I would think that good or bad is a human judgement of any
thing under the sun. Like all things in nature, art is also a thing.
mando
On Feb 27, 2009, at 4:02 PM, [email protected] wrote:
In a message dated 2/27/09 6:26:13 PM, [email protected]
writes:
"I believe it is possible to
speak of good and bad qualities in things, and these qualities are
independent of the perceiver's/interpreter's set of standards for such
things. The raw material that leads to "good" and "bad" predicates
reside in the objects, not exclusively in our heads."
I'm working on a somewhat defendible posting right now, but I'll
interrupt
myself to address what you say here, Michael, because it may help
clarify what
I'm working on.
Your two sentences above claim that what you call "good and bad
qualities"
and "The raw material" BOTH in some way reside "in the objects". Do
you think of
them as two different entities? I can see claiming that "raw material"
resides in objects, but I hear no justification for the existence
of something you
call "qualities". The "predicates" 'good' and 'bad' can be taken as
solely the
words, or as the notional feelings inside our heads. In either case
they do
not "reside in" the object.
You may reply, "When you squeeze a rock, don't you encounter the
quality of
hardness?" No. My fingers encounter only rock. My fingers then
send certain
nerve impulses that eventuate as sensation in my brain. I notice
the rock does
not crumble when I squeeze. "That thing is hard!" I cry. But the
big strong
guy next to me crushes the thing to crumbs. "That wasn't hard," he
says. "In
fact it was only dried mud." Can you see that "hard" or "soft" is
not a "quality"
of the thing we squeezed, but only a word we summon up to describe our
experience caused by our encounter with the "raw material"?
Similarly "goodness" or "badness" is never in an external object.
Only "raw
material" is.
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