However, the types of bullshit used in these studies have been generated by computers. So, although we have demonstrated that pseudo-profound bullshit can be employed successfully to enhance the perceived profundity of abstract art in a lab context, it remains to be demonstrated that the type of language actually used by artists is perceived to be distinguishable from bullshit.
While both International Art English and pseudo-profound bullshit appear to share various surface features e. In Study 4 we assess the similarity between International Art English and pseudo-profound bullshit by having participants judge the profundity of a variety of International Art English and pseudo-profound bullshit statements.
We hypothesize that profundity ratings for pseudo-profound bullshit and International Art English will be strongly associated. Study 4 no longer included computer-generated or artist-created art. Instead, participants judged the profundity of the same pseudo-profound bullshit, motivational quotations, and mundane statements used in Studies Its key features include converting verbs and adjectives into nouns e. For the purpose of this study, we had a hypothesis-blind research assistant gather 30 statements from various sources e.
Participants rated the profundity of each IAE statement on a 5-point scale which ranged from 1 Not at all profound to 5 Very profound. For each participant, an IAE profundity score detailing how profound an individual found IAE statements was calculated by averaging the profundity ratings provided to each statement.
Participants primary task in Study 4 was to judge the profundity of 80 statements presented in a random order consisting of 30 pseudo-profound bullshit statements, 10 motivational quotations, 10 mundane statements, and 30 IAE statements. Participants judged each statement using the same 5-point scale described above.
Following the profundity judgment task, participants completed the Wordsum and CRT see supplementary materials to conclude Study 4. The results of Study 4 can be viewed in Table 4. The current study demonstrates the potential for pseudo-profound bullshit to enhance the perceived profundity of abstract art.
Specifically, over the course of three studies, we find that simply including a randomly-generated pseudo-profound bullshit title alongside an abstract art image increases the perceived profundity of the art image. Furthermore, we show that it is pseudo-profound bullshit titles specifically that enhance the profundity of abstract art, as opposed to any and all titles.
Additionally, we demonstrate that bullshit titles produce the same profundity enhancing effect for both computer-generated and artist-created abstract art. Finally, in Study 4 we demonstrate that pseudo-profound bullshit and International Art English are perceived to be similar or the same rhetorical phenomena by our participants.
In most domains success is determined, at least partially, based on the ability to impress others. In any instance where humans are making decisions about the quality of output of others there is room for subjective impressions to influence outcomes.
As a highly social species, it may be the case that instances where performance is entirely objective are rarer than those influenced by the subjective opinions of others.
We theorize that bullshit can be used effectively as a low-cost strategy to impress others and gain prestige in every domain except where performance is clearly and strictly objective. The results of the current study exemplify these claims, as we demonstrate how attaching randomly-generated pseudo-profound bullshit titles to abstract art images improves the perceived profundity of these images.
Critically, this is true even though images and titles were paired completely randomly with no effort expended in matching the title to the artistic content.
Previous work has demonstrated that people bullshit more i. To the extent that some abstract artists embrace the radically subjective view that there is no objective standard for beauty or meaning, the domain of abstract art may be especially likely to be permissive of bullshit. That is, the agreed upon notion that no objective beauty exists and that all experiences are equally valid may serve to protect the individual using bullshit from skeptical claims.
Therefore, paired with the fact that the domain of abstract art heavily rewards impressing others, as opposed to objective demonstrations of technical skill, bullshit may not only be effective in this domain as demonstrated but also tolerated. On this basis, one may expect the presence of bullshit to be widespread in the abstract art world. In Study 4, we provide some evidence for this claim, as we find that International Art English, above sharing various surface features with meaningless pseudo-profound bullshit, is judged indistinguishably from pseudo-profound bullshit by our participants.
Thus, it may be the case that artists have independently stumbled upon the potential for bullshit to increase the profundity of abstract art. Although here we demonstrate that bullshit may be deployed to enhance the perceived profoundness of abstract art, of greater theoretical interest is the possibility for good bullshitting to afford a competitive advantage in many domains of human production.
Any system where individuals are rewarded some level of prestige, attention, or social status for impressing others offers a chance for energetically less expensive strategies to be employed as competitive short cuts. Bullshit, with its emphasis on impressiveness as opposed to meaningfulness and truth, may assist individuals in impressing others, and consequently, in successfully navigating various social systems.
This is likely to be especially true for social systems which do not place a high value on detecting and punishing the fakery characteristic of bullshit, as in such cases the potential rewards of bullshitting may far outweigh the potential costs.
