A poem can express sadness without representing a sad state of affairs. More obviously, to take a medium that is not representational, a piece of music can be sad. What we need is some way of making sense of these uses of the emotion terms.
Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them.-- L. Tolstoi.
the classic expression theory: the artist expresses "sadness" to the audience by causing the work to possess P (P causes sadness).
counter: a problem is that for this to be true P must be the vehicle for the artist’s expression. How is this to be explained?
the point is that if F causes P, F &P must be logically independent, otherwise they fall victim to the genetic fallacy. ex. if "my moving" is caused by your "ordering me to move," you can see that "ordering to move" and "my moving" are not logically connected in the same manner than "all triangles have 3 sides".
sircello argues that in virtue of their artistic acts and of the similarity they bear to common kinds of expressions, works of art may serve as expressions of those feelings, emotions, attitudes, moods and/or personal characteristic. so, to see a smile is not to see an appearance and infer a happy state of mind, but to see the happy state of mind in the face itself. The ‘act’ and the ‘thing’ are inseparable.
well known aesthetician Richard Wollheim defends this view as such: Human beings have the capacity to ‘project’ their internal states on to natural objects, a capacity that is rooted deep in our psychology. The objects on to which we project state F (for example) are those which ‘correspond’ to F. A rocky landscape with a solitary tree, for instance, might correspond to melancholy.
The semantic theory
defended by Nelson Goodman’s Languages of Art (1976). It attempts to explain the central features of art within a theory of symbols. A expresses E, according to Goodman, 1. A possesses E metaphorically, and 2. if A exemplifies E.
For A to possess E metaphorically, is for A to fall within the extension of E used as a metaphor. For example, a picture may possess ‘square’ literally, and ‘sad’ metaphorically. An object exemplifies a predicate or property if it refers to it.
Exemplification is possession plus reference. Hence, our picture not only is sad, it exemplifies sadness. For Goodman a term with an extension established by habit is applied elsewhere under the influence of that habit; there is both a departure from and deference to precedent.
this is a little bit of appealing to prior consensus.
what is it about the picture that justifies the application of "sad" to it, albeit metaphorically? metaphorical possession of a property IS NOT not as a linguistic fact, but as a way an object might possess a property.
so, for example, does Guernica by Picasso "posses" the property of horror?
does Guernica refers to "horror"?
the local quality theory
expression is to be analyzed in terms of expressive qualities which are recognized in works of art. such qualities can be analyzed independently of the state of mind of their creator.
the predicate needs to pick out a property of the work of art that is sufficiently akin to the natural expression of emotion to avoid the ambiguity. A popular candidate in the literature is resemblance between the purely musical properties (in particular, movement) and the natural expression of emotion. 1. a person or object can present the appearance of sadness without actually being sad. 2. resemblance is a property of the music and presumably can be experienced as such.
is this melody sad? (it's in a minor key, we talked about this). does it have the property?
do you think the creator didn't think of sadness?
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