Gregory Currie - An Ontology of Art PDF

AN ONTOLOGY OF ART
An Ontology of Art
Gregory Currie
Pal grave Macmillan

ISBN 978-1-349-20040-5 ISBN 978-1-349-20038-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-20038-2
©Scots Philosophical Club, 1989
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1989 978-0-333-46076-4

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Scholarly and Reference Division,
St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010
First published in the United States of America in 1989
ISBN 978-0-312-02856-5
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Currie, Gregory.
An ontology of art/Gregory Currie.
p. em.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-312-02856-5
1. Art-Philosophy. I. Title.
N70.C89 1989
701-dcl9 88--38728
CIP
For Penny
Contents
Preface x
Acknowledgements xii
1 Introduction 1
1. The project 1
2. Types and tokens 3
3. A theory to be refuted 4
4. Art works as action types 7
5. The multiplicity of instances 8
6. Some logical considerations 8
7. The problem of forgery 10
8. Ontology and appreciation 11
9. Kinds of works 13
10. Autographidallographic 14
11. A disclaimer 15
2 Empiricism 17
1. What is empiricism? 17
2. Empiricism and supervenience 18
3. Aesthetic properties 25
4. Why 'empiricism'? 26
5. Empiricism and the IMH 27
6. A first argument against empiricism 28
7. How to relativise aesthetic properties 31
8. Moving further away from empiricism 34
9. Aesthetic and art-historical properties 40
vii
viii Contents
10. A conclusion about aesthetic value 41

II. Contextual dependence in art and science 44
3 Art Works as Action Types 46

I. Introduction 46
2. The structural account of the work 46
3. Musical works and performance means 49
4. An objection to the structural view 50
5. Correct and incorrect instances of a work 53
6. Works as norm kinds 55
7. Works as created 56
8. Works as indicated structures 57
9. Are works created? 61
10. Some constraints on theory 64
II. Works as action types 66
12. A question about heuristics 71
13. Referential properties 73
14. Some reflections on the theory 74
15. The problem of pictures 78
16. Supervenience again 79
17. Transworld identification of works 80
4 Authenticity 85
I. Preliminaries 85
2. Is the IMH revisionary? 85
3. An important difference between visual and non-
visual arts 89
4. The intentional fallacy 91
5. Anti-empiricism and the IMH 92
Contents ix
6. The artist's relation to the work 96

7. Counterfactual dependence 98
8. Historical uniqueness 102
9. The problem of architecture 104
10. Forgeries and reproductions 105
11. Goodman's project 108
12. Looking 109
13. Looking and aesthetic discrimination 111
14. Forgery again 115
15. Looking revisited 117
16. Works and their instances 120
17. The problem of prints 124
18. Autographic!allographic again 124
19. Embodiment 125
20. Conclusions 127
Notes 130
References 135
Index 139
Preface
Recent work in aesthetics displays a tendency to regard an art

work's history, particularly the circumstances of its production, as
bearing on its aesthetic qualities. There is less talk now of an
'intentional fallacy', and the claim that aesthetic appreciation can
be isolated from the work's historical context is regarded with
some scepticism. Along with this tendency there is discernible an
attempt to re-evaluate old answers to the question, 'What is a work
of art?', and to go beyond them to something more in keeping
with an appreciation of the work's historical dimension. But recent
answers to this question fail, I think, to give this historical
dimension its proper role. Ontology has failed to keep pace with
epistemology in this area. My aim is to bring about a closer
connection between the two.
The structure of my argument is as follows. In Chapter 1 I state
my thesis and explain some of the background to it. Reduced to a
slogan that thesis is this: all art works belong to the same ontological
kind - action types. And all art works, including those in such
apparently singular arts as painting and sculpture (where it is
normal to identify the work with a unique object) may have many
instances with a status equal to that of the 'authentic' instance. In
Chapter 2 I try to motivate my account of art works by developing
a theory about the range of features of a work that may be relevant
to its appreciation. In Chapter 3 I use this account to motivate the
thesis that art works are action types. In Chapter 4 I turn to the
question of whether all kinds of works of art are capable of multiple
instantiation.
In this book I have tried to combine systematic argument, some
of it polemical, with accessibility to students who are beginning to
study the philosophy of art. I would like the book to be viewed
both as a contribution to research and as an introduction, though
not an impartial one, to some central topics in aesthetics. But these
aims are not easy to reconcile, and there are probably times when
the text will be tedious to the specialist and less than wholly clear
to the student. In my defence I say to the specialist that it is worth
while discussing these issues in a context that presupposes a
minimum of philosophical background, since background
x
Preface xi
assumptions often turn out to be highly questionable. And to the

student I say that the best way to learn philosophy is to embrace
controversy from the first, rather than to begin with a judicious
and impartial summing up of the alternatives.
It would have been possible to write a much longer book on this
subject. At various points it was tempting to look at the history of
aesthetic writing for guidance, to flesh out the analytical points
with a closer study of examples from the history of art, to consider
what further responses might be made to my arguments. But it
seems to me that there is value in dealing with the issue in a way
that will facilitate a broad overview of the whole position. Too
often the core of a philosophical argument is obscured by a wealth
of detail and the pursuit of alternative strategies. I hope that this
book will give a sharper focus to what is currently a rather diffuse
debate; I do not expect that it will reduce the opposition to silence.
Finally, I should like to mention here the appearance of a work
that suggests a growing interest among art historians with the
methodology of their subject. Michael Baxandall's Patterns of In ten-
tion (Yale University Press, 1985) provides a number of case studies
in the analysis of what I call here the 'heuristic' of a work. I suggest
that Chapters 2 and 3 of my book provide something like the
explanatory framework towards which Baxandall is moving.
GREGORY CURRIE
Acknowledgements
I feel that I have had an extraordinary amount of help from friends

and colleagues with the writing of this book. Members of the Otago
Philosophy Department sat patiently through a series of weekly
seminars based on an earlier draft, carefully pulling my arguments
to pieces. Graham Oddie, with his usual good humour, went on
with his daily task of instructing me. Jane Tannahill read two
complete drafts of the book and made a number of important
suggestions. John Haldane gave me encouragement, criticism and
hospitality while I was writing an early draft in St Andrews. Jerrold
Levinson sent me detailed comments on Chapter 3. In addition,
many people in seminars and conversation have either helped me
out of difficulty or helped me see more clearly where difficulty lay.
Among them are Alan Lacy, David Lewis, Colin McGinn, Alan
Musgrave, Pavel Tichy, David Ward, John Watkins, John Watling
and Crispin Wright. Where I have been able to recall their specific
contribution (and I am sure not to have done so correctly in all
cases) I have mentioned them in the text or footnotes. Brian Wilson
carefully read the final draft. I thank them all.
In addition I would like to thank various institutions: the
Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method, London
School of Economics, and the Department of Logic and Metaphy-
sics, University of St Andrews, for their hospitality to me when I
was on leave during 1984-5, and the University of Otago for freeing
me from teaching responsibilities during that time.
Some of the material in Chapter 4 is a much revised version of
'The Authentic and the Aesthetic' which originally appeared in the
American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 22 (1985). I thank the editor
for his permission to republish such of it as appears here.
G.c.
xii
1
Introduction
1. THE PROJECT
I have no definition of art; no set of necessary and sufficient

conditions for the application of the concept art. This book was
not written in the hope of finding one. Rather, my aim was to see
what progress could be made in the ontology of the arts while
avoiding an outright confrontation with the definitional problem.
I shall argue that there is a single kind of thing that art works are,
while admitting that there are things of this kind which are not art
works. Locating works of art in this category illuminates their
relations to each other and to other things and imposes stringent
constraints on any acceptable explanation of the concept art. It
may even provide grounds for some limited optimism about the
possibility of such an explanation. For I shall argue that there is a
quite surprising orderliness, coherence and unity about the way
in which art works relate to each other and to other things. Art
works have more in common than we might think, and they fall
neatly into a larger 'natural ontological category' of things that is
relatively well understood by philosophers. Locating them in this
category may help us to understand them better by applying
techniques from this other area - action theory.
That art works are in some sense closely connected with human
action - in particular with the actions of artists - is of course widely
recognised. An important feature of my theory is that it makes this
relation quite precise.
In saying that art works belong to a wider category of things I
give a necessary condition for the application of the concept art.
There remains, as I have already said, the problem of giving a
sufficient condition. But I doubt if this problem can be solved by a
further appeal to ontological distinctions, which is what I am
interested in here. If there is a way of distinguishing between art
works and other things in the favoured category, the distinction
can be made, I suspect, only by appeal to the ways in which these
entities are differentially regarded. Thus it may be true that art
1
2 An Ontology of Art
works are distinguished from other things by their being singled

out for a certain kind of attention, psychologically described, or by
their having a certain kind of status conferred upon them. 1 Some
such broadly functional account seems currently to be our best bet,
though I do not think that a satisfactory formulation of it has yet
been found. In that case ontology will not take us all the way to a
characterisation of art objects; but I want to go only so far as
ontology will take us. In going only this far we shall learn a good
deal about the nature of art.
In view of what I have said so far, one might see the project as
a kind of second best; trying to give a partial characterisation of
the concept art simply because no full characterisation is available.
But while a satisfactory definition of art would be a very pleasant
thing to possess, I doubt that it would supersede the results of the
present inquiry. For if, as I suspect, defining art is a matter of
specifying relations to human producers and consumers, the
questions I am most interested in here are likely to be left
unaccounted for. Suppose, for instance, that we were able to
specify some possibly very complex relation R that certain entities
bear to individuals and/or communities and in virtue of which
those entities count as works of art. It would be possible, I think,
to be quite precise about the relation R while being vague or
ambiguous or merely wrong about what the entities in question
actually are. And those who try to define art in terms of, say,
conferred status or aesthetic interest tend to assume that we know
pretty well what kind of thing an art work is; they assume that we
know a painting or a novel when we see one, and that we can
reidentify such things under at least normal circumstances. Or, as
with George Dickie, they simply add a catch-all condition: an art
work is an artefact, in some very broad sense. 2 So I perceive two
distinct but complementary projects here. The first is to specify
the kind of thing that art works are; the second is to specify the
relation that things of that kind must bear to us in order for them
to count as art works. Definers of art are interested in the second
project. I am interested in the first.
The value of the theory here proposed will be assessed, at least
in part, by the light it sheds on other questions about the arts.
How tight is the connection between the artist's intention and the
correctness or otherwise of an interpretation of the work? Where,
if anywhere, is the work located? What relation do works bear to
their exemplars? That is, what is the relation of the novel Emma to
Introduction 3
my copy of the novel? What is the relation of Beethoven's

Fifth Symphony to last night's performance of it? What, most
interestingly, is the relation of Picasso's Guernica to the canvas
painted by Picasso that we call 'Guernica'? The theory I shall
propose will provide answers to some of these questions, and will
impose important constraints on the answers to others.
To suppose that art works might be one kind of thing will seem
like the product of an outdated metaphysical optimism. There are,
after all, many different kinds of art works; painting, sculpture,
etching, musical composition, drama, poetry, the novel, etc. What
hope is there of giving a completely general answer to our question
in the face of such plurality? Surely a general answer will, unless
it is hopelessly vague, simply obscure the differences between
these very different kinds. I hope, however, to give a general
answer that is neither vague nor unfaithful to our data.
Let us begin with a review of some widely held opinions on our
topic.
2. TYPES AND TOKENS
The philosopher C. S. Peirce is responsible for a distinction

between types and tokens. 3 There can be many occurrences of the
same word on a page. But how can the same thing appear at
different places at the same time? In fact it is not literally the same
thing that appears in different places. The word itself is a type, of
which there can be many tokens. It is the tokens that appear in
writing and in speech, and two word tokens are tokens of the
same word type if they are identically spelt. What is written on
the page is never the type but always a token of the type. Tokens
are physical inscriptions that are created and may be destroyed.
The nature of types themselves is a matter of controversy. Some
view them as abstract entities existing independently of their
concrete tokens. Others pursue a nominalistic reduction of types.
Philosophers have found the distinction between types and
tokens useful in a variety of areas. Thus in the philosophy of mind
it turns out to be immensely important to distinguish sharply
between action-types and action-tokens. I open the door; later I
open it again. I perform the same action twice. But of course there
are two distinct doings. We say that there are, in this case, two
tokens of the same action-type. Any particular event or action is a
token of some event or action type. In our example we have

two action-tokens which are both door openings. I shall make
considerable use of this distinction later. But let us for the moment
put aside the notion of an action type and turn to art works as
they are conventionally understood.
3. A THEORY TO BE REFUTED
What I shall do now is describe a theory about the nature of art

works that employs the type-token distinction. It is an example of
the kind of theory I shall be arguing against in this essay. A clear
statement of it occurs in Richard Wollheim's book Art and its Objects
(though Wollheim suspends judgement as to the truth of part of
the theory).4 The theory consists of a number of logically separable
theses but I think it is worth considering it as a whole. First of all,
when put together, the elements seem to constitute a coherent and
plausible theory of the nature of art works. Thus together the
parts acquire a strength that they might not have in isolation from
one another. Secondly, while the elements of the theory are
separable, I shall be arguing against all the elements; I shall not
dismiss any part of the theory simply on the grounds of its
association with other parts. Here is the theory.
There are really two kinds of things that art works are. There
are works like paintings and certain kinds of sculpture which can
be identified as physical objects. We can point to Guernica; we
might even be lucky enough to own it. If we are careless it can be
destroyed - as Michelangelo's Vatican Pieta nearly was recently,
and as Leonardo's Last Supper will be unless we are able to halt its
decay. 5 But there are other kinds of works that cannot be identified
in this way. Emma is not identical with any copy of it; it is not, in
particular, identical with Jane Austen's original autograph copy.
Destruction of any copy of the work would not be destruction of
the work itself. Destruction of all the copies of the work might be
thought to constitute destruction of the work, because we would
have lost all access to the work. But even so we cannot identify
the work with the set of all copies of it. For one thing, if we did,
the work could not properly be said to be complete until all the
copies of it were produced; so Shakespeare's works would still be
in production, so to speak. And a literary work, memorised but
not written or uttered, may surely be said to exist. Since sets are
Introduction 5
extensional - identified in terms of their members - no set can

survive a change in its membership. But if there were more or
different copies of Emma than there actually are, that work would
not itself be a different thing. Reasons like this incline us to say
that copies have a different relation to the work. They stand in
relation to the work as tokens to the types of which they are
tokens. You can own a token of Emma - you can be lucky enough
to own that very special token written in Austen's own hand - but
you cannot own the type. And since the work itself is a type, you
cannot own the work (except in the very different sense of owning
the copyright to it).
Let us use the general term 'instance' to cover all those concrete
things that we come into contact with when we experience a work
of art. Thus my copy of Emma, last night's performance of
Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and Picasso's canvas entitled 'Guer-
nica' are instances of three works. The theory says that literary
and musical works are distinct from their instances, that there is a
potentially unlimited number of instances of works of these kinds,
that these instances are tokens of the type that is the work, but
that a painting or sculpture can have only one instance - the object
made by the artist - and that this instance is' identical with the
work itself.
What is the motivation behind this theory? The theory, or
something like it, seems to be forced on us by universally acknowl-
edged features of our interest in art works. We visit art galleries
because they contain, we hope and believe, original works -
canvases painted by the artists to whom the works are attributed.
To see the thing produced by the artist himself seems integral to
our aesthetic experience of the work. Now while museums do
display the original manuscripts of literary works they do so for
historical rather than for aesthetic reasons. For once the text of a
literary work is established we do not think that it is important to
read the original rather than any correctly transcribed copy thereof.
Gallery exhibitions are integral to the 'art world' in a way that
manuscript displays are not.
The theory is, then, an attempt to underpin the view that in the
visual arts but not in, say, the literary arts, authenticity is a
determinant of aesthetic value. By'authenticity' I mean the property
of being the object originally produced by the artist. Because this
property is significant in the visual arts, a copy of the original
painting or sculpture, however close in appearance to the original,
lacks something aesthetically important. Aesthetic value resides,

