Knowledge of things and aesthetic testimony

ABSTRACT

Many philosophers believe that aesthetic testimony can provide aesthetic knowledge. This leaves us with the question: why does getting aesthetic knowledge by experience – by seeing a painting up close, or witnessing a performance first-hand – nevertheless seem superior to aesthetic testimony? I argue that it is due to differences in their epistemic value; in the diversity of epistemic goods each one provides. Aesthetic experience, or the experience of art or other aesthetic objects, affords multiple, distinctive epistemic goods whereas aesthetic testimony affords less. In particular, it provides aesthetic knowledge of truths, a kind of propositional knowledge, as well as aesthetic knowledge of things, a kind of non-propositional knowledge. Although aesthetic experience is superior because it has more epistemic value, this doesn’t mean that aesthetic testimony provides weaker justification for aesthetic belief than aesthetic experience; the difference is evaluative, not normative. In this way, we can explain a key pessimistic intuition about aesthetic testimony – that it is inferior to aesthetic experience – whilst preserving the optimistic view that aesthetic testimony makes aesthetic knowledge available to others. The superior epistemic value of first-hand aesthetic experience is compatible with a number of important observations about aesthetic testimony, including the importance of aesthetic trust.

KEYWORDS:

• Knowledge of things
• aesthetic testimony
• epistemic value
• aesthetic trust‌

1. Introduction

Many philosophers have the intuition that aesthetic experience is superior to aesthetic testimony; that there’s something better about, say, believing that Winter Landscape with Skaters is majestic by seeing it first-hand than by testimony alone. One important puzzle in aesthetics is to explain this apparent asymmetry between experience-based and testimonial-based aesthetic knowledge or belief.¹

I argue that aesthetic experience is superior to aesthetic testimony in the following way: it has greater epistemic value than aesthetic testimony. This is because actual experience of art or other aesthetic objects provides not one but two kinds of epistemic good or value, whereas testimonial knowledge of art or other aesthetic objects provides only one kind. (That’s what’s better about experience-based aesthetic knowledge). It has greater epistemic value diversity. Call this the Extra Value View.

As a preview of this position, consider how seeing Rembrandt’s paintings first-hand affords knowledge of truths about the aesthetic properties of the artwork as well as knowledge of things. One comes to know the artwork’s aesthetic properties rather than only truths about them. Testimony about the aesthetics of Rembrandt’s paintings could give one only one kind of epistemic good, which is knowledge of truths, i.e. truths about the painting’s aesthetic qualities. While the Extra Value View can be developed in different ways – by appeal to the epistemic value of understanding or epistemic autonomy, for example – this paper explores its development with respect to the epistemic value of different kinds of knowledge, specifically, knowledge of truths and knowledge of things.

Importantly, the Extra Value View doesn’t imply that the justification one gets from aesthetic testimony is weaker than the kind one gets from aesthetic experience. Instead, it means that one source has more epistemic value than the other. This is an important clarification. For we shouldn’t confuse epistemic normativity (what I epistemically ought to believe) with epistemic value (what is good – epistemically). Aesthetic experience gives us more epistemic value, but not necessarily better justification to believe what we do than aesthetic testimony.

We’ll proceed as follows. Section 2 discusses one puzzle of aesthetic testimony and the main argument of the paper. Some initial objections are considered and answered. Section 3 defends the Extra Value View, characterizing the epistemology of knowledge of things in contrast to knowledge of truths. I defend the idea that knowledge of things is epistemically valuable and put this in the service of explaining the superiority of aesthetic experience over aesthetic testimony. Section 4 compares the Extra Value View with other views in the literature (Hills 2020; Lord 2018; Pettit 1987). Section 5 explores how the Extra Value View interacts with Nguyen’s (2017) cases and provides some concluding reflections.

2. Preliminaries

In this section, I want to make clear some preliminary assumptions and key terms. The first is about the kinds of cases our intuitions are tracking. Consider:

Aesthetic Experience: You visit the Sistine Chapel, and see Michelangelo’s vibrantly coloured frescoes on the ceiling, exploring the entirety of the frescoes, forming the belief that some are beautiful and that others are majestic.

Aesthetic Testimony: Your friend, an historian of renaissance art, recently visited the Sistine Chapel for the first time and reports that the frescoes were ‘beautiful’ and ‘majestic’. She’s an expert and trustworthy, so you form the belief that the frescoes are beautiful while others are majestic on the basis of her testimony alone.

In each case, you form the same true belief, the former on the basis of experience, the latter on the basis of ‘pure’ testimony: testimony that isn’t supplemented with additional qualifiers or explanations (Hopkins 2011, 138). We’ll assume that aesthetic knowledge is knowledge of aesthetic properties, like beauty, majesty, or sublimity (Sibley 1959).²

We can ask at least two kinds of questions about these cases. The first question is at the heart of the debate on aesthetic testimony:

1. Why does aesthetic testimony seem problematic in a way that non-aesthetic (non-evaluative) testimony does not?

Most aestheticians think that there is something wrong with aesthetic testimony. Availability Pessimists say that you couldn’t come to know that an aesthetic proposition p is true on the basis of testimony, which generally isn’t the case for non-aesthetic testimony.³ On their view, the problem with aesthetic testimony is fundamentally epistemic. Unusability Pessimists say that even if p were made available to you as knowledge by testimony, you shouldn’t believe it (Hopkins 2007; McKinnon 2017). On their view, there are non-epistemic norms which make refusal-to-believe the appropriate response to aesthetic testimony. Finally, we might think that ‘aesthetic testimony is epistemically inferior to nonaesthetic testimony’ (Laetz 2008, 355). This is the Inferiority View, which says that although aesthetic testimony can make knowledge available to others, there is still something epistemically defective about it that doesn’t plague non-aesthetic (non-evaluative) testimony.⁴

There is, however, a second question we might ask about our pair of cases, often implicit in the debates about aesthetic testimony:

1. Why does aesthetic experience seem epistemically better than (or superior to) aesthetic testimony?

This question focuses on the epistemic asymmetry between aesthetic experience and aesthetic testimony rather than aesthetic and non-aesthetic testimony. This is a natural move. After all, philosophers typically motivate the core puzzle of aesthetic testimony, surrounding question (1), by drawing our attention to the fact that there’s something odd about, say, believing that an artwork is beautiful without having experienced it (see, e.g. Hills 2020). Correspondingly, we don’t tend to think that there’s something epistemically problematic with aesthetic experience with respect to gaining aesthetic knowledge.⁵ This raises the question – perhaps most pertinent for optimists about aesthetic testimony, who hold that it can yield knowledge – as to why aesthetic experience nevertheless strikes us as epistemically superior to aesthetic testimony. Put another way, it’s puzzling why an ordinary source of aesthetic knowledge (like aesthetic testimony) might be epistemically inferior to another ordinary source of aesthetic knowledge (like aesthetic experience) when we consider them side-by-side, keeping everything else the same. As I see it, this is a puzzle primarily for optimists.⁶ However, it doesn’t require commitment to optimism to see it. Suppose you think aesthetic testimony could give us knowledge, but that we should always refuse its offer, failing to believe the testifier’s claims. That answer would help to explain what’s wrong with aesthetic testimony, albeit non-epistemically. Nevertheless, the initial question remains: why would aesthetic experience be superior epistemically to aesthetic testimony? Sure, you shouldn’t form aesthetic beliefs by testimony, but that doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong per se epistemically with aesthetic testimony – it could flow from non-epistemic norms, for example – much less that aesthetic testimony is epistemically inferior to aesthetic experience of artwork or other kinds of aesthetic objects.

The Extra Value View addresses this issue. The basic idea is that aesthetic experience provides more epistemic value than aesthetic testimony; specifically, it provides at least two types of epistemic value. In this fashion, aesthetic experience is more epistemically diverse than aesthetic testimony. Both experiential- and testimonial-based aesthetic knowledge are cases of propositional aesthetic knowledge, or knowledge of aesthetic truths, whereas only the former is also a case of objectual knowledge of aesthetic objects or properties, and thereby knowledge of aesthetic things. Knowledge of things is irreducible to knowledge of truths about things, however. Explaining why these kinds of knowledge are different is the goal of the next section. The important point for now is that experience-based aesthetic knowledge yields not one but two kinds of epistemic values, the value of truth and the value of awareness, whereas testimony-based aesthetic knowledge only yields the epistemic value of truth. For this reason, items of experience-based aesthetic knowledge are normally more epistemically valuable than the corresponding items of testimony-based aesthetic knowledge. The nature of this epistemic value is explored in more detail in §4.

The Extra Value View has affinities with the Inferiority View and Unusability Pessimism, but, as I’ll explain, it isn’t right to say that aesthetic testimony is epistemically inferior to non-aesthetic testimony. This is because they both lack the relevant epistemically good-making quality that I think aesthetic experience possesses (we’ll see why in §3). Likewise, it vindicates at least some of the motivation for Unusability Pessimism (§5). As a preview, it can explain why there is something epistemically substandard about relying only on aesthetic testimony for belief. The focus, however, is not so much on explaining why aesthetic testimony seems problematic, but why aesthetic experience seems better than aesthetic testimony given that both can yield knowledge.

2.1. The argument

Epistemological orthodoxy takes truth to be the fundamental epistemic value (Pritchard 2019, 2014). This means that insofar as we regard truth as the fundamental epistemic value then justified beliefs, evidentially supported beliefs, or even knowledge are epistemically valuable to the extent that they generate or promote truth. Their epistemic value is instrumental, relative to the final value of truth.

