Experimental Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics

First published Tue Oct 22, 2024

Experimental philosophy of art and aesthetics is the application ofthe methods ofexperimental philosophy to questions about art andaesthetics. By taking a scientific approach to experiences with artand aesthetic phenomena, it is continuous with the longstandingresearch program in psychology calledempirical aesthetics(see Nadal & Vartanian 2022 for overviews of work in thisprogram). However, it is also continuous with traditional research inphilosophy of art and aesthetics because it is centered on many of thesame timeless questions. Like other branches of experimentalphilosophy, such asexperimental moral philosophy, it involves gathering data using empirical methods and bringinganalyses of the data to bear on theorizing on a wide range of topicsin philosophy of art and aesthetics: definition of art, ontology ofart, aesthetic properties, aesthetic judgments, aesthetic adjectives,morality and aesthetics, and emotion and art. In this entry, webriefly examine the history prior to the current movement’semergence in the 2010s, extensively survey extant works in thismovement on each of the topics, and consider methodological debatesregarding this movement.

1. History of Empirical Research on Art and Aesthetics

Modern scientific approaches to art and aesthetics find their originsin Germany in the nineteenth century, in some of earliest works inexperimental psychology. Most notably, with hisVorschule derAesthtik (1876), Gustav Fechner pioneered what came to be knownas “bottom-up aesthetics”, which tried to discover generallaws of taste by examining preferences for simple geometric shapessuch as rectangles of varying proportions, colors, and arrangements oflines (for a summary of “bottom-up” aesthetics, see Nadal& Ureña 2022).

In mid-twentieth century, art historian and philosopher ThomasMunro—who founded the American Society of Aesthetics in 1942 andserved as the editor of the society’s publicationTheJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism between 1945 and1964—continually expressed optimism about the prospect ofintegrating philosophical and scientific approaches to aesthetics(1928, 1948, 1951, 1956, 1963). In “The Psychology of Art: Past,Present and Future” (1963), Munro observes that philosophershave actually been asking, for a long time, questions about art andaesthetics that are at least partly empirical, such ashow doartists come to create works? how does the experience of art affectthe audience’s character? are there rules by which the arts canplease and instruct? do some works universally please across epochsand cultures? how can different species of aesthetic pleasure betaxonomized?. In “Methods in the Psychology of Art”(1948), he notes that authors inThe Journal of Aesthetics and ArtCriticism often make empirical claims as part of their arguments,and so should use empirical methods more.

Not all philosophers have been as optimistic as Munro. George Dickie(1962) argued that psychology is not relevant to aesthetics. Some ofDickie’s worries echoed earlier ones: for example, he arguedthat the psychology of art was impoverished by simplified stimuli,such as the use of geometric shapes rather than real artworks (compareArnheim 1952). Other worries were due to his specific conceptions ofphilosophy of art and aesthetics, and philosophy in general. First,Dickie believed that aesthetics is “concerned only with thelanguage and concepts which are used to describe and evaluate works ofart” (1962: 289), and so questions outside of thisconception—such ashow do artists come to createworks?—are simply irrelevant. Second, Dickie believed thatphilosophy is discontinuous with science, such that “theproblems of ethics are not solved by a scientific study nor are theproblems of the philosophy of science” and aesthetics is noexception (1962: 301–302).

While Dickie’s criticisms, and hardline view, held considerablesway over philosophical aesthetics and the philosophy of art in thesecond half of the twentieth century, this has not continued. From thelate 1980s onwards, philosophical aestheticians and philosophers ofart have increasingly appealed to the findings of cognitive sciences(for a summary, see entry onaesthetics and cognitive science), and to a lesser extent to the findings of empirical aesthetics, andparticularly evolutionary aesthetics (see, for example, Dutton 2009).Indeed, from around 2010 onwards, philosophers joined thepsychologists of art and empirical aestheticians in conductingempirical studies.

In some ways, it is difficult to pinpoint exactly where modernempirical aesthetics and the psychology of art ends, and theexperimental philosophy of art and aesthetics, begins. But a roughcharacterization can be made along the lines that Dickie suggested.Empirical aesthetics and the psychology of art is primarily concernedwith characterizing the psychological responses to art andaesthetically significant objects. It answers questions such as:what is the nature of the responses (such as chills, pleasure,changes in self-conception)? what features of aesthetic objects andartworks tend to elicit these responses (such as curvature, certaincolors, etc.)? are there systematic individual differences in relationto this? Whereas experimental philosophy of art andaesthetics—as a branch of philosophy—is primarilyconcerned with empirically studying conceptual distinctions. Itanswers questions such as:do people think that a moral demeritcan also be an aesthetic demerit? do people think that something canbe art if it does not have any aesthetically valuable properties? whatis the nature of the folk’s concept of art and beauty—arethey purely descriptive or evaluative concepts?

Nonetheless, it is important to stress that, at best, this way ofcarving up the distinction picks out a central tendency of the twofields. In reality, the work done by researchers in philosophy,including experimental philosophical aesthetics, and empiricalaesthetics overlaps in many ways. To give a few examples. Philosophershave had a longstanding concern in trying to establish whether thereis a distinctive kind of aesthetic state of mind, and empiricalaestheticians have recently become interested in this question. Acouple of influential ideas about this from philosophy are that thepleasure taken in beauty is of a disinterested kind, where thisroughly means that it is not the result of desire satisfaction, ordoes not essentially produce desires (see Kant 1790); and thatapproaching objects aesthetically involves adopting a distancedattitude where we disengage from the object practically, and do notrelate it to our standing desires or interests (Bullough 1912). Morerecently, empirical aestheticians have attempted to tackle this issuewith the tools provided by neuroscience and psychology. For example,Marcus Nadal and Martin Skov (2018) have argued against the idea thatthere is a distinctivesui generis state of mind, on thegrounds that, for example, the same neural hardware that is involvedin responding to pleasant tasting food and sex have been shown to beinvolved in the appreciation of aesthetic objects. By contrast, AmyBelfi and colleagues (2019), for example, have shown that aestheticappreciation involves activation of the Default Mode Network, whichthey suggest may show that self-reflection, rather thanself-detachment, may form part of what makes aesthetic responsesunique. Philosophers have also been interested in explaining beauty interms of a harmony between the beautiful objects and our psychologicalfaculties in some ways (as present in, for example, Hume 1757a andKant 1790), and psychologists have sought to explain aesthetic appealin terms of processing characteristics, such as the fluency with whichan object is experienced (Reber et al. 2004). Both experimentalphilosophers as well as aesthetic psychologists have tried toelucidate the features of moral actions and traits that lead toattributions of beauty, as well as the kind of psychological stateappreciation of this kind of beauty gives rise to (see, for example,Doran 2023; see§6).

Unfortunately, notwithstanding the many overlapping concerns, thefields of philosophical aesthetics (including experimentalphilosophical aesthetics) and empirical aesthetics have remainedlargely siloed. On the side of philosophical aestheticians, this hascontinued to lead to missed opportunities for testing the empiricalaspects of their theories and for experimental philosophicalaestheticians to methodologically innovate. And on the side ofempirical aestheticians, this has led to a failure to benefit from thetheoretical and argumentative sophistication that tends to becharacteristic of the best work in philosophy. However, there aresigns that this is changing. Empirical aestheticians are increasinglyattempting to test claims drawn from philosophy (for example,Brielmann & Pelli 2017; Winner 2019), and experimentalphilosophers of art and aestheticians are increasingly working withpsychologists, if not empirical aestheticians yet (for example,Humbert-Droz et al. 2020). Nowhere is this more clear than in the caseof work on awe and the sublime, where philosophers have workedproductively with psychologists, and where philosophical claims haveinformed the design of empirical studies and the resultant theorybuilding in turn (for example, Clewis 2021; Keltner & Haidt 2003;Shiota et al. 2007; Arcangeli et al. 2020; Shapshay 2021).

2. Definition of Art

“What is art?” stands as one of the central questions inphilosophical aesthetics. In fact, we can ask different questionsabout the concept of art. First, we may ask about its extension:which works count as art? Second, we may ask about itsintensional structure:are there conditions necessary andsufficient for a work to count as art? Third, we may ask aboutits function:is calling a work ‘art’ a praise, ormerely a classification? Since many philosophers of art agreethat the definition of art should be compatible with art practices andthe way ordinary people think about art, unsurprisingly, it was alsoone of the first questions in aesthetics to be empiricallyinvestigated.