we may say, in the original and is not transferable to any copy.
There is therefore no barrier to the identification of the work itself
with the artist's original canvas or with the object carved or
moulded by him. But authenticity, in the sense of that term
favoured here, is not important in the literary or musical arts. From
the point of view of appreciation, any copy of the novel will do,
as long as it meets certain conditions - 1 shall discuss them below -
which have nothing to do with the question of whether that copy
was produced by the author himself. Thus in literature, while we
can identify an authentic object - the author's manuscript - that
authentic object has no privileged place vis-a-vis the work itself.
And in music the question of authenticity hardly arises because
the instances of a musical work are not normally taken to be copies
of the score but rather performances of the work. And it is not
usually the case that the composer initiates his work by performing
it; he may never, in fact, perform it. Rather, his compositional
activity consists in writing down the notes to be played together
with directions about how they are to be played. And if the
composer does perform the work his performance of it may be
good or bad. That performance has no special status simply on
account of it being his own. So no instance of a musical work (no
performance of it) can be said to have the property of authenticity,
and so the question of the status of the authentic object does not
arise in music. (There are, of course, other senses of 'authenticity'
in which one performance may be said to be more authentic than
another. It is important to keep these senses distinct from the
sense in which 1 use the term.) H, on the other hand, someone
does want to insist that the instances of a musical work are copies
of the score, it would not greatly affect the point being made here.
For while they would be insisting on something that has the
consequence that in music, just as in literature, it is possible to
identify an authentic object, it would be clear, just as it is clear in
the literary case, that that authentic item has no privileged aesthetic
status; the composer's original copy is not to be preferred, on
grounds of authenticity alone, to any other copy.
In summary, then, we may say that the theory we are considering
here insists on a duality between works for which authenticity is
important and works for which it is not. (I shall sometimes speak
of I dualism' and of 'dualists' in this connection.) Where authenticity
is important the work is a physical object, and where it is not, the
Introduction 7
work is a type, of which there can be many tokens. Works of the

latter kind are reproducible; we can generate an unlimited series
of instances of the work. But works of the former kind are not
reproducible in this sense. There can be, and indeed there are,
copies of paintings and sculptures, produced in various ways. But
these things have no status as instances of the work, for the work
is not something that can have instances other than the authentic
instance which is the work itself.
4. ART WORKS AS ACTION TYPES
It is my purpose here to attack this theory at all its crucial points. I

shall argue that no work of art is a physical object; that all works
of art are types. But the sense in which I affirm that works are
types is not simply a generalisation of the restricted sense in which
that view is usually affirmed. A work is not, according to my
hypothesis, a type which has as its tokens copies of books, copies
of pictures or musical performances. A work of art is rather an
action type, the tokens of which are particular actions performed
on particular occasions by particular people. The things which are
the natural candidates for being regarded as the instances of a
work - copies or performances - are not tokens of the type which
is the work.
Here is a brief and rather uninformative illustration of what I
mean by saying that an art work is an action type. Consider
Beethoven's action in putting together that structure of sounds
which we associate with his Fifth Symphony. We can describe that
action in various ways, but one way to describe it would be to say
that it consisted in Beethoven arriving at a certain sound structure
at a certain time in a certain way. That event token has four
constitutive objects: Beethoven, the sound structure arrived at, a
particular time, and the way of arriving at that structure. But
somebody else could have arrived at the same sound structure in
the same way at a different time. That possible token, and the
actual token involving Beethoven are tokens of the same type.
That type is the work that we call/Beethoven's Fifth Symphony'.
As I say, this is not a very illuminating account. But it may give
some vague idea of what I am driving at, and the details will, of
course, be filled in later.
So according to the hypothesis I propose there is no ontological
duality between kinds of works of art; all kinds of works belong to

the same ontological category; action types. Let us call this the
Action Type Hypothesis, which we shall abbreviate to ATH. In
Chapter 3 I shall argue for the ATH.
5. THE MULTIPLICITY OF INSTANCES
The other aspect of the theory that I want to reject is its insistence
that there is a duality between kinds of works from the point of
view of their possible instances. The theory says that some works
(musical and literary works, for example) can have multiple
instances while others (paintings, for example) can have only one
instance; the authentic one. (Art forms of the first kind we may
call/multiple'; those of the second kind we may call/singular'.) I
shall argue for a further thesis; all kinds of works are multiple:
capable, in principle, of having multiple instances. In principle it
is possible for there to be as many instances of a painting as there
are instances of a novel. Thus the theory I propose is monistic in
two ways; it says that there is only one kind of thing that a work
of art is, and it says that there is only one kind of relation between
a work of art itself and its instances. The work Guernica stands to
its instances (including Picasso's canvas) in the same relation that
Emma stands to those concrete objects that are instances of it. Let
us call this the Instance Multiplicity Hypothesis (IMH). In Chapter
4 I shall argue for the IMH.
6. SOME LOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS
The IMH does not entail the ATH. It is possible to hold that
all kinds of works of art may have multiple instances without
committing oneself thereby to the view that art works are action
types. The IMH is compatible with a number of different concep-
tions about what art works are; for instance it is compatible with
the view that all art works are types the tokens of which are
instances of the work. That is quite different from the view that
works are action types, for the instances of literary works of art,
copies of the text, are not action tokens. Since the instances of a
musical work are performances of it, there is a sense in which
these instances are action tokens. But these tokens are not tokens
Introduction 9
of the type which is the work, as my brief explanation of the ATH

ought already to have made plain.
Does the ATH entail the IMH? The bare claim that art works are
action types does not entail the IMH. Some action types necessarily
have at most one instance. (Getting to the South Pole first, for
example.) But the specific version of the ATH that I want to argue
for does entail that it is possible for there to be more than one
instance of a painting or sculpture, for it entails that two artists
may independently arrive at the same work, though the conditions
for this happening are unlikely to obtain. Thus art works are action
types of which there may be more than one token. In Section 3.9 I
shall wheel on the useful and perhaps familiar philosopher's
phantasy of 'Twin Earth'. If Picasso's twin on 'Twin Earth' produces
a canvas indistinguishable from Picasso's Guernica, and if he does
so in the same way, then Guernica and Twin Guernica are instances
of the same work. So it is possible for paintings to have many
instances. (This point will, I hope, be made clear by the time it is
spelled out in Section 3.14.)
This is enough to establish an important logical connection
between the ATH and the IMH. However, I shall not argue for
the IMH simply by arguing for the stronger hypothesis, the ATH.
After all, one might choose to regard the inference as a reductio of
its premises. Also, the ATH does not entail the strong form of the
IMH that I shall be arguing for. It implies merely that there might
be two 'authentic' Guernicas; in other words that two painters might
independently produce canvases that instantiate the same work.
It does not entail that the mechanically produced copy of Picasso's
canvas is an instance of the work, and I want to argue that it is.
So I am going to treat the ATH and the IMH in relative indepen-
dence from one another. And there are, as we shall see, plenty of
arguments for the IMH that do not depend upon the ATH.
Leaving aside the question of entailment I think we can say that
the ATH and the IMH naturally complement each other. They
address two closely related but importantly distinct problems. We
may call these problems the problem of the identity of works, and
the problem of identity within a work. The first problem is solved
when we specify what features identify or are constitutive (as I
shall sometimes say) of the work itself. The ATH, in the specific
form that I shall advocate, tells us that works are structured entities,
with two identifying components. Works are identical if they have
the same identifying components. The second problem is solved
when we specify the circumstances under which an object is an

instance of a particular work. In solving this problem we shall also
be able to answer the question: when are two instances of works
instances of the same work? Sometimes I shall speak of the status
of an object within the work, having in mind the question whether
some object is an instance of the work in question. The IMH, as I
shall elaborate it, provides us with a way of answering questions
about identity within the work.
Together the ATH and the IMH provide an extremely simple
and economical theory about what art works are. The ATH tells
us that all works belong to the same category, while the IMH tells
us that there are no differences between works from the point of
view of the relation of the work to its instances. The theory
provided by the conjunction of these two principles thus seems to
be strongly unified, and this is something in its favour even before
we come to look at the arguments that may be used to support it.
This brief account may already be enough to indicate that my
arguments will contradict not only the dualistic theory outlined
above, but a number of other dualistic theories as well. Thus
Nicholas Wolterstorff has argued that the duality appropriate for
art works is not that between physical objects and types but
that between physical objects and what he calls 'norm kinds'. 6
Wolterstorff's theory and some others will receive some critical
attention further on.
7. THE PROBLEM OF FORGERY
A good deal has been written that bears on the IMH. Much,
for instance, has been written about the aesthetics of forgery.
Encouraged, no doubt, by the attractively sensational nature of
some recent cases - van Meegeren's 'Vermeers' , Keating's
'Palmers' - aestheticians have allowed that problem to set the tone
for discussions of the IMH. Thus the question has often been
raised as to whether a 'perfect forgery' of an existing painting is as
aesthetically valuable as the original itself.7 This focusing of our
concerns is unfortunate, because forgery introduces the essentially
extraneous notion of deception into the discussion, and because
most forgeries are not copies of existing works; they are works
painted in the style of another artist. To consider the case for
the IMH properly, we should concentrate on the legitimacy or
Introduction 11
otherwise of non-deceptive copying procedures in the visual arts.

The question we should ask is this: is there any aesthetically
relevant difference between the original painting and the perfect
copy - whatever the motivation of the copy's creator?
How exactly does this question bear upon the IMH? Strictly
speaking, one could admit that the perfect copy is aesthetically
indistinguishable from the original and still hold that the original
is identical with the work. In that case the original would have an
ontologically privileged position, but not an aesthetically privileged
one. Conversely one could hold that such copies are genuine
instances of the work, but that they are always and necessarily
inferior, from the aesthetic point of view, to the original. In
that case the original would be aesthetically privileged, but not
ontologically privileged. But I think we should be wary of attempts
such as this to divorce the ontology of art from questions about
aesthetic value and appreciation. I shall say a little about my view
of their connection.
8. ONTOLOGY AND APPRECIATION
Both the ATH and the IMH are theses in the ontology of art.
Philosophers these days tend to be rather wary of ontological
problems, and prefer to approach them, if at all, by way of theses
about language and meaning. This is not the approach that I shall
adopt here, but I agree with those who are suspicious of attempts
to solve problems in ontology in isolation from all epistemological
issues. I think it would be hopeless to try to come to a view about
the ontological status of art works by pure reflection on the concept
art work. We cannot understand what art is except by understanding
how art works (the so called 'affective fallacy' to the contrary). We
need, I think, to take Frege's advice on the subject. In the course
of analysing the concept natural number he proposed that we judge
the analysis in terms of its ability to deliver the intuitive judgements
about number that we pre-theoretically make. 8 Similarly we shall
look at the ways in which works are to be judged and appreciated.
This will provide a set of constraints on a theory about what art
works are. We can then see 'work of art' as a term occurring in an
overall aesthetic theory which describes and analyses the sorts of
relations that hold between us as critics and observers, and the
works themselves. The best explication of this term will be the one
that best fits into that overall theory.
Thus I shall begin by building up a theory about what features
of a work are relevant to an appreciation of the work. When we
have decided what these features are we can decide what sorts of
things works must be in order to have those features. We could
have begun one step further back, by inquiring into the nature of
aesthetic appreciation. Such an inquiry would be of interest, but I
should like to avoid its inclusion in a work that aims at brevity.
And I think we may legitimately defer that task, because the
question 'What features of a work are relevant to an appreciation
of it?' can be answered independently of how we explicate the
notion of appreciation. In fact, deciding what features are relevant
to appreciation itself sets constraints on a theory of what appreci-
ation is. So we can afford, I think, to start with an investigation
into the nature of the aesthetically relevant features of art works. I
shall start, in fact, by considering a simple and initially rather
plausible theory about what determines the aesthetically relevant
features of a work. In seeing how the theory goes wrong we shall
put ourselves in a position to develop an adequate theory to replace
it. In Chapter 3 we shall use this theory to motivate the thesis that
art works are action types.
Another and related notion that I shall employ without any kind
of analysis is that of aesthetic value. Contrary to an earlier intention
I shall say nothing about whether aesthetic values are real; whether
they are, as John Mackie put it, 'part of the fabric of the world'.9
The matter is immensely complicated, and I decided that whatever
I have to say about it must be reserved for another occasion. I
should like to think that the theory I am offering here could be
accepted by value realists and anti-realists alike; at least, that it
could be accepted by those anti-realists who are prepared to allow
talk of value at all, choosing to understand it ultimately in terms
of preferences. Such appeal as I make to the notion of value is
really no more than an appeal to the phenomenon of valuing. And
while there may be, in some sense or other, no values, there
undoubtedly is valuing. My thesis is about the kinds of strategies
that we adopt when we come to value art works; it does not
commit me to the view that value resides in the works themselves.
Introduction 13
9. KINDS OF WORKS
I am arguing here for theses which are supposed to apply to all

kinds of art works. But I shall not explicitly consider every kind of
art work that there is or might be. To do so would be tedious and
would extend the length of this essay intolerably. Instead I shall
concentrate on the major kinds of art recognised in the western
cultural tradition; music which is composed and transmitted by
means of a score, written literature, painting and sculpture,
together with visual art forms like print making and etching (more
on these in a moment). Conceivably, my argument may not apply
to all other forms of art, and showing that it does not would
certainly refute my hypothesis in all its generality. But I am
immediately concerned to show here that the hypothesis (the
conjunction of the ATH and the IMH) does apply to those kinds
of arts which are most firmly embedded in our culture, and which
are most often discussed in the philosophical literature. These are
the first cases that a general ontology of art must confront; if it
does not get them right the theory cannot be correct. On the other
hand, getting these clear cases right may confer a strength upon
the theory that will help it to withstand apparent counterexamples
from other, less clear, cases. Further, part of my task is to obliterate
a distinction that is made between kinds of arts where works may
have multiple instances and kinds of arts where works may not.
Now if this distinction has any pre-analytical grip on us - and I
certainly concede that it has - it does so in virtue of there being
(apparently) clear cases of the former kind and (apparently) clear
cases of the latter kind. But what clearer cases of the former kind
could there be than notational music and literature, and what
clearer cases of the latter kind could there be than painting and
sculpture? If I can show that there is not the kind of difference
between these arts that there is supposed to be in respect of their
possible instances, then I have refuted the best cases that anyone
has ever made out for the existence of the distinction, and thus
provided a strong argument in favour of the IMH. So in this respect
at least, confining ourselves to these most traditionally recognised
art forms is no limitation.
I should say more about one class of works amongst those that
will concern us, since the reader may already be puzzled as to how
they fit into our scheme. Forms such as etching, print making and
bronze casting are kinds of art that do not fall easily into either of
the categories envisaged by the dualistic theory that I am opposing

