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My objective is to explain how we know what a painting, or any work of visual art, is like. This knowledge of what the work of art is like is knowledge of the content of the work of art. I use the concept of content in a way similar to the use of the concept of meaning, and construe content as having a functional role, though not merely a functional role, in the mentality of the viewer. When we know what the work of art is like, we know its content in a special way, by incorporating the experience of the work of art into a state of understanding and knowledge. We cannot know the content of the work of art without experiencing the work, because the experience is used to represent the content of the work and is part of the content. The representation of the content incorporates the experience, including thephenomenology of the work of art, into the representational understanding of its content. My project is to explain how we can know the content of the work of art.

It is uncontroversial that the content of some paintings can serve as historical evidence. Holbein’s paintings of the English court provide evidence of, for example, clothing styles of the period. Whether a particular painting is reliable in this respect will be a matter of historical inquiry into that particular painting. Was there a particular mode of dress that was worn only when sitting for paintings? Did the painter have a reason to misrepresent his subjects? No issues are raised here that do not apply quite generally to historical enquiry into primary sources.

While aestheticians have devoted substantial attention to the possibility of acquiring knowledge from fiction, little of this attention has been directed at the acquisition of factual information. This neglect does not stem from a denial that we acquire such information from fictions; it is usually taken for granted that one can learn a great deal about whaling from Melville’s Moby Dick or about World War I mining from Sebastian Faulk’s Birdsong . The neglect can instead be traced to the assumption that the task of aesthetics is to explain the special cognitive value of fiction. While the value of many works of non-fiction may be measured, in part, by their ability to transmit information, most works of fiction lack such a didactic aim. Thus, many of us conclude that the transmission of information is irrelevant to the value of such works.

It is not unusual for a reader of a novel, especially that of the nineteenth century variety, to assume that, in reading, she is acquiring important insights into human beings. Yet philosophers have often found this assumption problematic. Most agree that fiction can be a source of psychological understanding, either explicitly, via psychological descriptions of characters, or implicitly, via the construction of psychological character portraits. However, there is disagreement about the importance of fiction’s potential contribution in this area. Some have suggested that the psychological information presented in a work of fiction could not reasonably strike a reader as true without the reader having come across it already in some other non-fictional context. Jerome Stolnitz represents this view when he writes: “Art, uniquely, never confirms its truths. If [on reading Jane Austen] we find that stubborn pride and ignorant prejudice sometimes keep attractive men and women apart, we find the evidence for this truth about the great world in the great world” (1992: 198; see also Diffey 1995: 210). Meanwhile, Noël Carroll suggests that, in the moral realm, which presumably includes the realm of moral psychology, “if… learning is a matter of the acquisition of interesting propositions heretofore unknown… then… there is no learning when it comes to the vast majority of narrative artworks” (1998: 141). In contrast, others have cast fiction as a potentially ‘self-sufficient’ source of psychological understanding (Robinson 1995; Conolly and Haydar 2001: 119).

It has been argued that art cannot give us propositional knowledge. Alternatively, it has been proposed that any knowledge acquired via art is cognitively trivial. Finally, assuming the first two challenges can be met, it has been argued that, while art may provide us with propositional knowledge, it does not do so in any special or effective way. In other words, any knowledge obtained via art can be obtained elsewhere, and more efficiently and reliably to boot (Stolnitz 1992; see also Wilson 1983; Lamarque and Olsen 1994). Thus we have: (K) the knowledge challenge: art cannot provide propositional knowledge. (T) the triviality challenge: even if art can provide propositional knowledge (i.e. even if (K) is false), any knowledge so provided is cognitively trivial. (P) the proficiency challenge: even if art can provide non-trivial propositional knowledge (i.e. even if both (K) and (T) are false), it does so via means which are cognitively or epistemically inferior. Conjoining (K) through (P) presents us with a strongly non-cognitivist position – a rejection of the view that art is the kind of thing that can have significant cognitive value. Call this position the skeptical position .

It is a tired platitude that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. As ancient Romans put it, de gustibus non disputandum est . Yet, we all suppose that some people have better taste than others. There are facts about which things are beautiful, and some people are more sensitive that those facts. In short, taste seems to be both subjective and objective. Confronted with this familiar puzzle, philosophers have generally tried to have it both ways, arguing that taste can be simultaneously subjective and objective. Objectivist subjectivism is motivated by considerations that must be accommodated by any theory of aesthetic properties, but I will argue that it is the wrong strategy. Philosophers have overstated the objectivity of taste. We need a form of subjectivism that can accommodate our objectivist intuitions without going the full nine yards. I will outline such a theory. The theory is of potential use to epistemology. For one thing, it points to an account of what it means to know that an art work has aesthetic merit. For another, the account of aesthetic properties on offer is structurally isomorphic with a novel theory of knowledge that has some promise of being true. I will only gesture at that theory. My goal is not to defend a theory of knowledge here but to indicate, as an afterthought, that epistemologists may have a great deal to learn from aesthetics – far more than people ordinarily suppose.

Anti-realism holds an attraction for many philosophers across the range of evaluative domains. But while some of the motivations for anti-realism are shared in the ethical and aesthetic domains (e.g. the existence of widespread and apparently ineliminable disagreement, worries about verification), others are domain-specific. For example, internalism – in particular motivational internalism (the view that there is an internal connection between moral judgment and motivation) – drove much of the ethical anti-realism of the latter half of the twentieth century, but motivational internalism has never played a significant role in arguments for aesthetic anti-realism, since the internalist intuition is much less robust in aesthetics than in ethics. In this paper I focus on a distinctive motivation for aesthetic anti-realism – a motivation that I refer to as the puzzle of aesthetic testimony . This puzzle has to do with a noticeable difference between the way we treat aesthetic and non-aesthetic testimony. While we are quick to form beliefs on the basis of what others tell us about many non-aesthetic matters, we are hesitant to form aesthetic judgments on the basis of what others tell us. And while we are often comfortable counting someone as justified on the basis of nonaesthetic testimony, we tend not to be so inclined in the aesthetic case. These are puzzling disanalogies, and – as I shall show – they lend some attraction to aesthetic anti-realism. But aesthetic anti-realism can be resisted. I offer a solution to the puzzle of aesthetic testimony that is perfectly consistent with full-fledged aesthetic realism.