While many epistemologists are epistemic value monists who take there to be exactly one fundamental epistemic value (and usually it is taken to be truth), still many epistemologists are epistemic value pluralists, who recognize that there is more than one fundamental epistemic value. For example, some philosophers argue that understanding-why is a distinctive, fundamental epistemic value (Kvanvig 2003). Moreover, some philosophers maintain that intellectual flourishing is a distinctive, fundamental epistemic value, to which the cultivation of intellectual virtue aims (Zagzebski 2003). There is at least one other epistemic value, however, which resides in the value of knowing things, or ‘objectual knowledge’, where this consists in the awareness of objects or properties. As we’ll see, recognizing such knowledge can lead us but needn’t commit us to epistemic value pluralism (§3).

Here, then, is the Extra Value Argument:

P1. In Aesthetic Experience, one possesses the epistemic value of (aesthetic) truth and awareness of (aesthetic) objects or properties.

P2. In Aesthetic Testimony, one possesses only the epistemic good of (aesthetic) truth.

P3. If, ceteris paribus, an intellectual state or outcome E₁ possesses more kinds of epistemic good than E₂, then E₁ is prima facie more epistemically valuable than E₂.

Therefore,

C. One’s intellectual state, act, or outcome in Aesthetic Experience is prima facie more epistemically valuable than in Aesthetic Testimony.

Recall that, according to the Extra Value View, aesthetic experience yields more epistemic value than testimony-based aesthetic information, and this is why we can rightly prefer, from the epistemic point of view, aesthetic knowledge by experience to testimony. The conclusion of the Extra Value Argument explains this: for experience-based aesthetic knowledge is prima facie more epistemically valuable than testimony-based aesthetic knowledge.

For the remainder of this section, I want to respond to some initial worries. This helps us to preempt objections and clarify the position.

2.2 Clarifications

Question 1: ‘Why think that if you have more kinds of a good thing, then it’s more valuable than having just one kind of good thing? What if the one-kind-of-good is really very valuable? For example, suppose pleasure is good and that knowledge is good. Now suppose that, in scenario A, one has a bit of pleasure (e.g. one moderately pleasurable experience) and a bit of knowledge (e.g. one knows a single, moderately interesting truth that p). Contrast this with case B, in which one has (and only has) a highly desirable, very pleasurable experience. This seems to be a counter-example to premise P3, and thereby a relatively uncontroversial counter-example to the Extra Value Argument’.

It’s important to appreciate the role of ‘ceteris paribus’ and ‘prima facie’ in the principle, and to better understand the epistemic value comparison between Aesthetic Experience and Aesthetic Testimony. I’ll consider both in turn.

A set of scenarios which satisfy the principle at issue in Premise 3 would go like this: imagine someone who has a bit of pleasure (i.e. to degree D) and a bit of knowledge (i.e. they know that p, where p is some interesting, atomic truth). Now, in a counterfactual scenario, they have only the bit of pleasure to degree D, lacking the knowledge. The idea is that the first scenario intuitively has more value because it has exactly the same valuable item as the second scenario, but also has the other valuable item that the second scenario lacks entirely.

What we are comparing in the case of Aesthetic Experience and Aesthetic Testimony, then, are the following (where anything else of non-epistemic value is held fixed or otherwise bracketed across the scenarios):

Table

Scenario	Value
A. Seeing Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes; awareness of their aesthetic features, with the true belief that p, as a result.	V1 (to degree D) and V2 (to degree D*)
B. Testimony about Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes; the true belief that p, as a result.	V1 (to degree D)

Scenarios A and B both contain V1 (which is valuable to the exact same degree) but scenario A contains V2 as well, while B lacks it. The thought is that the sum of value-kinds makes a net value difference. This is intuitively correct: it’s normally better to be, say, happy and virtuous than to only be happy or only virtuous. It’s normally better to be healthy and happy than to be happy in the absence of good health. P3 simply codifies that intuitively compelling idea for epistemic value.

Question 2: ‘Couldn’t one argue for the Extra Value View, but say that the additional kind of epistemic value is grounded in something else? For example, couldn’t come to know that p by experience be a manifestation of intellectual virtue, something absent in the cases of knowing that p by testimony, and this is what motivates the Extra Value View?’

The proponent of the Extra Value View I defend here wants to vindicate the Acquaintance Principle to some degree – to show that there’s something right about it; that the proponent of the Acquaintance Principle is not entirely misled – and it seems like the explanation in terms of knowledge of things has more potential here than an explanation in terms of intellectual virtue (more on this in §4). What we should focus on, then, is whether an explanation in terms of intellectual virtue can do just as good of a job. One problem is that intellectual virtue and aretaic value can be present in cases of testimonial knowledge too, such as ones in which the person is the recipient of complex testimony or must first identify a trustworthy, reliable informant from which to competently judge that p.

For example, we can imagine that, to prepare for your art historian friend’s complex testimony about the Sistine Chapel frescoes, you read about the frescoes first, selecting highly reliable sources from a variety of others. Indeed, being the recipient of that aesthetic testimony needn't be merely a passive acquisition of information, but active in the sense that, while receiving the testimony, you need to recognize the distinctively aesthetic propositions, decipher complex pieces of artistic vocabulary, and appreciate their bearing on the relevant aesthetic propositions. A good inquirer asks good questions and seeks out more information about the topic. This takes intellectual skill, and it manifests your intellectual autonomy, since you are not a passive but an active recipient of testimony. For this reason, it’s not clear that we couldn’t, in principle, refigure the Aesthetic Testimony case so that you are a very active, skilled recipient and inquirer of pure aesthetic testimony.

In principle, I do not deny that one could defend the Extra Value View in another way. One of the major goals of this article is to flesh-out one interesting and compelling way one might defend the Extra Value View, and not necessarily monopolize how one must defend it.⁷ There are theoretical choice-points in dealing adequately with the epistemic asymmetry between aesthetic experience and aesthetic testimony. For example, one might follow Hills (2020) and argue that the ‘ideal way’ of forming aesthetic belief is to do what the aesthetically virtuous person would do, which is to understand why the artwork is good (if it is) (Hills 2020, 3). The thought is that you couldn’t understand the aesthetic value of an artwork from aesthetic testimony alone (see Hills 2020, 27). Strictly speaking, however, this would be yet another epistemic good facilitated by the aesthetic experience of the artwork, rather than one simply provided by knowing the artwork’s aesthetic qualities. One might see the specific beauty of a painting, and thereby know its beauty, without quite understanding why it is beautiful; this would be a further epistemic achievement. The Extra Value View then can be seen as a genus with different species. The species developed here focuses on how aesthetic experience facilitates knowledge of things in addition to knowledge of truths. If, however, one is attracted to the view that aesthetic experience can also make one understand why artwork or other aesthetic objects have aesthetic value, then Hill’s (2020) account provides yet another reason for thinking that aesthetic experience is more epistemically valuable to aesthetic testimony, without any commitment to pessimism about aesthetic testimony.

Question 3: ‘The Extra Value View tells us that aesthetic experience is epistemically superior to aesthetic testimony. But how does this address the normative question of whether we ought to rely on aesthetic experience to form aesthetic beliefs, or why we rationally ought to prefer experience to testimony?’ The proponent of the Extra Value View has a few choices here. She can say that it’s an advantage of the view that it doesn’t quite depend on views about epistemic normativity or its bearing on aesthetic belief, since it’s difficult to avoid anything uncontroversial about that. It is more ecumenical to explain why it’s epistemically better to rely on aesthetic experience over testimony without it depending on controversial views about the relative evidential quality of these sources. Instead, the view depends on a rather vanilla axiology (see Question 1) and is otherwise compatible with different ways of thinking about epistemic normativity.

For example, suppose one thought that epistemically justified aesthetic belief is a matter of one’s aesthetic belief being due to virtues that orient one towards aesthetic values (see, e.g. Hills 2020 on aesthetic virtue). In that case, there might be different situations which rationally call for favouring aesthetic experience to testimony and vice-versa. Developing virtue will sometimes mean that one needs to depend on other’s advice, aesthetic or otherwise. Fortunately, the Extra Value View doesn’t say that epistemic rationality requires favouring one source to the other – at least, not without plugging in optional (and highly controversial) theses about epistemic normativity.

Similarly, suppose one thought that epistemically justified aesthetic belief is a matter of forming beliefs by a truth-reliable process that bears on the aesthetic. Theorists attracted to such a position wouldn’t get very far with our puzzle, because there’s little reason to think that aesthetic experience and aesthetic testimony couldn’t be about the same in terms of getting true and avoiding false aesthetic belief. (Why think the epistemically autonomous novice is likely to be epistemically better off relying on their own aesthetic experiences than that of an expert?) At any rate, the Extra Value View could be embedded within such a reliabilist framework, but it wouldn’t be decisive about which source one epistemically ought to depend on anyway.