here. For in these cases works do have multiple instances, no one
of which can be regarded as more authentic than any other; but at
the same time the idea of authenticity seems to playa restraining
role in determining what may count as an instance of the work.
Thus it is said that while there can be many correct instances of a
print, all those instances must be pulled from the same original
plate. Something that looked exactly like a correct instance of a
print work but which was produced by some other means would
not be an instance of the work. And something that looked exactly
like a particular bronze statue but which was not cast in the original
mould would not be an instance of that work. How do cases like
this relate to the distinction I am opposing? In opposing that
distinction am I simply leaving these other kinds of visual art out
of account? We need to say something more on this topic.
to. AUTOGRAPHIC!ALLOGRAPHIC
Nelson Goodman has drawn a distinction between what he calls

autographic and allographic arts.lD An art form is autographic if the
only criterion of identity within the work is that the object under
consideration has a certain history of production. Thus print
making and cast sculpture, as well as easel painting and that
kind of sculpture which gives rise to a single shaped object are
autographic arts, even though works in the first two kinds can
have multiple instances. An instance of a print may differ greatly
from other instances of the same print, but it is still an instance if
it was pulled from the original plate; otherwise it is not. And
something is an instance (the instance) of Guernica if it is the object
upon which Picasso distributed paint in a certain way; otherwise
it is not. Literature and music, on the other hand, are examples of
allographic arts. Something being an instance of works of these
kinds is not a matter of the history of its production; it is determined
in some other way. Literature and music are allographic because
being a correct instance of a work of either kind is a matter of
conformity to a notation. The copy of the novel must be correctly
spelt, the performance of the symphony played in accordance with
the score. That is all there is to identifying what work the instance
is an instance of. Questions about how the copy or performance
originated are irrelevant. For art forms where identification of a
Introduction 15
work's instances is possible at all, the distinction between auto-

graphic and allographic arts is exhaustive. Any such work is either
autographic or allographic. Easel painting, print making and
sculpture of all kinds fall on one side of the divide, literature and
music on the other. That is Goodman's doctrine.
I shall argue in Section 4.18 that Goodman's distinction fails to
distinguish any kind of art from any other kind. Thus one of my
conclusions will be that in painting, print making, literature, music
and everything else, it is a condition on something being an
instance of a given work that it bear a certain kind of causal-
intentional relation to the original canvas, plate or mould, or to
the Original MS or score. And it is a further condition in all these
cases that the thing bear a non-causal similarity relation to a certain
object. But it must be stressed that the kind of causal relation that
I consider essential here is different from, and weaker than, that
envisaged by Goodman; and that this causal condition is not such
as to make it impossible for easel paintings and carved sculptures
to have more than one instance. I hold, against Goodman, that all
kinds of art works are reproducible without limit and that an
object's being an instance of a work is not a question of it having
been painted by the artist himself, or having been pulled from the
original plate, or having been cast in the original mould. These
remarks are not intended as explanatory of an account that I shall
give only later, but merely as notice that I do intend to cover those
art forms like print making where only a limited multiplicity of
instances is conventionally granted.
11. A DISCLAIMER
One final comment before I begin the argument. It hardly needs

saying that what I shall be offering here by way of arguments do
not establish the ATH and the IMH with absolute certainty. But
this essay should be prefaced by another, less trivial, disclaimer.
My purpose is primarily to advance our understanding of what is
involved in accepting these two theses. David Lewis has suggested
that metaphysical inquiry does not establish theses, it rather fixes
their prices; we work out what we have to believe in order to
believe the thesis in question. ll It is particularly true, I think, that
we are currently very hazy about the price of the IMH, even though
it, or something like it, has been advocated and rejected on a
number of occasions. We simply have no dear idea about what

accepting it commits us to. Everything depends upon the price
you are prepared to pay. My aim is to find out what that price is.
2
Empiricism
1. WHAT IS EMPIRICISM?
In this chapter we shall begin our investigations by considering an

influential aesthetic theory which relates in important ways to the
theses being argued for here. This theory provides a straightforward
argument for the IMH. Unfortunately from our point of view, the
theory is mistaken. Consequently, we must find another argument
for the IMH. On the other hand, in seeing what is wrong with the
theory we put ourselves in a better position to argue for the ATH.
The theory I shall consider might be called'aesthetic empiricism' .
'Empiricism' is the name we give to a family of philosophical
theories which are united by their insistence that our theories and
judgements must, if they are to be validated at all, be validated by
the evidence of our senses. In the philosophy of science this view
is expressed in the principle that there is no choosing between
empirically equivalent theories. The only reason for thinking a
theory true is that its empirically verifiable consequences are true.
If two theories have the same empirical consequences there can be
no experimental test that decides between them, and hence no
reason for believing one rather than the other. Empiricism finds
its natural expression in aesthetics in the view that a work - a
painting, for instance - is a 'sensory surface'. What is aesthetically
valuable in a painting can be detected merely by looking at it.
Features that cannot be so detected are not properly aesthetic ones.
It is this empiricist idea - that aesthetics is concerned only with
the surfaces of things - that David Prall was defending when he
said that 'Cotton will suffice aesthetically for snow, provided that
at our distance from it it appears snowy' (1936, p. 6).
This idea is in various ways extendible to the other arts that we
are considering here. Thus it is said that the limits of musical
appreciation are the limits of what can be heard in the work. 1
Properties of the work that we cannot come to know simply by
listening to it are not aesthetic properties. There is no straightfor-
ward application of this idea to literature, because it is clearly
17
wrong to say that what is aesthetically valuable in the literary work

can be perceived in some direct sensory way; appreciation requires
understanding the words on the page as well as seeing or hearing
them. But empiricists, and others who are in general not empiricists
at all, have argued that appreciation of the literary work must not
go beyond the text itself. For the text has a meaning that is
independent of facts about the work's history and, in particular,
independent of the intentions that the author had in writing it. A
version of this theory was argued for by Wimsatt and Beardsley in
their very influential article 'The Intentional Fallacy' .2 We shall give
a brief consideration to their position in Section 4.4.
The empiricist admits, of course, that works of art have properties
other than those directly perceptible at its surface, and that these
properties can be of interest to us in various ways. Works of art
have histories, and it is the business of art history to determine
what those histories are. But the history of a work, the influences
upon it, its influence on other works, its place in the development
of pictorial style, the aims and intentions of the artist who painted
it; these things do not affect its aesthetic status. Only confusion
can arise from the failure sharply to separate art-historical status
and aesthetic status. That, at any rate, is what the empiricist tells
us. 3
Empiricism (which is what from now on I shall call aesthetic
empiricism) means, then, that the boundaries of the aesthetic are
set by the boundaries of vision, hearing or verbal understanding,
depending on which art form is in question. So influential has this
view been that some recent writers have identified it as a central
presupposition of the whole discipline of aesthetics. Thus Timothy
Binkley wrote that 'The flaw in aesthetics is this: how something
looks is partly a function of what we bring to it, and art is too
culturally dependent to survive in the mere look of things' (1977,
pp. 272-3). But this identification depends upon a much too narrow
construal of the aesthetic. Art works may be appreciated and
analysed in ways that do not presuppose empiricism. Empiricism
is just one approach to aesthetics. Part of our task in this chapter
will be to sketch an alternative to it.
2. EMPIRICISM AND SUPERVENIENCE
Empiricists face an immediate problem: exactly what can be seen

Empiricism 19
by merely looking at a picture? This turns out to be a tremendously

difficult problem in the philosophy of mind and perception.
Perhaps the least contentious answer that the empiricist could give
to our question is this: we see patterns of colours. Anything else
that we claim to see in a picture - as when we claim to see beauty
or the representation of a person - is, properly speaking, a matter
of interpretation rather than mere seeing. But this very restrictive
view about what can be seen puts the empiricist in an embarrassing
position when it comes to explaining our aesthetic judgements.
For if the aesthetic properties of a work are those that can be cited
as reasons for an aesthetic judgement (a judgement as to the quality
of the work), then it seems that on the empiricist's account the
only thing we can do to defend such a judgement is to cite the
colours of the work and their locations on the canvas. (Let us call
such properties pictorial properties; and we shall include among
pictorial properties those properties to do with the surface texture
of a picture. The pictorial properties of a work concern how it
looks, and works with the same pictorial properties will look
exactly the same. The overall appearance of a work will be referred
to as its 'pattern'. We shall also use these terms in referring to
sculptural works, generalising in the obvious ways.)
But such a view as this is wildly at variance with our critical
practice, because we often say that a work is good or valuable
because it, or some part of it, exhibits, say, grace or dynamism.
And in doing so we are doing more than merely citing the pictorial
properties of the work. Further, there does not seem to be any
way of translating statements about beauty, grace, dynamism or
other paradigmatically aesthetic characteristics into statements
about pictorial properties. Attributions of aesthetic properties
cannot be 'reduced to' attributions of pictOrial properties.
This last point has been forcefully made by Frank Sibley, who
tried to develop a version of empiricism that avoids this difficulty.4
Sibley argued first of all that aesthetic properties are not 'condition
governed'. We cannot give necessary and sufficient conditions for
their application in non-aesthetic terms. We cannot say that a line
is graceful if and only if it has such and such a shape, and we
cannot say that a pattern of colours is vibrant if and only if it
consists of certain colours in certain spatial relations. There are
indefmitely many different lines that may be graceful, and the
gracefulness of a given line may be partly a function of the shapes
of other lines with which it is juxtaposed. Similarly, there are
indefinitely many different colour combinations which, in various

situations, will count as vibrant. This is why we cannot hope for a
reduction of the aesthetic to the non-aesthetic. Statements about
gracefulness cannot be replaced without change of content by
statements that refer only to lines and colours.
In this way Sibley anticipated some important arguments that
have recently been urged in the philosophy of mind. It has been
argued that, while we may not need a dualism of substances
(mental and physical) we may need a dualism of properties. A
mental property like being in pain cannot be identified with any
physical property, because that would have the consequence that
beings, so different from us in their physical make-up that they
do not instantiate any of the physical properties that we instantiate,
could not be in pain. But surely there can be creatures complex
enough to feel pain, and to instantiate more sophisticated 'inten-
tional' mental properties as well, yet who are physically very
different from us. Mental states must be, as we say, 'realisationally
plastic': they can be realised by indefinitely many physical states. s
Sibley's point was that the aesthetic properties of a picture are
realisationally plastic with respect to its pictorial properties.
All this seems to make the gap between pictorial properties and
aesthetic properties wider. How does Sibley deal with the problem?
His answer is to say that a picture has aesthetic properties which
are not themselves pictorial properties in the strict sense, but which
it has in virtue of the pictorial properties it has. On this view the
aesthetic properties of a picture supervene on its pictorial properties.
If two pictures look exactly alike - if they have the same pictorial
properties - they will have the same aesthetic properties. And this
idea is consistent with the view that the class of aesthetic properties
is distinct from (thought possibly overlapping with) the class of
pictorial properties and with there being no straightforward sense
in which the aesthetic properties are reducible to, or definable in
terms of, the pictorial properties. Consider an analogous case.
G. E. Moore is famous for insisting that ethical properties cannot
be reduced to naturalistic properties. But he also seems to have
believed that ethical properties supervene on naturalistic ones. If
St Francis was a good man, then surely anyone like him in all
naturalistic respects (in respect, say, of thought and action) would
have to be a good man also. 6
Now the empiricist can start to give a more plausible account of
what we do when we make aesthetic judgements about, and
Empiricism 21
discriminations between, pictures. While admitting that there is

more to appreciating a picture than merely noticing its pictorial
properties, he will insist that everything relevant to appreciation
is determined by pictorial properties alone. Fix the work's pictorial
properties and you thereby fIx its aesthetic properties also. But
how do we get from judgements about pictorial properties to
judgements about aesthetic properties? To say that the one deter-
mines the other is not to say how we arrive at the other on the
basis of the one alone, especially if there is no translation procedure
available for turning judgements about pictorial properties into
judgements about aesthetic properties. Sibley's answer is to say
that we do so by employing the faculty of taste. While pictorial
properties determine, in an abstract sense, the work's aesthetic
properties, it is possible for there to be someone who is perfectly
well sighted, and therefore perfectly able to detect the pictorial
properties of the work, but who fails utterly to see that the work
is graceful, dynamic, vibrant, or whatever. And the reason is that
the person lacks, or is for some reason unable to exercise, the
faculty of taste. So a person who is able to employ the faculty of
taste is able to appreciate the aesthetic qualities of work by having
just that information that is presented to him by looking at the
picture's surface. Knowledge of any other facts about the work is
unnecessary in order for taste to be successfully employed.
The empiricist will sometimes admit that a knowledge of the
work's history can playa heuristic role in our coming to appreciate
it. A person may simply fail to notice some aesthetically relevant
pictorial property of the work until his attention is directed towards
it by his coming to possess information about the work's history of
production: its having been painted by a certain artist at a certain
time and place, its conventional and iconographic features, the
influence upon it of other works and artists, etc. But an art-
historical fact is never, according to the empiricist, directly relevant
to a judgement about the work's aesthetic qualities. It may not
legitimately be cited as a reason for making an aesthetic judgement.
Art-historical facts may suggest certain aesthetic judgements; they
can never justify them. And if two pictures happen to look exactly
the same, there can be no aesthetic difference between them,
whatever other differences between them there might be.
Up until now we have content with a rather informal account of
the supervenience thesis (5). Empiricists have often stated their
view in an impressionistic way that is hard to criticise. Thus
Monroe Beardsley, reflecting on his earlier empiricism, says 'I

reject the idea that there can be two indistinguishable paintings
very different in value' (1983, p. 229, my italics). And Beardsley
gives us no indication as to what limits of variation in value are
encompassed by the qualification 'very'. If we are to refute
empiricism we must know more clearly what we are dealing with.
So I shall give a sharp formulation of the supervenience thesis. If
we can show that this is false then it is up to empiricists to decide
what they will substitute for it if they want to continue with their
programme.
It is clear, first of all, that we cannot adequately formulate S as a
mere generalisation:
(51) 't:/x't:/y (x and y share the same pictorial properties ~ x and y

share the same aesthetic properties),
where x and yare variables that range over pictures.

