Psychologism about Artistic Plans: Reply to Cray Guy Rohrbaugh May 10, 2017 In a recent paper (Rohrbaugh, 2017), I argued that mainstream accounts of artwork completeness are mistaken precisely because they offer purely psycho- logical conditions for such facts, conditions in which the state of the artwork-in- progress plays no role at all. According to such accounts, whether an artwork is complete is solely a matter of the artist’s attitudes toward that work, e.g. the existence of a judgment that is it finished or a tendency to act as if one has made such a judgment. I pointed out that such accounts give rise to obvious regresses when applied to the content of, and justifications for, the artist’s own cognitive attitudes toward the work. On what basis could I come to believe that my work is done if its being done is just my believing that it is? What content could I be entertaining in thinking that my work is done if thinking my work is done is my thinking that I am thinking my work is done, and so on? These criticisms are local versions of older lessons. Euthyphro once said that piety is the love of the gods, that their attitudes confer the holy condition on their objects. But Socrates, and we along with him, concluded that Euthyphro had gotten the direction of explanation backwards, that their attitudes are ex- plained by the holy character of their objects, and that what shows this is the groundlessness Euthyphro must otherwise attribute to those attitudes. And just as we went on to conclude that moral right and wrong cannot consist in legisla- tion or mere authority, even be it divine, we ought also to conclude that artwork completeness cannot consist in the authority of the artist’s say so. Rather, we must understand the artist as reacting to antecedent qualities of work and con- text which explain and potentially justify the attitudes formed. Like the artist, we must think of artwork completeness in non-psychological terms. This is not to say that completeness is a qualitative or intrinsic feature of works. It is not revealed by closer inspection, nor it is necessarily shared by exact duplicates. Rather, the completeness of an artwork consists in its relation to a further standard, one which only the artist has the authority to supply. 1 The psychological states of the artist are thus relevant to the facts of completeness because they determine the standards that the work must meet, but its meeting those standards is not itself any kind of psychological fact. 1 I say ‘only’ but one might reasonably wonder there are conditions under which another could justifiably supply the standards relevant to bringing an artwork to completion. This is distinct from asking whether there are conditions under which another could justifiably try to bring the work into compliance with what is believed to be the standard set by the artist. 1