of the agent’s self is drawing the agent to refrain, people will have a general tendency to think that the part of the agent that is drawing her to use heroin is not her true self. This tendency doesn’t have anything to do with which part of the agent is the part that the agent herself rejects. Independent of anything like that, it is just a very fundamental tendency to think that the deeper essence of the agent is the part of her that is drawing her to the good.

As a result, experimental philosophy research finds that people show a general tendency to think that bad desires are less full part of the agent true self. In cases like the classic philosophical thought experiment, where the desire that the agent rejects is a desire to do something bad, people think that the desire that the agent rejects is not part of her true self. But in cases like the reversed version, where the desire that the agent rejects is a desire to do something good, people tend to think that this desire is a part of her true self.

This effect seems to connect with some much deeper philosophical issues that have nothing to do with second-order desires or anything like that. Basically, it seems like when people are thinking about what is most essential about an object, they tend to pick out what is good about that object. This isn’t just something about how they think about agents; it arises much more generally. For example, if you are reading an academic paper and you think that there is a lot of pointless stuff in it but that there is also an idea of genuine value, you will tend to think that the real essence of the paper is the valuable idea. And when people are thinking about what is most essential about the United States – what the United States is “really all about” – they tend to think about the good things about the United States. This is an important but mysterious phenomenon, and I don’t think we have a good understanding of it quite yet. It seems to involve some important connection in the ways people ordinarily think about essence, teleology and value.

But if we want to understand the role of things like reflective endorsement and second-order desires, then clearly, we need to be wary of looking at cases in which peoples intuition are determined by this other factor. Surely, it is cheating to look at cases in which the agent has a second-order desire not to do something that we ourselves regard as bad. If the action in question is something like doing heroin, then there’s an unrelated psychological process that will lead us to see the desire is not being part of the true self. If we want to understand the role of second-order desires per se, we should look at cases in which the desire itself is not something that we would independently see as particularly bad or good.

So let’s introduce a third case in which you have no independent ideas about whether the desire is good or bad: Sandra is an undergraduate student who is caught between two different majors, A and B. She has a strong desire to focus on major A, but when she reflects about what she is doing, she thinks that she should focus entirely on major B. Sometimes she finds herself staying up at night reading books related to A or writing in her journal about questions related to A, but when she thinks about it, she always concludes that this is a big mistake. She wants to stop wanting to study A so that she can focus on what she think she really ought to do, which is B. In this case, which of the two desires would you see as coming from Sandra’s true self? 

If you are like most people, then when faced with cases of this type, you specifically have the opposite of the intuition aligned with the traditional view. That is, when there are two desires such that one align with the agent’s unreflective urges and the other with the agent’s reflective endorsement, the desire associated with more reflective endorsement is seen as less part of her true self.

Given all this, why might people have had thought that there was some special connection between reflective endorsement and the true self? I don’t know the answer, but in closing, I want to briefly mention one speculative hypothesis. Perhaps the issue is that it just generally happens in life that we more often encounter cases like the classic philosophical experiment in the first paragraph of this post than cases like the reversed version in the second paragraph. That is, when we see an agent who has an unreflective urge toward a behavior but who completely rejects that behavior at a reflective level, we very frequently think that the behavior is something bad. As a result, we normally think that the desires that the agent rejects on reflection are not part of her true self.

But this is just a statistical correlation. Ultimately, second-order desires are not what matters. It’s not as though we have the intuition that these desires are not part of the agent’s true self because the agent wishes she didn’t have them. Rather, we have that intuition because the desires have a certain other quality, and that other quality happens to frequently arise in cases where people reject their own desires.

Changing Explanatory Theories vs. Changing Norms

Posted on by Joshua Knobe

Suppose you want to do something to decrease the amount of sexist behavior in the world. One thing you might do is try to change people’s explanatory theories. Perhaps you think that sexism is caused in part by people seeing certain outcomes as the result of a biological essence. You might then try an intervention in which you change people’s beliefs about gender and biology. A very different strategy would be to try to change prevailing norms. Some overtly sexist things were considered normal in the America of fifty years ago but are considered highly abnormal in America right now. So in a culture like today’s America, there might be certain sexist behaviors that almost never even come to mind as possible options.

The difference between these two approaches (theories vs. norms) is a very fundamental one. In this quick post, I want to focus on bringing out just one of the key differences. Changing people’s theories is the kind of thing one might be able to do in, say, 10 minutes. But changing norms is not like that. If you want to change the norms in a community, you can’t do it in 10 minutes. It’s the sort of thing you would hope to accomplish over the course of 10 years.

First, consider the point about theories. We are all familiar with times where we are wondering why something is happening, we read something that tells us the answer, and then we immediately adjust our explanatory theory. That’s just how theories work. The same point then arises for theories about social issues. At the moment, I have no idea why it is that such a high percentage of chess grandmasters are male. So if you presented me with a magazine article that provided strong evidence for a particular explanation, there’s a very good chance you could convince me. Over the course of 10 minutes or so, I might go from a state of having no idea why this happens to a state of being convinced by your explanatory theory. One might wonder whether this intervention would have any deep effect on my behavior, but at a minimum, it would successfully change my beliefs.