This generalisation may well be true for the uninteresting reason
that there happen not to be any pictures that share exactly the
same pictorial properties; the thesis would then be 'vacuously
true'. And even if there are pictures that share all their pictorial
properties it may just happen that they share all their aesthetic
properties toO.7 If S is to be of philosophical interest it must, like
the statement of a natural law, 'sustain counterfactuals'; it must
enable us to infer that if any pictures did have the same pictorial
properties then they would have the same aesthetic properties. S
must be construed as involving some necessitation relation between
pictorial and aesthetic properties.
What kind of necessity is it that attaches to S? Let us introduce
at this point the idea of a possible word. 8 When we imagine how
the world might have been, if things were in some way different
from the way they actually are, then we are imagining a possible
world different from the actual world. Worlds are individuated by
what goes on in them. Distinct worlds must differ, in some respect
at least, as to the propositions that are true in them. Now to say
that a proposition is not merely true but necessarily true is to say
that it is true in every possible world. To say that a proposition is
pOSSibly true - that it might be or might have been true - is to say
that there is a world in which it is true. To say that a proposition
is true simpliciter is to say that it is true in the actual world.
In addition to these strict notions of possibility and necessity we
Empiricism 23
have variants like nomic possibility and necessity. There are worlds
that differ from the actual world in various ways but which
nevertheless possess the same laws of nature as the actual world.
Let N be the class of such worlds. We say, then, that a proposition
is nomically possible (consistent with the laws of nature) if it is
true in some world in N, and nOmically necessary (entailed by the
laws of nature) if it is true in all worlds in N. (We shall make brief
use of these concepts again in Section 4.12.) There are other
concepts of possibility and necessity definable in similar ways.
Now it seems that the empiricist is not plausibly understood as
arguing here for a thesis based on any contingent matter of fact,
such as what the laws of nature actually are. This is, after all,
something that we are very uncertain about. He is best understood
as arguing that the concept of an aesthetic property is such that
the aesthetic properties of, say, a painting, supervene on its
appearance. Anyway, to my knowledge, no empiricist has made
it clear what contingent matters of fact might be relevant here.
Thus in formalising S I shall not put any restriction on the possible
world quantifiers. I shall formulate the thesis in such a way that
in order for it to be true it must be true in every possible world. A
first shot at such a formulation might be this. Let x and y be
variables ranging, as before, over pictures and let w be a variable
ranging over worlds.
(52) VxVyVw (x and y have the same pictorial properties in W::::l

x and y have the same aesthetic properties in W).9
(52) can be contrasted with a stronger thesis (for the expression of

which we introduce another possible word variable, u):
(53) V xV yV uV W (x has the same pictorial properties in u that y

has in W ::::l x has the same aesthetic properties
in u that y has in w)
(53) entails (52), but not vice versa. (52) says merely that, sameness
of pictorial properties necessitates sameness of aesthetic properties
for pictures within the same world. It does not allow us to conclude
that for example, something in another possible world that looks
exactly the way Guernica actually looks will have the same aesthetic
properties that Guernica actually has. Is the empiricist committed
to either of (52) or (53)? I think he is committed to something more
than (52). As we have seen, the empiricist's motive is to separate

aesthetic questions from art-historical questions, and make the
former dependent upon pictorial properties alone. (52) fails to
capture that idea. To see this, consider an example from a quite
different area of philosophy; the relation between sense and
reference. On a broadly Fregean view, sense determines reference. 1o
Two expressions with the same sense must have the same reference.
But of course the Fregean thesis is not that sense alone determines
reference; facts about the world play their part as well. The
reference of 'the king of France' is determined not just by the sense
of that expression but by who happens to be the king of France.
What it means to say that sense determines reference is that if two
expressions have the same sense they will have the same reference
within any given world. An expression may have one reference in
one world and a quite different reference in another world, but
expressions with the same sense will undergo exactly the same
reference change from world to world. Thus the determination of
sense by reference must be formulated by analogy with (52) rather
than with (53).
Now let us go back to the formalisation of S. The empiricist's
intuition is that aesthetic properties are ahistorical; their application
does not depend upon the history of the work. It depends only
upon the precise configuration of the visual pattern. But (52) does
not explicate this intuition. For all that (52) tells us, it may be that
a picture with a certain history of production would have had quite
different aesthetic properties if its history had been different. In
that case one would need to know, of any picture, what its history
of production was in order to defend a judgement about its
aesthetic properties (just as, in order to know the reference of an
expression, one must know contingent facts about the world). All
one can say, given (52), is that two pictures in the same world that
look exactly alike will have the same aesthetic properties in that
world; and that falls far short of the empiricist claim that aesthetic
properties depend only on pictorial properties. Just as it would be
absurd to use the thesis of the determination of reference by sense
to argue that we can find out what our words refer to without
having to know any facts about the world, so it would be absurd
to use (52) to defend the irrelevance of a work's history to aesthetic
judgements about it.
One might try to defend the identification of empiricism with
(52) by reinvoking the notion of taste, saying that the person of
Empiricism 25
taste is a person who knows all the relevant non-pictorial facts

about the works concerned. It is knowledge of these facts which
enables the person of taste to pass from a perception of the visual
pattern to the aesthetic qualities of the work. And I think that
'having taste', as normally understood, does involve the possession
of art-historical knowledge. l l But such a response is unsatisfactory
from the empiricist's point of view. Taste is, according to Sibley,
the ability to interpret aesthetic properties on the basis of an
exposure to pictorial properties. If having that ability means also
having a lot of art-historical knowledge the empiricist has lost the
battle to separate aesthetic from art-historical interests. (53), I think,
does a much better job of characterising empiricism than (52)
does. It tells us that the aesthetic qualities of the work depend
logically only on the work's pictorial properties, without any
contribution from the work's history. We shall confront a similar
problem of interpretation in Section 3.4.
However, I should say now that (52), while weaker than (53), is
still false. While (53) best expresses the position of a pure empiri-
cism, it is possible to refute empiricism by finding counterexamples
to (52) alone, which is certainly a consequence of (53). In fact,
some of the counterexamples that I give in Section 2.8 can be
construed as counterexamples to (52) as well as to (53). So we need
not worry about whether my characterisation of empiricism is too
strong.
3. AESTHETIC PROPERTIES
Given the supervenience thesis, what properties will count as

aesthetic properties for the empiricist? The empiricist now has a
powerful intuitive test for whether a property is an aesthetic
property. For any property P, if we can imagine that two pictures
share exactly the same pictorial properties but that one possesses
P and the other does not, then P cannot be an aesthetic property.
For example, representational properties will not count as aesthetic,
for it is possible for two pictures to look exactly alike and yet for
them to represent different things. Consider, for instance, identical-
looking pictures of identical twins. Representation clearly has more
to do with the history of production of a work that with its
appearance. Which picture is a picture of which twin is decided,
not on grounds of appearance alone, but on grounds of causal-
intentional interaction between painter and subject. Properties like

representing a certain person we may call 'specific representational
properties'. But a picture can, in the ordinary sense, be a picture
of a chair, without it being a picture of any particular chair. In that
case it would have the 'non-specific representational property' of
representing a chair. Could pictures that look exactly alike have
distinct non-specific representational properties? Could two pic-
tures be visually alike, while one is a picture of a chair and the
other not? Yes. Imagine that there is a race of beings somewhere
in the universe who, because of their physical differences from us
have no use for chairs but do have a use for nose rests - portable
objects against which they rest their large noses. And it might be
that a picture of one of their nose rests looks exactly like a human
picture of a chair. These pictures look exactly alike, but differ with
respect to their non-specific representational properties. Not even
the most general representational properties are supervenient upon
pictorial properties. 12
The supervenience thesis clearly excludes from the realm of the
aesthetic facts about a work's history of production: who it was
painted by, in what style it was painted, when and where, etc.
Pictures that look exactly alike may have been produced by different
artists at different times and in different circumstances. It is true
that we often infer facts about a work's origin from its appearance;
and appearance is often a good guide to origin. But this is always
plausible inference, not deduction. It is possible for a work's origins
to be quite out of keeping with what its appearance would suggest
to us. Otherwise, successful forgery would be impossible.
4. WHY 'EMPIRIOSM'?
It may be said that in using 'empiricism' to describe the doctrine

under consideration, I am using that term in an eccentric way.
After all, someone who thinks that the boundaries of the aesthetic
are determined by the boundaries of the work's pictorial properties
need not think that all the other properties of the work are
empirically undetectable. Any number of such properties clearly
are empirical; how do we find out who painted a picture other
than by an empirical inquiry? However, at least some of the
arguments designed to exclude the work's history from the material
relevant to its evaluation are based upon scepticism about the
Empiricism 27
empirical availability of certain aspects of that history. Thus it is

said that we cannot take into account the intentions of the artist,
because those intentions are private mental items unavailable to
US. 13 And it certainly does seem that we are on firmer ground,
from an empirical point of view, if we stick to the picture itself and
do not try to reconstruct its history which, with the passage of time,
becomes an increasingly conjectural enterprise. The advantage of
pictorial properties from the point of view of the empiricist is that
they are immediately given to us - unless the picture is ageing or
damaged (a point with important ramifications that I shall not
pause to examine here). Thus I think that my use of 'empiricism'
does have at least some motivation. Anyhow, I define an empiricist
as one who is committed to (53).
(53) has natural analogues in the other arts, to which the
empiricist will also be committed. Thus if x and y range over
literary works we have
(53') VxVyVuVw (x in u and y in w are identically spelt :::::> they

have the same aesthetic properties),
where identity of spelling is a matter of sameness of letters,

punctuation and spacing. And if x and y range over musical works
we have
(53") V x V y V u V w (x in u and y in w have identical scores :::::>

they have the same aesthetic properties).
As we shall see, (53') and (53") are false for the same reason that
(53) is false.
5. EMPIRICISM AND THE IMH
Let us now connect empiricism with one of the hypotheses of this

book. (53) tells us that a work's aesthetic features supervene upon,
or are determined by its pictorial features. On this view, if we have
a copy that looks exactly like the original from which it is copied
there is nothing to choose between them from the aesthetic point
of view. But if there is no aesthetic ground for distinguishing
between them there seems to be little reason for identifying the
original with the work and denying to the copy any status within
the work. To do this would be to divorce questions about identity

within a work from questions about the aesthetic status of works.
And it is hard to believe that decisions about work identity, unless
they are arbitrary stipulations, can be made in isolation from
decisions about the ways in which aesthetically important character-
istics are distributed (see my remarks in Section 1.8 above). So
empiricism seems to undermine the dualistic view, and point us
in the direction of the IMH. If appearance counts for everything,
then the copy of Guernica, as long as it looks right, ought to be as
much an instance of that work as my correctly spelt copy of Emma
is an instance of that work.
Indeed, empiricism seems to establish something stronger even
than this. For it is surely possible for one picture to look exactly
like another without either being a copy of the other, the two
pictures having been produced in causal isolation from one another.
But (53) tells us that they do not differ in any aesthetically significant
way. And so, by the argument of the preceding paragraph, we
ought to conclude that each is an instance of the same work.
Whether the one is a copy of the other is, from the point of
view of strict empiricism, irrevelant. Similarly, the empiricist will
conclude that if two poets happen to come up with the same
sequences of words, or two composers independently produce the
same score, they must be said to have arrived at the same work,
however different their paths to that work may be. We shall begin
our attack on empiricism at this point.
6. A FIRST ARGUMENT AGAINST EMPIRICISM
I shall offer a number of arguments against empiricism, all involving

counterexamples to (53). The first argument I shall consider is due
to Kendall Walton. Walton's argument is to be found in an extremely
important paper entitled 'Categories of Art' .14
Walton begins with the idea of a category of art. A category of art
is determined by a choice of standard, variable and contra-standard
features. Thus the category painting is such that it is a standard
feature of paintings that they are two dimensional. If we know
that something is a painting then we expect it to have (at least
approximately) a flat surface. Paintings also have features that are
variable; for instance, subject matter and distribution of colour.
These features vary from painting to painting without obvious
Empiricism 29
limit. A contra-standard feature is one the possession of which

tends to disqualify to object from the category concerned. We do
not expect paintings to have mobile elements or to emit melodic
sounds, for instance. Similar points can be made about other art
forms. In classical tragedy the tragic fate of the hero is standard,
details of the plot are variable, while a happy ending would be
contra-standard.
Now Walton's thesis is that the aesthetic qualities of works
supervene, not merely on their pictorial properties, but rather on
pictorial properties together with the category to which the work
belongs. Two works may be visually identical but have distinct
aesthetic properties, because they belong to different categories.
Walton tells the following story.
Imagine a society which does not have an established medium

of painting, but does produce a kind of work of art called
guernicas. Guernicas are like versions of Picasso's 'Guernica' done
in various bas-relief dimensions. All of them are surfaces with
the colors and shapes of Picasso's 'Guernica', but the surfaces
are moulded to protrude from the wall like relief maps of different
kinds of terrain . . . . Picasso's 'Guernica' would be counted as
a guernica in this society - a perfectly flat one - rather than as a
painting. Its flatness is variable and the figures on its surface are
standard relative to the category of guernicas. . .. This would
make for a profound difference between our aesthetic reaction
to 'Guernica' and theirs. It seems violent, dynamic, vital, distur-
bing to us. But I imagine it would strike them as cold, stark,
lifeless, or serene and restful, or perhaps bland, dull, boring -
but in any case not violent, dynamic, and vital (1970, p. 347,
italics in the original).
To avoid any subsequent confusion, I shall use 'guemica' to

refer to the category, and 'Guernica' to refer to the painting. Let us
suppose, to fill out Walton's example a little, that in the society
imagined there is a work produced (a guemica) which is flat, and
which looks exactly like Picasso's canvas Guernica. Let us call
Picasso's painting 'GI ', and the flat guemica 'G2'. What Walton is
telling us is that G1 and G2 have the same pictorial properties, but
distinct aesthetic properties. While G1 is dynamic, G2 is lifeless, or
serene, or boring, but certainly not dynamic. And this difference
in their aesthetic properties is due, according to Walton, to their
possession of different standard and variable features. They belong

to different categories. Thus the aesthetic features of a work are
not merely a function of how the work looks, but of how it is to
be looked at. To know how to look at a picture we must know how
to distinguish between those visible elements that are standard, and
those that are variable.
In the case of the category painting it is natural to think of
the difference between standard and non-standard features as a
difference between features that have relatively little impact and
features that have more impact on the observer. Someone properly
familiar with paintings hardly notices that the picture is flat,
concentrating their attention on the pictorial, representational and
other properties of the artist's work. But it would be wrong to
generalise this way of drawing the distinction. Mondrian's neo-
plasticist works, for instance, belong to a category (a sub-category
of painting) in which it is standard for blocks of colour to be set at
right angles to the horizontal and vertical axes of the picture. But
this standard feature is a very prominent feature of such works.
Similarly, literary genres such as the revenge tragedy have certain
standard features (e.g. the revenger will be destroyed once he has
wreaked havoc on his enemies) that play an important part in
determining our response to the work. I do not think that there is
one uniformly applicable description of the way in which the
distinction between standard and non-standard features contrib-
utes to the aesthetic impact of the work. But the distinction is
clearly an important one. (It is illuminating, for instance, to read
Ernst Gombrich's Art and Illusion in the light of this distinction.)
Without further argument I shall simply assume that Walton is
right to say that a work's aesthetic properties are partly a function
of the category to which it belongs. If that is right, Walton presents
us not merely with a counterexample to empiricism (the case of
Guernica) but with an explanation of what is wrong with empiricism:
it fails to accommodate the aesthetic relevence of category consider-
ations. And Walton presses the argument further; the Guernica
example shows that a work's aesthetic properties are in at least
some cases determined partly by its history of production. For in
the case we are considering it is natural to say that the category to
which Picasso's G1 belongs is determined by facts about the context
in which it was produced. G1 is a painting partly because Picasso
intended that it be judged as a painting (and not, for instance, as
a guemica) and partly because it was painted in a society which
Empiricism 31
recognises the category of paintings but not the category of

guemicas. In that case the example is a counter-example to
empiricism exactly because the empiricist refuses to acknowledge
the dependence of aesthetic features on the work's history of
production.
7. HOW TO RELATIVISE AESTHETIC PROPERTIES
One obvious response to this counter-example that the empiricist