Which works count as art? In his first empirical study on intuitionsabout the extension of the concept of art, Richard Kamber (2011)presented participants with a large number of descriptions and imagesof objects and asked whether they would classify these objects as art.The main focus of this study was putting to test prominentdefinitions of art: aesthetic definitions claim that art is created with an intention tobe aesthetically appreciated; institutional definitions claim that artis created by an artist and presented to an artworld; and historicaldefinitions claim that art is created with an intention to belong tothe same set of objects as previously created works of art.Kamber’s approach was to examine a variety of “hardcases” discussed in the aesthetics literature, such as objectsof low aesthetic value and objects that were made prior to socialart-making practices. He concluded that none of the art theoriessucceed in fully tracking people’s intuitions about the varioushard cases, but theaesthetic definition of art, which holdsan artwork to be an object created with an intention to provide peoplewith aesthetic experiences, was somewhat more successful than others.In a follow-up study, Kamber and Taylor Enoch (2019) also askedparticipants to justify their decisions of what is art by selectingsome of fourteen possible reasons, which included those thatemphasized intentional creation, the creator’s consciousness,beauty or evoking imaginative experiences. In this study,justifications involving intentionality were the most often chosen.Nevertheless, this study again indicated that none of the maindefinitions of art fully aligned with what the study participants,predominantly art professionals or art lovers, found intuitive.

However, these studies have received some criticism. While AnneliesMonseré (2015) is sympathetic to Kamber’s criticism ofphilosophers’ reliance on intuitions in defining art, she isequally skeptical of reliance on ordinary people’s intuitions.Instead, she advocates for a more indirect role for intuitions, onwhich they are not used to directly justify any specific definition ofart, but as elucidations of how the concept gets invoked in practice.Ellen Winner (2019: 21) notes that Kamber “designed his studyvery informally, testing a grab bag of theories, using only one or twoexamples to test each one”, and that it might benefit from amore sensitive measure than a dichotomous choice of ‘yes’or ‘no’, as was used.

Although neither folk nor expert intuitions strictly require a work tohave high aesthetic value for it to be classified as art, morebeautiful (or moreliked—a more common concept in thepsychological literature, which nowadays tends to steer clear ofdiscussions of beauty) works do tend to be classified as art moreoften. Matthew Pelowski and colleagues (2017) investigated therelationship between ratings of liking and attributions of art status.Participants were shown a set of 140 digital images of abstractpaintings, hyperrealistic paintings, poorly-executed paintings andready-made sculptures, and were asked to spontaneously classify themas ‘art’ or ‘not art’. They were also asked torate the extent to which they liked those images. Pelowski’sfindings revealed a positive correlation where higher ratings ofliking were associated with a greater likelihood of being categorizedas art, which provides some support for the aesthetic definitions ofart.

Can art be defined by necessary and sufficient conditions at all?Elzė Mikalonytė and Markus Kneer (forthcoming) investigatewhether the folk concept of art is an essentialist or anon-essentialist one; in other words, whether it can be defined by aset of individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions. Incontrast to Kamber’s studies mentioned earlier, they askedpeople who were not art professionals. In two vignette studies,Mikalonytė and Kneer manipulated three properties ofartworks—namely, being intentionally created, having aestheticvalue, and being institutionally recognized—aiming to seewhether any of those properties, corresponding to the mainessentialist art definitions, are seen by the folk as necessaryconditions for an object to be classified an artwork. The results,similar to Kamber’s, also suggest that the folk concept of artis not an essentialist concept, but rather a cluster concept.Interestingly, none of the three properties were considerednecessary—there were cases where art status was ascribed even toaccidentally created objects. This finding is surprising consideringthe role that intentional creation and the creator’s intentionsare thought to play in this context in the literature on philosophicalaesthetics (Mag Uidhir 2013), as well as some studies in thepsychology of art. For example, Jean-Luc Jucker et al. (2014)discovered that when people are asked to classify artefacts into artand non-art, their decisions are guided by inferences about thecreator’s intentions. George Newman and Paul Bloom’s(2012) results showed that participants’ beliefs about whetheran object was intended to be an artwork or not had an important effecton how they see a physically identical copy of the same object. Moregenerally, it is widely believed that people classify objects intoartefact kinds by making inferences about the creator’sintentions (Bloom 1996). Mikalonytė and Kneer’s study,however, is not the only one showing that intentional creation is notseen by the folk as necessary—they have also discovered thatalthough people consider AI-generated paintings to be art to a similarextent as human-created paintings, they are not very willing toconsider AI-creators artists. In the context of artistic creation,mental state (including intention) ascription to AI agents isrelatively low, and this might partially explain why AI robots are notaccepted as artists (Mikalonytė & Kneer 2022). However,another study by Mikalonytė and Kneer suggests that thephenomenon of art without an artistic intention might not be confinedto the realm of AI-generated art: even human creators are seen ascapable of creating artworks without intending to do so(Mikalonytė & Kneer forthcoming).

Is calling a work ‘art’ to praise it, or to merelyclassify it? Shen-yi Liao, Aaron Meskin, and Joshua Knobe (2020) takea different tactic to understand the concept of art. Their aim is notto uncover its extension, or to defend any specific concept of art,but to clarify its nature. Descriptivists about the concept of artcontend that to call something ‘art’ merely conveys aclassificatory status, whereas evaluativists contend that to do so isto convey a positive evaluation. Liao, Knobe, and Meskin uselinguistic patterns to argue that the concept of art is neither.Instead, it is a “dual character concept”, which involvescharacteristic values that are realized by concrete features (Knobe,Prasada, & Newman 2013). To diagnose the nature of the concept ofart and other art concepts, they examine participant responses tosentences of the following schema:

That is not good, but it is true [concept].

Extant research shows that dual character concepts, but notdescriptive concepts, tend to sound fine when combined with the“true” modifier (Knobe, Prasada, & Newman 2013). So,for merely descriptive concepts, the sentence makes little sense. Forexample, it sounds weird to say “that is a true sonnet”.Moreover, for positive evaluative concepts, the sentence also makeslittle sense because of the explicit negative evaluation. For example,it sounds weird to say “that masterpiece is not good”.Since participants think that the sentence “that is not good,but it is true art” sounds fine, Liao, Meskin, and Knobe arguethat the concept of art is neither descriptive nor evaluative, butdual character.

3. Ontology of Art

Ontology of art (see entry onhistory of the ontology of art) aims to discover what kind of things works of art are, whichontological category or categories they belong to, whether it ispossible and what it means to create or destroy them, and what itmeans for two different objects to be ‘the same’ work.Works of art can be divided into two categories: repeatable andnon-repeatable. The former category consists of musical works andother kinds of works that exist in multiple instantiations. The lattercategory consists of singular works of art where there is only oneoriginal instance of that work and all others are merely copies of theoriginal, for example, paintings or sculptures. This distinction alsohas implications for the way people evaluate work of art.

For repeatable artworks, the most pressing ontological questionconcerns the conditions under which two performances are of the samework. Christopher Bartel (2018) investigated intuitions on therepeatability of pop songs. He presented study participants with threescenarios describing three pairs of musical performances, with each ofthese pairs reflecting one of the following differences: a differencein provenance (two identically sounding performances are played by twodifferent bands), in affect (one performance sounding humble, and onesounding dramatic), and in connotation (the two performances areplayed by different bands, with different lyrics and expressive ofdifferent emotions). Bartel found that a difference in provenance doesnot make a difference to whether the song is identical acrossdifferent performances, but differences in affect and in connotationdo.

Elzė Mikalonytė and Vilius Dranseika (2020) focused on worksof classical music. They created scenarios that reflected the mainpoints of disagreement among theories of the individuation of musicalworks, such as sonicism (which claims that identity of musical worksdepends on their acoustic properties only), instrumentalism (whichalso adds the instrument used to perform the musical work to the listof identity-conferring properties), and contextualism (which alsoemphasizes the importance of musico-historical context). In contrastto many other studies, Mikalonytė and Dranseika target intuitionsabout the identity of two performancesat the same point intime. They presented the participants with seven scenarios,including, for example, two identically sounding performances of twoidentical scores which were independently created by two composers, ortwo performances that differ only with respect to their emotionalexpressivity. They concluded that folk intuitions correspond most withpure sonicism, the theory which claims that work identitydepends solely on its (non-timbral) acoustic properties, although theidentity of the composer is also an important factor. While Bartelconcludes that pop music songs are not easily repeatable—in manycases, participants were inclined to deny that two performances wereof the same song—Mikalonytė and Dranseika’s studypoints in the opposite direction: people consider works of classicalmusic to be quite easily repeatable.

Nemesio Puy (2022) has criticized this approach for relying solely ontextual vignettes, lacking real musical stimuli (for more on thisdiscussion, seesection 8). Puy’s experiments show that, compared to Bartel (2018) andMikalonytė and Dranseika (2020), when study participants have thechance to hear musical works, they are even more likely to answer theindividuation (or repeatability) question in the sonicist way. Thistendency is especially apparent if the question is asked immediatelyafter hearing two musical samples, without any contextual informationbeing provided.