For example, bullshit may be especially effective as a low-cost strategy for gaining prestige in social systems in which prestige is rewarded by unknowledgeable or like-minded individuals, as such individuals may be less likely to detect and punish the use of bullshit. Overall, the extent to which bullshit can be effectively deployed by individuals looking to gain social advantages is an interesting question for which the current study begins to address.
One limitation of the current study is that it exclusively tests the influence of pseudo-profound bullshit titles in the domain of abstract art. However, the theoretical account that we propose here leads us to predict that bullshit can be applied in a wide-variety domains in which competence is not objectively judged using strict and specific criteria, success is determined by impressing others, and the fakery characteristic of bullshit is not strictly monitored and punished.
For example, our proposed account predicts that attaching pseudo-profound bullshit titles to representational art would also increase the profundity of such art images, albeit to a lesser degree, as representational art lends itself to more objective assessments of quality and meaning e. Future studies should be undertaken to investigate the domains in which bullshit may be deployed to gain a competitive advantage.
Second, another limitation of the current study is that participants were exclusively judging various artworks for their profoundness. There are many other dimensions on which people can form an impression of a piece of art e.
Finally, given the pattern of results observed by Eriksson whereby experts in mathematics did not judge nonsense-math containing abstracts to be indicative of higher quality science, it remains an open question whether art experts would demonstrate the effects observed here. However, it is also possible that, similar to experts in mathematics, the acquired expertise for artists would allow them to distinguish between descriptions of art that are honest and insightful as opposed to those consisting purely of randomly generated pseudo-profound bullshit.
If art expertise does allow one to spot the fakery characteristic of bullshit, at least in the domain of art, then one would expect that art experts, unlike non-experts, would not have their judgements of a piece of art affected by the presence of bullshit. Across many domains, people compete for status and prestige by attempting to impress others.
In these cases, despite its fakery, the impressiveness of pseudo-profound bullshit may offer individuals a low-cost strategy for impressing others and gaining prestige. Specifically, we demonstrate how randomly-generating various pseudo-profound bullshit titles and indiscriminately attaching them to either computer-generated or artist-created abstract art images increases the perceived profoundness of abstract art. While extending the current theoretical framework to new domains is an exciting future prospect, for now it can be concluded that at the very least, bullshit makes the art grow profounder.
Crowley, D. Aesthetic judgment and cultural relativism. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism , 17 2 , — Dalton, C. Bullshit for you; transcendence for me. Judgment and Decision Making , 11 1 , — Dissanayake, E. What is art for?
Seattle: University of Washington Press. Donald, M. The origins of the modern mind: Three stages in the evolution of culture and cognition. Eriksson, K. The nonsense math effect. We don't dislike jews, but we disagree with some of their beliefs and this can sometimes cause tension between the Jews and the Christians. There are many couples that have an age difference. Many people dislike an age difference between couples when the couples are young.
Whether and age difference between a 17 year old and a 21 year old is right or wrong is an issue to be discussed with parents. At 17, you are not legally an adult yet. The difference is one of degree. Both connote negative feelings toward something. Hate is much more intense than disliking. They are both gangs and they dislike each other. Probably the country that hates Canadians the most is America. It's this brotherhood rivalry going on, although if you went to both countries without knowing which one you were going to, I doubt you'd see a difference.
It's the same. The one difference between the two is a border. Hope I helped! I dislike my foot falling asleep. They dislike when they die. They are under the same management and there is no good reason for super junior to hate them..
I sincerely dislike the taste of broccoli. The word 'dislike' is both a noun dislike, dislikes and a verb dislike, dislikes, disliking, disliked.
Examples:noun: His dislike of video games is based on his dislike for violence. Log in. Art History. The Difference Between. Add an answer. Want this question answered? Inferences are based on analysis. They are statements of the unknown based on the known.
They are derived from reason, in other words figured out based on our past experience. Here are some examples of inferences based on facts:. Maybe Ann just won the lottery and cannot control her emotions. Inferences need to be corroborated. Or if we knew more facts about why Ann was acting this way, we could prove the inference to be a fact. Judgments are subjective observations. But judgments are statements showing approval or disapproval. It is not clear who is right here.
The nub of the issue is the nature of pleasure in the beautiful. Does it have its source in what Human beings share, or in what distinguishes them? Kant might argue, against Nietzsche, that seeing pleasure in beauty as springing from what varies between people, not only places people at the mercy of their good or bad aesthetic upbringing, but also makes untenable the normative claims to correctness or universal validity that are part of judgments of beauty, as we ordinarily conceive of them.
If we lack what it takes to appreciate a certain beauty, then it cannot be required of us, and the normativity of the judgment of taste would be lost. Or so it seems. If judgments of beauty were based on variable pleasures or displeasures, then it seems that the claim to correctness is fraudulent.