can offer is this. Aesthetic properties are, when properly under-
stood, relative to a category. That is, one cannot simply say that a
work is dynamic or non-dynamic; one must say instead that it is
dynamic as a painting, or non-dynamic as a guemica. And for
something to be dynamic as a painting is for it to be such that,
when viewed as having those standard, variable and contra-
standard features determined by the category painting, it appears
as dynamic. If this is correct then Walton does not have a
counterexample to empiricism, but rather a proof of the relativity
of aesthetic attributions. Both Gl and G2 have the property of being
dynamic as a painting and non-dynamic as a guemica; neither has
the property of being dynamic or non-dynamic simpliciter. So there
is no aesthetic difference between them.
Walton has a reply to this: that 'category-relative interpretations
do not allow aesthetic judgements to be mistaken often enough'
(1970, p. 355). Someone who made the judgement that G1 is dull
or cold would surely just be wrong, and they would still be
counted as wrong if they explained that their judgement was more
completely expressible as the judgement that G1 is dull as a
guemica. For 'in at least some cases, it is correct to perceive a work
in certain categories, and incorrect to perceive it in certain others'
(p. 356, italics in the original). G1 just is a painting and not a
guemica. Seeing it as a guemica is seeing it wrongly. So on this
account aesthetic properties like being dynamic are dependent
upon category considerations, but their attributions are taken to
be unrelativised to categories. A work is either dynamic or non-
dynamic; it cannot be both. This seems to me the wrong way to
answer the objection.
To see this, consider the following possibility.15 Suppose that
the history of art had been somewhat different, and that we had
come to recognise the category of guemicas as well as the category
of paintings. Suppose also that Picasso decided, as he very well

might have, to produce a work that belonged simultaneously to
both categories. The result is his familiar G1 • What are we to say
about its aesthetic properties in this situation? If we follow Walton
in insisting that aesthetic properties like being dynamic are absolute
we would have to say that GI is both dynamic and non-dynamic,
these judgements being the result of seeing the work in two
different categories to which it in fact does belong. But this would
involve a contradiction. Nothing can be simultaneously dynamic
and non-dynamic.
The solution comes when we realise that there are two distinct
ways in which aesthetic properties can be relativised. Walton's
objection is an objection only to one of these ways; the way
according to which 'is dynamic' really means 'is dynamic as a K',
which in turn is short for 'is dynamic when viewed as if it belonged
to the category K'. But the alternative is to treat aesthetic attributions
as category-relative in the sense that they are always relative to
categories to which the work does in fact belong. On this view 'is
dynamic' means 'is dynamic for a K', which in turn is short for
'belongs to the category K and is dynamic when viewed as
belonging to that category'. On this view it would be wrong for
someone to claim that G1 is non-dynamic for a guernica, exactly
because it is not a guemica. It does not have the right history of
production to count as belonging to the category of guemicas. But
if history had been different in the way I just described, then G1
would be both a painting and a guemica, and we would be able
to say, without fear of paradox, that it is both dynamic for a
painting and non-dynamic for a guemica.
Although Walton does not distinguish explicity between the 'P
as a K' account of aesthetic properties (where P is a property) and
the 'P for a K' account, it is possible to find in what he says an
objection to the latter as well as to the former. He finds significance
in the analogy between category relative judgements about art
works and judgements like, 'This animal is small (for an elephant)'
(ibid., p. 356). Here the need for the bracketed relativisation is
pressing and obvious. For most judgements about the size of an
animal we can imagine quite legitimate reference classes to which
that animal belongs and with respect to which the simple judgement
of size would be false; even a small elephant may be large for a
mammal. And there are purposes for which it is as reasonable to
compare an elephant with other mammals in general as to compare
Empiricism 33
it only with other elephants. So it is at least usually true that an

animal, however small, is large for a something. But we do not
want to say of Gl that it is dull in any sense. So we had better
avoid relativising judgements about aesthetic properties in the way
that we relativise judgements about size. Walton concludes:
The conflict between apparently incompatible aesthetic judge-

ments made while perceiving a work in different categories does
not simply evaporate when the difference of category is pointed
out, as does the conflict between the claim that an animal is
large and that it is small, when it is made clear that the person
making the first claim regarded it as a mini-elephant and the
one making the second claim regarded it as an elephant (ibid.,
p.356).
However, the point is not that we need to relativise in the case

of properties like size and not in the case of aesthetic properties. It
is rather that we need to recognise that correct relativisations to
artistic categories are much less easy to come by than relativisations
that might be useful for properties like size. When we consider
judgements of size there is no natural limit to the class of things
that we might compare the object with. If we are considering how
large the different things in this room are we might end up with a
reference class that includes (among other things) a raven and a
writing desk. But categories of art cannot be gerrymandered in this
way. Not every class of paintings is the extension of a category of
art. In fact very few such classes are. The class of paintings
currently on exhibition at the Tate Gallery does not correspond to
any category. We have to regard a category as specified by some
'natural' choice of standard, variable and contra-standard features.
Complicated disjunctions such as might be used to show that the
class of paintings in the Tate belong to the same category must be
ruled out. (To do this for all cases would not be easy. We must
rely heavily on intuitions here.) And in view of our discussion so
far, I hardly need add that while it may be possible to think up a
natural sounding category to which a work appears to belong (as
G1 appears to belong to the category of guernicas) it will not in
fact belong to it unless it has the correct history of production; it is
this that makes it the case that G1 is a painting and not a guernica.
So in allowing that judgements of aesthetic properties are relative
to a category in the way I have suggested we do not license
intuitively unwarranted judgements such as 'GI is dull (for some

K)'; for there is no category to which GI belongs and with respect
to which it is dull. In fact, having introduced aesthetic properties
as category relative we can now, derivatively, introduce an absolute
interpretation for such properties. A work will be dynamic simpli-
citer if it is dynamic for a K, for every category K to which it
belongs. We may then say, truly, that GI is dynamic simpliciter,
exactly because there happens to be no category to which it actually
belongs and with respect to which it fails to be dynamic. These
results will be applied in the next section.
8. MOVING FURTHER AWAY FROM EMPIRICISM
With this correction in mind, let us return to Walton's main thesis.

The thesis is that the aesthetic properties of a work supervene on
its pictorial properties, together with the category of art to which
it belongs. While Walton recognises that this is a refutation of
empiricism in the strict sense, he turns out to have some sympathy
with empiricist ideas. He says; 'I do not deny that paintings and
sonatas are to be judged solely on what can be seen or heard in
them - when they are perceived correctly' (i.e. in the correct
category) (ibid., p. 367). Thus aesthetic judgements about visual
art are to be based on the perception of visible properties in the
work, as those visible features are weighted in accordance with
the category to which the work belongs. In this way Walton can
give a pleasingly precise answer to the question: how much do we
need to know about the history of a work in order to appreciate
the work correctly? His answer is: just enough history to decide
what category it belongs to.
Walton's view is certainly an advance on empiricism, but I do
not think that it is correct. That is, I do not think that it goes far
enough beyond empiricism to avoid the sorts of problems that
empiricism faces. I shall try to refute Walton in the same way that
he refuted empiricism; by constructing examples where works
which have the same pictorial properties and belong to the same
category have different aesthetic properties.
Consider, first of all, the case of Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avig-
non, a picture that is often said to be the first Cubist painting. But
though the work is highly valued for its originality, many have
been critical of certain features of the work. Critics have described
Empiricism 35
the composition as 'hasty and confused' and involving 'stylistic

inconsistencies' .16 But the work's greatness is recognised at the
same time, and this recognition is partly dependent upon the
recognition that, with this work, Picasso was struggling to bring
forth a new conception of representational painting.
Now imagine, however, that Les Demoiselles was not an early
Cubist painting but rather a late Cubist painting; that it was painted
at a time when the conventions of cubism had become well
entrenched. In that case I do not think that we would regard the
work so well. It would probably represent for us a degeneration
of Cubist art from the high standards set by Picasso's and Braque's
other works. But it does not seem to me that in imagining this
situation we would thereby be imagining a change in the category
to which the work belonged; at least it is possible to imagine that
what is standard, variable and contra-standard for Les Demoiselles
as an early Cubist work might also be standard, variable and
contra-standard for it as a late Cubist work. But we are, it seems,
imagining a situation in which the work's aesthetic properties are
other than they actually are. In that case we have a counter-
example to Walton.
Here is another example. Suppose we come across a panel
picture, apparently by Giotto, representing a scene from the life of
St Francis. Suppose also that the painting is apparently a striking
example of Giotto's ability to deal with problems of realistic
representation. The painting is as good as or better than any other
work of the same period in its representation of volume and
movement. Such a work would be highly praised by us. We then
disover that the work is a modem fake. And we discover this,
not by discovering anything in the picture's appearance that is
inconsistent with it being by Giotto, but by, say, X-ray analysis. In
that case our original assessment of the work's merits would have
to radically revised. We would probably decide that the work is
close to being worthless. But how could Walton account for this?
According to him we may revise our account of the work's aesthetic
properties only if we revise our account of its category. Now
Walton gives several criteria by which we may judge whether a
given work belongs to a given category:
1. That the artist intended it to be seen as belonging to that

category.
2. That the community in which the artist worked would be prone

to regard it as belonging to that category.
3. That it is mostly highly regarded when seen as belonging to
that category.
On all these counts, the modem fake would have to be said to

belong to the same category as Giotto's actual works. So Walton
has no grounds for saying that it would be rational for us to revise
our assessment of the work. But it seems, intuitively, that we
ought to revise our assessment of it.
It might be objected that the psuedo-Giotto painting fails to
belong to the same category as Giotto's actual work because it was
painted at the wrong time. But Walton's definition of a category
in terms of standard, variable and contra-standard features does
not allow us to exclude a work from a category on purely historical
grounds. He says' ... whether or not a piece of music was written
in the eighteenth century is irrelevant to whether it belongs to the
category of classical sonatas ... and whether a work was produced
by Cezanne or Beethoven has nothing essential to do with whether
it is in the style of Cezanne or late Beethoven' (ibid., p. 339).
On the other hand, Walton might deny that these examples are
counter-examples to this thesis at all. He might insist that while
they are cases in which we would probably want to reassess the
work's art-historical status, they are not cases in which we would
want to reassess its aesthetic status. Thus the late Cubist Demoiselles
and the psuedo-Giotto are indiscernible, aesthetically, from the
early Demoiselles and the genuine Giotto respectively, but they are
considerably less important from the point of view of art history.
We might sum up this line of thought by saying that, while a late
Demoiselles would be a much less interesting achievement for
Picasso than an early one, and while the faker's achievement in
producing the psuedo-Giotto would be much less significant than
Giotto's in producing the same picture, a work's aesthetic properties
are independent of the artist's achievement. It is this last idea that
I want to undermine in my third example.
Imagine that there is a race of beings who live on Mars and who
have aesthetic interests and sensibilities much like our own. They
differ from us, however, in that their artistic abilities are vastly
greater than ours. What for us would be a work of consummate skill
and subtle expression would be for them something unremarkable
if it were the product of an average five-year-old Martian.
Empiricism 37
Imagine that an untalented (by Martian standards) Martian child

produces something that looks exactly like Picasso's Guernica,
though it is produced independently of it; at the time of painting
assume no contact between the Martian's community and ours.
Let us recycle the tags used a few pages back and call Picasso's
canvas 'G{ and that of the Martian child 'G2'. Imagine also that
Martians have the same categories of art that we do, or at least
that they share with us sufficiently many conventions about the
categorisation of art works for us to say that these two pictures
belong to the same category. So if there is any aesthetic difference
between them it cannot be explained as a difference of category.
Since they look the same it cannot be due to a difference of
appearance.
Is there, in fact, any aesthetic difference between them? We
think that Gl is very valuable, while the Martians think that G2 is
not at all valuable. So if there is in fact no aesthetic difference
between them one or other of these judgements must be wrong.
But there does not seem to be any principled reason for saying
that one is right and the other wrong. From our perspective, our
judgement that Gl is a great work seems as rationally defensible
as their judgement that G2 is lousy seems to be from theirs. Any
grounds that we might have for rejecting their judgement about
G2 could presumably be matched by grounds they would have for
rejecting our judgement about Gl . It would be completely arbitrary,
therefore, to say that one was right and the other wrong. So it
seems that there must be an aesthetic difference between Gl and
G2 • In that case aesthetic value does not supervene on appearance
plus category.
But perhaps this is too swift a conclusion. For one might say
instead that the argument shows that both we and the Martians
are wrong. And what would be wrong with our judgements is
that they presuppose an absolute concept of aesthetic value. A
work cannot be said to be great or lousy in any absolute sense; it
is simply better or worse than some other works. There is a
continuum along which we can place pictures and with reference
to which we can say that one picture is better than another. And
presumably we can agree with the Martians about the relative
positions of pictures on the continuum, agreeing that Gl and G2
occupy the same position. It is just that most human works are
worse than Gl and most Martian works better than G2 •
So far as it goes, this is a correct response. But it leaves us with
the problem of interpreting our claim that G1 is a great work, and

the Martian claims that G2 is not a great work. I do not think that
our judgement that Gl is great, and countless similar judgements
that we make, can just be dismissed. The only way to make sense
of our judgements of aesthetic value in this and other cases is to
interpret them as being relativised to the class of human works of
art. The scale that we use is the scale defined by the kinds of artistic
abilities found in our communities (and analogously for Martian
judgements). Gl and G2 turn out to have the same value on the
absolute scale, and the apparent conflict between the Martian
judgement and our judgement must be explained in terms of the
implicit relativisation of those judgements to different reference
classes. Here I invoke the same model of relativisation that I used
to explicate Walton's theses concerning categories of art. When we
say that G1 is a great work of art we mean that it is great for a
human work of art, or, more precisely, that it is great for a work
produced by a member of a community in which human levels of
artistic skill prevail. So to say that Gl is valuable (or dynamic, or
profound) is to say that it is the product of a member of a
community in which such-and-such a level of artistic ability
prevails, and is more valuable (or more dynamic, or more profound)
than most works produced within that community tend to be.
(Doubtless this is a simplification. But it moves us, I think, in the
right direction.)
Now it is extremely important to realise here that these relativis-
ations are not relativisations to artistic categories in Walton's sense.
The class of human works is not the extension of a category of art,
and neither is the class of Martian works. There is no natural set
of standard, variable and contra-standard features that human
works must possess and which all non-human works must lack.
And, as I have described the imaginary case, the class of categories
that prevail in human society is the same as, or at least intersects
in the relevant ways with, the class of Martian categories. They
produce the same kinds of works as we do; they just do it better
than we do.
By now we have developed a powerful argument against Walton.
We have shown that attributions of aesthetic properties depend
not only on the work's appearance and its artistic category, but on
facts about the prevailing level of skills and abilities in the
community where it was produced. And this shows that aesthetic
judgements are, in part, judgements about the artist's achievement
Empiricism 39
in producing the work. We think of G1 as a great work because its

production was a great achievement by human standards. And
the Martians do not think of G2 as great, because by their standards,
its production was no achievement at all. And this relativised
concept of aesthetic value is the only concept of aesthetic value
that makes sense of our intuitive judgements about the status of
works. So there is not merely a contingent connection between
aesthetic value and achievement, but a conceptual one. Our
conception of aesthetic value is essentially bound up with our
interests, experiences and abilities. And it is clear that we can have
no adequate understanding of what the artist's achievement was
in producing a given work unless we have a detailed knowledge
of the work's history of production. For there is no telling what
someone has achieved unless we can assess the influences upon
his work, the extent to which he borrowed ideas from others and
worked within an established framework; the extent to which he
went beyond existing ideas and frameworks. We need to under-
stand the limitations that were imposed upon him or which he
may have imposed upon himself, so we need to understand the
technical means at his disposal, the conventions he chose to adhere
to and the conventions he chose to ignore. If this is correct then
aesthetic appreciation is indissolubly linked to a very detailed
understanding of the work's history of production.
Should we say, then, that a work's aesthetic properties supervene
on its appearance, its category, and on facts concerning its history
of production? We shall see in Section 3.16 that the prospects for
an interesting supervenience thesis about aesthetic qualities are
poor. But for now let us note that my modification of Walton's
theory does not really involve adding a third clause. Rather we
can subsume category considerations under the more general
heading of history of production. For as I have said, one of the
things that we need to know in order to understand the artist's
achievement in producing the work is what artistic conventions
and limitations the artist was accepting. And knowing what
category the work belongs to is part of knowing what those
conventions and limitations are. So my proposal is not to add a
new set of considerations over and above those urged as relevant
by Walton, but rather to extend that domain to include more facts
of the same kind. My disagreement with Walton is not a dramatic
one. We disagree at most about how much of a work's history of
production is relevant to its appreciation.
In terms of the analysis offered here (an analysis that will be