These case-studies are suggestive. Fortunately, the Extra Value View isn’t designed to deal with these sorts of normative questions. What’s important is that the Extra Value View parsimoniously answers the puzzle we began with. It takes seriously the intuition that there’s something epistemically better about aesthetic experience to aesthetic testimony without succumbing to pessimism about aesthetic testimony. The hope is to harmonize key optimistic and pessimistic intuitions: that, on the one hand, aesthetic testimony makes aesthetic knowledge available, contra pessimism, and yet – allying with pessimism in spirit but not letter – there is nevertheless something epistemically better about aesthetic experience. If the Extra Value View can explain this without relying on controversial views about epistemic normativity – in particular, why one epistemically ought to form beliefs by one source rather than the other – that’s an advantage. This is precisely what it tries to do. In particular, aesthetic experience gives us more epistemic value, but not necessarily better justification to believe what we do than aesthetic testimony (we’ll return to this issue in section 5).⁸

Finally, as we’ll explore in section 4, similar views on offer which try to do the same (even if only implicitly) – e.g. Pettit (1987) and Lord (2018) – are charitably read as trying to explain why aesthetic experience is epistemically superior to testimony without giving any grounds for thinking that epistemic rationality requires preferring aesthetic experience for aesthetic belief. For example, Pettit says that aesthetic experience is the only way to get ‘full knowledge’ of the aesthetics of an artwork, but then if the question about why epistemically you ought to base your belief on aesthetic experience to testimony isn’t answered by the Extra Value View than it’s not answered by Pettit’s view either (see Pettit 1987, 28). We explore the comparisons between the Extra Value View and Pettit’s view more fully in section 4. Similarly, Lord holds that only by being acquainted with artwork could one get reasons to appreciate the artwork aesthetically. Aesthetic testimony can and does give one aesthetic knowledge, however (see Lord 2018, 79–80). At first blush then, Lord’s view doesn’t come down on the normative epistemic question either. That we can only get reasons to appreciate an artwork aesthetically from one source rather than another is not obviously an epistemic claim. And even if it were, it would be obscure why it answered the normative question if one is puzzled by this in the case of the Extra Value View. After all, if you think that aesthetic experience gives one the (we are supposing) epistemic good of possessing reasons to appreciate the artwork in addition to true aesthetic belief, why not think the same for the cases where aesthetic experience gives one the epistemic good of knowledge of things and knowledge of truths? In turn, the Extra Value View is at worst ‘partners-in-crime’ avoiding the normative epistemic question here. Here too we explore more comprehensively how the Extra Value View compares with Lord’s view in section 4. For now it’s enough to motivate the Extra Value View by observing its ability to ecumenically resolve the epistemic puzzle.

3. The extra value view

The Extra Value View says that aesthetic experience yields more epistemic value than aesthetic testimony. Specifically, it yields two types of knowledge: aesthetic knowledge of truths and aesthetic knowledge of things. This isn’t trivial. For although ‘knowledge’ is ambiguous, it’s not trivial that there is non-propositional knowledge and likewise that it has epistemic value. The goal of this section is to vindicate these ideas and to show how it bears on the case of Aesthetic Experience.

3.1 Knowledge of things

You are walking through the Rijksmuseum for the first time. The museum itself fills with you awe. You casually walk around, enjoying the splendour of the museum on a quiet day. You pause; something catches your eye. You stop to view Winter Landscape with Skaters, and form the belief that it’s lovely; it’s a scene you wish you could be in. It’s a balanced painting, with delicate figures and soft pastel colours. You notice some skaters are working on the ice, clearing out the way for others; that while some are falling, others are trysting. It is sometimes comical. The bubbly and balloon shape of people’s pants makes you smile. The landscape extends far into the background, where the icy canal fades away into wintry blurriness. You are transfixed, finding yourself lost in the scene, almost hearing the sounds and feeling the brisk, cold air.

What do you know? Insofar as aesthetic knowledge is possible, you learned various truths. You learned that the painting is delicate in its colour and rich in form; perhaps you learned that it is beautiful. But is that all you know? Plausibly, you know the things that your true beliefs are about as well. After all, you enjoyed highly determinate, fined-grained visual experiences of Winter Landscape with Skaters. Coming to know that the falling skaters are comical, or that a particular shade of orange is beautiful, occurred in tandem with your awareness of the comical skaters and the beautiful shade of orange. You now know the figures depicted comically in the painting and not only that there are such figures depicted comically.

This is an argument by cases. It presents a paradigm case which exemplifies knowledge of things. What helps to motivate it further is to explain why knowledge of things is knowledge. So, our next question is this: what makes the immediate awareness of aesthetic properties a case of knowing things rather than (i) not at all a case of knowing or else (ii) just knowing truths about those things? I will argue that its status as knowledge can be appreciated by reference to its relation to objects and properties, and to its analogous structural features with propositional knowledge.

Aware of the beautiful new shade of orange, you formed the true belief that that shade of orange is beautiful. You came to know that there’s this distinctive beautiful shade of orange featured in Winter Landscape with Skaters, but if someone else had seen it and said ‘there’s this distinctive beautiful shade of orange featured in Winter Landscape with Skaters’, you could have learned it in that way too. Both beliefs would be true and candidates for knowledge, but in the case of testimony you would not have been aware of the referents of your belief; for only the testifier, who experienced seeing the painting would have been aware of these things as well. She would have seen – and thus been aware of – the things her true belief is about. It is a kind of ignorance to not know the things one’s true beliefs refer to. While you can know that it is the painting Winter Landscape with Skaters that your belief is about, crucially you do not know the painting; for you’ve never viewed it. In this way, you’re ignorant of these things.

This example motivates the idea that experiencing an artwork first-hand supplies you not only with knowledge of true propositions about its aesthetic features but knowledge of the artwork and its aesthetic features. It will be helpful to step back for a moment to consider non-aesthetic knowledge of things as well to help make the example clearer. Paradigmatic examples of non-aesthetic knowledge of things include knowledge of colours. For example, after seeing the beautiful shade of orange for the first time, it’s plausible that you now know that shade of orange. You are furnished with knowledge of the referent of the phrase ‘that shade of orange I saw’ or the concept < sunset orange > and now – upon having seen the shade – a way of identifying future instances of it. Imagine going to the gift shop afterwards and discovering a scarf with that shade of orange. You identify it and consider purchasing it as a gift. What explains your behaviour here is your knowledge of the colour, and not the knowledge that there is a distinctive orange shade depicted in Winter Landscape with Skaters.

Knowledge of truths, or propositional knowledge, is most fundamentally a propositional attitude which fulfils certain conditions, such as its content’s being true, the attitude is held for reasons or evidence which favour its content’s truth (that is, it is justified) and the attitude is sensitive to potential changes in one’s environment (that is, it is modally stable). One’s attitude ‘tracks’ those changes and updates accordingly. Knowledge of things, or objectual knowledge, is most fundamentally a conscious awareness relation which has objects, properties, or perhaps even states-of-affairs as its intentional objects; it has conditions of success, such as the fulfilment of the state’s veridicality conditions; and the awareness relation is sensitive to changes in the environment, which can reflect not only how things appear to one, but in how one responds to and navigates their environment. Below, I’ll comment on the structural analogies between objectual knowledge (knowledge of things) with propositional knowledge (knowledge of truths) so that we can better appreciate its status as knowledge.

Objectual knowledge has concrete or at least existing individuals, like objects or properties, as its relatum, whereas propositional knowledge has true propositions as its relatum. Propositional knowledge takes belief as its realizer; objectual knowledge takes awareness as its realizer. There are paradigmatic ways of coming to that p, such as deducing that p, seeing that p, or relying on the reliable testimony that p, but there are also paradigmatic ways of coming to know a thing O, such as by consciously seeing, hearing, or touching O. Knowing things is paradigmatically a kind of sensory exploration of things in suitable conditions, rather than affirming a true proposition for the right reasons in suitable conditions.⁹

Duncan (2020) has drawn a compelling connection between knowledge of things and the practice of epistemic praise and blame, which helps to situate knowledge of things in the epistemic domain as well. Consider someone who ignores the sign at a campground that ‘this water is not potable’, serving a glass of that water to a child. This is not only morally but epistemically blameworthy. They should have listened to the sign. Failing to do that was an epistemic failure, a case of willfully ignoring relevant evidence.

Now consider a scenario where you are walking through a restaurant and see a waiter who is struggling with a large tray of drinks overhead. You don’t try to quickly manoeuver out of the way, but bump into him so that he spills the tray. If you hadn’t seen the waiter, you wouldn’t be to blame for this action. But since you did see him, you are to blame. This seems to be an epistemic reason for blame. Given what you knew – you were aware of the waiter – you should have done differently. Likewise for praise. You see the waiter, and this leads you to act: you steady his tray of drinks before it falls. You are praiseworthy, and this is partly because you acted on what you knew. If, on the other hand, you hadn’t seen the waiter but suddenly threw your hands out in a stretch, preventing the waiter’s tray from tipping over, it would be a lucky day for the waiter, but you wouldn’t be praiseworthy; you didn’t know what you were doing (see Duncan 2020, 3572).¹⁰

This kind of case also brings out the way in which knowledge of things informs action. When you first entered the restaurant, your plan was to find your friends and then get to them. Suppose you spot them, but they’re across the restaurant. It’s a dark and busy restaurant, so you need to move carefully, quickly making intricate manoeuvers around other diners and waiters. You first walk a few metres from the entrance, stopping to shift around a busy table on your left, then pivoting to the right by about 25 degrees to make just enough space to allow a waiter to pass by, before shifting a few degrees slightly to the right to avoid stepping on a fallen coat, and then again slight left, walking about 6 metres before reaching your table. Duncan asks: ‘Why these specific movements?’ (Duncan 2020, 3570). One plausible answer is that you were actively aware of the things you would need to manoeuver around. Your action reflected this knowledge – your knowledge of the locations and movements of the people and furniture – that you needed to manoeuver around them. That this awareness is knowledge explains why you acted successfully and not merely why you acted as you did. If you had left your sunglasses on when you entered the restaurant, you might have been aware of some of the things there, but not enough to successfully (and non-accidentally) fulfil your goal of getting to your table without fumbling about. It is rather your ‘successful awareness’ – i.e. knowledge of the things there – which explains that practical difference.

Finally, it will be helpful to appreciate the connection between awareness and core epistemological notions like modal stability (e.g. safety) to strengthen the sense that knowledge of things is a kind of knowledge. Some philosophers articulate this idea broadly in terms of being ‘reality sensitive’ in a way akin to belief (see Duncan 2020, citing Gendler 2008). If there is a tight connection between awareness and these notions, as there is for propositional knowledge, that’s an additional reason to think that awareness can be a kind knowledge too. In what follows, I’ll assume that some version of safety is necessary for knowledge, but the discussion should be translatable for theorists attracted to other modal requirements.