But this only follows if we follow Kant in locating pleasure in beauty, and our right to make judgments of beauty, in faculties that all human beings share. Perhaps there are rarefied beauties that only elite special souls can appreciate. One non-Kantian suggestion would be to locate the source of normativity of the judgment of taste, in the world, not in what human beings share. That view might seem metaphysically extravagant. Not easy! On a realist view, beauty need not be universally available.
The Kantian and perhaps Humenan view locates the source of normativity in what we share. But Nietzsche would ask: is there, and should there, be something that humans share in their responses to beauty?
Do we want aristocratic or democratic aesthetics? Let us now turn to the contemporary notion of the aesthetic. It is probably best to take aesthetic judgments as central. We can understand other aesthetic kinds of things in terms of aesthetic judgments: aesthetic properties are those that are ascribed in aesthetic judgments; aesthetic experiences are those that ground aesthetic judgments; aesthetic concepts are those that are deployed in aesthetic judgments; and aesthetic words are those that have the function of being used in the linguistic expression of aesthetic judgments.
And it excludes judgments about physical properties, such as shape and size, and judgments about sensory properties, such as colors and sounds. However, in addition to judgments of beauty and ugliness, the contemporary notion of an aesthetic judgment is typically used to characterize a class of judgments that also includes judgments of daintiness, dumpiness, delicacy and elegance.
For Kant used the notion to include both judgments of beauty or of taste as well as judgments of the agreeable —for instance, the judgment that Canary-wine is nice Kant , 5: —, [ 89—90 and 99]. Moreover, the contemporary notion usually excludes judgments about pictorial and semantic content of a work of art.
What is it that distinguishes judgments as aesthetic? What do they have in common? And how do they differ from other kinds of judgment? Do these judgments form a well-behaved kind? It may be worth mentioning in passing that the notion of an aesthetic judgment should not be elucidated in terms of the idea of a work of art; we make aesthetic judgments about nature and we make nonaesthetic judgments about works of art.
The articulation and defense of the notion of the aesthetic in modern times is associated with Monroe Beardsley , and Frank Sibley , As noted in Section 2. But it cannot be denied that Dickie was right that even if the problems of characterizing the three features were resolved, it would still not be plausible that the three Beardsleyian features are necessary or sufficient conditions of aesthetic experience.
That would be a flawed induction from a single instance. Sibley claimed that the discernment of aesthetic properties requires a special sensitivity, whereas the discernment of nonaesthetic properties could be achieved by anyone with normal eyes and ears. He thought of the faculty of taste as special mental faculty, possessed by people with a distinctive sensitivity. This account of the aesthetic was inadvisable, since it allowed critics like Cohen and Kivy to argue that ascribing many aesthetic properties did not in fact require a special faculty, since anyone can distinguish a graceful line from an ungraceful line.
On the other hand, the pessimistic induction, now with two instances under its belt, is perhaps looking a little less unhealthy—especially given two such distinguished exponents. Despite this, Sibley was surely minimally right to think that ascribing aesthetic properties to a thing requires more than merely knowing its nonaesthetic properties.
Whether or not the extra something is distinctively difficult, erudite, sophisticated or non-condition-governed, it is something over and above nonaesthetic understanding. So perhaps we should keep on trying to articulate the notion of the aesthetic, or at least a useful notion of the aesthetic. One strategy is the following. Begin with the account of what it is to be a judgment of taste, or of beauty and ugliness, that was outlined in part 1, and then use that to elucidate the broader notion of an aesthetic judgment.
The present strategy is to use this Kantian account in order to ground a wider category of the aesthetic, which includes judgments of taste along with judgments of daintiness, dumpiness, delicacy, elegance, and the rest.
The idea is that these substantive judgments are aesthetic in virtue of a special close relation to verdictive judgments of taste, which are subjectively universal. We can assume that judgments of beauty and ugliness coincide with judgments of aesthetic merit and demerit. However, even if beauty were taken to be a substantive aesthetic notion, like elegance, delicacy or daintiness, there would remain some other overarching notion of aesthetic merit or excellence, and we could take that notion as central.
On this approach, judgments of daintiness, dumpiness, delicacy and elegance stand in a special and intimate relation to judgments of beauty and ugliness or aesthetic merit and demerit , and it is only in virtue of this intimate relation that we can think of all these judgments as belonging to the same category. Now, what exactly is this special intimate relation between verdictive and substantive aesthetic judgments? Firstly, substantive judgments describe ways of being beautiful or ugly Burton , Zangwill It is part of what it is for a thing to be elegant, delicate or dainty that it is beautiful in a particular way.
