British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol 35, No 1, January, 1995

LEARNING FROM ART

Gordon Graham

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THE BELIEF that the value of art lies in what we can learn from it has always
had its adherents. Perhaps the most forthright statement of this belief among
prominent modern philosophers of art is made by Nelson Goodman in Ways
of World Making of which he says: 'a major thesis of this book is that the arts
must be taken no less seriously than the sciences as modes of discovery,
creation, and enlargement of knowledge in the broad sense of advancement
of the understanding'.1
It can hardly be denied that some works of art, especially literary ones,
contain self-conscious statements and elaborations of doctrines and proposi-
tions, but Goodman's is the more interesting claim that works of art not
merely assert propositions but advance our understanding and if this stronger
claim can be shown to be correct, the importance of art will have increased
greatly in most people's estimation.

In the opinion of some, however, notably Douglas Morgan, this is just what
it ought not to do. Even to entertain the idea of a cognitive value in art is to
sell out to a certain sort of prejudice against it, for trying to construe art as a
form of understanding is forcing it into a mould it will not fit, and at the
same time overestimating the relative value of knowledge. 'To the question
of the "cognitive significance of art" I say directly that although many words
in many arts can and do give us knowledge of many kinds, nonetheless if this
knowledge were the key and limit to the love of art, the world of art would
be even sorrier than it now is'.2
In Morgan's view we are driven to explain the value of art in terms of
'cognitive significance' first, because of an 'absurd alternative which offers us
only a specious choice between art as a diversion or decoration, on the one
hand, or as a peculiar second rate substitute for true-blue empirical knowledge
on the other", and second, because of a slavish adulation of science. That our
thinking in this way is, so to speak, a local peculiarity is shown by the fact
that in times past the parallel was invoked the other way about, and it was
deemed a convincing way of justifying philosophy to construe it as a kind of
music. Morgan is, rightly, concerned to resist reductionism in art, that is, to
© Oxford University Press 1995 26
 GORDON GRAHAM 27
resist any explanation of the value of art which does not recognize its distinctive
value. He asks, 'Who among us would exchange the Sistine Ceiling for one
more monograph, however learned, on Pauline theology?' in confident
expectation of what the answer will be.3
That the answer to his question is plain, however, does not establish as
much as Morgan thinks it does. To suppose that the Sistine Ceiling could be
replaced by a theological monograph is like supposing that an explanatory
study of Shakespearean tragedy renders it otiose for a reader to see the plays,

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and this is certainly an absurd supposition. Yet the fact that a play cannot
be so replaced, does not imply that literary criticism cannot enhance our
understanding of Shakespeare. Similarly, to agree that the value of the Sistine
Ceiling is sui generis does not imply that this value cannot he in its ability to
enhance our understanding of, perhaps, Pauline theology.
Morgan's mistake here is in thinking that the 'cognitive significance' theory
must be spelled out in terms of propositional truth, and he has an argument
which relies very heavily upon it, namely his contention that any truth must be
contradictable, whereas one art work cannot contradict another, from which it
follows that art works cannot be regarded as truths of some sort. But the
more interesting versions of the theory under consideration, such as Good-
man's, speak of art as a form of understanding, and while it may be true that
any proposition can be negated, an understanding cannot be negated, though
it can be shown to be deficient. Newton's mechanics offers us a different
understanding of matter in motion than does Aristotelian physics, but one
does not contradict the other in any straightforward sense. For all Morgan
shows to the contrary, as much can be said of artistic visions.
Having offered some general considerations against the cognitive signific-
ance view, Morgan goes on to consider its application in specific art forms —
music, painting and literature. He thinks it patently absurd that the importance
of that 'breathless final moment when you have moved intensively with heart
and mind through a quartet of Brahms or Bartok' should be explained by
'what you learned'. 'Learning, knowledge, and truth are no less valuable
because their value is not exclusive. There really are other goods in the world
than these, and there really is no need to confect such bogus kinds of truth as
poetic or pictorial or musical truth for works of art to wear as certificates of
legitimacy'.4
No one need deny this. Pleasure, for example, is a value which might be
invoked to explain the value of art. Morgan, however, dismissively speaks of
it as diversion or decoration and this is because he no less than others wants
to speak of art enriching us, and even wants to be able to speak of music as
involving a movement of mind. It is precisely these and many similar ways of
talking that the 'cognitive significance' thesis aims to accommodate, and
regarded as a claim about understanding rather than truth, nothing said so far
shows that it cannot do this.
28 LEARNING FROM ART

