Pragmatism and the Ontology of Art

Abstract

AbstractContemporary pragmatism—often dubbed ‘neopragmatism’—opposes the idea that legitimacy of institutional practices consists in conformity to requirements issuing from objects, properties, or states of affairs; it is people, not objects, that demand compliance, and whose patterns of behavior constitute the ultimate grounds of normativity. This theme, conjoined with semantic anti-representationalism—viz., the denial that a privileged word-world relation of “reference” or “representation” plays a key role in understanding conceptual activity—constitutes the strain of neopragmatism to be explored. The goal here is to observe the impact of neopragmatist doctrine on theorizing about the arts. Two strategies often prompted by pragmatist agendas—“institutional” theories of art and expressivist semantics for art-critical discourse—are shown to face serious obstacles. But it emerges that pragmatist skepticism about metaphysics has considerable purchase, thereby casting doubt upon both the explanatory and normative power of artworld ontology. Neopragmatism thus earns mixed reviews in the domain of aesthetic theory.