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The British Journal of Aesthetics 2002 42(3):296-309; doi:10.1093/bjaesthetics/42.3.296
© 2002 by British Society of Aesthetics
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Critical Pluralism Unmasked

Brandon Cooke1

1 Department of Moral Philosophy, University of St Andrews, St Andrews KY16 9AL, Scotland, UK. Email: blc{at}st-andrews.ac.uk

Artworks frequently are the objects of multiple and apparently conflicting aesthetic judgements. This commonplace of the artworld poses a challenge for realist metaphysics, because to assert conflicting judgements of an artwork seems to amount to asserting p & ~p. Critical pluralism is an ever-more frequently invoked solution to this impasse. What its varieties share in common is the claim that the disagreement between judgements is only an apparent one. I argue, however, that critical pluralism masquerades either as relativism or anti-realism. I examine a number of pluralist proposals, including one that attempts to reconcile pluralism with critical monism, and argue that they are inadequate to their advertised task. Finally, I sketch a solution employing dialetheic logic that captures both intuitions about these cases: that sometimes, judgements about artworks can truly conflict and jointly be true.


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