The thesis certainly has its difficulties, but before considering them in more
detail, it is worth rehearsing the advantages it enjoys as an explanation of the
value and importance of serious art, for these show that we have reason to
persist in trying to solve these difficulties.
The belief in serious art as a medium in which human understanding may
be advanced explains its place in our culture. The role and status of art in the
curricula of schools and universities is immediately more intelligible than it
would otherwise be. Given that the purpose of education is to develop the

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mind and promote understanding, and that art is one form of understanding,
the study of art clearly has a proper place in education. The fact that private
time and public resources are devoted to it in greater measure than to the
pursuit of amusement or even the development of sport is no more puzzling
than that the time and resources given to study of the sciences also exceeds
these. Moreover, someone's making a lifetime's commitment to art as a
painter, poet or composer, can be understood as another instance of devotion
to the old Delphic ideal 'Man, know thyself!' rather than an excessive pursuit
of pleasure or unintelligible wallowing in emotional turbulance.
Art as understanding also enables us to explain an important range of critical
vocabulary which is as a matter of fact widely and readily used. A work may
be said to have quality to the degree that it enhances our understanding and
be undistinguished to the extent that it does not, just as the importance of
one experiment or mathematical proof is judged greater than another in
accordance with its contribution to intellectual progress. We can describe a
work as the exploration of a theme without any conceptual impropriety, and
speak intelligibly of insight and profundity, superficiality and distortion. An
artistic portrayal of something may be described as convincing or unconvin-
cing, just as an argument may. All assessments of this sort are either imposs-
ible or puzzling if the value in art is pleasure or enjoyment. Furthermore,
contrary to what might be supposed, appeals to some variety of expressivism
cannot make much sense of them either. If art is the expression of an artist's
emotion, then, though it can have an effect upon an audience, it does not direct
the mind, and hence cannot direct it either superficially or to insight and
illumination.
In short, the principal virtue of aesthetic cognitivism is its ability to provide
a better explanation of the value and significance of art and to explain ways
in which people actually think and talk about it.

II
There are however some familiar difficulties. Three are specially important.
Consider more closely Goodman's suggested parallel between art and science,
where 'science' is taken to include all abstract intellectual inquiry—history,
mathematics, philosophy and so on, no less than natural or social science. In
all these disciplines, inquiry can be characterized as a movement of thought
 GORDON GRAHAM 29
from an established basis to a yet to be established terminus via a logic, or set
of rules of reasoning. In empirical studies the established base is called evidence
and the terminus is called hypothesis. In mathematics the equivalents are
axioms and theorems, in philosophy premisses and conclusion. The termino-
logy changes, but in all forms of intellectual inquiry the same structure can
be discerned in the abstract; an effort is made to show (in the sense of
demonstrate) a progression from base to terminus and, since an established
terminus becomes a base for the next chain of reasoning, successful inquiry

