UNIVERSITY OF SHEFFIELD

What are the legitimate sources of aesthetic belief? Which methods for forming aesthetic belief are acceptable? Although the question is rarely framed explicitly, it is a familiar idea that there is something distinctive about aesthetic matters in this respect. Crudely, the thought is that the legitimate routes to belief are rather more limited in the aesthetic case than elsewhere. If so, this might tell us something about the sorts of facts that aesthetic beliefs describe, about the nature of our aesthetic judgements, or about the responses that ground them. Getting the epistemology right here may help with the metaphysics, the semantics or the philosophical psychology. Investigating the legitimate sources of aesthetic belief may thus teach us something important about the aesthetic realm. I begin with a principle that seeks to identify which sources of aesthetic belief are legitimate, and use it to review the possible candidates. I don’t attempt to defend the principle, merely to explore the shape it imposes on the phenomena. Previous discussions of the principle have concentrated on only some of its implications, and previous discussions of the possible candidate sources of aesthetic belief have overlooked some. In both respects, I aim to be more comprehensive. Towards the close, I suggest that the principle itself is interestingly ambiguous. There are two rather different positions it might be used to articulate