Two more empirical studies in this area of inquiry investigatepeople’s intuitions regarding thepersistence ofmusical works—in other words, their identity over time.Mikalonytė and Dranseika (2022) explored the hypothesis thatmusical works’ identity crucially depends on their purposes:different versions of a musical work remain versionsof the samework if and only if they retain the same overall point they werecreated for. Their results provide some support for this hypothesis,but purpose was not considered to be a necessary condition. Again,this study shows that people have mostly sonicistintuitions—they believe that the identity of musical worksmostly depends on their acoustic properties, and this is considered tobe a much more important criterion in judgments of identity comparedto the overall purpose of the work as intended by the composer.

Elzė Mikalonytė and Clément Canonne (forthcoming)found that judgments of the identity of artworks—both musicalworks and paintings—are partially normative. Their resultsprovide some support for the Phineas Gage effect—according towhich, changes in valued qualities, and especially moral properties,change identity judgments—suggesting that if a musical workundergoes some changes and becomes more aesthetically valuable, peopleare more likely to say that it is still the same musical work comparedto the condition when the musical work becomes less aestheticallyvaluable. However, the effect observed was easily overridden bychanges in material identity or moral value and for this reason itdoes not seem sufficient to claim that musical works are essentializedin terms of their aesthetic value.

All of the empirical studies in the ontology of musical works so farhave focused on their identity conditions. Many other topics remainunexplored by experimental philosophers, such as the way musical workscome into existence and cease to exist. An overview of such topics anda systematic survey of philosophers’ appeals to ordinaryintuitions regarding musical works is presented in Mikalonytė(2022), where she also discusses how the ontology of musical workscould benefit from further empirical research.

Unlike repeatable artworks that can have many genuine and potentiallyequally valuable instances, other works of art, such as paintings orsculptures, can only have one physical object. The relationshipbetween different instances of these artworks is of copy and original,where only one physical object can count as a given artwork. This hasimportant implications both for identity judgments and aestheticevaluation.

Given that many non-repeatable artworks share similarities withordinary, non-artistic artefacts, it is helpful to compare studiesthat explore the role of material continuity in judgments ofartefact andartwork persistence. Sergey Blok,George Newman, and Lance Rips (2005) investigated people’sintuitions about the persistence of various types of objects,including persons, animals, plants, and artefacts. Participants werepresented with a vignette about each of these objects either (a) beingdisassembled into individual particles, transported and reassembledagain, or (b) being replaced by an identical material copy, theoriginal of which is destroyed. People were inclined to see artefactsas the same after being ‘copied’. In a related study,David Rose and colleagues (2020) have investigated intuitions aboutthe Ship of Theseus puzzle across different cultures. Their resultssuggest that people are ambivalent about whether it is the continuityof form or the continuity of material that is decisive in matters ofidentity. Results of both studies suggest that material identity mightnot be the main criterion for judgments of persistence of artefactualobjects. However, extant empirical research suggests that judgments ofthe persistence of artworks are different from those of otherartefacts. When presented with a scenario about someone creating acopy of either an artwork or of a tool and destroying the originalobject, people are not willing to see the copy as ‘thesame’ object, even if the only difference between the tool andthe artwork is labeling them as such (Newman, Bartels, & Smith2014).

Some philosophers, such as Arthur Danto (1973), claim that a copy of anon-repeatable artwork is always aesthetically less valuable.Empirical research also suggests that people tend to value a copy ofan artwork less than the original, even if the two are perceptuallyindistinguishable (Rabb, Brownell, & Winner 2018). George Newmanhas conducted a series of studies to explain this effect. One possiblereason is that the created object is evaluated as the result of aunique creative act; another is that there is a perceived physicalcontact between the object and the original creator (Newman &Bloom 2012). When a duplicate object is made by someone other than theoriginal creator, people are less inclined to see it as the sameobject (Newman, Bartels, & Smith 2014). Since people believe thatan object’s or person’s essence can be transferred bymeans of physical contact, Newman and Smith (2019)hypothesized—and confirmed—that differences in evaluationbetween a copy and an original painting are mediated by theartwork’s perceived anthropomorphism; that is, feelings that theartwork seems alive and expresses emotions. In some cases, physicalcontact is not necessary for beliefs in contagion: intentional contactmay be enough (Stavrova et al. 2016). Shen-yi Liao, Aaron Meskin, andJade Fletcher (2020) examined the contagion effect in the museumcontext. They asked the participants (a) whether the objects in thegallery embody “the very being” of their creator, and (b)whether they are unique, and they found that contagion has an effecton perceived aesthetic value both in the museum and laboratorycontext, while uniqueness matters only in the latter.

Finally, there is one more way aesthetic information has an effect onontological judgments, even if this kind of research does not speakdirectly to the ontology ofart: aesthetic preferences mayinfluence judgments of personal identity. Previously, it had beenthought that we consider humans and their ‘true selves’ tobe fundamentallymorally good, and that changes tosomeone’s moral character influence judgments of aperson’s identity. Joerg Fingerhut and colleagues discoveredthat changes in our aesthetic taste are also seen as profoundlytransformative changes: when someone’s aesthetic preferenceschange, they cease to bethe same person (Fingerhut et al.2021).

4. Aesthetic Judgments

A particularly fruitful area of experimental philosophical researchhas centered around the question of how objective ouraesthetic judgments are, and related issuessuch as the possibility ofaesthetic testimony. This has principally been done by either examining meta-aestheticintuitions, or by examining the amount of agreement in aestheticmatters, and the source of this agreement.

With respect to the issue of objectivity, many philosophicalaestheticians have thought that aesthetic judgments intend to expresstruths about the way the world is, and that some people have betteraccess to these truths than others. David Hume (1757a) suggests thatsome people are better able to detect and weigh the aesthetic meritsof a work than others—they have delicate taste—and thatworks that are reliably appreciated over time and across cultures arethose which are truly good. Immanuel Kant (1790) suggests that whileour judgments of beauty are based in pleasure, they command universalagreement—that is, we expect others to make the same judgmentsas us. In this respect, aesthetic judgments have been thought to beunlike statements of personal taste, such as ‘broccoliis delicious’, about which there can only be blamelessdisagreement; andlike empirical judgments, such as‘there is a piece of broccoli on my plate’, about whichthere can be genuine disagreement. Indeed, some have thought that thewaythe folk act presupposes such a realist conception ofaesthetic judgments, with Noël Carroll (1999), Nick Zangwill(2005), and Peter Kivy (2015) noting that we argue with each otherabout aesthetic matters.

Taking this as a starting point, a number of psychologists andexperimental philosophers have presented findings that suggest realismcannot be given special status as the commonsensical view, andphilosophical accounts of aesthetic judgments do not need toaccommodate realist intuitions. This line of research started withGeoffrey Goodwin and John Darley (2008), who asked people to determinewhether comparative aesthetic judgments—such as‘Shakespeare was a better writer than DanBrown’—were true, false, or a matter of opinion. Mostparticipants described aesthetic statements as opinions (despite thestrength of agreement with each statement) and they did this morefrequently than in the case of comparable moral, factual statements,or statements reflecting social conventions.

Then, in a series of studies led by Florian Cova, the folk’smeta-aesthetical views were further tested by presenting participantswith an aesthetic disagreement—such as where someone finds asunset beautiful and the other does not—between twointerlocutors (or between the participant and an interlocutor), andasking participants whether one person is correct, both are correct,or neither is correct. Across different kinds of objects (includingnatural objects and art widely recognized to be beautiful, as well asobjects that study participantspersonally find beautiful),type of aesthetic judgments (including judgments of beauty andugliness), and across a wide range of different countries, it has beenfound that most select the option “Neither is correct”(Cova & Pain 2012; Cova, Olivola, et al. 2019; for further studiesutilizing the disagreement method, see Andow 2022).

Returning to the comparative method, Nathaniel Rabb, Alex Han, andcolleagues (2022) have presented further evidence against the ideathat the folk are aesthetic realists by explicitly asking participantswhether aesthetic judgments are matters of opinion or matters of fact.They showed that people believe that aesthetic judgments aresubjective even after learning that one of the two works has beenhistorically acclaimed, or even when they liked one artwork much morethan another (though, for criticisms of this study, see Moss &Bush 2021).