pursued in Chapter 3), we can express Walton's thesis as a special
case of a more general phenomenon: the aesthetic difference
between Guernica the painting and Guernica the guernica reflects
the different kinds of achievements that these works represent. As
we have told the story, the difference is due to the different
backgrounds of artistic conventions - what is variable and what
standard - that the artists were working with. These differences
of convention meant that they faced different problems in coming
to the same visual pattern. We need not say that one of these
achievements was greater than the other: merely that they were
different. And that may be enough to give their works different
aesthetic properties. Now while artistic conventions are one kind
of thing that can affect an artist's achievement, there are many
others, as the examples I have given above have shown. So I
suggest that the best way to interpret Walton is as pointing to
conventions of artistic category as one kind of factor in assessing
artistic achievement. In the end it is the achievement itself that we
are interested in.
9. AESTHETIC AND ART-HISTORICAL PROPERTIES
Some authors acknowledge the importance of understanding a

work's history, but think that we can still make a distinction, at
least in principle, between the work's value as an art-historical
achievement and its purely aesthetic qualities. In an influential
article in which he considers the aesthetics of forgery, Leonard
Meyer emphasises how much our appreciation of art is bound up
with our beliefs about the value of creativity and originalityY But
while he is eloquent on the importance of these concepts for
our culture, he seems to admit a distinction between criteria of
judgement which are 'purely aesthetic' (p. 87) - that is, based on
pictorial properties alone - and the cultural presuppositions of our
interest in art, which is bound up with a reverence for the creative
artist. Describing his enterprise as an anthropological one (p. 80),
he seems to imply that it is a contingent fact that, in judging
art, we mix purely aesthetic judgements with judgements about
creativity. Perhaps, he suggests, if we had different cultural values,
we could be pure aestheticians ('pure empiricists' in my terms). I
believe that the argument I have just given shows that the aesthetic
Empiricism 41
judgements we make are essentially bound up with presuppositions

about what constitutes an accomplished performance by the artist.
Not even the most innocent-seeming aesthetic response ('this is a
beautiful picture') is purely aesthetic in the sense that Meyer thinks
they might be. They are possible only against a background of
assumptions (no doubt often vague and scarcely conscious) about
what constitutes an achievement in the way of combining lines
and colours. And these assumptions depend in their tum upon
complex assumptions about what is remarkable and what merely
ordinary concerning skill and general artistic ability within a
community .
Similar arguments dearly apply to the other arts. We can imagine
situations in which a musical work that sounds the same as
Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, and a play that has the same dialogue
and stage directions as Hamlet, would count as unremarkable
products. These would be situations in which producing works
with that particular sound structure or that particular dialogue was
much easier, much less demanding of insight, sensitivity and
originality, in which success at the level required to produce such
works was less remarkable than it is for us.
10. A CONCLUSION ABOUT AESTHETIC VALUE
If we take seriously the idea that the appreciation of a picture (or

novel, or symphony, etc) involves an appreciation of the artist's
performance in producing that picture, we can see why Walton's
revision of empiricism is inadequate. Appreciating a picture re-
quires not merely that we give a weighting to the different elements
that go to make up its appearance - though Walton is no doubt
right to say that that is something we must do. It requires that we
see the picture'S visible elements as evidence of something else.
The painter Constable once remarked - and the remark has been
taken up by Sir Ernst Gombrich in developing his theory concerning
the psychology of art - that paintings are 'experiments': experi-
ments in attempting to convey the appearance of things through a
medium that does not simply mirror the reality of the seen object. 18
It is worth pursuing this idea in a direction somewhat different
from Gombrich's application of it to problems of representation.
Perhaps we should say, first of all, that a painting is the result of
an experiment; an experiment performed by the artist who uses
certain theories, conventions and techniques; an experiment to see

what can be done by using certain limited means. Now a significant
purpose of experiments in science is, as Popper has pointed out,
to test our theories. 19 This is one reason, and according to Popper
it is epistemologically the most important reason, why experiments
are carried out. What, then, is an artistic experiment a test of? Two
things, I suggest. First it is a test of the fruitfulness of the
conventions and techniques that the artist allows himself to draw
upon. Our test of a genre or category is the quality of the works
that exemplify it. But it is also a test of the artist's own abilities.
Works within a genre can vary greatly in quality. And both the
artist's abilities and the conventions and techniques that he uses
are aspects of his performance in producing the picture. So I
suggest that a painting is the outcome of an experiment, and that
when we judge it we are weighing the evidence that it provides
concerning what we should say about the artist's performance,
taking 'performance' in that wide sense which includes not merely
his actions in applying paint to the canvas but also his path to the
conception and execution of the work, an understanding of which
involves an analysis of the conventions and technical limitations
that constrain his action. In Chapter 3 I shall try to make this
notion of performance more precise.
This performance, I suggest, must be seen as integral to the
work itself. What is visible in the picture does not, even when
properly weighed, exhaust the work. Extracting another analogy
from the philosophy of science, we may liken the work to a
scientific theory. The strict scientific empiricist wants to enforce a
clear division between a theory's empirical part and its purely
theoretical part; between observational and non-observational sen-
tences. The empiricist's strategy is then to hive off the theoretical
part by insisting that only the observational sentences have truth
values (or, on a stronger view, meaning). Cognitive judgements
about the theory may then be confined to judgements about its
empirical part; the theoretical part then being regarded as a
heuristically useful but cognitively irrelevant appendage. Realists,
on the other hand, have wanted to insist that a scientific theory is
an attempt to describe the (partly hidden) structure of reality, and
must be judged as such. Its theoretical component contributes as
much to the theory's worth as does its empirical component.
And scientific realists have argued that it is in fact impossible to
draw a non-arbitrary distinction between observational and non-
Empiricism 43
observational sentences. In this respect the theory is a seamless

whole.
Aesthetic empiricists insist, as we have seen, that we must
appraise the work, if not on the basis of observable characteristics
alone, then on the basis of those of its characteristics that supervene
on its appearance. In attacking this view I am adopting a position
akin to scientific realism; a position that denies that we can
distinguish effectively between an appraisal of the work's appear-
ance and an assessment of the kind of ability and technique that
went into producing it. Aesthetically considered, the product and
the act of production are a seamless whole.
It is time to take stock of what we have established in this chapter
so far. We have seen, I think, that aesthetic empiricism is false.
We have seen, by way of direct counter-example, that it is possible
for two pictures with the same pictorial properties to have distinct
aesthetic properties. But these counter-examples are not counter-
examples to the claim that a picture and a perfect copy of that
picture will have the same aesthetic properties (a claim I shall
defend later in connection with the IMH). Walton's Guernica case
is a case of two casually independent pictures that happen to look
exactly alike. Their having distinct aesthetic properties depends
crucially on the assumption that they belong to different categories
of art. But it is at least doubtful whether a picture and a copy of it
belong to distinct artistic categories (more on this in Section 4.10).
We have similar independence of production in the case of the
comparison between Guernica and the Martian child's modest
efforts that happen to look the same. In that case, aesthetic
difference was a function of differential levels of community skill.
At this point one might offer the following simple argument. While
it required great ability for Picasso to paint Guernica, it requires
no ability to feed that painting into a machine that produces
indistinguishable copies of it. Therefore the original and the copy
differ greatly in artistic value for reasons connected with the
achievements of the persons who produced them. Arguments like
this have been advanced, but I believe them to be unsound. We
shall see why in Section 4.10. For the moment I shall merely assert
that while we have refuted empiricism, and thus lost one attractive
argument for the IMH, the IMH itself stands unrefuted. In the
next chapter I shall use the results of this chapter concerning the
nature of aesthetic value judgements to develop a theory about
what art works are.
11. CONTEXTUAL DEPENDENCE IN ART AND SCIENCE
I shall conclude this chapter with one further observation about

the relation between art and science.
In saying that the work's aesthetic value depends partly upon
its history of production we are admitting that aesthetic value is
contextual. A visual pattern that has a certain value in one context
will not have the same value in another context. Can we draw
from this the conclusion that here we have one of the features that
distinguish 'soft' disciplines like fine art from the hard sciences?
After all, we might say, evaluation of theories in the sciences (at
least in the physical sciences) is a determinate relation between
theory and evidence. It is entirely a matter of assessing the truth
values of the theory's logical consequences. Historical and personal
factors about the circumstances of the theory's production are
surely irrelevant to this.
On this view, the relation between theory and evidence is purely
logical in character. Suppose that E is our total evidence and that
Tl and T2 are rival scientific hypotheses. Then, according to this
view, if Tl and T2 both entail the same part of E (or make it probable
to the same extent) then they must be regarded as equally confirmed
or corroborated by that evidence.
But there is reason for us to be dissatisfied with this theory of
evidential support. For it takes no account of whether some part
of E was used in the construction of either theory. Suppose we are
at a time when some part of the evidence, call it e, is as yet
unknown. Suppose that Tl predicts that e will (or does) occur; that
is, Tl together with accepted background assumptions, entails e.
The prediction of e is subsequently verified. T2, on other hand,
was unable to predict e. But now that e is a known fact, the
advocates of T2 can modify their theory in a purely ad hoc way so
as to produce a new theory T2', which differs only slightly from T2
and which entails e. (This might be done by the adjustment of a
parameter.) Now Tl and T2' both entail e. But intuitively, Tl gets
much greater evidential support from ethan Tz' does. And the
reason is that e was used in the construction of T2', but not in the
construction of T1 • And a theory cannot get support from a fact
used in this way, because the prediction has been rigged in the
theory's favour. The theory was modified so as to take account of
e; it is then no surprise that it entails e. In predicting e, T2 ' does not
pass an empirical test. So empirical support is not simply a two-
Empiricism 45
place relation between theory and evidence, but rather a three-

place relation between theory, evidence and the method by which
the theory is constructed. The same theory, constructed in different
ways, may have different degrees of evidential support. 20
If we think of a painting's visible surface as the evidence that
counts towards an assessment of it, we can sum up the course of
our discussion so far by saying that, according to the empiricist,
aesthetic value is a two-place relation between a picture and its
visible surface, while the anti-empiricist case that I have been
urging suggests that it is a three-place relation between a painting,
its visible surface, and the history of its production. Thus the
contextual dependence of evaluation is a feature common to art
and science. This is not to say, of course, that the kinds of historical
evidence necessary for the assessment of a scientific theory and of
a work of art will be the same. They may be quite different, and I
think in fact that they are. But the fact that two scientific theories
and two works of art can be 'empirically equivalent' and yet differ
in value suggests an important analogy between them. We shall
make further use of this analogy when we come to answer the
question 'what kind of thing is a work of art?' in the next chapter.
3
Art Works as Action Types
1. INTRODUCTION
The aim of this chapter is to provide an argument for the ATH

(the hypothesis that art works are action types). It will be useful,
however, if we begin by examining some alternative theories
current in the literature and showing that they are deficient in
various ways. This discussion will enable us to formulate a number
of constraints on an ontology of art. It will then be shown that the
ATH meets these constraints. In this way we do no more than
build a provisional case for the ATH. There may be other theories
that meet the constraints equally well. There may be constraints
not considered here that the ATH does not meet. My aim is only
to make the ATH seem a plausible hypothesis. Throughout, we
shall bear in mind the proposals of the previous chapter concerning
the nature of aesthetic appreciation.
2. THE STRUCTURAL ACCOUNT OF THE WORK
We have examined the empiricist's theory of the aesthetic; the way

in which he delimits the range of features of a work that count as
aesthetic features. But we have not yet seen what account of the
work itself the empiricist gives. On the whole, this question has
been rather neglected by empiricists. We shall have to decide what
an appropriate empiricist theory of the work would be. The issue
is further complicated by the fact that those who endorse empiricism
often accept a dualistic theory about the nature of art works; that
is, they seem willing to identify works like paintings and sculptures
(but not works like novels and plays) with physical objects. But as
I have remarked, the acceptance of empiricism makes this view at
least problematic, because it undercuts the motivation for regarding
the original canvas as identical with the work. (I use the term
'canvas' in a general sense to refer to any object that is the authentic
instance of a painting.) If all that matters is what the work looks
46
Art Works as Action Types 47
like, then surely anything that looks exactly like the original canvas
has as much status within the work as the original itself. (We shall
return to this problem in the next chapter.) Here I shall simply
ignore this difficulty, presenting instead what I take to be the
most characteristically empiricist answer that can be given to the
question, 'What is an art work?', without worrying about whether
every philosopher who shows signs of empiricist persuasion has
adopted this view.
Since the empiricist thinks that the aesthetic qualities of the work
depend essentially only on how it looks, or how it sounds, or what
sequence of words it contains, it seems natural for the empiricist
to say simply that the work itself is a certain pattern of lines and
colours, structure of sounds, or sequence of words. Thus a painting
is a visual pattern, something that a particular physical object can
instantiate by having that pattern painted on its surface; a musical
work is a certain structure of sounds, something that a certain
performance can instantiate when the performers produce tokens
of those sounds in the correct order; and a literary work is a
sequence of words (i.e. a kind of structure), something that a
certain physical object (e.g. bundle of pages) can instantiate when
tokens of those words are inscribed on it. Any other view about
what the work is would be ontologically inflationary from the
empiricist's point of view, since it would invoke redundant struc-
ture, and empiricists are well known for their horror of ontological
excess. The hypothesis that the work is a pattern or structure of
the kind just described identifies the work with that thing which
contains just enough structure to determine the work's aesthetic
properties and no more. When we confront the pattern or structure
we come into contact with all that we need in order to appreciate
the work; therefore the work just is that pattern or structure. Let
us call this view 'structuralism'. Structuralism, as I define it, is the
natural ontology of the aesthetic empiricist.
The empiricist's ontology is attractively simple. But it cannot be
of interest to us unless it can be separated from the empiricist's
aesthetic which, on the evidence of the previous chapter, I shall
treat as something discredited. What we must do is to decide
whether it is possible simultaneously to hold that a work is a
pattern or structure in the sense of the previous paragraph, and
that it has aesthetic properties not determined by (supervenient
upon) that structure. In what follows I shall concentrate on musical
and literary works, leaving the visual arts out of account until the
end of this chapter. In fact most of my examples will be from

