Las cualidades secundarias y el valor epistémico de la experiencia estética

Entendido lo estético como vinculado al carácter apreciativo de la experiencia sensible, el presente artículo explora su rescate del ámbito de la mera opinión vinculándolo con la intencionalidad de la sensación. Tras definir el problema en la introducción, el texto se centra en las llamadas cualidades secundarias, objeto inmediato de la sensación. Se parte de la hipótesis de que el débil contenido epistémico que se ha atribuido a las cualidades secundarias a lo largo de la historia es responsable de la difícil valoración del juicio estético. Se procede por ello a una reformulación del tipo de noticia que recibimos de dichas cualidades, partiendo de la definición de cualidad secundaria de John Locke, y revisándola a partir de algunos textos de John McDowell y Crispin Wright, en diálogo con la teoría aristotélica de los sensibles propios. El resultado de esta revisión afectará al papel que atribuyamos, dentro del espectro de las disciplinas, a la estética y, secundariamente, al arte. Considering Aesthetics as linked to the appreciative nature of sensorial experience, this article uses the concept of intentionality of sen-sation to rescue Aesthetics from being confined into the scope of mere opinions. After introducing and defining the problem, the text focuses on the so– called secondary qualities, immediate object of the sensation. The hypothesis is that the weak epistemic content attributed to secondary qualities throughout history is responsible for the difficult assessment of aesthetic judgment. A reformula-tion of the kind of news we receive from these qualities is proposed reviewing John McDowell and Crispin Wright review of Lockean’s secon-dary qualities, in dialogue with the Aristotelian theory of the proper sensible. The result of this review should influence the role we attribute, within the spectrum of disciplines, to Aesthetics and, secondarily, to Art.

Knowing, Framing, and Enframing

The first half of this chapter is an exercise in the philosophy of film, which treats Christopher Nolan’s body of cinematic work as Nietzsche treats a Wagner opera in the final essay of the Genealogy—as a key cultural site at which the complex interaction of the elements of the ascetic ideal play themselves out. The second half takes the analysis into the realms of science and philosophy: taking orientation from certain of Nietzsche’s claims about how modern philosophy adopts a scientistic stance, it weaves together these suggestions with some complex and controversial arguments advanced by the later Heidegger, to defend the idea that our contemporary age is best understood as the age of technology, and how this has informed and deformed some central cultural projects—in art, particularly the advent of modernist painting and its continuation in contemporary photographic practices; and in philosophy, in its treatment of secondary qualities, and more generally in its willingness to regard physics as metaphysics.

Perceiving Images and Styles

Marks individually or in combination constitute images that represent objects. How do those images represent those objects? Marks vary in style, both between and within images. Images also vary in style. How do those styles relate to each other and to the objects that those images represent? Referencing a diverse range of images, we answer the first question with a response-dependence theory of image representation derived from Mark Johnston, differentiating Lockean primary qualities of marks from secondary qualities of images. We answer the second question with a perceptual theory of style derived from Paul Grice, differentiating physical style from image style, and representing conventionally from representing conversationally.

Quantifications of the Secondary Qualities, Heat and Cold, on the Earliest Scales of Thermoscopes

While scaled thermoscopes were developed only at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the medical tradition had already started to quantify some secondary qualities towards the end of sixteenth century. However, degrees of heat and cold were only meaningful in connection with Galenic-Aristotelean ontology, consisting of elements, temperaments and degrees of the four humours. The first graduated thermoscopes transformed the prevailing conceptualizations of heat and cold. By delegating some specific senses of heat and cold to an external contrivance, together with the evolution towards a linear numerical scale, these qualities became objectified as observable phenomena. The degree of expansion and compression of air, and later liquid, became an observable measure of temperature and narrowed down the existing conceptualizations of temperature. The paper also discusses the three types of scale that were used in the early thermoscopes between 1610 and 1640.

Qualities, Powers, and Bare Powers in Locke

Lisa Downing focuses on the important issue of the metaphysics of Locke’s primary–secondary qualities distinction. In recent years this has returned as a topic of scholarly contention. Downing is concerned by the anti-realist trends in recent work on the metaphysics of Locke primary–secondary qualities distinction, and she is keen to defend the claims that Locke was ‘putting forward a kind of realism about secondary qualities’ and that his realism does not readily appear to be a reductive form of realism. Downing begins with the traditional claim that Locke’s distinction was driven by his understanding of matter theory within the new science, like many others in the seventeenth century. From this perspective, she criticizes recent work on the nature and priority of primary qualities, which fail to root the primary in a metaphysical base or connect them to the metaphysical base in the wrong way. Next, she turns toward explaining her own understanding of the subordinate status of the secondary qualities, which brings Downing to Locke’s claim that secondary qualities are ‘mere powers’ and what this meant metaphysically to him.

Things in Themselves and their Relation to Appearances

The theses that things in themselves exist and ground appearances by affecting sensibility are discussed, a discussion that includes an examination of the difference between the empirical and transcendental distinction between things in themselves and appearances and of the role of the analogy between secondary qualities and spatiotemporal determinations in Kant’s explanation of critical idealism. The relation between the transcendental and the empirical self is revisited, and the two-world reading of this relation is confirmed and integrated with an account of Kant’s conception of human beings as composed of various distinct parts, including a body, an empirical self, and a transcendental self. The account, begun in chapter 3, of how critical idealism differs from ordinary idealism is further refined, and Kant’s arguments for the existence and grounding theses are reconstructed and shown to ultimately rely on the assumption that the human mind is essentially finite. Finally, two versions of critical idealism are distinguished—bold critical idealism and timid critical idealism—and it is argued that Kant is a bold critical idealist.

Secondary Qualities as Dispositions

In this paper I will defend the view that, according to Locke, secondary qualities are dispositions to produce sensations in us. Although this view is widely attributed to Locke, this interpretation needs defending for two reasons. First, commentators often assume that secondary qualities are dispositional properties because Locke calls them “powers” to produce sensations. However, primary qualities are also powers, so the powers locution is insufficient grounds for justifying the dispositionalist interpretation. Second, if secondary qualities are dispositional properties, then objects would retain secondary qualities while not being observed, but Locke says that colors “vanish” in the dark. Some commentators use this as evidence that Locke rejects the dispositionalist view of secondary qualities, and even those that are sympathetic to the traditional interpretation find these comments to be problematic. By contrast, I argue that even in these supposedly damning passages Locke shows an unwavering commitment to the view that the powers to produce sensations in us, i.e., the secondary qualities, remain in objects even when they are not being perceived. Thus, the arguments against the traditional interpretation are unpersuasive, and we should conclude that Locke does indeed hold that secondary qualities are dispositions to cause sensations in us.

In Defence of David Armstrong's Materialist Theory of Perception

ABSTRACT There are no qualia. The phenomenological difference between seeing and visualizing something is that the propositions which the experient begins to believe in the first case are only entertained in the second. We can know what it's like to be a bat by knowing that their echolocation informs them non-inferentially of the shapes, sizes, and directional distances away of nearby surfaces. The terms for secondary qualities like colours, though, are names of the type-properties they designate, tracing back causally to a verbal ‘baptism,’ and so experients don't know the character of colour experiences until they study brain physiology.