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moves progressively from terminus to terminus
Description of the underlying structure common to a variety of disciplines,
if it is to avoid the terminology of any one discipline, will inevitably sound
unfamiliar, but it draws attention to a feature of inquiry which is in fact
thoroughly familiar. So described, however, important difficulties are raised
for the idea of art as a form of understanding, because in a work of art there
appears to be no room for a distinction between the established ground upon
which we begin and the terminus to which we are being led, nor is there
anything very obvious that might parallel a 'logic'. This is partly because
works of art are works of imagination. Unlike scientific or historical theories,
they have, it appears, no reference outside themselves. For instance, we can
say if we like that Arnold Bennett's novel Lord Raingo is a study of the inter-
play of principle and ambition in politics, just as we might say it of Stephen
Oates's biography of Lincoln, With Malice Toward None. But to speak of both
of them as studies or explorations disguises a difference between the two.
Oates is constrained in what he writes by what actually happened. Bennett
on the other hand has, apparently, no such constraint; he can make the 'facts'
of Raingo's career whatever he wishes. Lincoln is recorded as being assassin-
ated. That his life and career should end in this way is a matter over which
Oates has no choice. As Raingo's political fortunes begin to rise once more,
he contracts an illness which proves fatal. That his life and career should end
in this way is a matter wholly of Bennett's choosing
The same point applies to many other literary works and indeed of other
forms of art as well. Constable's picture is not a less wonderful painting if in
fact Salisbury Cathedral cannot and never could be seen from that angle, but
the same misrepresentation in a guidebook would be a serious fault. It seems
to follow that however novelists or other artists might direct our thoughts,
they cannot direct them from truth to truth since at the base of their activity
lies not fact but imagination.
A second difficulty is this. In history or philosophy the evidence adduced,
the hypotheses advanced and the conclusions defended can almost always be
expressed or explained in different ways. There can, certainly, be better and
less good formulations; some explanations are better because more simply
expressed, for instance. But in general the precise wording of an argument or
hypothesis, or the order in which evidence is presented, is inessential to truth
30 LEARNING FROM ART

and validity. It seems that the contrary is true in art. It has long been held
that one of the peculiarities of art is its unity of form and content, that it is
impossible for a true work of art to say or to show what it does in any other
form without significant loss of content. If so, how could artistic insight and
understanding be paraphrased, for to present the content of a work in another
form, is to destroy it? This means the 'truth' in art eludes us every time we
try to explain it. Thus, Pope's well-known line—'What oft was thought but
ne'er so well express'd'—cannot properly describe the nature of poetry, since

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in poetry there is no way of isolating the thought other than in its expression.
How then is truth in art to be tested, refined and revised?
Thirdly, there is the difficulty of particularity in art. Cognition, Aristotle
tells us, trades in universals. It involves a measure of abstraction and general-
ization, which enables us to transcend the peculiarities of the particular case
and arrive at an understanding of a range of cases. Even where it is inappropri-
ate to speak of anything as precise as a theory, there is always a measure of
abstraction. Now, though Aristotle himself thought that art deals in univer-
sals, this is not a view that is easy to accept. Paintings, plays, sculptures and
so on portray, and must portray, particulars. We can say if we wish that a
face in a painting is the face of human distress, but the fact remains that it is
a face, and how we move from a judgement about this one face to a universal
judgement raises a difficulty. Mr Woodhouse in Jane Austen's Emma, for
instance, may be described as a splendid image of hypochondria, but once we
regard him as having standard character traits mirroring those to be found
elsewhere, we replace the particularity of Austen's imaginative creation (which
is where her genius is correctly thought to lie) with a stereotype.
These, then, are the three major difficulties that the theory of art as under-
standing most obviously encounters. But though they are familiar, each of
them, I shall argue, overstates the case.

Ill
Works of art are wholly imaginary. In whatever sense this is true, it must be
made to square with a distinction between the realistic and the fantastic in art.
In A History of Tom Jones Fielding prefaces each book with remarks on the art
of writing novels in which he eschews all fantastic mechanisms—magic spells,
witches, good fairies and the like—whereby the problematic action of a story
may be resolved. So, when it appears that Tom Jones has been to bed with
his own mother, a fact presenting seemingly insurmountable difficulties for
him, we know that Fielding has to find a non-fantastic way of getting him out
of them. He has to imagine some resolution to the plot, but his imagination is
constrained by the realities of human experience. This does not mean that
fantastic works cannot deal with the realities of human experience, or that
Tom Jones is not a work of imagination. The point is rather that we must
 GORDON GRAHAM 31