Most epistemologists recognize that knowledge excludes luck, and the safety requirement is one plausible expression of this idea. What safety helps us to see about (propositional) knowledge is that the way ones learns that p must be safe from error in a certain way for one’s belief that p to qualify as knowledge. Safety articulates that stability in the following way: you couldn’t easily be wrong in what you believe if you know (Williamson 2000). This also helps us to bring out one of the motivations for safety specifically, which is that it arises out our thinking about epistemic luck (Pritchard 2005). According to Duncan Pritchard’s theory of luck, for example, an event e is lucky for an agent S at some time if and only if e matters to S, occurs in the actual world, but not in many close worlds where the initial conditions prior to e in the actual world are also present.¹¹ Now consider, say, believing that you’re wearing a blue shirt on the basis of your visual experience of it. If in many of the nearby worlds where the initial conditions are the same as the actual world (e.g. you wear colourful shirts and you use vision to know what you’re wearing), but you nevertheless believe falsely that you’re wearing a blue shirt, then, in the actual world, you don’t qualify as knowing.

We can put the safety requirement as follows:

Safety requirement: your belief that p is safe only if, in most nearby worlds where you continue to believe that p in the same way as you do in the actual world, your belief that p continues to be true. (see Pritchard 2005)

Now let’s consider knowledge of things. Consider again your visual awareness of your blue shirt. You know this blue shirt: perhaps it’s your favourite shirt, suppose. But imagine that, in the closest worlds to this one, where you are wearing that shirt and you exercise your capacity for awareness in the same way as you do in the actual world, yet you do not successfully become aware of your shirt. For example, perhaps you go to explore it visually but don’t become aware of it – you are rather aware of blue mental-images – or perhaps you become aware of just its outline, or just a visual field of blue, thereby experiencing illusions. Those drawn to safety might say that you thereby don’t really know the blue shirt because too easily could you have been unsuccessful when you try to become aware of it. At least, this seems right if you’re attracted to the idea that a significant degree of modal error affects whether your state of mind qualifies as knowledge in the actual world.¹² This suggests the following thought:

Safety requirement_KT: you know O only if in most nearby worlds where you exercise your capacity for awareness with respect to O in the same way as you do in the actual world, you continue to know O.

One potential disanalogy between this safety requirement for objectual ‘knowledge of things’ and the safety requirement on propositional ‘knowledge of truths’ is that, unlike the requirement for propositional knowledge, this one is explicitly non-reductive; it mentions ‘knowing’ in its consequent.¹³ The reason why is that it helps to explain the intuition that if, in most of the nearby worlds toe the actual one you don’t even know your blue shirt, then you don’t know it in the actual world either. This is intuitively plausible, to be sure. But some of us might have weaker intuitions about knowledge of things, to which the following safety requirement might do a better job:

Safety requirement_A: you know O only if in most nearby worlds where you exercise your capacity for awareness with respect to O in the same way as you do in the actual world, you continue to successfully be aware of O.

This accounts for the thought that if, in most of the nearby worlds in which you try to exercise your capacity for awareness, but you fail to become aware of O, then you don’t qualify as knowing O in the actual world either. Knowledge of things is prevented, even if you are aware of the relevant things; it’s just your awareness isn’t modally stable enough to qualify as knowledge.

For example, suppose that the reliability of your visual capacities is a kind of cosmic fluke; you exercise them in the actual world, and thereby become aware of all sorts of things – e.g. that beautiful shade of orange, the comical winter skaters, and so forth – but in all nearby worlds where you exercise that capacity, you aren’t thereby made aware of anything but floaters and other retinal, sensory features. Here’s the question: does this modal failure preempt knowing those things in the actual world too or not? It’s difficult to say. The intuition is much stronger for the case in which although you exercise your capacity for awareness in those nearby worlds, but don’t manage to know the relevant things, you are thereby prevented from knowing (in the actual world) those things in the relevant ways (e.g. by experience or attention). Whichever way we go, however, we can make good on the idea that knowledge of things so understood displays modality stability in a way akin to safety.

There are therefore significant structural analogies between belief and awareness. This further supports the idea that awareness can amount to knowledge (knowledge of things – objectual knowledge) just as belief can amount to knowledge (knowledge of truths – propositional knowledge). We shouldn’t be too worried that awareness of things cannot earn the status of knowledge.

3.3. The value of knowledge of things

Now that we have a better idea of what knowledge of things is and why it’s knowledge, we need to explain its epistemic value. This might sound unusual: for isn’t knowledge of thing’s status as knowledge explanatory of its epistemic value? No. After all, propositional knowledge’s status as knowledge is not explanatory of its epistemic value. If it were, epistemic value theory would be a trivially confused area. For this reason, we need to explore the features of knowledge of things which might explain its epistemic value.

Let’s focus on the epistemic value of truth for a moment to see whether we can make a convincing analogy. Truth is said to be epistemically valuable because it is the aim of belief. Believing has truth as its goal in the sense that this is the telos of belief. Truth is the correctness condition of belief, in that a belief which failed to reach its goal would be incorrect.

Recall that epistemological orthodoxy takes truth to be the final epistemic value in the sense that all other epistemic values owe their value to their relation to truth (e.g. justification, evidence). If this picture is correct, then epistemic value has a teleological structure: some things have final value, while other things have instrumental value, relative to their relation to the things with final value.

Part of the desire to know is the desire to come into contact with reality (Johnston 2006).¹⁴ That strikes us as a key intuition about knowledge. Think about Jackson’s colour scientist Mary, but this time she is content to stay in her monochromatic room because of her knowledge of the facts about colours. ‘I already know everything about colors anyway, so why should I leave?’, she asks. Intuitively, this represents a kind of epistemic apathy. The reason why is that we sense that she’s missing something epistemically. But the apathy cannot be understood epistemically if we restrict ourselves to only knowledge of truths. It’s not a lack of desire for more truth – ex hypothesi, she has all the relevant true beliefs about colours she could ever want to know. So, we need to understand her epistemic apathy differently. One way is to think that she’s missing a kind of practical knowledge, namely, how to identify the colours by their distinctive look. The ability to identify colours by their look, however, presupposes knowledge of what the colours look like (Campbell 2009). The missing desire, I submit, is for that knowledge – knowledge of the distinctive look of the colours – or knowledge of things.¹⁵

This can be appreciated in the aesthetic case as well. Imagine Mary now lives in New York City, leading a rich, carefree life. She’s a modern art-lover, with lots of free time, but – save for purely practical reasons – she has no desire at all to go to the MoMA to see the collections for herself. She’s read all about the collections in leading books and articles. For this reason, she is content to rely on the online digital immersion programme. Although it’s beneficial for people who cannot access the MoMA, there is something ceteris paribus objectionable about loving art and being able to go to the museum effortlessly and yet resigning to see only the digital representations. Isn’t Mary missing out on something epistemically valuable – something worth having from the epistemic point of view that one doesn’t get just by knowing the relevant aesthetic facts about the artworks? It’s one thing to know that Matisse’s The Swimming Pool is soothing because of what one read about it and quite another to know it by being aware of its soothing aesthetic features. Mary’s attitude, then, manifests itself as a real indifference for contact with aesthetic reality. The lover of aesthetic reality – like the lover of reality tout court – desires to make contact with it.

One might worry that recognizing the epistemic value of knowledge of things presupposes epistemic value pluralism, the thesis that there is more than one fundamental epistemic value. I am sympathetic to this position. In particular, that cognitive contact with reality and truth are fundamental epistemic values. The worry is presented too soon, however. We can recognize the epistemic value of knowledge of things without being epistemic value pluralists. For perhaps it is the contact with reality that knowledge of things delivers which is the fundamental epistemic value rather than truth. Alternatively, awareness of what one’s true beliefs are about puts in a position to know more truths, promoting truth, in turn. Here, I’ll explore these options.

First, how could awareness of reality be more fundamental as an epistemic value than true beliefs about it? At least one speculative consideration is that being in contact with reality is explanatory of our care for truth.

To see why, imagine if truth were a purely syntactic property (like disquotation), or a purely expressive property (like approval), or a purely doxastic property (like belief) and one’s beliefs and other cognitions didn’t correspond to reality. Then one’s beliefs could be true and yet one’s cognition fails to correspond to reality. There seems to be an epistemic failing here, but, ex hypothesi, it is not explained by a failure to have true beliefs. The idea that cognitive contact with reality is the fundamental epistemic value can explain why: the person has truth (i.e. believes truly), but their cognition lacks contact with reality (i.e. they are not aware of the things their true beliefs are about). It is truth only understood as a relation to reality that we can make sense of the aforementioned epistemic failure.

But then this raises another worry: perhaps testimonial aesthetic knowledge is just as valuable as experiential aesthetic knowledge if aesthetic truth is a matter of correspondence with aesthetic reality. I think this is partly right but missing a key ingredient. Even if truth consists in a propositions’ correspondence with reality, this just moves the question of why we care about that relationship. Is it really a proposition’s correspondence with reality simpliciter that matters? When we believe truly, a state-of-affairs is propositionally represented accurately. But the state-of-affairs needn’t be in view. We also care about perceiving what our true beliefs are about. We care about awareness of reality, where our awareness is the pre-doxastic intake of reality, providing the material for forming beliefs about reality – aesthetic or otherwise – in the first place.¹⁶

What’s important here is that how we understand the structure of epistemic value is not altered by affirming that knowledge of things has epistemic value. Its structure is teleological. This means that what makes the norm ‘one ought to believe what’s true’ correct is that truth is the goal of belief and truth is an epistemic value. Likewise, what makes the norm ‘one ought to become aware of the things their beliefs truly represents’ correct is that awareness of things is the goal of awareness with them is an epistemic value. That’s the telos of awareness. If epistemic norms are teleological, it follows that awareness of things is the correctness condition for awareness. That is, becoming aware of what one’s true belief refers to is itself epistemically valuable. This is what happens when, because you are aware of the majesty of Winter Landscape with Skaters, or else the unity depicted therein – its hues, its form, its distinctive shade of orange coming together as a unity, which realize its majesty – you believe truly that Winter Landscape with Skaters is majestic. The referents of your true belief are not some distant causes along a chain of information transmission, but something for which you are directly aware.

