Experimental Philosophy of Aesthetics: Aesthetic Judgment

Experimental philosophy of aesthetics is the attempt of using empirical methods to make progress in traditional questions in philosophical aesthetics and philosophy of art. While psychology of aesthetics and neuroaesthetics have mainly focused on aesthetic experiences and aesthetic appreciation, experimental philosophy of aesthetics explores people’s conceptions of the aesthetic and artistic realms. Thus, one of its main topics of investigation has been “folk meta-aesthetics”, i. e., whether people consider aesthetic properties to be objective rather than subjective. In this chapter, I begin by presenting a comprehensive survey of this debate and how it engages a wide variety of topics in philosophical aesthetics: the nature of guilty pleasures and aesthetic taste, the possibility of aesthetic disagreement, and the value of aesthetic testimony. I then illustrate the breadth and variety of empirical research in the field of experimental philosophy of aesthetics by summarizing past and present research on topics as diversified as the definition of art, the ontology of musical works of arts, the nature of aesthetic adjectives, the interaction between aesthetic and non-aesthetic evaluations, the paradox of fiction, and the puzzle of imaginative resistance.