not understand the claim that works of art are wholly imaginary to imply
that the artist's imagination operates without constraint.
Conversely, it is wrong to think of scientists or historians as passively
'tracking' the truth on the basis of empirical data which just present them-
selves. Intellectual inquiry too employs imagination, in forming hypotheses,
rooting out the facts in the first place and interpreting them.
To appreciate these observations about art and science, compare a map and
a photograph. Maps aim to represent the landscape whose features they

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record. It might be supposed that doing so involves the complete suppression
of imagination, but of course, geographical features are represented by sym-
bols and the perspicuousness of the representation, and hence the usefulness
of the map, depends upon the imagination with which symbols are devised.
Imagination makes a great difference to a map's utility; yet the purpose of
every map remains the representation of things as they are.
Consider now a photograph of the same landscape as represented on a
map. Occasionally it has been thought that photography, since it cannot but
represent 'what is there', is not an art. Such a view, however, is impossible
to sustain, since photographs employ focus, composition, and use of colour
no less than a painting. The photograph gives us knowledge of the area.
Unlike the map, though, it does so by letting us see the landscape itself, not
by supplying information in the form of conventional notation. Imagination
can enter into the photograph more deeply than it can into the mapmaking,
however, even at the level of choosing of a point of view. While the business
of the map maker is to record information neutral with respect to interest,5
the photographer chooses a point of view precisely in order to give the land-
scape special interest. Furthermore, the more imaginative the photographer
is, the more likely it is that the point of view is one which, left to our own
devices, we would not have chosen. Thus it is not fanciful to speak of a
photograph's revealing new, and hitherto unimagined aspects of a landscape.
This use of imagination is to be contrasted, of course, with doctoring the
photograph. A highly imaginative photograph of a landscape is to be distin-
guished from the celebrated 'photographs' of fairies at the bottom of the
garden. It is at one and the same time a work of imagination and concerned
with what is really there.
The sharp contrast between reality and imagination upon which the first
objection depends can thus be seen to be misdrawn, though there is a residual
difficulty. Even if imagination is involved in ascertaining truth in history or
in science, an important difference remains between a work of art and a work
of inquiry, namely that the latter has a structure of reasoning by which it
moves from premiss to conclusion, whereas the former does not. History,
science and philosophy are disciplines, organized systems of knowledge, not
merely collections of isolated facts or propositions. Intellectual inquiry does
32 LEARNING FROM ART

not just confront the mind with fact or hypothesis, but directs it through a
progression of thought, and it is this capacity which allows us to call these
modes of understanding. In contrast, it seems, the best art can do is present a
point of view. Even writers sympathetic to the idea of truth in art have
generally supposed that art merely expresses truth, not that it argues for it.6
If it does not argue for it, however, it cannot be said to show anything, and
if it cannot show the truth of what it contains, it can at best be a mode of
expression, not of understanding.

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But is this correct? Though there are certainly differences between artmak-
ing and intellectual inquiry, contrasting them in just this way is misleading.
The content of 'mind' is not only thought; sensual experience is as much
mental as intellectual reflection. The visible, the audible and the tactile com-
prise the content of mind as well as the intelligible. Moreover, sensual experi-
ence, as an aspect of mind, is not a matter of passive seeing and hearing, but
of active looking and listening. Looking and listening exercises the mind no
less than thinking or calculating. Now while it may be true that works of art,
even works of literature, do not direct abstract thought, it may none the less
be true that they direct the mind, that is, direct the perception of the audience.
The example of the photograph makes this plain. A photograph gives us a
point of view, just as a painter determines how we see the objects in the picture.
This is most obvious at the basic level of perspective; foreground and back-
ground are essential elements of our visual experience, and in a picture it is
the painter, not the spectator, who determines what is in the foreground and
what in the background. Whereas when I look about me I determine what I
focus on, in a photograph or a painting this is largely (though obviously never
wholly) determined for me.
Thus we can properly speak of works of art directing the mind, even though
not by proof, demonstration or the presentation of propositions. Examples
of this power of mental direction are legion. Rhythm in poetry, for instance,
by determining how we hear the line, and where the emphasis falls, can
determine what the sense is. Composers determine how music is heard—
which sound predominates over others both acoustically and harmonically.
An architect can determine the order in which shapes and materials are seen
by those who walk through a building. And so on. What this shows is that
art has resources which imagination may employ in directing the minds of
the audience, and as yet we have seen no reason to suppose that it cannot do
so to the end of greater understanding.

