ON AN APPARENT TRUISM IN AESTHETICS Paisley Livingston It has often been claimed that adequate aesthetic judgements must be grounded in the appreciator’s first-hand experience of the item judged. Yet this apparent truism is misleading if adequate aesthetic judgements can instead be based on descriptions of the item or on acquaintance with some surrogate for it. In a survey of responses to such challenges to the apparent truism, I identify several contentions presented in its favour, including stipulative definitions of ‘aesthetic judgement’, assertions about conceptual gaps between determinate aesthetic properties and even the most perfect descriptions, and claims about the holistic and sensibility-relative character of aesthetic qualities and values. W ith reference to considerations advanced by Frank Sibley, Alan H. Goldman, and particularists and anti-particularists in meta-ethics, I contend that strong versions of the apparent truism lack sufficient warrant. Two successors are proposed, however. One reframes the thesis in terms of our con- tingently limited descriptive and theoretical capacities with regard to a subset of the aesthetic qualities of extraordinary works; the second involves a shift from epistemic to axiological matters: what even the most perfect descriptions cannot provide, and in some cases spoil, is our gauging of an item’s inherent, experiential value. MANY philosophers have maintained that adequate aesthetic judgements can only be based on first-hand experience. For example, Alan Tormey claims that In art, unlike the law, we do not admit judgments in the absence of direct or immediate experience of the object of the judgment. We require critical judgments to be rooted in ‘eye-witness’ encounters, and the epistemically indirect avenues of evidence, inference and authority that are permissible elsewhere are anathema here. 1 Similarly, Frank Sibley asserts that: . . . we have to read the poem, hear the music, or see the picture (not merely have it described in non-merit and even determinate descriptive terms if that were possible), and then judge or decide whether an aesthetic merit-term applies to it or not. 2 © British Society of Aesthetics 2003 260 British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 43, No. 3, July 2003 1 Alan Tormey, ‘Critical Judgments’, Theoria, vol. 39 (1973), pp. 35–49, at p. 39. 2 Frank Sibley, ‘Particularity, Art, and Evaluation’, in John Benson, Betty Redfern, and Jeremy Roxbee Cox (eds), Approach to Aesthetics: Collected Papers on Philosophical Aesthetics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), pp. 88–103, at p. 99.