Supporters of the presumption in favor of realism have, however,fought back. Zangwill (2019) argues that Cova and hiscolleagues’ studies are not about whether people think aestheticjudgments can be true or false, but rather about whether a givenperson is right or wrong, and so leave the presumption in favor ofrealism unscathed. The distinction Zangwill is aiming at is asfollows: Someone who guesses correctly that it is raining outsidewould be saying something true when they say that “it is rainingoutside”, but they cannot be described asright. Beingright is a matter of being justified in saying something. Inaddressing Zangwill’s critique, in the same design whereparticipants are asked to consider an interlocutor disagreeing withthem in making various kinds of judgments, including aestheticjudgments, Cova (2019) asked participants whether one, both or neitherperson said something true or false. The results here were quitedifferent from those of the studies conducted to date: with the modalresponse being that only one person says something true (40%),followed closely by the response that says that both say somethingtrue (39%). Despite these differences, Cova suggests that these do notsupport the idea that the folk tend to be realists about aestheticjudgment on the grounds that the pattern of responses did not matchthe pattern for paradigmatic factual judgements (that is, adisagreement about whether something is steel, where 71% ofparticipants selected the response that only one person said somethingtrue).

A further objection has been raised to this work on folkmeta-aesthetics by Filippo Contesi and colleagues (2024). They pointout that all the studies discussed above reveal that the folk’sexplicit meta-aesthetic views are subjectivist, and that thisis consistent with what supporters of aesthetic realism say. Thesesupporters—such as Carroll (1999), Zangwill (2005), and Kivy(2015)—claim that the folk are implicitly realist in arguingabout matters of taste, even if they hold explicit subjectivistattitudes, as expressed by hackneyed proverbs such as“there’s no accounting for taste”. As such, Contesiand colleagues suggest that Cova’s results are inconclusive, andthat disproving folk aesthetic realism as it has been conceived of byrealists to support the plausibility of their position would require adifferent methodological approach.

Turning away from critiques of aesthetic realism to positive accountsof folk meta-aesthetics, experimental philosophers have also suggestedthat folk meta-aesthetical views might nonetheless allow for somedegree of objectivity, and have found that the concept of good tastemight behave differently from that of aesthetic truth.

Cova (2019) suggests that the folk might be expressivists aboutaesthetic judgments, and that they may think that there cannonetheless be correctness conditions for aesthetic judgments, insofaras people can, for example, be mistaken about the cause of thefeelings they express. In one study to begin to test this position,Cova presented participants with a case where someone judges theEiffel tower to be beautiful as a result of being high on drugs, or asa result of seeing the Eiffel tower unimpaired. The results revealthat participants were less likely to say that a judgment of beautywas true and more likely to say that the judgment was false when theexperience was the result of drugs. Similarly, across five studiesthat manipulated the type of disagreement (cross-cultural orintercultural, or internal disagreement of one individual over time)and asked participants about the possibility of error in aestheticjudgments, James Andow (2022) found that while people do not holdrealist beliefs, they do believe that they have correctness conditions(though see Murray 2020 for results suggesting that people do notthink that disagreement implies that they are seen as incorrect).

Moreover, although most studies on aesthetic judgments point in thedirection of subjectivism, research on aesthetic taste suggests thatpeople believe aesthetic tastecan be good or bad. ConstantBonard et al. (2022) asked participants whether it makes sense todistinguish between good and bad taste, and then asked to define whatit is. The majority of participants agreed with the distinction, andalthough a significant part defined good taste in terms of the abilityto detect aesthetic properties, expressing the view compatible withaesthetic realism, for other participants, good taste was compatiblewith aesthetic subjectivism, since ‘good taste’ wasdefined simply as something corresponding to their own personalpreferences. Another phenomenon that has been thought to be relevantto the issue of whether good taste exists, is that of ‘guiltypleasures’—enjoying aesthetic objects one feels one shouldnot enjoy. As Kris Goffin and Florian Cova (2019) observe, theexistence of guilty pleasure at first sight might be consideredevidence for the existence of good taste among the folk. However, theypresent evidence suggesting that the guilt people experience should beunderstood as guilt for violating social norms, not aesthetic ones,and therefore should not be seen as evidence for folk aestheticrealism.

In addition to the meta-aesthetical method outlined above,psychologists and experimental philosophers have also examined realismabout taste by considering the mechanisms that result inpeople’s aesthetic judgments.

Some philosophers have suggested that the idea that there be objectiveaesthetic value might be demonstrated simply by pointing to the factthat some artworks and not others are universally judged asaesthetically valuable. For example, Hume (1757a) suggests that someworks are, truly, better than others, and that those works will passthe test of time: they will be judged to be good across cultures andepochs, and they will do this in virtue of truly having aestheticallygood-making features.

However, James Cutting (2003) has presented evidence that has seemedto put pressure on this Humean view. Having found that merely exposingpeople to impressionist works made them like them more, Cuttingsuggests that we may like canonical works because they have beencontinually broadcast to the world. Armed with Cutting’sfindings, the aesthetic skeptic might argue that passing the test oftime isn’t an indication of aesthetic quality, but rather anindication that people have merely experienced the works morefrequently.

In defense of the Humean view, Meskin et al. (2013) suggest that mereexposure might not indiscriminately improve liking of works,irrespective of their aesthetic quality; but rather, help us to moreaccurately appreciate their true aesthetic merits and demerits. As acorollary, they also suggest that works may enter the canon becausethey are truly better. Putting their Humean defense to the test, theymerely exposed participants to works that the authors and many criticsconsider good and bad (namely, works by John Millais and ThomasKinkade, respectively). The results revealed that participants likedthe Kinkade paintingsless the more they were exposed tothem, and the results suggested a trend for participants to like thelate Millais paintingsmore the more they were exposed tothem (though this was not significant). Meskin and colleaguesinterpret this evidence as consistent with the existence of aestheticvalue, as well as the reliability of the test of time: with repeatedexposure, we are better able to appraise a work’s good- andbad-making features, and so those works that endure do so, at least inpart, in virtue of having good-making features.

Bence Nanay (2017) has criticized the idea that mere exposure isrelevant to aesthetic realism. First, studies on mere exposure targetspontaneous reactions, while aesthetic judgments are traditionallythought to be reflective and unfolding in time. Secondly, the mereexposure effect seems to work only with good artworks and not with badones—exposure to good artworks makes positive aestheticjudgments more likely, but not the other way around. Most importantly,according to Nanay, experiments show that exposure to one artworkchanges our preference forthat particular artwork, but notfor any other artwork. In order for these experiments to count asevidence against aesthetic realism, Nanay contends, we would need todemonstrate that exposure to one particular artwork can influence ourpreferences for other artworks of the same kind (for example, of thesame artistic style).

Finally, another tightly related question is about the nature ofaesthetic testimony: if our aesthetic judgments are similar toempirical judgments, we can reliably learn about aesthetic propertiesfrom what other people say—if during a phone call someone saysthat a piece of broccoli they are having for lunch ‘isbeautiful’, should we trust their testimony to the same extentthat we would trust their claim that ‘there is a piece ofbroccoli on my plate’?

Andow (2019) asked his study participants whether they think thatforming aesthetic beliefs based on testimony given by a friend or anexpert is lesspermissible andlegitimate comparedto forming such beliefs based on first-hand experience, and alsocompared to forming non-aesthetic beliefs, such as beliefs about sizeor price. Although his results confirm that there is an asymmetrybetween the extent to which people are inclined to trust aesthetictestimony, compared to testimony about non-aesthetic properties,interestingly, this effect was not moderated by theparticipants’ attitudes toward the status of aestheticjudgments. Moreover, another similarly designed study shows thataesthetic and moral beliefs based on testimony, in contrast todescriptive beliefs, are not seen as constitutingknowledge(Andow 2020).

5. Aesthetic Adjectives

Aesthetic adjectives, such as ‘beautiful’ and‘elegant’, are central to aesthetic communication: theyare the most common tools with which we attribute aesthetic propertiesto works and communicate aesthetic judgments with others. Somephilosophers contend that aesthetic adjectives constitute a segment ofnatural language that is interesting in its own right, for differentreasons. Frank Sibley (1959, 2001) argues that aesthetic adjectivesare distinctive in that they require taste to apply. By this, Sibleymeans that whether an aesthetic adjective applies to a work is neverdetermined by any set of non-aesthetic properties. Tim Sundell (2017)argues that although aesthetic adjectives are not semanticallydistinctive, they are metalinguistically distinctive because of theirrole in coordinating and negotiating standards. By this, Sundell meansthat when you say ‘this artwork is beautiful’ and I say‘no it is not’, we are not only attributing properties tothe work itself, but communicating our different standards of beautythrough our different applications of the term‘beautiful’.

