dc.description.abstract | Experimental philosophy of aesthetics has explored to what
extent ordinary people are committed to aesthetic realism.
Extant work has focused on attitudes to normativism – a key
commitment of realist positions in aesthetics – the claim that
aesthetic judgments/statements have correctness condi tions, invariant between subjects, such that there is a fact of
the matter in cases of aesthetic disagreement. The emerging
picture is that ordinary people strongly and almost univer sally reject normativism and thus there is no strong realist
tendency in ordinary people’s thinking about the aesthetic.
This has been taken to dissolve the traditional puzzle in
aesthetics of how to best account for the fact that (a) aes thetic judgments seem intersubjectively valid, while (b) aes thetic experience seems subjective. This paper presents
studies which further enrich our understanding of ordinary
thinking about the aesthetic: ordinary thinking about the
aesthetic may not be so vehement in its rejection of norma tivism; and where previous results suggested that, in many
cultures, the dominant trend is to reject correctness condi tions for aesthetic judgments, the current results suggest
participants think aesthetic judgments have correctness con ditions (albeit perhaps very finely relativized to specific cir cumstances of judgment). | vi |