Secondly, for those allied to epistemic value monism, we might think that awareness of what makes one’s beliefs true also puts one in a position to learn more truths. The idea here is that knowledge of things would inherit its epistemic value from the value of truth: for knowledge of things vis-à-vis awareness promotes truth. Return to Winter Landscape with Skaters. By being aware of the actual painting, one is positioned to learn more finely-grained details about it. For example, by being aware of the majesty of the painting, you are thereby aware of other things too: the painting’s intricate colours and shapes; the depicted skaters and their number, and so forth. When you see a majestic painting, you thereby see other things too. In this fashion, your awareness of the aesthetic features that your true belief refers to facilitates more true beliefs.

Knowledge of things bears other structural analogies with knowledge of truths that might also help us to see its value. Consider the idea that part of what makes knowledge of truth (propositional knowledge) more valuable than mere true belief is its ‘survivability’: it is less susceptible to rational undermining (Williamson 2000, 79). A familiar example is the barn case, where one sees the real barn but unbeknownst to them the other structures are mere barn-facades. Their true belief could easily rationally be undermined here. Imagine someone tells them ‘Did you know that there is just 1 real out of 100 fake-barns here?’ Rationality would require them to become less confident, but the thought is that genuine knowledge would be enough to rationally withstand certain kinds of counter-evidence.¹⁷

Suppose you are attracted to this way of thinking about epistemic value. For our purposes, the Extra Value theorist doesn’t need to commit to it but it’s helpful to see how those drawn to that line of thinking might develop the value of knowledge of things along similar lines. Think again of seeing Winter Landscape with Skaters, whereby one is aware of the comicalness of the skaters falling on the ice (or the beauty of the evening colours). Ex hypothesi, one knows these things; one knows the comicalness of the falling skaters or the beauty of its evening sky and not just that it is comical or that it is beautiful. But now assume one is told (mistakenly) by an otherwise reliable art historian that the skaters are not meant to look comical, or that the evening colours are not beautiful but sinister, and imagine the person is such that had they first been privy to this misleading information – as they are in all close worlds, let us suppose – it would have affected the phenomenology of their awareness of the artwork in the here-and-now, so that their aesthetic experience would be altered.¹⁸ No longer would those aesthetic features be manifest or noticed in their awareness of the artwork. As with the barn case for knowledge of truths, we might think that one’s modal error means that one is too much at risk in the actual scenario to know the aesthetic things otherwise presented to them. Crucially, however, when we suppose that one knows the aesthetic things then the thought is their state-of-mind (their awareness – with the manifest aesthetic features presented to them) survives. This marks a difference between knowledge of things and mere awareness in a way that echoes knowledge of truths and mere true beliefs.

4. Comparisons

In this section, I want to explore how the Extra Value View differs from other views in the literature, but to also highlight their points of contact.

For starters, one might naturally wonder how The Extra Value View substantively differs from the Acquaintance Principle (AP). It’s important to see that the AP entails that if you form the true belief that ‘Vermeer’s The Milkmaid is elegant’ [P] by testimony, you are not in a position to know that P. The Extra Good View lacks this entailment, although it is compatible with it. The Extra Value View allows that you do know that P by testimony, doing justice to intuition that aesthetic testimony can yield knowledge. Crucially, what it tries to explain is why this item of knowledge is less epistemically valuable than the corresponding first-hand knowledge that P. The reason why is that, by coming to know that P as you do in the first-hand case, you also get knowledge of things. In a word: first-hand aesthetic knowledge is always a two-for-one deal.¹⁹

We might also wonder about the relationship between the Extra Value Views and Unusability Pessimism. Unusability Pessimism tells us that even if a reliable testifier makes P available to you as an item of knowledge, you should refuse the offer. This position has most prominently been defended by Hopkins (2011). On his view, there are non-epistemic norms which mandate that one not form aesthetic beliefs by testimony (Hopkins 2011, 147). To see how this idea works, imagine you are the boss of a company and legally allowed to fire your staff when profits are down. Legally, you can increase profits in this way but you really shouldn’t; for it’s the wrong thing to do. This, in essence, is how Unusability Pessimists think about aesthetic testimony. For example, a colleague might tell you how magnificent the lighting in Vermeer’s View of Delft is, thereby making their knowledge available to you, so that you can believe that the lighting in View of Delft is magnificent. Nevertheless, according to Unusability Pessimists, you should resist their offer.

Unusability Pessimists have different explanations for why aesthetic testimony is unusable for aesthetic belief. Hopkins (2011) provides two candidates: a non-epistemic version of the Acquaintance Principle, that ‘having the right to an aesthetic belief requires one to have experienced for oneself the object it concerns’ (Hopkins 2011, 149) and what Hopkins calls ‘the Requirement’, that ‘having the right to an aesthetic belief requires that one grasp the aesthetic grounds for it’ (Hopkins 2011). Going back to the Vermeer example, the application of both principles is clear. Your friend’s testimony doesn’t make the aesthetic grounds for the belief available to you, despite making justification available to you to believe that it has some aesthetic property. Likewise, the testimony doesn’t provide an outlet for you to experience the painting for yourself. Both principles imply that you thereby shouldn’t form the relevant aesthetic belief.

The Extra Value View also allows testimony to transmit aesthetic knowledge. The driving thought behind Unusability Pessimism, recall, is that there is something wrong with forming aesthetic belief by testimony, even though aesthetic testimony can make aesthetic knowledge available to one. The Extra Value View can explain this as well, which can be appreciated by thinking about belief-reports and assertion. There’s the implication that by reporting one’s aesthetic belief (for example: ‘It is a lovely painting’) that one has experienced first-hand the aesthetic features of the object. This is the extra good – the knowledge of things – that is missing from the kind of knowledge of aesthetic truths made available by aesthetic testimony. One in effect misleadingly implies that one has something one couldn’t have gotten second-hand: awareness of the artwork’s aesthetic properties.²⁰ One is responsible for misleading the recipient.

Let’s now examine two key views similar to the Extra Value View. The first is developed by Pettit (1987) and the other by Lord (2018). According to Pettit, aesthetic characterizations of things are:

essentially perceptual in the sense that perception is the only title to the sort of knowledge which perception yields – let us say, to the full knowledge – of the truths which they express. (Pettit 1987, 25)

What Pettit has in mind here is this: suppose you see The Milkmaid and you later tell your friend about the painting, characterizing it aesthetically (e.g. that it was elegant). Pettit’s thought is that you – but not your friend – have ‘full knowledge’ of the truths that your aesthetic characterization expresses; that your friend understands your characterization only if she too had such a ‘non-testimonial relation’ to the painting (Pettit 1987, 28). Call this the Full Knowledge View.

Does the Extra Value theorist endorse the Full Knowledge View? It depends on how we understand ‘full knowledge’. The Extra Value theorist says that your friend might know that The Milkmaid is elegant, but she doesn’t know the elegance of The Milkmaid. She has propositional knowledge about the painting, but she lacks non-propositional knowledge of the aesthetic features of the painting that her propositional knowledge refers to (e.g. the painting’s elegance). She lacks knowledge of things. Whether this prevents one’s knowledge from being full or not is unclear. After all, the Extra Value theorist says that one can know by testimony that, say, the painting is elegant – one ‘fully’ knows that this proposition is true: it’s not incomplete as propositional knowledge.

Furthermore, the Full Knowledge View at times seems to be a version of Availability Pessimism. If that’s right, then the Extra Value Theorist will reject it. As Pettit argues, ‘one can understand properly what is expressed by ‘p’ [an aesthetic proposition] only if one has the non-testimonial relation to it enjoyed by person 1 [the testifier]’, which suggests that the recipient cannot know that p since they won’t be able to understand p and hence fulfil the belief requirement on propositional knowledge (Pettit 1987, 28). The Full Knowledge and Extra Good Views diverge here.

However, Pettit also says that: ‘we might well wish to deny that person 2 [the recipient] knows that p, or at least that he knows that p in the same sense as person 1’ (Pettit 1987, 28). The first claim expresses pessimism, but the latter does not. Pettit says that the recipient doesn’t know that p in the same sense as the testifier. Since ‘knowledge’ has different senses – e.g. knowledge of truths (propositional knowledge), knowledge by ability (know-how), and knowledge of things (non-propositional ‘objectual’ knowledge) – the Full Knowledge View might entail the Extra Value View if this is what it means.