There is a nearby segment of natural language that has attracted muchattention from philosophers and linguists:predicates of personaltaste such as ‘tasty’ and ‘fun’. Indeed,some experimental philosophers have made valuable contributions tothis debate (such as Kneer, Vicente, & Zeman 2017; Dinges &Zakkou 2020; Kneer 2021). However, scholars in this debate typicallyset aesthetic adjectives to the side in their investigations. Forexample, Peter Lasersohn (2005: 645) explicitly does so in order toavoid fundamental issues in aesthetics. In contrast to the livelyscholarly activity on predicates of personal taste, there are only afew works that explicitly and primarily investigate aestheticadjectives. As such, it remains an open question whether aestheticadjectives are distinct from predicates of personal taste, or whetherthere exists a unified treatment of the two.

Louise McNally and Isidora Stojanovic (2017) argue that whilepredicates of personal taste are necessarily mind-dependent insofar asthey entail an experiencer, aesthetic adjectives are semanticallydistinctive because they express evaluations without entailing anexperiencer. McNally and Stojanovic’s diagnostic appeals to thefact that the verb ‘find’ tends to complement adjectiveswith an experiencer. For example, sentences like ‘I find himattractive’ tend to sound fine but sentences like ‘I findhim tall’ tend to sound weird. Using the British NationalCorpus, they found that aesthetic adjectives do not tend to complement‘find’, which they take to be evidence that “theirevaluative component is not based directly on personalexperience” (2017: 29).

Shen-yi Liao and Aaron Meskin (2017) argue that aesthetic adjectivesare semantically distinctive because they exhibit a strange sort ofcontext-sensitivity. Standardly, gradable adjectives are classified asabsolute or relative. Absolute adjectives—such as‘straight’ or ‘spotted’—have theirstandards of application built in, and do not rely on the context tofix this threshold. By contrast, relative adjectives—such as‘warm’ or ‘long’—do rely on a contextfor its threshold of application. Through a series of experimentsinvolving a diagnostic used to classify gradable adjectives, Liao andMeskin found that aesthetic adjectives behaved like neither absolutenor relative adjectives. Participants were presented with pairs ofobjects and asked to pick out ‘the [adjective] one’. Thekey to this diagnostic is that ‘the’ implies bothexistence (there is at least one) and uniqueness (there is at mostone). As such, most participants are unable to pick outthespotted disc when presented with two discs that are spotted todifferent degrees because ‘spotted’, as an absoluteadjective, has a context-insensitive threshold of application which ismet in both cases. By contrast, most participants are able to pick outthe long rod when presented with two rods that are long todifferent degrees because ‘long’, as a relative adjective,has a threshold of application that is sensitive to the context. Inparticular, participants are able to construct an implicit comparisonclass using the context of application: they pick out thelonger rod as ‘the long one’. However, Liao andMeskin found that about half of the participants use‘beautiful’ like ‘spotted’ and about half ofthe participants use ‘beautiful’ like ‘long’.Moreover, the same pattern holds also for negative aestheticadjectives like ‘ugly’ and thick aesthetic adjectives like‘elegant’. These results are difficult to explain for thestandard typology of gradable adjectives.

Stojanovic (2019) argues that Liao and Meskin’s results do notprovide grounds for drawing any interesting conclusions regardingsemantic adjectives because the studies do not reveal a stablepattern. The 50/50 pattern in response to the request to pick outthe beautiful / ugly / elegant object is just what would beexpected if participants were answering by chance. Liao, McNally, andMeskin (2016) conducted further experiments and corpus observations toshow the instability of aesthetic adjectives’ behaviors. On somediagnostics they pattern with absolute adjectives, but on otherdiagnostics they pattern with relative adjectives. In response tothese results, they propose a different hypothesis: aestheticadjectives are like relative adjectives insofar as both involveimplicit comparison classes, but unlike relative adjectives insofar astheir implicit comparison classes are not determined by the immediatecontext of application.

Where the studies described above have attempted to treat aestheticadjectives as a homogeneous andsui generis class, morerecent studies have pointed to important sources of heterogeneityamongst them. ‘Beautiful’ and ‘pretty’ aresimilar adjectives in that they can both express certain descriptivecontents—namely, that an appearance is intrinsically pleasing,or that it is, for example, delicate, small, and soft. But they differinsofar as prettiness is thought to be more closely tied toappearances and less important than beauty. In trying to account forthis patterning, Doran (forthcoming a) suggests that BEAUTY but notPRETTINESS is a dual-character concept, and that in addition to thedescriptive senses they share, BEAUTY has a normative sense connectedto our most cherished values, including, most prominently, moralgoodness. In support of this claim, in one of the studies reported, heshows that ‘beauty’ but not ‘prettiness’ isjudged to be able to felicitiously combine with the ‘true’modifier, which is thought to be one source of evidence that theconcept expressed by a given lexical item is dual-character (Knobe etal. 2013). “That is true beauty” sounds perfectly naturalto native speakers of English, but “That is trueprettiness” sounds decidedly odd.

6. Morality and Aesthetics

Morality and aesthetics stand as two prominent normative domains. Howdo the concerns in these two domains interact with one another?Drawing from a substantive philosophical literature on theseinteractions (see Harold 2023 for overviews), topics at theintersection have also been empirically investigated in recent years.Here, we roughly divide works into two aspects: concerningmorality’s influence on aesthetics, and concerningaesthetics’ influence on morality.

In the first direction, concerning morality’s influence onaesthetics, philosophers have wondered about the influence of moralattitudes on aesthetic attitudes. In traditional philosophicalaesthetics, this is sometimes known as the “valueinteraction” or “ethical criticism of art” debate(Clavel Vázquez 2018; Giovanelli 2007; Liao & Meskin 2018;McGregor 2014). There are three main positions: autonomists say thatmoral attitudes do not influence aesthetic attitudes; moralists saythat negative moral judgments always negatively influence aestheticjudgments; and contextualists say that moral attitudes’influence on aesthetic attitudes depends on the context.

This direction of value interaction might affect taste perception.Patrik Sörqvist and colleagues (2013) found that, between twoqualitatively identical cups of coffee, participants whose attitudesare congruent with sustainability rated the one labeled as“eco-friendly” as tastier. However, Aaron Meskin andShen-yi Liao (2018) were unable to conceptually replicate this result.Similarly, Beth Armstrong and colleagues (2019) found that the valenceof ethical information affected consumers’ expected experienceof food. Taken together, these results suggest that a folk psychologyof moralism or contextualism is currently more plausible than a folkpsychology of autonomism.

This direction of value interaction might also affect judgments ofbeauty. One longstanding debate in this context surrounds whethermoral goodness can be beautiful in itself—with philosophers suchas Plato (c. 370 BCE) and Shaftesbury (1711) claiming that moralbeauty exists, and others such as Edmund Burke (1757) and ImmanuelKant (1790) denying this (though see Doran forthcoming d). Untilrecently, one of the principal ways that philosophers have tried tosettle this matter is by examining the use of ordinary language fromthe armchair. Berys Gaut (2007), for example, argues in favor of theexistence of moral beauty principally by noting that wecallpeople beautiful when they are good. Gaut argues that this kind oftalk cannot be intended non-literally, as was suggested by Burke(1757), as neither of the two defeators of literal use—obviousfalsity (as in ‘my boss is a pig’) or trivial truthfulness(as in ‘I’m not over the moon’)—seem to applyto locutions that appear to express moral beauty. But as Ryan Doran(2021) notes, Gaut’s method of testing for non-literal use istoo demanding, as it wrongly assumes that people are alwaystruth-maximisers. To move past this apparent impasse from thearmchair, and help to reveal the number of species of moral beautythat exist, Doran suggests that we turn to experimental studies. Heshows that people tend to judge morally good people to be morebeautiful, and that this cannot be deflated in terms of non-literalintent or an error (such as misattribution) on the grounds that makingthe source of the goodness salient, and giving people the opportunityto express their approval of the goodness prior to making the judgmentof beauty, does not eliminate the effect of moral goodness onjudgments of beauty. Doran also finds evidence that moral goodness canaffect the beauty of physical appearances by affecting thedeterminants of thick aesthetic properties such as balance anddelicacy, and that people’s moral character can be beautiful initself, suggesting that beauty is not perception dependent.

Building on this work, experimental philosophy studies have also beenused to help resolve apparent inconsistencies in the existingliterature onwhich moral traits are beautiful, as well asreveal hitherto unacknowledged reasons why morally good traits andactions are beautiful, among other things.

Supporters of moral beauty can be divided intoparticularistsabout the beauty of traits—who tend to hold that only the‘warmer’ virtues such as compassion are beautiful (forexample, Kant 1764)—anduniversalists about moralbeauty—who tend to argue that all virtues are beautiful, andindeed that certain colder non-moral traits such as intelligence canbe beautiful too (Schiller 1793 [2003], 1793 [2005]; Gaut 2007; andParis 2018).