And secondly, it is part of the meaning of substantive aesthetic judgments that they imply verdictive aesthetic judgments.
This is the hierarchical proposal. Both Beardsley and Sibley seem to have made the mistake of casting these issues at the linguistic level rather than at the level of thought; they should have focused not on aesthetic words but on aesthetic judgments and responses. Let us now see how this hierarchical proposal works. Consider an abstract pattern of curving lines, which is elegant. It might be necessary that that pattern is beautiful. This is because the beauty depends on or is determined by that specific pattern.
But it is not part of what it is to be that pattern that it is beautiful. That is, the pattern is necessarily beautiful but it is not essentially beautiful.
On the general distinction between necessity and essence, see Fine Furthermore, we can think of that pattern without thinking of it as beautiful.
By contrast, it is both necessary and essential that something that is elegant is beautiful. And this is reflected in our concepts and judgments. We can think of the pattern without thereby thinking of it as beautiful, but to think of the pattern as elegant is to think of it as beautiful, at least in certain respects. Hence elegance is an aesthetic concept. The hierarchical proposal thus seems to characterize a non-arbitrary and useful notion of the aesthetic.
If so, the contemporary broad notion of the aesthetic can be vindicated. We need a hierarchical rather than an egalitarian conception of aesthetic notions. To see how this works, consider representational properties. Are they aesthetic properties? Suppose that a painting represents a tree and is a beautiful representation of a tree. It is not merely beautiful and a tree representation but beautiful as a tree representation Zangwill But being beautiful is not part of what it is to be a representation of a tree.
Moreover, to think that the painting represents a tree is not thereby to think that it is beautiful. Being beautiful is not an essential property of the representation, and thinking of the representation does not mean thinking of it as beautiful, even though it may be necessary that it is beautiful. Hence representational properties are not aesthetic properties. The proposal faces a challenge, however.
Jerrold Levinson has argued that not all substantive properties have evaluative valence Levinson Being starkly grim seems not always to be a way of being beautiful of ugly. The defender of hierarchy could reply that it is specific uses of these words, in context, that pick out features that have evaluative valences.
If so, the particular instance of stark grimness might be a valuable aspect of a thing however it is with other instances of stark grimness. But it might be replied that particular instances of stark grimness may be value-neutral? The issue is a difficult one. If the hierarchical suggestion fails, then we lack one way of vindicating the notion of the aesthetic, and it is not clear that there is another way. But, firstly, this will rule out the aesthetic properties of abstract objects by fiat; and secondly, there remains the question of what kind of appearance properties aesthetic properties are.
One notion that is hard to place among other aesthetic notions is that of sublimity. There is a long and venerable tradition of thinking that beauty and sublimity share equal status as fundamental aesthetic categories. Sublimity comes in different varieties. The fundamental question about beauty and sublimity is whether they exclude each other. According to the long and venerable tradition, if something is sublime then it is not beautiful and vice versa.
Many have conceived of sublimity such that it excludes beauty. But this is questionable. If we conceive of beauty narrowly, where it merely means a certain elegance and prettiness as Levinson does in Levinson , then that would be a narrow concept of beauty, which would be a substantive aesthetic property.
That notion of beauty may exclude sublimity. However, it is not clear that there is reason to restrict beauty in this way. If, on the contrary, beauty or at least a concept of beauty is a generic over-arching aesthetic value, then one suggestion would be that sublimity should be understood as a kind of beauty. In that case, it would turn out that it is sublimity that is a substantive aesthetic concept, not beauty. On that view, beauty and sublimity are not opposed to each other. Instead sublimity is a kind of magnificent beauty or a spectacular or extraordinary way of being beautiful.
The idea seems to be that judgments of sublimity are grounded on both pleasure and pain, whereas judgments of beauty are grounded only on pleasure. So the pain account is not generally true of the sublime.
Many musicologists follow Wagner, such as Richard Taruskin [, forthcoming]. But on that view, where sublimity is associated with danger and extremity, it is not clear that we have a plausible story of why people seek out the sublime in music. Is it a kind of thrill-seeking, like fairground rides or rock climbing, where people believe themselves to be in danger or at least cannot help imagining that they are?
This seems unlikely. Their faces are unlike those of those on fairground rides or rock climbers who have to make difficult moves. Furthermore, the audience of the Ninth are not motivated to flee from the concert hall. Do they have to be strapped into their seats to prevent escape as on a fairground ride?
By contrast, on the substantive view of the sublime as a kind of beauty, there is a distinctive kind of pleasure that characterizes the experience of the sublime, on which judgments of the sublime are based. It is an intense pleasure, to be sure. But intensity does not entail a mixture with pain. Sublimity in a representational art such as painting is a different matter.
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