We can therefore also make sense of the Full Knowledge View as a variation of Extra Value View. Here’s how. Let’s say that S has full aesthetic knowledge that p, where p is an aesthetic proposition, only if (i) S knows that p and (ii) knows the referents of p by aesthetic experience. Full aesthetic knowledge that p is knowledge of aesthetic truths with non-propositional aesthetic knowledge of things. For example, you might know that The Milkmaid is elegant by being aware of its elegant features whereas the recipient knows that it is elegant as well but crucially doesn’t know The Milkmaid’s elegance; for the recipient isn’t aware of its elegance. What’s special about perceiving artwork is that it makes available knowledge of its aesthetic properties – it makes an artwork’s elegance, beauty, etc., available to one – and not simply that it has these properties. This makes sense of what Pettit calls having ‘full knowledge of the truth’ about the painting (Pettit 1987, 33).²¹

Lord’s view connects aesthetic experience with acquaintance and its alleged reason-giving powers. According to Lord, experience acquaints one with the aesthetic features of artwork and this provides reasons which ‘justify or rationalize’ affective attitudes, like appreciation (Lord 2018, 76). Call this the Reasons View. In particular, the reasons that acquaintance provides facilitates what Lord calls ‘appreciative aesthetic knowledge’, which is ‘the sort of knowledge that allows one to fittingly have the full range of affective and conative reactions’ to aesthetics things (Lord, 2018, 76).²²

The Extra Value View can diverge from the Reasons View in at least three ways. One way is by denying that aesthetic experience – at least understood as acquaintance with aesthetic properties – provides reasons. The second and third ways hinge on the details of the Reasons View. We’ll focus on the first way, but it’s useful to appreciate the details of the Reasons View. Lord tells us that:

Fact Acquaintance Provides Reasons: ‘acquaintance enables the possession of certain facts as reasons’, e.g. reasons to form fitting affective attitudes. (Lord 2018, 72)

It does so by:

Reactive Know-how: ‘putting one in a position to exercise a certain type of know-how’, namely, the knowledge of how to react to the aesthetic facts. (Lord 2018, 72)

The proponent of the Extra Value View can reject either or both positions. Indeed, the Extra Value View developed here doesn’t fit well with core thesis of the Reasons View: that acquaintance with aesthetic properties provides affective reasons. The reason why is that acquaintance is presentational; it relates one to things, say, a sculpture’s beauty, without thereby providing knowledge of the fact that the sculpture is beautiful, which is what allegedly the reasons consist in.²³ Put another way, acquaintance with things on its own doesn’t provide reasons – affective or otherwise – but only together with other kinds of conceptual abilities.

Lord’s example involves someone seeing Nefertiti’s Bust, becoming acquainted with the fact that it’s beautiful, so that this fact becomes a reason to appreciate it. For starters, we might worry that ‘acquaintance with facts’ is obscure: is this just seeing that, say, the sculpture is beautiful? If so, one needs the concept <beauty> to bring the fact into view. One cannot see that it’s beautiful without knowing the relevant concept, but one can certainly see the sculpture’s beauty; seeing that x is beautiful and seeing x’s beauty are different relations, epistemically and metaphysically.²⁴ When you are aware of the sculpture, you might be aware of its beauty without thereby being aware of the fact that it is beautiful, which is a cognitive achievement over and above successful awareness.

At best, then, one might think that experience qua acquaintance provides reasons only with the activation and proper use of conceptual capacities, namely, the kind of capacities required for affirming propositions. As Lord himself notes, one also needs ‘knowledge about how to fully react’ to the facts, which suggests that one’s know-how is connected to one’s knowledge of which concepts apply and, of course, the ability to apply them in the right circumstances.

Consider a child who lacks the concepts of <beauty> or <ought to be preserved>. She might see Nefertiti’s Bust and thereby become aware of its beauty, in turn coming to appreciate what she experiences, but for all that she might not know that the bust is beautiful, or that it ought to be preserved, for relatively innocuous reasons: she doesn’t have the relevant concepts. Ex hypothesi, she lacks the relevant concepts to even believe those propositions about the bust. She can’t know that it’s beautiful, then, but she apparently needs this knowledge (or at least belief) to possess the reason for her appreciation.²⁵ This highlights another key difference between the Reasons View and the Extra Value View. For the Extra Value theorist, aesthetic experience supplies knowledge of things, which doesn’t require possessing reasons – which can nevertheless move one to appreciate what one experiences, recall – even if the relevant aesthetic facts about the artwork aren’t available due to the relevant lack of conceptual abilities.

Next: might the Reasons View do a better job of explaining the epistemic asymmetry between aesthetic knowledge by aesthetic experience versus aesthetic testimony? No. Without the Extra Value View, the Reasons View would lack the explanatory resources for dealing with it. In fact, the Reasons View seems to require the Extra Value View for making good on the epistemic asymmetry between aesthetic experience and aesthetic testimony (as I’ll explain below). In this way, the two views are allies more than competitors. However, the Extra Value View doesn’t need the Reasons View. It can stand on its own two feet.

To see why, let’s suppose the Reasons View is positioned to explain the epistemic asymmetry between experience- and testimonial-based aesthetic knowledge. How would this work? A natural thought is that aesthetic experience ‘puts us in a position to rationally appreciate’ artwork – that is, it gives us appreciative aesthetic reasons bearing on how to affectively react to the artwork – whereas aesthetic testimony fails to give us these kinds of reasons (Lord 2018, 79).

The trouble with this natural move is that appreciative aesthetic reasons don’t seem to be epistemic in character – at least, it isn’t obvious. Appreciative aesthetic reasons are after all reasons to form affective attitudes. In turn, there’s nothing per se epistemically more valuable about aesthetic experience over aesthetic testimony if the difference between them were just that the former can supply one with affective aesthetic reasons while the latter cannot. There’s rather a broader psychological difference between the two kinds of cases.

Nevertheless, the Reasons View might easily avoid this worry because appreciative aesthetic reasons are grounded in aesthetic knowledge. To see how one might develop this line of thought, let’s focus on Lord’s (2018) case of Hanna, the onsite admirer of Nefertiti’s Bust:

Hanna’s conative and affective reactions are fitting in part because she knows the aesthetic facts. Those facts themselves make the affective and conative reactions fitting – e.g. the fact that Nefertiti’s Bust is awesome makes awe fitting. Finally, it’s plausible that the way in which Hanna acquired her aesthetic knowledge is important. Hanna is put in a particularly good position to have fitting attitudes in response to the work. […] It is the kind of knowledge that enables appreciation. (Lord 2018, 76)

What kind of knowledge is Lord referring to here? After carefully exploring Nefertiti’s Bust, Hannah comes to know that it is awesome (see Lord 2018, 78). This knowledge is what supports appreciating Nefertiti’s Bust.²⁶ Thus, perhaps we can trace the epistemic difference between the aesthetic experience and testimony cases to the kind of knowledge that is necessary for the possession of appreciative aesthetic reasons.

Insofar as the Reasons View is compatible with optimism about aesthetic testimony, however, this knowledge is attainable in at least some aesthetic testimony cases, like the case where an artist testifies to a peer that Nefertiti’s Bust is awesome, since what’s sufficient for possessing the reason is just knowing that the relevant object has the relevant aesthetic property (and aesthetic testimony can give one that). But then why couldn’t Hannah use her aesthetic knowledge in a case of testimony as a reason to appreciate Nefertiti’s Bust? Lord’s answer is that ‘[w]e cannot display the right sensitivities to the particular way the bust is beautiful just by hearing a description of the bust’ (ibid). That is to say, the way one gets aesthetic propositional knowledge makes the difference for appreciative reason-possession. And the way one gets that knowledge is by acquaintance.

The trouble is that, as Lord conceives of acquaintance, when all goes well it’s just another way of getting propositional knowledge. If that is how we think of acquaintance, then there’s still no distinctive explanation of the epistemic superiority of aesthetic experience to testimony since aesthetic testimony is way of getting aesthetic propositional knowledge. That is, if we think of acquaintance in these cases as just the experiential way of knowing true propositions about artwork, we’re left wondering what it is about experiential ways of knowing that explains the valuable epistemic difference between the two cases. Tracing it to aesthetic propositional knowledge that grounds appreciative aesthetic reasons is unhelpful because, pace pessimism about aesthetic testimony, that’s precisely the kind of knowledge we have in testimony cases as well. Why is it that that way of getting aesthetic knowledge grounds the possession of appreciative aesthetic reasons?²⁷

One answer is that it is when one is acquainted with the artwork one thereby knows-how to use their aesthetic propositional knowledge to appreciate the artwork (see Lord 2018, 78). That’s what’s missing from merely getting the same aesthetic propositional knowledge from testimony. But then why does acquaintance facilitate know-how? Maybe the thought is that when Hannah sees the bust, she comes to know that bust is awesome because, say, she sees that Nefertiti’s chin is elegantly sculpted. This is the missing fine-grained information she needs to rationally motivate her awe of the bust – her appreciation that the bust is awesome. But then this piece of propositional knowledge – what comes from seeing that Nefertiti’s chin is elegantly sculpted – can be transmitted by testimony as well. It’s just more specific propositional information. In principle it can be encoded via testimony as well.

The Reasons View leaves us with many more questions than it answers. In turn, it’s not so clear how acquaintance explains the know-how (knowing how to use one’s propositional aesthetic knowledge as a reason to appreciate some aspect of the artwork), at least – so the Extra Value theorist will argue – not without supplementing it with knowledge of things. If we assume rather that when one is acquainted with the fact that Nefertiti’s chin is elegantly sculpted, one is thereby aware of the elegance of Nefertiti’s chin – and not just that the chin is elegant, which is transmittable by testimony – we’re much better positioned to explain why it’s fitting to appreciate the sculpture. It is their awareness of the sculpture’s elegance which motivates their fitting appreciation of it. In this way, the Reasons View starts to look like a variation on the Extra Value View when we fill out the details to get a hold on the epistemic superiority of aesthetic experience to aesthetic testimony.