Doran (2023) proposes that these positions only appear to beinconsistent with one another, as they range over different kinds ofbeauty: with universalists targeting the beauty that is found in goodform, and particularists targeting the kind of beauty that lies inthings that have a disposition to lead to an emotion that is variouslydescribed as ‘love,’ ‘elevation’ and‘ecstasy’—which is characterized by feelings akin tobeing moved, inspired, and of unity with the object of this state. Totest this view, he presented participants with a story about twoindividuals who are equally well-formed—in the sense that theirmental states are all working harmoniously to lead them to do theright thing—but differ in the kind of virtue they exhibit, withone individual being just, and the other being compassionate.Consistent with the idea that there is a beauty in some traits whichresides in the disposition to give rise to this special emotion inaddition to well-formedness, participants found the fully just andfully compassionate individuals to be equally virtuous and good, butthe latter to be more beautiful to the extent that this individualtended to give rise to this special emotion to a greater extent.

Examining the link between internal harmony and beauty moreexplicitly, Doran (forthcoming b) has tested the idea—which ismost prominently found in Friedrich Schiller’sOn Grace& Dignity (1793 [2005]) andKallias (1793[2002])—that actions are beautiful if and only if they areexpressive of freedom by being the result of a high degree of internalharmony, as in cases where our desires, beliefs, and will allseamlessly work together to produce the good action. While Doran findssome evidence which is consistent with actions being beautiful to theextent that they are expressive of freedom by being the result of ahigh degree of internal harmony, his results also suggest that themoral actions of conflicted individuals can beas beautiful,or evenmore beautiful, as those of internally harmoniousmoral agents, and so Schiller’s claim need to be weakened andsupplemented with additional claims. In one experiment, for example,participants were presented with two individuals who both do the rightand good action in making necessary redundancies and giving financialsupport to those affected, where the only difference is that where oneindividual makes the redundancies without any internal conflict, theother does so with a great deal of conflict due to a reluctance toafflict the necessary suffering. Consistent with his earlier findings,the results show that the latter individual’s action isconsidered to be more beautiful, and that this is due to the latterindividual’s tendency to move us, and make us feel at one withthem. As such, Doran suggests that it is not only the internal harmonyof the agent who performs an action that determines its beauty, butalso the degree to which the action tends to make usfeel asthough we are harmoniously related to the agent that performs theaction. Further elucidating some of the reasons why morally goodactions can be beautiful, Doran (forthcoming c) finds that people tendto think that morally good actions are beautiful when the action isseen as expressing who the person truly is (their essence), and asstemming from a location deep inside of them, and in turn tends tolead to feelings of being moved and inspired.

Imagination may play an especially important role in mediating moralattitudes’ influence on aesthetic attitudes. Imaginativeresistance refers to the phenomenon in which “an otherwisecompetent imaginer finds it difficult to engage in some sort ofprompted imaginative activity” (Gendler & Liao 2016: 405;see also Miyazono & Liao 2016). Imaginative resistance is puzzlingbecause imagination is standardly unconstrained. Typically, acompetent imaginer finds no difficulty in imaginingfactualdeviations, such as a fictional world in which humans and dragonsco-exist. However, it has been hypothesized that imaginativeactivities that involvemoral deviations are especially proneto evoke imaginative resistance (Gendler 2000, 2006). For example, ithas been suggested that a fictional world in which female infanticideis morally right is likely to evoke imaginative resistance (Walton1994). Philosophers disagree about many aspects of imaginativeresistance, such as: whether the resistance is special to imaginingmoral deviations, whether the resistance reflects an intrinsiclimitation of imagination, and indeed, whether the phenomenon is realin the first place. Experimental philosophers and psychologists havesought to bring systematic empirical evidence to help resolve thesedisagreements.

As an early example of this kind of work, Liao, Strohminger, andSripada (2014) conducted two studies on imaginative resistance and itsdriving factors. In the first study, they asked participants to engagewith a story in the style of Greek myths, in which it is morally rightto trick a person into entering a romantic relationship. They foundevidence for imaginative resistance being a real phenomenon: theextent to which this fictional world is counter to participants’moral attitude is correlated with the extent of their self-reportedimaginative difficulty. However, they also found evidence against theresistance reflecting an intrinsic limitation of imagination: theextent to which participants are familiar with the genre conventionsof Greek myths is also correlated with the extent of theirself-reported imaginative difficulty. In the second study, theypresented a fictional world in which it is morally right to sacrificean infant, but varied the genre of the story such that someparticipants engaged with a story in the style of police proceduralsbut others engaged with a story in the style of Aztec myths. Sureenough, participants do have a harder time accepting that infantsacrifice really is morally right in the police procedural world, butan easier time accepting the same for the Aztec myth world. Thiscontrast found in this study (replicated by Mark Phelan and colleaguesin Cova, Strickland, et al. 2021) lends further support to the realityand the non-intrinsicality of imaginative resistance.

Subsequent investigations by other philosophers and psychologists havefound additional support for the reality of imaginative resistance andfurther uncovered its contours. Jessica E. Black and Jennifer L.Barnes (2017) have designed and validated a scale for measuringimaginative resistance. With this scale, they have also found thatparticipants do experience imaginative resistance in response to moraldeviance, albeit with contextual and individual variations (Barnes& Black 2016; Black & Barnes 2020). However, Hanna Kim, MarkusKneer, and Mike Stuart (2019) found that the resistance is not specialto imagining moral deviations. Instead, imaginative resistancereflects the “weirdness” of the claim that participantsare asked to imagine, which is itself an amalgam of three factors:unusualness, counterfactuality, and surprisingness. Morally deviantclaims, as a class, are not necessarily more weird than factuallydeviant claims, as a class. Moreover, given that surprisingness is acomponent, weirdness depends on expectations which might be modifiedby genre expectations and other contextual factors. Dylan Campbell,William Kidder, Jason D’Cruz, and Brendan Gaesser (2021) foundthat the resistance does not reflect an intrinsic limitation ofimagination. Instead, imaginative resistance reflects individualdifferences in emotional reactivity: participants who experience lessnegative affect in response to harms also experience less difficultyin imagining moral deviance.

In the second direction, concerning aesthetics’ influence onmorality, philosophers have also wondered about the influence ofaesthetic attitudes on moral attitudes. This direction comes up too,albeit much more rarely, in the “value interaction” debate(Harold 2006; Stecker 2005). In psychology, however, aestheticattitudes’ influence on moral attitudes has been systematicallystudied in an extensive literature on the beauty-is-good stereotype(Dion et al. 1972; compare the metaanalyses in Eagly et al. 1991 andLanglois et al. 2000). Roughly, the idea is that positive aestheticjudgments always positively influence moral judgments of persons. Thisstereotype holds in a surprisingly wide variety of domains, such aspedagogy and politics.

Philosophers have been equivocal in their answer to the question ofwhether aesthetic appreciation has a salubrious effect on us morally.Cynics about beauty have suggested that appreciating beauty might havea corrupting influence. J. Robert Loftis (2003), for example, suggeststhat beauty might lead us to focus on the superficial, “skindeep”, features of the world. But some philosophers have beenmore sanguine about the prospect of moral cultivation via beauty.Plato, in theSymposium, suggests that the appreciation ofphysical beauties leads to the appreciation of non-perceptual kinds ofgoodness; and Kant (1785) suggests that a love ofnaturalbeauty in particular is a “mark of the good soul”, andindicates that a person is susceptible to the “moralfeeling”. Since this issue is an empirical one to an importantextent, it is perhaps no surprise that experimental philosophers andempirical aestheticians have entered the fray. Providing correlationalsupport for the optimistic view, Diessner et al. (2013) found that thetendency to be sensitive to beauty (that is, to notice it, and bemoved by it), and particularly sensitivity to natural beauty, wasassociated with the moral attitudes towards close and distant others(in line with Kant’s suggestion). Providing evidence of a causalrelationship, appreciation of natural beauty has been found to lead tomore morally admirable behavior (Zhang et al. 2014; see Silvers &Haidt 2008 and Landis et al. 2009 for evidence concerning the morallysalubrious effects of appreciating moral beauty). In addition to thiswork on beauty, the moral effects of appreciating the sublime havebeen explored in the context of empirical work on the nature of awe(see Piff et al. 2015).