IV
There arises now, however, a doubt about the object of that understanding.
Consider again the parallel of the photograph and the map. The argument
was that the photograph no less than the map can give us information about
a landscape and that a good photograph does so by presenting us with imagin-
 GORDON GRAHAM 33

ative ways of looking at the landscape. Now it seems to be confirmation of

this thought that we can speak of a deceptive photograph, one which gives
us mistaken ideas about the subject photographed. But in fact this possibility
counts against the suggestion that photography as an art is a form of under-
standing because, considered as an object of aesthetic interest, the deceptive
character of a photograph is of no consequence. In order to decide whether a
photograph is worth exhibiting or not, we do not need to inspect the original
subject of the photograph. We need not go beyond the photograph; its aes-

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thetic merits and demerits are, so to speak, wholly within it.
The irrelevance of the independent subject is one consequence of the view
that in art the ideal is unity of form and content. In the imagined photograph
what matters is not the accuracy of beliefs about the subject that the photo-
graph generates, but the internal harmony between the subject and the way
the photograph, deceptively or not, presents it; in other words, the harmony
of form and content.
Similarly, in a poem what matters is not the truth or falsehood of the
sentiment expressed, but the fittingness or otherwise of its expression. When
Macbeth says 'Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets
his life upon the stage and then is heard no more', it is irrelevant to assessing
the merits of Shakespeare to ask whether life is a walking shadow. Someone
who, in critical response, said, for instance, that life is generally not as bad as
Shakespeare here makes it out to be, would rightly be thought to be making
a foolishly irrelevant remark. What matters is whether despair of the sort
Macbeth is imagined as undergoing is or is not fittingly expressed in the line.
Both examples purport to show that though photographers, poets and
painters can direct the mind, the point of their direction does not lie beyond,
but wholly within the work of art, and it seems it must be so. Collingwood
makes this point in connection with portraiture:

A portrait . . . is a work of representation What the patron demands is a good

likeness; and that is what the painter aims, and successfully, if he is a competent
painter, at producing. It is not a difficult thing to do, and we may reasonably
assume that in portraits by great painters such as Raphael, Titian, Velazquez, or
Rembrandt it has been done. But, however reasonable the assumption may be, it
is an assumption and nothing more. The sitters are dead and gone, and we cannot
check the likeness for ourselves. If, therefore, the only kind of merit a portrait
could have were its likeness to the sitter, we could not possibly distinguish, except
where the sitter is still alive and unchanged, between a good portrait and a bad 7

Clearly there is cogency in this line of thought, but once again what is right
about it is generally misconstrued. It is true that we ought not to think of
Macbeth's speech as a short treatise on despair by Shakespeare, and we ought
not to regard, say, Gainsborough's portrait of Mr and Mrs Andrews as a
record of the appearance of the couple in question. Nevertheless, it does not
34 LEARNING FROM ART

follow that these works do not point beyond themselves in any way whatever.
We can profitably regard Macbeth, at that point in the play, as an image, not
just of one man's mood, but of despair. And, as John Berger once demon-
strated,8 we can see, caught in Gainsborough's portrait of the Andrews, some-
thing that they themselves may not have been able to see, a distinctively
proprietorial attitude.
What is correct in Collingwood's argument is its insistence that the relation
between art and anything beyond it cannot be construed as one of correspond-

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ence, but it does not follow that there can therefore be no relation between a
work of art and an external reality.