At any rate, we might jettison the Reasons View altogether because it’s not so clear that we even need to posit appreciative aesthetic reasons to explain why aesthetic experience can properly move one to appreciate artwork. Seeing Nefertiti’s Bust up close and personal can move one to appreciate it – one’s perceptual exploration of the sculpture can make one aware of just how beautiful it is – moving one to admire it (or more specifically its manifest beauty). The extra-step of getting and employing a reason – of thus acquiring and storing the cognitive representation that x has aesthetic property P – is unnecessary, even if it is standard practice amongst people who think about their experience of artwork. This is good news for theorists concerned about ontological parsimony – since appreciative reasons aren’t strictly necessary for experience to motivate fitting states of appreciation – but also for the conceptually impoverished who lack the aesthetic concepts ‘elegance’ or even ‘beauty’ from which to represent that the artwork is elegant or that the artwork is beautiful. The Reasons View won’t make sense of these folks (like some children) who might have awe-inspiring moments of admiration after exploring an artwork but lack the relevant concepts to apply to their experiences of the art.

The advantage of the Extra Value View is that it can explain the movement from experience to appreciation without packing appreciative reasons into the picture, then. This advantage is grounded in ontological parsimony – appreciative reasons aren’t necessary – but likewise we get the other benefits of the Extra Value View that are missing from the Reasons View. This is the epistemic benefit, namely the ‘two-for-one deal’ that experiential awareness of an artwork can give us: aesthetic knowledge of truths (when aesthetic concepts are appropriately deployed) and aesthetic knowledge of things (even when aesthetic concepts are lacking).

5. Nyguyen’s cases

What I want to do is now is consider some interesting cases from Nyguyen (2017). These cases suggest that the asymmetry between first-hand and second-hand sources is more complicated than standard case suggests. While I think Nyguyen is right, I won’t argue that he’s right. What I will do is show that his cases are not a problem for the Extra Value View. In turn, the proponent of the Extra Value View isn’t committed to accepting Nyguyen’s verdicts about his cases, but she isn’t committed to denying them either. This is a virtue of the account over other pessimistic views because, if Nyguyen is right, his cases tell against a variety of mainstream views.²⁸

Nyguyen discusses three types of cases: advice-oriented, decision-oriented, and action-oriented cases. What they all have in common is that they don’t neatly fit the standard case of bare aesthetic testimony. As Nyguyen puts it: ‘the asymmetry itself is asymmetrical’ (2017, 25). For our purposes, focusing on one case will be sufficient. Consider, for example, the following:

Modern dance. You are deliberating about whether to pay for your child to take abstract dance lessons, or something more traditional like ballroom. You just don’t see what’s good about modern abstract dance, so you are disinclined. But your neighbor, experienced with modern dance choreography, assures you that there is something aesthetically good about it; that it can take time to appreciate it. You decide to trust their judgment.

As Nyguyen argues, you want your child ‘to learn something worthwhile’ (Nyguyen 2017, 23). In turn, you are ‘acting out of a desire to help’ them learn something aesthetically valuable (Nyguyen 2017). We might think this is a problem for the Extra Value View because the second-hand testimony in effect trumps your own first-hand experience of modern dance: you trust the aesthetic testimony about modern dance over your first-hand experience of it.

But the worry is misplaced. This is because the Extra Value View is about the comparative epistemic value of experiencing the aesthetic features of artwork over testimony about it, and not about the defeasibility or quality of evidence of experiential sources of aesthetic information.

For example, the Extra Value View entails that were one to have a positively-valanced aesthetic experience of modern dance which led one to judge truly that p, (e.g. that the performance was elegant) their knowledge that p would have extra epistemic value compared with the corresponding knowledge that p by testimony. The reason why, recall, is that one would have two kinds of epistemic good here: the truth that p and the awareness of the things p represents. Nevertheless, the fact that there is more epistemic value to be had in the item of experience-based knowledge that p doesn’t suggest that it is more trustworthy than the testimony. It could be that the testifier, and thereby their testimony, is more reliable than one’s experience; perhaps the fact that one got it right this time is a fluke, but it still revealed the aesthetic property whereas the testimony did not.

Likewise, were one to have a negatively-valanced aesthetic experience of modern dance which led one to judge truly that q, that the performance was actually inelegant, suppose, although there is aesthetic disvalue here there is still positive epistemic value: the direct awareness of the things that one’s true aesthetic belief represents, namely, the inelegant performance. Nevertheless, that doesn’t suggest that the experience is more trustworthy than the testifier’s testimony. Again, it could also be a fluke that your friend who is well-versed in modern dance is making a mistake this time. This doesn’t imply that you thereby have more reason to trust your experience. In general, the fact that the experience is more epistemically valuable – or that it is latent with more potential for epistemic value than the testimony – doesn’t support the idea that it’s more trustworthy.

As a result, the Extra Value View is compatible with the idea that one’s experience-based aesthetic beliefs can be defeated by testimony. What the Extra Value View entails is that aesthetic experience cases are epistemically better because they make available more kinds of epistemic value than the corresponding bare testimony about it. But just because one can get more kinds of epistemic value in aesthetic experience cases, this doesn’t suggest that the corresponding testimony sometimes shouldn’t be favoured.

Indeed, this is supported by generic differences between epistemic normativity and epistemic value. The former is concerned with what one should believe, whereas the latter is concerned with the value of one’s intellectual states (like belief or experience). Sometimes, although p is true and worth knowing, and you’ve acquired experientially some evidence which supports p, the testimony of an expert for ∼p favours believing ∼p (even though ∼p is false). This doesn’t tell against the idea that knowing that p is epistemically valuable. Certainly, it’s more epistemically valuable than believing that ∼p, because ex hypothesi ∼p is false and thereby not in the market for knowledge.

Indeed, we can go one step further, consistently with the Extra Value View. Imagine seeing Tableau I (Piet Mondrian, 1921) in person, and judging that it’s magnificent. But an experienced curator that you know retorts: ‘Look, honestly it’s not that great; certainly not magnificent. Remember that you were under the influence of psilocybin at the time, and so that probably affected your experience as well as your judgment’. In that case, intuitively you should be much less confident in your judgment. But we can suppose that your visual evidence was factive with respect to the magnificence of the piece – so your judgment was true – but surely you ought to trust your expert friend’s testimony here. Nevertheless, this doesn’t mean that your experience of the painting didn’t make available to you more epistemic value than the corresponding testimony. It did. It actually made knowledge of the magnificent features of the painting available to you. What the testimony did was make it impermissible for you to judge that the painting is magnificent, owing to the (misleading) defeater. In this way, you can have objectual knowledge of the magnificent painting without thereby knowing (without being in a position to know, given the defeater) that it is magnificent.²⁹

6. Conclusion

We sometimes trust aesthetic testimony but feel that something is missing when we do. The Extra Value View tells us that what’s missing is aesthetic knowledge of things; another kind of knowledge we can take pleasure in receiving. As lovers of art or the aesthetic, we desire not only learning truths about what we appreciate but experiencing first-hand the objects of our appreciation: there’s nothing quite like seeing the beauty of the Bay of Napoli at dusk or the magnificent lighting of View of Delft first-hand.

Nevertheless, the comparative epistemic value of aesthetic experience over aesthetic testimony needn’t result in a difference in evidential quality. An aesthetic belief P formed by an expert (with good taste) about View of Delft can be just as – indeed sometimes better justification than – one’s aesthetic experience of the artwork. Although the experience contains an additional epistemic good that the aesthetic testimony lacks, this doesn’t tell us about its comparative evidential quality. The Extra Value View tries to account for the epistemic superiority of aesthetic experience without bottoming out in comparative evidential differences. This has the advantage that we can make sense of the epistemic permissibility of relying on aesthetic testimony without falling prey to pessimism. For there’s no in-principle reason on the view why aesthetic testimony might sometimes give one just as strong justification as aesthetic experience.

While I have focused here on visual arts and aesthetics, it’s important to see what the Extra Good View implies for the non-visual arts. As a conjecture, awareness of music seems superior epistemic value-wise to testimony about it, but we can imagine that some composers will disagree. Finally, we might be able to draw on the Extra Value View as a generic thesis about comparative epistemic value in other evaluative domains, like ethics, or to advance our understanding of the epistemic value of standpoints. These further explorations are likely to be fruitful.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Consider Konigsberg (2012): ‘While I may tell you that X is beautiful, you cannot come to believe that X is beautiful simply because I believe it is or because I tell you so. You must … . experience this beauty for yourself’ (2012, 153). Konigsberg is referring to what adherents of the so-called ‘Acquaintance Principle’ hold: that aesthetic knowledge requires aesthetic experience of aesthetic objects or properties, directly, by acquaintance. Others in the literature concentrate on adject puzzles (see Budd 2003). For example, Robson (2015) thinks that there is a puzzle about issuing aesthetic vs. non-aesthetic assertion. Whiting (2015) thinks that there’s an intuitive illegitimacy in forming aesthetic belief by testimony as opposed to non-aesthetic testimony. Nguyen (2017) frames this puzzle in terms of unqualified aesthetic judgments. Others, like Konigsberg (2012), are concerned with the possibility of aesthetic knowledge by testimony. Hills (2020) asks why we don’t fully trust aesthetic testimony. See Robson (2012) for an overview. Notice that most philosophers, then, primarily focus on the asymmetry between aesthetic and non-aesthetic testimony, whereas our focus concerns the asymmetry between aesthetic experience and aesthetic testimony, or first-hand and second-hand ways of getting aesthetic information.

2 Aesthetic belief or judgment might differ from descriptive belief by not only predicating aesthetic properties of objects but by having an expressive or affective profile, or by having a certain aetiology. Pettit (1987), for example, thinks that aesthetic judgment is essentially perceptual, which is what blocks knowledge by aesthetic testimony. Franzén (2018) holds that aesthetic belief has affective profile, but descriptive belief does not. I won’t enter this debate here, but for those attracted to the idea that aesthetic judgment has an affective – or perceptual-profile, my view doesn’t require its denial. See De Clercq (2008) for an overview.