Philosophers have generally held two main positions about the rolethat something’s beauty can play in grounding moral standing. Onthe one hand, optimists about beauty have argued that beauty confersintrinsic moral standing—that is, beautiful things are worthy ofprotection independently of their relationship to humans and otheranimals (for example, G.E. Moore 1903; Routley, 1973). Pessimistsabout beauty, by contrast, think that beauty at best provides anon-intrinsic kind of moral standing, insofar as it is but one sourceof pleasure for humans (for example, Passmore 1974). Experimentalphilosophers and empirical aestheticians have recently tried to castlight on some of the mechanisms that might be involved inbeauty’s effects on judgments of moral standing, with a view tointerrogating its normative significance in some cases. Doran (2022),for example, argues that both the optimists and pessimists areincorrect. Across two studies with beautiful plants, he shows that tothe extent that people tend to experience the beauty ofplants—and in particular to the extent that they tend to feelmoved and inspired by the beauty—they tend to judge that theplant can feel pain and has intrinsic moral standing. As such, heargues that the intuitions that optimists appeal to should bedebunked, and that beauty tends to give rise to a state that is morevaluable than mere pleasure, contra the pessimists. Investigating theissue through the lens of Moral Foundations Theory, Klebl andcolleagues (2022) found that purity intuitions tend to underliepeople’s willingness to protect beautiful things.

7. Emotion and Art

There is a rich set of puzzles in philosophical aesthetics concerningemotional responses to fictions, and here, both psychologists and experimental philosophers have madecontributions, in some cases moving the debate beyond the standardphilosophical concerns. Here we discuss a few of those that havereceived the most attention from philosophers:How can fictionelicit emotional responses when we know that the characters do notexist? If certain works of art, particularly music, can evoke negativeemotions, like sadness, which we typically aim to avoid in everydaylife, why do we pursue such experiences in art contexts? Moreover, howcan music be expressive of emotions, if there is nobody in the musicitself experiencing them?

The ‘paradox’ of fiction is motivated by the followingobservation: if we were to learn that events in life that make us feelsad have not in fact come to pass, our sadness would disappear. Butthe same is not true in art. I may know that Tolstoy’sAnnaKarenina does not exist, and yet may feel sad reading about herfate in the novel (Radford & Weston 1975). With this in mind, theparadox of fiction has standardly been formulated as a trilemma ofthree individually plausible but mutually inconsistent claims (forexample, Currie 1990):

We have emotional responses directed towards fictional entitiesand situations in literature and art;
In order to have emotional responses we need to believe in theexistence of the entities and situations that they are directedat;
We do not believe in the existence of the fictional entities inliterature and art.

Most philosophers have now jettisoned this paradoxical formulation, byrejecting proposition (2). But, even if there is no paradox per se,philosophers have noted that interesting questions remain here:Doour emotional responses to fictions differ from their real-lifecognates? And, if so, what might explain this? Do our emotionalresponses to fiction involve different mental representations, forexample? And are any differences that exist sufficient to constitute adifferent kind of emotional response?

In connection with this, some experimental philosophers have thoughtthat the emotional responses that are had in response to fictionalentities and events might differ in their intensity, as a result ofdifferences in self-referential processes. Sperduti et al. (2016), forexample, asked participants to watch clips of scenarios apt to elicitpositive or negative emotions, or neutral video clips, presented aseither mockumentaries (fiction), or documentaries or amateur films(non-fiction). Participants self-reported less intense emotions onlyin response to thenegative clips when they were presented asfictions, and even here, there were no differences in thephysiological responses (and specifically, in electrodermal activity).The authors interpret this as suggesting that the emotional responsesto fiction are genuine emotions, on the grounds that there are nophysiological differences, but that appraisals of fictionality mightnonetheless cause people to psychologically distance themselves fromthe content (for discussion, see Pelletier 2019). Humbert-Droz et al.(2020), by contrast, found that longer clips of sad scenes lead tolower skin conductance when labeled as non-fictional versus fictional,as well as greater self-reports of sadness—suggesting thatbelieving that the clip was real led to greater sadness. Given themixed findings in this context, the issues of whether the emotionsthat we feel in response to fiction differ from those we feel innon-fictional contexts, and if so why, remain open questions.

The paradox of negative emotion (Hume 1757b), has intriguedphilosophers since the time of Aristotle: why do we seek exposure toart arousing negative emotions if negative emotions is something thatwe tend to avoid in our everyday life? One important example islistening to sad music, which is often thought to evoke sad mood inlisteners (though for dissent, see Kivy 1990). There is vastpsychological literature on emotional responses to music that arerelevant to this philosophical discussion (see Mitterschiffthaler etal. 2007; Juslin & Västfjäll 2008; Vuoskoski &Eerola 2012; Koelsch, 2014; Peltola & Eerola 2016; Juslin 2019),and it has received some attention from experimental philosophers aswell.

Mario Attie-Picker and colleagues (2024) tested the hypothesis thatpeople choose to listen to sad music because of the emotions music isexpressive of: listening to sad music allows people to feel moreconnected. In the first study, participants were presented withvignettes describing musical pieces with differing levels of musicalproficiency and emotional expressiveness. They were then asked to whatextent they agreed that the described piece of music was good andembodied the essence of what music is ‘all about’. Theresults revealed that emotional expressiveness, more so than technicalproficiency, influenced judgments on what are the characteristicvalues of music. In the second study, participants were asked tocomplete sentences about (a) the characteristic values of music, (b)feeling connected in conversations, and (c) pleasantness of music.They found an overlap between the emotions people listed as embodyingwhat music is “all about” and the emotions that makepeople feel connected in conversations. Attie-Picker and colleaguesthus try to explain the paradox by shifting the focus away from thetraditional emphasis on the listener’s felt emotions and insteadcentering it on emotions one perceives in music.

The paradox of emotional expressiveness is related not to the emotionswe feel when we listen to music, but rather emotions we hear in themusic itself. In our everyday conversations, we often characterizemusic as joyful, sad or angry. We use those terms when discussing apiece of music—an entity that does not have mental states and isincapable of experiencing emotions.

One way to empirically study the relationship between music andemotional expressiveness is through cross-cultural research.Psychological literature suggests that cross-cultural recognition ofemotions in music is quite limited. Some studies have shown that thelist of cross-culturally recognizable emotions in music is limited tothree basic emotions of happiness, sadness and fear (Fritz et al.2009). Other studies suggest that even major and minor chords may not,after all, be universally associated with happiness and sadness(Lahdelma et al. 2021; Smit et al. 2022). However, at least aversionto dissonant musical chords appears to be cross-cultural (Lahdelma etal., 2021).

The question of cross-cultural recognizably has also been tackled inConstant Bonard’s experimental philosophy paper (2019). Bonardargues that the affective meaning of a musical piece depends onmusical grammar, as there is an overlap of cognitive mechanismsconstituting the capacity for language and capacity for music.According to him, listeners familiar with certain musical idioms andgrammatical organizations are better able to perceive the affectivemeaning of a piece. Bonard presented his participants in Geneva andIndia with excerpts from Western classical music, South Indian music,as well as a set of atonal melodies that do not belong to either ofthese cultures. They were asked to identify musical excerpts that donot correspond to musical grammatical rules. For both Indian andWestern participants, the Western and atonal (but not Indian) stimuliwere easier to encode for those familiar with the musical idiom.Participants were also asked to listen to musical extracts andcontinually rate how much the music expressed a given emotion. Thestudy confirmed that participants were better at recognizing theaffective dimension of music that originated from their region. Takentogether, these studies present tentative evidence that therecognition of emotions in music may depend on familiarity with localmusical grammar rules (for more readings on musical semantics, alsosee Schlenker 2017, 2019, 2022).

The topic of art and emotion induction may also be relevant todiscussions on art and morality. Angelika Seidel and Jesse Prinz(2013b) found that music can be used to induce positive or negativeemotions, which in turn modifies moral evaluations. Roughly, happymusic increases judgments of goodness, and angry music increasesjudgments of wrongness. Seidel and Prinz (2013a) further discoveredthat different negative musically-induced emotions, anger and disgust,can impact the severity of different kinds of moral judgments. A morecomplex result comes from Ansani and colleagues (2024), which showsthat musical expertise is likely to lead to moreindividualizing moral foundations as opposed tobinding ones.

8. Methodological Debates

Throughout this entry, we have generally focused on recent empiricalresearch done by philosophers on topics in philosophy of art andaesthetics. However, this scope is admittedly arbitrary. As noted atthe start, the research program that we have surveyed is continuouswith empirical aesthetics in psychology, and comes from a longhistorical tradition that encompasses both philosophy and psychology.The principal reasons to draw boundaries are pragmatic ones.

Like other branches of experimental philosophy, experimentalphilosophy of art and aesthetics involves gathering data usingempirical methods and bringing analyses of the data to bear onphilosophical theorizing. As a matter of general fact, research inexperimental philosophy is relatively replicable (Cova, Strickland, etal. 2021), and relatively free of scientific misconduct such asp-hacking (Stuart, Colaço, & Machery 2019). Whileexperimental philosophy of art and aesthetics is bolstered by thisgeneral track record, it also inherits a number of methodologicalchallenges from experimental philosophy and related areas ofpsychology regarding instruments, samples, and stimuli.