Changing norms is a fundamentally different type of process. If a given community has a norm of telling lots of sexist jokes, there’s no way you could possibly change that norm through a 10 minute intervention. That’s just not the way norms work. The process of changing a norm requires much more time and effort. As a simple illustration, there has recently been a change of norms that led to the use of preregistration, open data and open code, but that change took around a decade or so.

Of course, one might think it could be possible to have a quick intervention that led to a big change in people’s perceptions of the norms in their community, but studies indicate that this hope is also not warranted. There has been a lot of research about interventions that briefly tell people about the percentage of folks in their community who perform a particular behavior, but research finds that this sort of quick intervention rarely works. Presumably, the reason is that quickly telling people about certain percentages is not something that can change their representation of the community norm in the relevant sense.

With all this in the background, let’s now consider a very general hypothesis. I’m not sure whether the hypothesis is true, but I do think it is very much worth considering.

The hypothesis is that quick interventions like changing people’s explanatory theories just fundamentally do not work. If you want to do something that changes someone’s psychological states in a way that would lead that person to engage in less sexist behavior, there is no way you can do that through an intervention that lasts 10 minutes. The only things that work are large interventions like changing the norms within a community, which typically take years to complete.

Before the replication crisis, it certainly seemed as though we had lots of evidence that quick interventions on explanatory theories could yield large effects on behavior – but most of that evidence seems to be evaporating. Growth mindset interventions designed to change people’s explanatory theories about achievement don’t seem to lead to higher achievement. Interventions designed to change beliefs about free will don’t seem to impact cheating behavior. Interventions designed to change beliefs about genetics don’t seem to have much impact on judgments about punishment. Some recent studies indicate that interventions designed to reduce genetic essentialism don’t have any impact on prejudice.

One possible reaction to all of this would be that we haven’t yet found the exact right interventions on explanatory theories or the exact right downstream behaviors to measure… but another possible reaction would be that we are just fundamentally not looking in the right place.

Workshop: “XPHI UK Work in Progress Workshop Series”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

The “XPHI UK Work in Progress Workshop Series,” organized by James Andow and Eugen Fischer, continues. They write:

We are looking forward to the next series of our monthly online workshop devoted to discussion of work in progress in experimental philosophy. The workshop is held via Teams, the second Wednesday of each month, 16:00–18:00 UK time. Except for the opening keynote session, all sessions will have two presentations. Please email to register and receive the links (by the day before the session you hope to attend would be ideal).

October 9, 16:00–18:00 (UTC+1)

  • Shaun Nichols (Cornell University): “The PSR and the Folk Metaphysics of Explanation”

November 13, 16:00–18:00 (UTC±0)

  • Monica Ding (King’s College London): “Non-Factive Understanding – Evidence from English, Cantonese, and Mandarin”
  • María Alejandra Petino Zappala (German Cancer Research Center), Phuc Nguyen (German Cancer Research Center), Andrea Quint (German Cancer Research Center), and Nora Heinzelmann (University of Erlangen-Nuremberg): “Digital Interventions to Boost Vaccination Intention – A Report”

December 11, 16:00–18:00 (UTC±0)

  • Elis Jones (Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research): “The Problem of Baselining – Philosophy, History, and Coral Reef Science”
  • April H. Bailey (University of Edinburgh) and Nicholas DiMaggio (University of Chicago Booth School of Business): “Of Minds and Men”

January 8, 16:00–18:00 (UTC±0)

  • Ajinkya Deshmukh (The University of Manchester) and Frederique Janssen-Lauret (The University of Manchester): “Reincarnation and Anti-Essentialism – An Argument Against the Essentiality of Material Origins”
  • Ethan Landes (University of Kent) and Justin Sytsma (Victoria University of Wellington): “LLM Simulated Data – The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”

February 12, 16:00–18:00 (UTC±0)

  • Elzė Sigutė Mikalonytė (University of Cambridge), Jasmina Stevanov (University of Cambridge), Ryan P. Doran (University of Cambridge), Katherine A. Symons (University of Cambridge), and Simone Schnall (University of Cambridge): “Transformed by Beauty – Exploring the Influence of Aesthetic Appreciation on Abstract Thinking”
  • Poppy Mankowitz (University of Bristol): “Experimenting With ‘Good’”

March 12, 16:00–18:00 (UTC±0)

  • Kathryn Francis (University of Leeds), Maria Ioannidou (University of Bradford), and Matti Wilks (University of Edinburgh): “Does Dietary Identity Influence Moral Anthropocentrism?”
  • Jonathan Lewis (University of Manchester), James Toomey (University of Iowa), Ivar Hannikainen (University of Granada), and Brian D. Earp (National University of Singapore): “Normative Authority, Epistemic Access, and the True Self”