V
What, then, is this relation? The basic thought in representation as correspond-
ence is that we look independently at reality and then at art in order to see
how well the latter has represented the former. But we may as easily, and to
greater advantage, construe the relation as the other way about. We look
independently at art in order thereafter to see reality afresh, or even, to become
properly aware of it for the first time.
To appreciate the extent of the alteration in thinking about art that this
reversal allows, consider the third problem detailed above, that concerning
the particularity of art and the universality of understanding. This has now
been cast in a different light. The problem was that Mr Woodhouse, to con-
tinue the earlier example, though a convincing portrait of a hypochondriac,
is a particular character. How then can he summarize general truths about
hypochondriacs? Once we reverse the relation between art and reality it
becomes apparent that what there is to be learned from Emma in this regard
is not obtained by seeing in Mr Woodhouse aspects of real hypochondriacs,
but seeing in real hypochondriacs aspects of Mr Woodhouse. Our experience
is not summarized in the character, but unilluminated, perhaps awakened
by it.
We speak of having or lacking experience, of being experienced and inex-
perienced. Usually when we do so, some specific context is understood—
military experience, for instance, or experience of mountain climbing. But as
far as the word itself goes, the contexts in which it may be used are very
broad. We can speak more broadly in emotional contexts —experience of fear
or love—or most broadly of all perhaps —sense experience. In this last use
some writers have thought that the sense of the word changes, but if, as I
argued earlier, the mental life of a human being is of different kinds, there is
no reason to think this.
Understood in this way, we may say that human existence, as opposed to
mere organic existence, is largely, though not exclusively, a matter of experi-
ence. It is not exclusively so because experience may be distinguished from
memory, from imagination, from anticipation of the future, and from intellec-
 GORDON GRAHAM 35
tual abstraction, all of which play important parts in the life of a human being.
And each of these may inform experience.9 In attending to what is happening
to us, these other aspects of mind make us aware of interconnections —with
past events, with hoped-for outcomes, with true generalizations. What is of
most interest here is imagination. Human beings have the ability to manipulate
their experience imaginatively. And this is one of the ways in which we may
bring it more sharply into focus and find greater significance in it.
Once again, this is just an abstract way of describing something familiar.

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We may interpret the words, or actions or gestures of another person with
more or less imagination, the result being a greater or lesser degree of under-
standing of* their meaning. Of course, individuals are not possessed of ima-
gination to the same degree, any more than they have equally good memories
and it is here that we find a significant role for art and artists, namely in
supplying the imaginative apprehension of experience in which others are
relatively deficient.
To see how art can be a form of understanding, it is essential to grasp that
it involves moving from art to experience, not from experience to art. It is
true that the images by which we are confronted in art are always images of
particulars, but as Aristotle points out in the case of drama, images and charac-
ters can be generalized. Bruegel's celebrated picture can be of a country wed-
ding, and need not be of any particular country wedding. It will not alter its
subject to discover that the faces and objects collected in it were never
assembled together at any one time, or even that they never existed. Art may
be imaginary through and through, but it can still enable us to look more
sensitively at the people, circumstances and relationships in our own experi-
ence. The question to be asked of such a work is not, 'Does this effectively
capture the scene portrayed?' but 'Does this make us see this sort of occasion
differently?'.