music.
Someone who attempts a combination of views such as I have
just described is Richard Wollheim. 1 As we saw at the beginning
of this book, he treats literary and musical works as types. Wollheim
does not give us much information about what he takes a type to
be. But presumably his idea is that, just as a word type is a
sequence of letter types, a literary work is a sequence of word
types and hence ultimately a sequence of letter types (among
which we include spaces and punctuation marks). So while the
instances of the work are sequences of word tokens, the work is
the corresponding sequence of word types. The natural extension
of this to the musical case would be to say that the work is a
sequence of sound types, these sound types being describable by
expressions like 'B flat above middle Clsemiquaver'. (Where the
work involves more than one 'voice' we must treat it as a sequence
of sequences. The term 'structure' is therefore most appropriate
for musical works.) Thus types are structures in our sense, and a
token of the work is simply a corresponding sequence of sound
tokens; the work and its instances are structurally the same. A
similar view (complicated somewhat by his nominalism) is that of
Nelson Goodman: 'A literary work ... is ... the text or script
itself' (1968, p. 209). Thus both Goodman and Wollheim think of
the literary work as identified purely in terms of its word sequence.
Now neither of these authors has much sympathy with the
empiricist aesthetic, and Wollheim certainly does not regard the
work's aesthetic properties as supervenient upon its structure
alone. Neither author confronts the issue raised here, though
Goodman remarks at one point that in characterising the work
itself we need not worry that we are not characterising all its
properties (1968, pp. 209-10). This remark suggests the following
treatment of the problem. In each possible world we identify the
work in terms of its structure, for the work just is that structure.
In different such worlds the work will have different histories of
production, generated by the different activities of its composer
(or author) and by differences in the surrounding art-historical
context. Thus we make a distinction between properties that the
work has essentially (properties it has in all possible worlds in
which it exists) and properties that it has non-essentially (properties
that it has in some worlds but not in others). The structure of the
work will be an essential property, while its history will be
inessential. Correspondingly, any aesthetic properties of the work

that are (at least partly) a function of the work's history will be
properties that the work has inessentially. Thus while this view
admits, against the empiricist, that the work's aesthetic properties
are partly a function of its history, it retains an empiricist-minded
regard for pure structure; the structure is essential, the history
accidental. If there are any aesthetic properties determined by
structure alone (my argument in the previous chapter was designed
to show that there are not) they will be essential properties of the
work. Those that involve history as well will be accidental.
Consistently with this view it may be said that it is an essential
property of a work that it has a history that is relevant to the
determination of its aesthetic properties. But what history it has
will vary from world to world.
Our business is now to see whether this way of having an
empiricist ontology without an empiricist's aesthetic is tenable. I
shall argue that it is not, and I shall try to show that the position
is susceptible to an objection that has been put by Jerrold Levinson. 2
Levinson has in fact two objections, one less significant in its
consequences than the other, but it is worth stating both of them.
I begin with the less significant one. It will be made use of again
in Section 4.7.
3. MUSICAL WORKS AND PERFORMANCE MEANS
Levinson makes the point that the view of musical works as pure
sound structures cannot be correct because considerations of
performance means would thereby be left completely out of
account. If someone produces by purely electronic means a pattern
of sounds that conforms to the notes laid down in the score of
Beethoven's Hammerklavier Sonata, has he thereby produced an
instance of the work? Intuitions here may differ, but what is surely
much clearer is that he has not produced a correct instance of it. It
is an integral feature of the work that it is to be performed only in
certain ways. A performance that violates the composer's directions
as to how the sounds are to be produced is not a correct performance
of it. But if works are pure sound structures then anything which
is an instance of that structure must surely be equally an instance
of the work. The purely structural view can be rescued from this
objection by being modified in the following way. We do not any
longer regard the work as a structure of pure sound-types, the

elements of which are specified purely in terms of their sonic
properties, but a structure of sounds-as-produced-by-certain-
instruments. Thus the tokens of the type Middle-C-as-produced-
by-a-violin are all notes produced by violins. This version of the
work-as-type theory takes into account the fact that performance
means is integral to the work. Let us call structures of sounds-as-
produced-on-certain-instruments 'applied structures'. The structu-
ral view we shall consider from now on is the view that words are
such applied structures.
4. AN OBJECTION TO THE STRUCTURAL VIEW
However, there is a more significant objection to be brought against

the structural theory. Suppose it happens that two composers,
working independently, produce identical scores. Have they pro-
duced the same work or distinct works? On the structural view
they have presented us with recipes for performing tokens of the
same type; they have composed the same work.
Levinson finds this consequence objectionable for two reasons.
He finds it objectionable, first, because it makes the identification
of works independent of their histories; and secondly because it
fails to recognise that works are created rather than discovered by
their composers. I think that Levinson's first objection is correct;
his second not. Let us consider these objections in tum.
Levinson gives a number of examples of imaginary situations in
which there are works that have the same sound structure or are
correctly performable in the same way, but in which it seems we
are confronted by different works because they have different
histories of production. Here is one of the examples he gives.
Brahms's Piano Sonata Opus 2 (1852), an early work, is strongly

Liszt-influenced, as any perceptive listener can discern. However,
a work identical with it in sound structure, but written by
Beethoven, could hardly have the property of being Liszt-
influenced. And it would have a visionary quality that Brahms's
piece does not have (1980a, p. 12, italics in the original).
Thus the imaginary Beethoven sonata and the Brahms sonata are
distinct works, even though they are the same from the structural
point of view.
One objection to this example may quickly be disposed of. The
objection is that cases like this do not concern properties of works,
but rather properties of the composer's activity in producing the
work. In that case they are examples of composers arriving in
different ways at the same work. Being Liszt-influenced is not, on
this view, a property of the work, but rather a property of Brahms's
compositional activity. To say this is certainly contrary to the
practice of informed criticism in the arts, which emphasises features
of the work such as originality of thematic invention or of orches-
tration. And critics clearly regard an understanding of such features
as important for an understanding of the work itself. The point
becomes more obvious if we consider a case more extreme even
than Levinson's. Suppose, for instance, that Brahms had merely
produced a slight variation on a work by Liszt. The resulting work
would be very insignificant. But if Beethoven, uninfluenced by
Liszt, had produced a work with the same sound structure he
would surely have produced a much more important work.
While Levinson's example is, I think, a counter-example to the
purely structural view as we have interpreted it (that is, as involving
a distinction between essential structure and inessential history)
we must resolve an ambiguity that lurks in the description of this
and similar examples that Levinson gives. The problem takes us
back to what was said in Section 2.2 about how to construe
the empiricist's supervenience thesis. Is Levinson offering us a
counterfactual situation (possible world) in which it is Beethoven
instead of Brahms who composes Piano Sonata Opus 2, or a possible
situation in which Beethoven composes a work with the same
sound structure as Brahms's later work of which Brahms (and, we
had better say, everybody else) was ignorant at the time when
Brahms came around to composing his work? The difference I am
pointing to is the difference between a world in which something
happens instead of that which actually happens, and a world in
which something happens in addition to what actually happens. If
we interpret Levinson in the former way, we must treat his example
from the point of view of interworld comparison of works; if the
latter, it is an example that we must treat from the point of view
of intraworld comparison between works. In terms of the distinction
made in Section 2.2, this difference is analogous to the difference
between interpretations (52) and (53) of our supervenience thesis.
(Levinson's words, here and in other passages, suggest the former

interpretation, but this is not the important point. The point is that
the examples can be construed in these two different ways.3) Of
course, if we are interested in Levinson's example only as a possible
counter-example to the empiricist's supervenience thesis this
distinction would not matter, because on either interpretation the
example is a counter-example to the supervenience thesis as we
have interpreted it, namely as (53). But here we have separated
the structural theory of the work's identity from the empiricist
aesthetic that suggested that theory to us.
Suppose that we interpret Levinson's examples in the first way.
It is clear that the structuralist may respond by saying that the
story as told is consistent with the idea that we are dealing with
the same work in distinct possible worlds. He might say that all
Levinson has established with an example like this is that works
do not have their aesthetic properties essentially; that is, they do
not have the same aesthetic properties in all the worlds in which
they exist. And that has already been granted by the structuralist.
Levinson has shown us that, while Brahms's Piano Sonata Opus 2
actually has the aesthetic quality of being Liszt-influenced, there
are possible worlds in which it does not have that quality, and in
some of these worlds the work has a visionary quality that it does
not have in the actual world. So Levinson has given a counter-
example to the claim that the aesthetic qualities of a work are (all)
among its essential properties; he has not given a counter-example
to the claim that the work's identity is independent of its history
of production.
This response, whatever its merits, would have no force against
the example if it were construed in the second way. On the second
interpretation, we are to think of a world in which Beethoven
composes a work (uninfluenced, of course, by Liszt); later Brahms
composes a work with the same sound structure, under the
influence of Liszt (but knowing nothing of this particular work by
Beethoven). If we agree that properties like being visionary, and
being influenced by the work of Liszt are properties of the work,
rather than merely properties of the compositional activity of the
composer - and the argument given above certainly suggests that
they are - then we have a case which is undoubtedly a case of the
composition of distinct works. One and the same work cannot be
both visionary and non-visionary in the same world, for nothing
can have a property and the negation of that property within a
world. So we had better assume that Levinson's example is to be

construed in this, second, way.
We now have a counter-example to the structuralist view of the
work's identity. For on this view, two composers or authors who
independently produce the same structure have produced the
same work. But we have seen that there are possible cases where
we want to say that distinct compositional acts result in distinct
works with the same structure. And we have done this, moreover,
without having to assume that a work has its aesthetic properties
essentially. (We shall return to the question of essential properties
in Section 3.17.)
5. CORRECT AND INCORRECT INSTANCES OF A WORK
Before moving further towards our construction of a positive

alternative to the structuralist view, I want to consider one other
version of structuralism, because in doing so we shall make a
distinction that will be important to us in the next chapter. We
shall continue with our development of the argument in Section
3.7.
Nicholas Wolterstorff has offered an account of the nature of
works that shares similarities with Wollheim's and Goodman's.4
Wolterstorff's theory is best understood as a response to the
following problem. Must every instance of a work be a correct
instance of it? Let us concentrate here on the cases of literature
and music. A correct instance of a novel is a copy that is correctly
spelt; a correct performance of a sonata is one that conforms to all
the requirements laid down in the score. Can something be said
to be an instance of a novel if it is not correctly spelt? Can something
be an instance of a sonata if it is not correctly performed? The
tough-minded view that encourages a negative answer can hardly
be right. Consider Jane Austen's original MS of Emma. Suppose,
as is certainly possible, that it contains an error, in the sense that
it contains a word not spelt according to the norms of spelling that
prevailed at the time the work was written. Now there are two ways
of interpreting the thesis that every instance of a work must be
correctly spelt. On one interpretation being correctly spelt means
being spelt in exactly the same way that the original was spelt. On
that interpretation, every instance of Emma must contain exactly
the same spelling mistake as the original- hardly a plausible view.
On the other interpretation, being correctly spelt means conforming

exactly to the rules of spelling prevailing at the time and in the
place where the work was written. In that case Austen's MS would
not itself be an instance of the work. Again, this is highly
implausible. I conclude that we need a distinction between in-
stances and correct instances of a work (the latter being a subclass
of the former). I admit, however, that I can see no way in which
being an instance of can be made a precise property. A copy that was
so badly mis-spelt as to be unintelligible would, presumably, not
count as an instance of the work it was intended to be an instance
of. But we cannot say 'if the text has n or more deviations in
spelling then it is not an instance of the relevant work', if for no
other reason than that mistakes have to be weighted by context.
Some spelling mistakes are more serious and confusing than others.
Being an instance of is an ineluctably vague concept, but so are a lot
of other concepts that we would find it hard to do without. We
return to this question in Section 4.16.
What we have said about the spelling of a literary work has an
obvious analogy in the case of music. An instance of a musical
work - a performance of it - is correct if it is played in accordance
with the score, without deviation in pitch, intensity or means of
performance from what the score allows. But clearly we want to
say that there can be performances of a work that are genuinely
instances of the work even though they are incorrect to some
degree.
Nelson Goodman is an energetic defender of the view that strict
conformity in spelling (or, in the case of music, strict conformity
to the score) is a necessary condition for something being an
instance of the work (he also thinks that it is a sufficient condition). 5
He recognises, indeed, that this hardly conforms to our ordinary
ways of speaking about instances of works. He defends this
discrepancy by saying that 'the exigencies that dictate our technical
discourse need [not] govern our everyday speech. I am no more
recommending that in ordinary discourse we refuse to say that a
pianist who misses a note has performed a Chopin Polonaise than
that we refuse to call a whale a fish, the earth spherical, or a
grayish-pink human white' (1968, p. 187).
The analogy is misleading. We can all accept that while it is
useful for certain purposes, or appropriate in certain conversational
circumstances, to say that the earth is spherical, it is not really
spherical. But consider again the case in which the MS of Emma
contains a spelling error. Do we want to say that, while for certain

purposes Austen's MS may be described as an instance of Emma,
it is not really one? Or, to consider the alternative way of treating
the case available to someone of Goodman's persuasion, do we
want to say that, while my copy of Emma which does not contain
the same spelling error may for some purposes be described as an
instance of Emma, it is not really one? Neither alternative is
palatable. While being spherical is a concept capable of precise
definition which we may sometimes apply in a loose way, the
concept being an instance of, as it applies to works of art like novels
and sonatas, has a vagueness about it that can be removed only
by doing violence to the concept itself. (This is not true, of course,
of the concept being a correct instance of, which is precise.)
6. WORKS AS NORM KINDS
One account of the work which is intended to accommodate the

possibility of incorrect instances of a work is Nicholas Wolterstorff's
analysis of works as norm-kinds. He asks us to acknowledge a
category of things which are kinds. For every property of the form
being an F there is a kind F which things that have that property
belong to. Now some kinds are normative in the sense that they
can have both correct and incorrect instances. For something to be
a tiger it must have all the essential properties of tigerhood, but it
may lack some property necessary for being a properly formed
tiger; suppose, for instance, that it has only three legs. Tiger is a
(natural) norm kind and the Hammerklavier Sonata is a (non-
natural) norm kind. Understood as norm-kinds works do not
possess the properties that our usual talk attributes to them. Thus
we say of the work that is Bartok's First String Quartet that it has
a G sharp in its seventh measure. But on Wolterstorff's view this
is not a property of the work, though it may be a property of some
instances of the work and will be a property of any correct instance
of it. When we say of a work that it has a G sharp in its seventh
measure we mean, according to W olterstorff, that it has the
following property; being such that something cannot be a correct
instance of it without having a G sharp in its seventh measure. Thus
what the work-as-type version of structuralism explains as a type-
token ambiguity, the work-as-norm-kind theory explains as the
systematic suppression of an operator: 'being such that something
cannot be a correct instance of the work without having property

