Abstract
AbstractThis chapter argues that a large portion of the apparent intuitive appeal of pessimism comes from a tendency to focus on a very narrow range of cases, and that consideration of a wider range of cases quickly unearths a great deal of intuitive support for optimism. This chapter considers a wider range of intuitions about certain kinds of aesthetic judgement (such as those concerning lost works) as well as appeals to various aspects of our aesthetic practice which are best explained by an appeal to optimism. It then moves on to ask which view of the epistemology of aesthetic testimony is best able to account for the full range of cases. It concludes that standard versions of optimism fare better here than either unavailability or unusability versions of pessimism, but that even these perform less well than my own preferred optimistic view.
Publisher
Oxford University PressOxford
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