VI
I have been defending a version of cognitivism in art, but there is an important
point to be stressed. Aesthetic cognitivism is plausible only as a normative
not as a descriptive thesis. It says that in so far as art advances understanding,
it is to be valued the more highly, not that it always does, or that this is the
only reason for valuing it. As a descriptive universalization about art, cognitiv-
ism is no more convincing than any other. It is clear that many poems, pic-
tures, pieces of music, statuettes, stories, plays, tapestries and items of jewel-
lery, which have been held in high regard, cannot be thought to have a
cognitive dimension and it would require the most elaborate conceptual man-
oeuvres to save the descriptive thesis that art is a form of understanding from
straightforward empirical refutation.
Descriptive theories of art are exclusive. If Bell, Fry and others are right
that art is to be defined in terms of significant form, then expressivists are
36 LEARNING FROM ART

wrong. A definition couched in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions

must rule out any other such definition. This is not true of normative theories.
We can accept that art is to be valued as a form of understanding, and deny
that all that is called art is to be valued for this reason or denied the title 'art'.
Talk of art as a form of understanding usually smacks of portentousness.
Perhaps for this reason it is often and easily construed as implying a denigra-
tion of the more obvious values of entertainment and enjoyment. But this is
a false construction. However welcome the suggestion that there is more to

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art than the pleasure we derive from it, we need not deny that pleasure is
often, though not always, one of the things that makes it valuable. The point
to be emphasized is that a normative theory of art, of the sort elaborated here,
is not intended to demarcate 'true art' or 'art proper' to the detriment of
'so-called art' which does not or cannot fit this description. It is meant to
explain, in the sense of rationally justify, certain discriminations between
works and forms of art, discriminations that show themselves not only in
express judgements but in status accorded. Whether anyone prefers D. H
Lawrence to P. G. Wodehouse or thinks more highly of Michael Tippett than
Scott Joplin is not to the point. What we want to know is whether the different
status frequently accorded to different artistic productions has a rational basis
or is the result of mere social prejudice and cultural illusion.10
And this is what the cognitivist theory—that art can enhance our under-
standing of human experience—purports to explain. If it is a fact that some
works of art can supply us with a deeper understanding by imaginatively
illuminating our experience, then it is no more puzzling that we lend greater
importance to them than to works of entertainment than it is to discriminate
between significant scientific experiments and amusing or fascinating tricks
that exploit a knowledge of optics or magnetism. Science no less than art can
be entertaining; it can require very high levels of expertise; it can have practical
uses. But the greatest scientific achievements are those that have made funda-
mental contributions to human understanding. And something similar, I have
argued, can intelligibly be said of art."

Gordon Graham, Department of Moral Philosophy, University of St Andrews, St

Andrews, Fife KY16 9AL, Scotland

REFERENCES
3
Nelson Goodman, Ways of World Making He is, presumably, dismissing the opinion
(Cambridge, Massachusetts Hackett, 1978), of some Puritans
4
p 102 Morgan, op a t , p 19
5
Douglas Morgan, 'Must Art Tell the This statement needs qualification since
Truth'' Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism plainly maps of the same area can differ pre-
26 (1967), p 18 cisely according to the purposes for which
 GORDON GRAHAM
they are drawn—landuse maps and geolo-
gical maps for instance But 1 do not think
this qualification invalidates the point being
made here.
6
See for example Morris Weitz on T S Eliot
and Proust in 'Truth in Literature' in John
Hospers, ed Introductory Readings m Aesthet-
ics (New York. Collier Macmillan, 1969),
PP 213-24
7 1979)) is wholly mistaken But this claim
R G Colhngwood, Principles of Art
(Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1938), p 44
8
In a television series
9 11
It is this that Hobbes thought peculiar to
human beings
10
This is not meant to imply that the relative
37
status here assumed is one universally agreed
to. P G Wodehouse has been the subject
of at least six academic studies To my mind
the scholarly effort in those I have read has
an element of absurdity, it seems obvious
that the books are meant to be enjoyed, not
studied and that the use of 'comparative
morphology' (R A Hale, The Comic Style
of P G Wodehouse (Hamden, Connecticut,
Downloaded from http://bjaesthetics.oxfordjournals.org/ at New Mexico State University on September 12, 2014
too has to be borne out by a normative
theory of art
Thanks are due to James Taylor for helpful
comments on this essay