What´s Making an Aesthetic Judgment?

Making an aesthetic judgment is about expressing an opinion of whether a work of art is worthy of being intrinsically valuable. The means of arriving at an aesthetic judgment has being a topic of much debate among philosophers and psychologists, as it begs into question what the qualities of aesthetics are (if such exist), and the cognitive mechanisms that propel us to define them as so. Perhaps aesthetic judgment can be thought of as something derivational; for the means of arriving at any judgment involve a process of assessments, in which we decide whether something is good or bad, big or small, beautiful or ugly. Whatever value we arrive at depends on a set of physical qualities that are observed. For example we may judge the height of a person as tall if they exceed a certain number of inches, generally, there is to some extent, an agreement on what constitutes tallness, all things considered (age, gender etc.). So, our concluding judgments seem to supervene on a number of physical properties of the object. The question at hand is whether the same can be true of the aesthetic judgment.

This paper is centered on the aesthetic experience of art. There is a litany of philosophical inquiries into the origin aesthetic judgment and research on the cognitive mechanisms involves in observation of art, that will aid in the exploration of the inner experience of art; and the role of our body and emotions in the art experience.

If aesthetic judgments are like other judgments in that they are derivational, then what we consider to be beautiful may be traced back to given qualities of the object. However, there is no obvious contingency between aesthetically pleasant stimuli and the individual components from which they are built. Th...

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...divergent kinds of ap-, 2(2), 1–10.

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