Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in Art
Episode: Jon Robson, "Aesthetic Testimony: An Optimistic Approach" (Oxford UP, 2022)
Description: A lot of what we claim to know we learn from other people's testimony: they tell us, and in many ordinary contexts that is enough to gain knowledge. But for many philosophers, aesthetics is different. Such pessimists about aesthetic testimony hold that facts about aesthetic properties – such as Shakespeare's Hamlet being a tragedy, or Picasso's Guernica being anti-war – can't be transmitted by testimony, and can only be learned through first-person experience. In Aesthetic Testimony: An Optimistic Approach (Oxford UP, 2022), Jon Robson argues that aesthetic testimony should be treated on a par with testimony in other domains; our deferen...