Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";”>Critical Thinking
Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";”> 7th Ed.                                                                    
Summary of Main Points
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Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";”>Chapter 12                  Aesthetic Reasoning
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Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";”>Judgments about beauty and art, like moral and legal reasoning, rely on conceptual frameworks that integrate fact and value.  When we make a judgment about art we appeal to aesthetic reasoning to defend or criticize value statements, usually using one of the following eight principals:
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Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";”>1.
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Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";”>Objects are aesthetically valuable if they have a meaning or teach something true.
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Such truths about life are generally overlooked due to the busy lives we lead.  This framework identifies value in art that fulfills a cultural or social function by teaching that nonart cannot provide. 
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Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";”>ex.    More happens in one episode of All My Children , than happens to me in a year.   A soap opera makes its viewers think about what they would do/feel/think in situations, without having to live through it.
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Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";”>2.   Objects are aesthetically valuable if they express the values of the cultures they arise in, or the artists who make them.  
Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";”>This framework also identifies value in art that fulfills cultural or social functions.
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Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";”>ex. 
Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";”>Homer’s Iliad makes a warrior’s values vivid.  You don’t have to believe what the object says or even that it has given an argument for the values it represents.
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Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";”>3.
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Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";”>Objects are aesthetically valuable if they can lead to social change.
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Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";”>This is the third principle that identifies value with art’s ability to fulfill cultural or social functions.  The social change is an improvement, although not widely recognized at first.
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Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";”>            ex.  Rock n’ Roll music led to sex, drugs and long hair.
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Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";”>4.
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Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";”> Objects are aesthetically valuable if they give their audience pleasure.
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Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 18.0pt;”>The art object contributes to our happiness, connecting value with a thing’s ability to produce a type of psychological experience, aesthetic hedonism. 

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Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";”>5.
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Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";”>Objects are aesthetically valuable if they give their audience certain emotions.
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Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";”>Again, this principle connects value to a thing’s ability to produce a type of psychological experience.  These emotions are not daily occurrences, but we value the art object for awakening them in us. 
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Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";”>            ex.   The Lincoln Memorial is awesome.
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Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";”>6.
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Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";”>Objects are aesthetically valuable if they produce a special nonemotional experience that comes only from art, such as autonomy, or, the willing suspension of disbelief.
Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";”>  Here again an aesthetic value comes down to the production of a certain subjective state, and as in the above, connects to a function of art. 
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Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";”>ex.  
Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";”>Ansel Adams’ photos of Yosemite Valley are breathtaking.
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Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";”>7.
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Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";”>Objects are aesthetically valuable if they possess a special aesthetic (formal)          property, such as beauty, unity, or organization.
Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";”>  In its’ significant form, the art object is valuable for itself, not for function.
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Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";”>ex.
Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";”>  Monet’s Water Lilies  series of oil paintings beautifully display his obsession with color and design.
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Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";”>8.
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Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";”>Objects are aesthetically valuable because of features that no reasons can determine, and no argument can establish.
Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";”>   This principle corresponds to moral subjectivism in the view that an object is aesthetically valuable if someone values it.
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Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";”>ex.
Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";”>  She loves the look of her antique bathtub.
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Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";”>As in moral and legal reasoning, in reasoning about art we sometimes appeal to more than one principle or framework in a single argument, but not always.  An aesthetic argument describes features of a work that are relevant and descriptively true to a principle.  Guidelines to remember when combining these principles:
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Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";”>— #1 and #3 = compatible: object gets aesthetic value both from teaching about morality therefore influencing us to become better people.
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Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";”>—  #3 and #4 = seem to agree theoretically, but not in particular cases,
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Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";”>ex.  
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Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";”>would satisfy #4 (pleasure), but not #3 (social change).
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Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";”>—  #3 and #7= contrary claims: aesthetic value (#3) function vs. (#7) form,  cannot both be true, although both might be false. (Chapter 8, Sq. of Opposition).  
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Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";”>— #1 and #5= consistent views: conveying a truth and releasing the emotion.
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Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";”>— #5 and #6 = contradiction: #5 claims value in ordinary emotional experience, while #6 claims a special nonemotional experience.
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Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";”>                       
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Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";”>— #8 contradicts #1-7 by denying that any good reasons exist.
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Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";”>THE CHANGES IN ART HISTORICALLY AND PRESENTLY MAY MAKE THESE GENERAL PRINCIPLES OR FRAMEWORKS INADEQUATE TO THE PROCESS OF EVALUATION OF AESTHETIC VALUE JUDGEMENTS.  WHILE THESE AESTHETIC PRINCIPLES MAY NOT HAVE THE FOUNDATION THAT MORAL OR LEGAL PRINCIPLES DO, THEY DO CONTRIBUTE TO AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE BY:
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Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";”>—  capturing the definition of aesthetic value (see Chapter 2 pp.48-49) by the use of words that convey meaning about art which have an emotive or rhetorical force – creating certain feelings or attitudes.  Such descriptors then teach the language of art and can bring audiences into agreement (or not) with the critic. 
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