By far, the most common instrument used in experimental philosophy ofart and aesthetics is—like other branches of experimentalphilosophy and related areas of psychology—the questionnaire.Participants’ responses are measured by their answers toquestions posed by the researchers. Nick Zangwill (2019) expresses ageneral skepticism toward studies that use questionnaires, andcriticizes experimental philosophy of art and aesthetics for its wideuse of this specific measurement instrument. Drawing inspiration fromWittgenstein, Zangwill is pessimistic about the questionnaire’sattempt to use language to reveal agents’ thoughts generally. Inaddition, he is pessimistic about the questionnaire’s capacityto reveal agents’ normative judgments, such as judgments ofbeauty, as opposed to non-normative judgments, such as judgments ofagreeableness. Zangwill’s critique could be taken as aninvitation for experimental philosophers to explore methodologicaltools beyond the questionnaire. In fact, some philosophers havealready experimented with eye movement tracking (Wright et al. 2019),virtual reality (Francis et al. 2016), electroencephalography (Bricker2020), and corpus analysis (Liao, McNally, & Meskin 2016; McNally& Stojanovic 2017; Sytsma et al. 2019; Chartrand 2022; Doran,forthcoming a). Some of these or other proposed methods (see Fischer& Curtis 2019; Fischer & Sytsma 2023) might also enrichexperimental aestheticians’ toolboxes.

The most common sample used in experimental philosophy of art andaesthetics is—once again, like other branches of experimentalphilosophy and related areas of psychology—WEIRD: participantsfrom Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic countries(Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan 2010). Whether responses from theseWEIRD participants are representative of people in general remains anopen question. Within experimental philosophy (and related areas inpsychology), there is an ongoing debate about the legitimacy of makingtheoretical generalizations based on empirical results from WEIRDsamples (for criticisms, see Stich & Machery 2023 and Peters &Lemeire 2024; for defenses, see Knobe 2019, 2021). Clearly, thisongoing debate impacts the evidentiary value of existing research inexperimental philosophy of art and aesthetics as well.

That said, it is important to highlight a couple of cross-culturalworks in experimental philosophy of art and aesthetics. In one work,Florian Cova, Christopher Olivola, and colleagues (2019) extendCova’s earlier research on the intersubjective validity ofaesthetic judgments to a sample that includes participants from 19countries on four continents. Across six geographical areas (Europe,Middle East, Central and North America, South America, East Asia, andSouth and Southeast Asia), they found both variations and convergencesin patterns of responses. While participants from East Asia tend toendorse ‘subjectivism’ about aesthetic judgments (when twopeople disagree, both can be correct), participants from othergeographical areas tend to endorse ‘nihilism’ (when twopeople disagree, neither is correct or incorrect). At the same time,people everywhere tend to not endorse ‘realism’ (when twopeople disagree, at most one can be correct). In another work,Constant Bonard (2019) conducted studies in Switzerland and India tovindicate the hypothesis that musical idioms have grammaticalstructures. The grammar of Western classical music was found to bemore recognizable to Switzerland participants than Indianparticipants, but no reverse asymmetry was found for South Indianclassical music. Another study investigated aesthetic judgments ofmathematical beauty between Chinese and British mathematicians andfound that they do not seem to be strongly influenced by culturaldifferences (Sa et al. 2024). As things stand, these threecross-cultural works remain the exception, and not the norm, inexperimental philosophy of art and aesthetics. The fact that the vastmajority of work has been conducted with Western European and Americansamples is not dissimilar to the situation in empirical aesthetics(see Che, Sun, Gallardo, & Nadal 2018) or music cognition (seeJacoby et al 2020). As such, this is a problem that needs to beaddressed in all fields that empirically study art and aesthetics.

In addition, samples used in experimental philosophy of art andaesthetics tend to be ordinary people with no special expertise inphilosophy or the relevant arts. One criticism of experimentalphilosophy’s relevance for philosophical theorizing, commonlycalledthe expertise objection, endorses privileging experts’ responses over ordinarypeople’s. While the existing debate primarily concerns theexpertise of philosophers—insofar as the objectors privilegephilosophers’ intuitions from thought experiments—in thedomain of philosophy of art and aesthetics, expertise in therespective artforms might be relevant as well. Many psychology studieshave shown differences between ordinary people and art experts inaesthetic judgments and preferences (Hekkert & Van Wieringen,1996; Leder, Ring, & Dressler 2013), as well as emotionalresponses to art (Silvia 2013; Leder, Gerger, et al. 2014), and thesedifferences are relevant to at least some of the topics experimentalphilosophers are interested in. As such, we want to highlight a fewworks in this domain that use experts as samples.

Three studies in experimental philosophy of aesthetics have comparedexpert and non-expert samples. In one empirical study based on moralfoundations theory, Alessandro Ansani and colleagues (2024) found thatmusical experts tend to have a higher preference for individualizingmoral foundations, Harm and Care. Elzė Mikalonytė and ViliusDranseika (2020) compared intuitions on the individuation of musicalworks between musicians and non-musicians and found that although theytend to be similar, musicians’ intuitions are usually morepronounced. However, Mikalonytė and Dranseika (2022) found nonotable differences between professional singers and orchestramusicians working in the opera and participants with no musiceducation. Most of Richard Kamber’s (2011) study participantswere art professionals or ‘art buffs’, so the study itselfdoes not allow us to compare experts’ and non-experts’responses. Kamber explains this methodological decision by statingthat if there is a consensus between professional artists on whatcounts as art, philosophers are inclined to agree with professionalartists.

In other branches of experimental philosophy, many studies rely onintuitions that arise from thought experiments. This is less so inexperimental philosophy of art and aesthetics. Indeed, Cova andRéhault (2019b: 3) speculate that it is because intuitions playa much less prominent role in philosophical aesthetics that the fielddid not draw the initial attention of experimental philosophers. Withthat said, it is important to stress that there is variation withrespect to this within this branch of experimental philosophy too.Emanuele Arielli (2018) distinguishes studies that solicit intuitionsand other cognitive responses and studies that solicit aestheticreactions and other perceptual and phenomenological responses. Whilecritical of the former type of studies, he finds the latter type ofstudies more promising insofar as they are more continuous withempirical aesthetics in psychology.

Others have remarked on this difference between experimentalphilosophy of art and aesthetics and other branches of experimentalphilosophy. Clotilde Torregrossa (2020, 2024) argues that insofar asexperimental philosophy of art and aesthetics is more reliant onreactions to aesthetic phenomena, standard objections againstexperimental philosophy that turn on the reliance on intuitions fromthought experiments are less applicable. Jonathan Weinberg (2019)argues that the availability of artworks means that experimenters neednot rely solely on descriptive vignettes. The presentation of actualartworks can fill in gaps that are usually left by the short textualvignettes that are typical of philosophical thought experiments. Weshould note, however, that in actuality such studies remain relativelyrare (some examples are Kamber 2011; Meskin et al. 2013; Liao &Meskin 2017; Bonard 2019; Puy 2022; Mikalonytė & Canonneforthcoming).

There is ongoing debate about whether studies about music shoulddepend on the use of acoustic stimuli. Building on Weinberg’sargument, Nemesio Puy (2022) contends that ontological judgments aboutartworks involve an aesthetic dimension and must therefore be groundedin the experience of real works of art. This contention receivesindirect support from a study that shows people are generallyunwilling to base their beliefs about aesthetic dimension of anartwork on testimony alone, without first-personal perceptual access(Andow 2019). Moreover, this contention receives direct support fromtwo studies that show that the decision to include or exclude acousticstimuli has an effect on the results of studies investigatingontological judgments, even if the descriptive part of the stimuli iskept as consistent as possible (Puy 2022; Mikalonytė &Canonne forthcoming). Notwithstanding this, Elzė Mikalonytė(forthcoming) points out several reasons why purely textual vignettesare so widely used and might not always be easily replaceable. Suchvignettes might help the participants to focus on the most relevantaspects and filter out irrelevant factors. In fact, additionalperceptual information may actually distract participants, as mayoccur, for example, in making judgments in the ontology of art, whicharguably should be made on the basis of conceptual rather thanperceptual information (such as information about the artist’sintentions). Especially in the case of music, presenting theparticipants with short descriptions without corresponding works ofmusic might help to avoid relying on sustained attention over extendedperiods of time.

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All authors contributed to this entry equally. Work on this entry wassupported by grant TRT-2021-10448 from the Templeton Religion Trust;and grants CEX2021-001169-M (funded byMICIU/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/), PID2023-150569NB-I00 andRYC2023-045407-I from the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación deEspaña.

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