AESTHETIC JUDGMENT, THE POWER OF IMAGINATION, AND FIRST-PERSON TESTIMONY

There is much debate surrounding the nature of aesthetic testimony, mostly concerning questions of its epistemic value. Testimonies are assumed to serve as a reliable source of information about objects about which we obtain knowledge from other people. For example, we usually trust a person to testify that s/he saw a red object. However, we are not inclined to trust it when it comes to aesthetic experience. It seems that we are not ready to accept his/her testimony that he saw a beautiful object until we get to know it ourselves. This kind of asymmetry observed in relation to perceptual and aesthetic testimonies requires explanation. Contemporary discussions of aesthetic testimony completely ignore the distinction between third-person testimony and first-person testimony. This difference lies in the fact that perception and the so-called "acquaintance principle" (as a right to knowledge) play a constitutive role in third-person testimony, while, in first-person testimony, it is the productive activity of imagination that reliably reports that I may or may not like it, even without getting acquainted with the object itself. The acquaintance principle is closely related to the concept of "awareness", which strictly limits our experience to the realm of the actual and perceptual. To form a belief based on third-person testimony, we only need to show trust in witnesses - other people. By receiving third-party testimony, we form beliefs that indicate the firmness of our belief that things in the world are this way and no other way. However, in cases of aesthetic experience this is not enough - one cannot simply claim to convey, through third-person testimony, the relevant beliefs of the witness, even in matters where s/he is an expert. In the example of the red object, the person is demonstrating his/her participation in the general agreement to call the representations that s/he experiences in his/her perceptual experience of being affected by the color red by the word 'red'. In aesthetic experience, in his/ her judgment about an object, a person each time re-experiences his/her own agreement with the object of experience no longer perceptually, but transcendentally - when perceptions, having no empirical origin, nevertheless a priori show their relationship to the objects of experience. The very activity of imagination here prefigures experience, which simply follows the image that has arisen, creating new objects or bundles of properties that I have not had acquaintance with before.