3 See, e.g. Scruton (1976).

4 For example, according to Meskin (2004), aesthetic testimony is often unreliable. This doesn’t mean that aesthetic testimony cannot make aesthetic knowledge available to us, only that it often doesn’t. For this reason, aesthetic testimony is just ‘epistemically inferior’ to non-aesthetic testimony.

5 Insofar as we are already onboard with the possibility of aesthetic knowledge. The debates on aesthetic testimony presuppose that aesthetic knowledge is possible, and so the key worries about aesthetic testimony don’t tend to arise out of skepticism about aesthetic knowledge.

6 Compare with Lord (2018). Lord argues that:

Optimists about testimony – i.e., those who think that deference is often (epistemically, aesthetically, morally) permitted – have an explanatory burden. What this burden is will depend on whether they think there is still something amiss with deference. If they do, then they have to explain why there is still something amiss with deference even though we are often permitted to defer. If they don’t think that there is something amiss when deference is permitted, they have to explain why so many have thought otherwise’ (Lord 2018, 75)

We can understand the proponent of Extra Value View as urging us to see that once we recognize that testimony can provide aesthetic knowledge, there remains the task of explaining (rather than explaining away) the intuition that getting aesthetic knowledge by experience just seems epistemically superior to aesthetic testimony.

7 Hazlett (forthcoming) argues that testimonial aesthetic understanding is possible, so we might think that understanding-why cannot sustain the asymmetry, as Hills (2020) suggests. See also Boyd (2017) and Grimm (2020), who argue that testimony can transmit understanding. If testimony can give one understanding, this would be an advantage for the Extra Value View developed here.

8 For those theorists who want more the view aligns quite naturally aligns with epistemic consequentialist views which say that epistemic rightness (justification) is conduciveness to the epistemic good(s), since we get more epistemic goods relying on experience than testimony, including one of the very same goods we’d get by only relying on aesthetic testimony.

9 See Matthen (2014) for the term ‘sensory exploration’, which is active examination of objects using one’s senses, like touching it, shining a light on it, or just attentively looking closer. Knowledge of things as ‘knowledge by acquaintance’ has been defended by Russell (1911, 1912). See Duncan (2021) for an overview. See also Fumerton (2013) and Brewer (2011), who give knowledge by acquaintance a prominent role in their theories of mind. Russell (1912) took acquaintance to be an immediate cognitive relation that experience and introspection realizes but that the scope of acquaintance was limited to sense-data and universals. The account defended here doesn’t and doesn’t need to presuppose these additional metaphysical and epistemological views. Most acquaintance theorists take acquaintance to be relation to objects or properties, rather than facts. A notable exception is Fumerton (2013).

10 Reflection on visual attention makes this even more clear. A taxi-driver who is not attending to the other cars, the colors of the stoplights or traffic signs – who doesn’t care to look at these things – is blameworthy in part for their lack of concern for knowledge. The knowledge here seems to be knowledge of things, namely, conscious attention to certain salient features in their environment. A taxi-driver who is attentive intuitively meets certain minimal standards for epistemic responsibility, even if all the while the driver doesn’t form any explicit beliefs about their environment whilst driving.

11 See, e.g. Pritchard (2019) for a general theory of luck, which builds upon Pritchard (2005).

12 Some might find this intuition hard to accept. After all, in the actual world where you exercise your capacity for awareness and visual skills for identifying your colorful shirts, you do successfully become aware of them. So, don’t know you them? Put another way, why should the fact that, because of nearby worlds where you fail, that stops you from knowing your shirts in the actual world? Interestingly, this intuitional variance mirrors the same variance for propositional knowledge. Some say that in fake-barn cases whereby you do see the real barn, you lack knowledge only because of the error across modal space, whereas others say that you do know (see, e.g. Sosa 2021). This intuitional variance is another structural similarity between the two kinds of knowledge, then, since we can expect the variance to arise for knowledge of things in the same cases where it arises for propositional knowledge.

13 Williamson (2000), however, treats the safety requirement on propositional knowledge as having to refer to knowledge. See, e.g. Williamson (2000, 100).

14 See Campbell (2009), Martin (1997), and McDowell (1995) for this idea. Arguably, Nozick (1974) had something like this in mind in his discussion of the problems with the experience machine.

15 This is similar to Conee (1994), but the suggestion is not intended to be a contribution to the metaphysical debate about Jackson’s (1982) Knowledge Argument. Instead, it refigures the ‘Mary’s Room’ thought experiment so that our focus is on Mary’s intellectual desires rather than on the status of physicalism. When we criticize our art-loving Mary for her epistemic apathy, the criticism targets an indifference she manifests with respect to what she could know of the relevant aesthetic things – the paintings, sculptures, and performances. As we are assuming that Mary has propositional knowledge of the relevant aesthetic facts about the artwork – granting the right practical motivational profile and few practical obstacles – the intuitive idea is that she’s indifferent towards some other epistemic value.

16 The argument here is a development of my (2021), where I focus on why truth may not be the fundamental epistemic value (Ranalli 2021).

17 The fact that knowledge excludes luck further helps us to appreciate this point. This is because – plugging in safety for a moment – if one knows that p then one is not at (or has a very small) risk modally of error with respect to p: there are few close worlds where one forms the belief in the same way and makes a mistake. Thanks to an anonymous referee of Inquiry for suggesting this connection.

18 For our beliefs and emotions can affect the phenomenology of experience, see Siegel (2017).

19 This differs from Ransom (2019), who argues that aesthetic judgment requires acquaintance, but that aesthetic knowledge needn’t involve aesthetic judgment, because it needn’t involve the exercise of aesthetic competence. Gorodeisky (2010) argues that aesthetic testimony cannot lead to genuine aesthetic judgment because it constitutively requires direct experience of the aesthetic object. The Extra Value View is simpler than both, for it neither entails nor denies that aesthetic judgment can be initiated by testimony. See Meskin and Robson (2015) for the view that aesthetic judgment doesn’t depend on acquaintance either.

20 This holds in the visual art and landscape cases, but it is less clear in audio cases. Is there any greater epistemic value in hearing Chopin’s Nocturnes by one orchestra rather than another? Given the essential reproducibility of music, this makes it look like all experience of music are first-hand experiences of the music. On the other hand, an intelligible question about epistemic value survives this observation: why is the first-hand experience of music epistemically more valuable than accurate testimony about it? Likewise for photographs. See Cohen & Meskin (2004).

21 The explanatory resources of the Extra Goods View then kick in here. The reason why aesthetic experience is superior to aesthetic testimony is due to the fact that only aesthetic experience provides full aesthetic knowledge. Crucially, however, it is because full aesthetic knowledge that p is understood as partly propositional ‘knowledge of aesthetic truths’ and partly non-propositional ‘knowledge of aesthetic things’ that it can make sense of the extra epistemic value of aesthetic experience, in line with the Extra Goods View.

22 Although Lord doesn’t pursue this thought, one might see appreciative aesthetic knowledge as the extra good that aesthetic experience provides, albeit a non-epistemic good, viz., reasons to appreciate. This is because the testimony that p provides knowledge that p as well, just not the knowledge of how to use p as a reason to appreciate p. The value is fundamentally aesthetic; acquaintance facilitates appreciation of the aesthetic.

23 Since Lord (2018) thinks that one can be acquainted with aesthetic facts, he needs an account of how that’s possible, since it is the aesthetic facts – possessed by one by knowledge that they are facts, say – which supplies reasons for one’s affective attitude. See Lord (2018, 76–78).

24 This distinction is made by Dretske (1969). See also French (2013), who builds on Gisborne (2010).

25 Of course, one can deny that knowing-that or even belief are necessary for possessing reasons, but even if we say that experience is sufficient, this too won’t do. If S lacks the concept <beauty>, S cannot see that it is beautiful – which differs from simply seeing the beautiful sculpture, or seeing its beauty – which is possible without the ability to predicate <beauty> of what one sees.

26 Lord says that ‘knowledge is sufficient’ for possessing the reason that supports appreciation (Lord 2018, 77) and Hannah knows that Nefertiti’s Bust is awesome (Lord 2018, 78).

27 Lord’s (2018) view suggests that only acquaintance could ground the relevant fitting affective aesthetic attitudes, but this relationship isn’t so watertight for non-aesthetic appreciation. Knowledge of the facts can sometimes motivate appreciation in the absence of knowing the thing one’s knowledgeable belief is about first-hand through experience of it. When one learns that their great-great grandparent’s intentional investment in their future great-great grandchild’s education is what enabled them to study, for example, it’s permissible for one to become appreciative of their great-great grandparent and the relevant event without knowing – without having any first-hand awareness or acquaintance with – the person or event.

28 See Nyguyen (2017, 22–27) for his arguments.

29 Indirectly, however, the Extra Value View bears on the normative epistemic question of whether one ought to form an aesthetic belief by experience over testimony. Consider the following idea: If you stand to gain the epistemic goods g₁ and g₂ by basing your judgment on v-ing rather than x-ing, and either way you’d get the target epistemic good g₁ – say, the true aesthetic belief that p – then prima facie you ought to rely on v-ing, everything else being equal. This is an intuitively plausible principle. Importantly, it doesn’t presuppose any controversial theory of epistemic normativity, like epistemic consequentialism, although it doesn’t deny it either. The proponent of the Extra Value View can be deliberately vague about how strong the epistemic ought in the principle is because it will depend on one’s theory of epistemic normativity: it could be permission to favor one source over the other; it might be supererogatory – i.e., epistemically good for one but not required – or as strong as a requirement to favor one over the other, at least considering only the epistemic point of view. Thanks to anonymous referee of Inquiry for instigating this point.