P.'6
This is a minimal account of Wolterstorff's theory. But we do
not have to probe the resources of the theory very far in order to
discover its fundamental flaw; the same flaw, indeed, that we
discovered in the work-as-type version of structuralism. Suppose
that two composers independently pick out the same norm kind
by making the same properties normative within the kind. On
Wolterstorff's view, they have both picked out the same musical
work. Once we know how a work is properly to be played, then
we know all there is to know about the identity of the work itself.
Similarly, on the view that works are types, two composers who
pick out the same sound structure will have picked out the same
work. There is no room for the idea of distinct works with the
same sound structure. How much of a deficiency in an account of
works this consequence is has been pointed out in Section 3.4.
7. WORKS AS CREATED
Levinson offers as an alternative to the structural view his own

account of the nature of the work, an account that we shall have
reason to reject. Before I describe his theory I shall present one
further piece of motivation that he provides for it, for this will be
important to us in Section 3.9.
Levinson has another objection to the structuralist view, based
on his insistence that to compose (and he would presuambly say,
to write or paint) is to create. The artist with whom we associate a
work is the person who, in virtue of his compositional activities,
brings the work into being. But the person who identifies the work
with a structure of sounds must say that the work is something
that exists eternally. 7 It is not clear to me that this is the only option
open to someone who identifies the work with a sound structure.
A rather complicated argument might be provoked by someone
who wanted to argue that certain abstract entities like sound
structures are created. But we need not resolve that complex issue
here, for the question reduces to something rather simpler. For if
your view is that composition is creation (or at least involves
creation) then you must take the view that the same work cannot
be composed on two different occasions (in the same possible
world). For to create is to bring into being, and you cannot bring
into being what already exists. Of course, one may want to argue
that a work can be composed on distinct occasions if, sometime
between the two, it is destroyed; in that case something is brought
into being, destroyed, and then brought into being again. I am not
sure that the idea employed here of numerically the same object
being destroyed and then recreated again makes sense, but we
will suppose that it does. So in order to find out what views about
the ontology of art are inconsistent with the hypothesis that
composition is creation we must find out what views allow a
work to be composed on distinct occasions without intervening
destruction.
Clearly the structuralist theory allows this. Two composers may
independently present scores which specify the same structure of
sound types (as relativised to instruments). And this would be the
multiple composition of the same work. And Wolterstorff's theory
also allows distinct composers independently to specify the same
norm kind: to specify the same properties as normative within the
work. And these things would be possible even if nothing hap-
pened between the first composition and the second to bring about
a destruction of the work. All that is required is that the second
composer work in ignorance of the first. On views like these, then,
to compose a work is not necessarily to create it. We return to the
question of creation in Section 3.9.
8. WORKS AS INDICATED STRUCTURES
Levinson develops an account of works which builds a work's

history into the conditions for its identity, and makes it the case
that composition is creation. On his view a work is not merely an
applied sound structure but a structure-as-indicated-by-C-at-t,
where C is the composer and t is the time of composition. 8 The
structure itself is admitted to be an eternally existing entity. The
composer 'indicates' this structure S when he composes. But
through the act of indicating, the composer brings something else
into existence, namely, S-as-indicated-by-himself-at-t. Before t no
relation obtained between C and S; composition establishes a
relation of indication between them. As a result of the compositional
act the world contains a new entity, S-as-indicated-by-C-at-T. This
theory has the dual advantages, says Levinson, that it ensures that
a work is created rather than discovered, and that works with the
same sound structure composed in different situations by different

people will be different works. 9
In some ways Levinson's proposal is, I think, on the right lines.
He is certainly right to think that the work is not simply a structure
of abstract elements; its historical dimension must somehow be
built into it. But his proposal as it stands is unacceptable. Note
first that there are, on Levinson's account, two distinct things
done by the composer. He discovers a certain pre-existent sound
structure, and at the same time composes - that is creates - a
musical work. What he discovers is 5, what he composes is 5-as-
indicated-by-C-at-t; call it 5'. But what exactly is 5'? This is
metaphysically obscure, to say the least. Columbus discovered
America (let us suppose). In doing so, did he bring into being a new
entity; America-as-discovered-by-Columbus? Fleming discovered
penicillin, in the process of doing so did he bring into being
penicillin-as-discovered-by-Fleming? What sort of entity would
that be, if it is not simply identical with penicillin? If Levinson's
arguments establish the existence of indicated structures in the
arts, they seem to establish their existence in a number of other
areas where they are not wanted. And in no sense do we have a
grip on what these entities might be. It is hard to resist the
conclusion that Levinson has merely postulated a kind of entity in
order to solve his problem, without being able to tell us anything
informative about that entity's nature.
However, it might be said that this objection concentrates on an
inessential element in Levinson's theory. For the real content of
Levinson's theory may be taken to be a claim about the identity
conditions for works. We may in that case take him as telling us
not what works are but when works are identical. And as Frege
made clear for the case of numbers, telling us when things are
identical does not amount to telling us what they are. to So we can
leave the question of what works are in temporary obscurity and
concentrate on Levinson's claim about their identity conditions.
On this question we may take him to be saying that indicated
structures involve three essential components; a structure, a person
(composer) and a time (of composition). Indicated structures are
the same if these three elements are the same. Given this, we
might suppose ourselves able to generate a direct counter-example
to Levinson's theory in the following way. Consider a case very
like the one we quoted earlier from Levinson: Imagine that by 1852
Liszt had not written any piano music, or any music at all. In that
case Brahms's Piano Sonata Opus 2 of 1852 would not be Liszt-

influenced. It would be a more original work than it in fact is.
In this case we imagine a possible world in which the work
retains its structure, composer and time of composition (and hence
its identity) but in which it has an aesthetic property that it lacks
in the actual world. But of course this is no counter-example to
Levinson's proposal as long as he is willing to concede that works
do not have (all) their aesthetic properties essentially; that they
have aesthetic properties in some worlds that they do not have in
others. But now we can see that it is much harder to find a direct
counter-example to Levinson's theory than it was to find counter-
examples to the structural view. For we cannot alter the example
in such a way that we imagine the same work to be presented
twice under different circumstances in the same world. Levinson
rules this out by making time and authorship of composition
integral to the work; two independently working composers who
produce the same score do not compose the same work on
Levinson's view. Perhaps if we worked hard enough with the idea
of a brain-bisected, ambidextrous composer who wrote out the
same score simultaneously with both hands, each half of his brain
drawing on distinct musical ideas, we could generate a counter-
example, but it would very likely be a rather lame one. I shall not
try to construct such an example.
However, I think that we can still give some arguments against
Levinson (in addition to the argument already given about meta-
physical obscurity). Let us see how well his theory of work
identification fits with our intuitions. Imagine two worlds, WI and
W2, which differ from the actual world in the following ways. In
WI Beethoven composes a work that has exactly the same sound
structure as his Hammerklavier Sonata except that at one place
there is a note to be played slightly differently (fill out the example
in such a way that the difference is as insignificant as any such
difference can be). Otherwise, WI does not differ from the actual
world in any significant musico-historical way. In W2, however,
there are rather larger divergencies from the actual world. In W2
Beethoven composes in 1817 a work identical in sound structure
to the Hammerklavier Sonata. But he does so in an exceedingly
impoverished musico-historical setting. Suppose in fact that this
composition is the first to be written since the time of Purcell, the
art of composition having somehow been lost. This would surely
be an astonishing achievement. Now it seems to me that, from an
intuitive point of view, we are no more inclined to regard the work

in WI as distinct from the Hammerklavier Sonata than we are to
regard the work in W2 as identical with it. But Levinson's identity
conditions on works force us to say that in WI the work is not the
Hammerklavier Sonata, and that in W2 it is. Further, it seems clearly
wrong to make the time of composition constitutive of the work.
Surely at least some works might have been composed a few days
(hours, minutes?) later or earlier than they in fact were. Levinson's
theory makes this impossible. And it is far from clear that composer
identity is integral to the work; imagine a possible world in which
Beethoven and Schubert swap musical careers. Everything done
musically by Beethoven in the actual world is done by Schubert in
this world, and vice versa. Thus in this world all Beethoven's
actual achievements are Schubert's, and vice versa. But surely we
want to say of such a case that Beethoven composed all of Schubert's
works and Schubert all of Beethoven's. Again, Levinson's theory
precludes us from saying this.
An attempt to rescue something of Levinson's idea has been
made by James Anderson. l l Anderson agrees that it is counter-
intuitive to say that composer and time of composition are integral
to the work's identity, but he wants to follow Levinson in ruling
out the possibility of composers independently composing the same
work in different musico-historical circumstances. The solution he
comes up with is to define a work in such a way that, while the
identity of its composer and the time of composition are left
unspecified, it is stipulated that no work can be composed more
than once in a given world. His definition looks like this:
MW = S/PM as indicated by no more than one P per possible

world at exactly one t per possible world,
where MW is a musical work, S/PM a 'sound/performance means

structure' (an applied structure in our sense), and P and tare
person and time variables respectively.
But this suggestion quickly comes to grief. For it has the
consequence that in any world where composers come indepen-
dently to the same sound structure, neither of them has composed
a work. For something to be a work, it must be indicated only
once in a given world. This would be violated in such an example.
Thus, far from it being the case that this proposal sustains the
intuition that distinct composers independently coming to the
same sound structure in different musico-historical contexts present

different works, it turns out that they do not present any works at
all. If someone ignorant of musical history should tomorrow think
up the sound structure of the Hammerklavier Sonata, it would
then suddenly become true that Beethoven did not compose that
work at all. But whether Beethoven composed that work surely
cannot depend upon what happens later. This proposal is clearly
no advance on Levinson's.
9. ARE WORKS CREATED?
Levinson's identification of works with indicated structures is

motivated, as we have seen, by a desire to endorse the view that a
work is created by the artist associated with it. This motivation is
certainly widely acknowledged; but is it correct? I shall argue that
works of art are not created. I shall not, however, be arguing for
the view that they are discovered. The relation of artist to work is
different from both discovery and creation. We shall see why in
Section 3.14.
We have agreed that, with reservations about destruction, a
work cannot be created and then created again at a later time (in
the same world, that is). In order to show that composition is not
creation I shall produce an example where it seems intuitively clear
that we do have such a case of multiple composition.
Our problem is to find a case where a work is composed on
two different occasions. Now given what I have said about the
dependence of the work's identity on its history of production, it
looks as if it will be very difficult to find an example where
independently produced works have exactly the same history of
production. Surely two artists working independently will always
be situated in musico-historical contexts that differ in some way
or other. As Levinson says, 'even small differences in musico-
historical context . . . seem certain to induce some change in
kind or degree in some aesthetic or artistic quality, however diffi-
cult it might be to pinpoint this change verbally' (1980a, p. 13).
Thus Levinson's challenge is to construct a case where distinct
artists working independently of each other are in exactly the same
musico-historical situation.
Now talk of sameness of context or situation is subject to a type-
token ambiguity. Two people may be in the same type of situation
but not literally in the same (token) situation. I suggest that all we
need here is a case of sameness of type of situation, as long as
sameness is guaranteed in a very precise way. We need Hilary
Putnam's idea of 'Twin Earth'.12
Imagine that there is, somewhere in the universe, a Twin Earth;
a planet that is in every qualitative respect exactly like our own,
except, of course, that it is inhabited by people different from us.
By 'qualitatively the same' I mean that one cannot tell these planets
apart by looking at what is going on in them. Each of us has a
doppelganger on the other planet who is physically indistinguish-
able from us, performs the same action (types) that we perform,
thinks all the thoughts we think, experiences the same sensations.
Our cultural and physical environments are the same, except
for the identity of objects. 13 All the actions and achievements
accomplished on Earth, including all the artistic ones, are duplicated
on Twin Earth. In particular, Beethoven has a twin on Twin Earth.
Everything that we would say about Beethoven's achievement in
composing the Hammerklavier Sonata we would say about Twin
Beethoven's achievement in producing a work with the same
sound structure. Beethoven and Twin Beethoven solve the same
musical problems in the same way, under the same influences and
with the same degree of originality, coming up with that sound
structure. There is no aesthetic feature of the one that is not an
aesthetic feature of the other. Every judgement we would make
about the one, qua art work, we would make about the other.
Therefore, I claim, they each independently produce the same
work.
Imagine also, to make the example a little more forceful, that
while Twin Earth society develops in exactly the same way that
Earth society develops (and independently of it), it develops
somewhat later. In that case I think we ought to say that every
work of art composed on Earth is composed somewhat later on
Twin Earth. And in the time that elapses between the occurrence
of composition on Earth and occurrence of composition on Twin
Earth let us suppose that no work is destroyed. In that case we
have a counter-example to the claim that composition is creation.
For we have an example where works are composed on Earth and
then later on Twin Earth.
Now someone who identifies composition with creation - let us
call him the 'creationist' - may reply that the example can be
described in such a way as to be consistent with his view. In the
situation that I have described, Beethoven's Hammerklavier Sonata

is first of all created on Earth by Beethoven, and then discovered
on Twin Earth by Twin Beethoven. Works certainly are created,
but once created they become part of the furniture of the universe
and are available to be discovered. In the situation just described
it would then look to the inhabitants of Twin Earth as if Twin
Beethoven had composed the work but he would not in fact have
done so. He would merely have discovered something already
brought into existence.
But this reply is not a satisfactory one. Imagine a variation of
our story. Everything that happens on Twin Earth happens slightly
earlier than the corresponding events on Earth. In that case it
would not be Beethoven who created the Hammerklavier Sonata
but Twin Beethoven. But of course this possible situation might
conceivably be the actual situation; there might be a Twin Earth
somewhere in deep space. In that case the creationist cannot say
definitely that Beethoven composed that work; on his own account
the history of our culture is consistent with the possibility that he
discovered it, in which case he would not have composed it. But
this would be a very odd thing to say of a situation in which
Beethoven came to the sound structure of that sonata quite
independently of anyone else. If he did come to that sound
structure independently then surely, in the ordinary sense of
'compose', Beethoven did compose the work. To say that he might
not have composed the work in that situation is to stipulate anew,
technical, meaning for 'composition', not to explicate its ordinary
meaning. It cannot be part of the concept of composition that
composers create their works.
Of course the creationist could object to the example on the
grounds that, since distinct composers are involved, distinct works
must be involved too. But this is just to insist upon the point that
composer identity is integral to work identity, it is not to argue for
it. On the other hand, the position I advocate here seems well
suited to the aesthetic developed in the previous chapter. To
appreciate the work is to appreciate the artist's achievement; if two
artists achieve the same thing, why should we count their works
as distinct?
At this point the creationist might issue a challenge of his own.
If works are not, in fact, created, how is that we all unreflectively
think of them as created? Indeed, would it not be reasonable to
argue in the following way? The overwhelming majority of us think
that works are created. The best explanation of this convergence of

opinion is that works are created and that we are aware of that
fact.
Arguments like this deserve to be taken seriously, and I wish I
could reply to this one by offering a better explanation of conver-
gence than the one just canvassed. Unfortunately I cannot. How-
ever, this lack, deplorable though it may be, does not affect the
dialectic of the present dispute. While I admit that I do not have a
good explanation of why people should be so willing to believe
something that I take to be wrong, the kind of creationist that I
am arguing against here is in exactly the same position. Let us see
why.
At this stage in the argument we have abandoned the view that
works are structures (pure or applied). This view just gives the
wrong results about the identity and diversity of works. And it is
agreed by the remaining parties to the dispute that there can be
cases of the multiple composition of works with the same sound
structure. So it is agreed that the composer does not create the
sound structure of his work. Those who think that he creates his
work think that he creates something distinct from (though possibly
involving) that sound structure. So the kind of creationist I am
considering here agrees with me that, for example, Beethoven did
not create the sound structure of the Hammerklavier Sonata. But
that is exactly what is denied by pre-philosophical opinion, which
identifies the work with the associated sound structure. Most
people would say, I believe, that Beethoven created that very
sound structure. (My own informal canvassing of opinion indicates
this.) In that case, the creationist is in exactly the same position
with respect to naive opinion that I am in, and cannot get any
advantage from pointing out that I deviate from it.
10. SOME CONSTRAINTS ON THEORY
The purpose of the foregoing discussion has been partly to reveal

the defects in extant theories about the nature of art works, and
partly to lay the foundations for a better theory by suggesting a
number of constraints that an acceptable theory must meet. We
are now in a position to specify what these constraints are.
1. What is partly constitutive of a given work is its pattern or

structure. No theory of art works that made the structure

extrinsic or incidental to the work itself could hope for accept-
ance. It is not just an accidental fact about Emma that it contains
that particular word sequence. It is not just an accidental fact
about the Hammerklavier Sonata that it contains that sound
structure.
2. The structure is, however, only partly constitutive of the work.
Distinct works may possess the same structure. In cases like
that, what differentiates the works is the circumstances in which
the composer or author arrived at the structure. So we must
find a way of capturing this idea of 'the circumstances in which
the artist arrived at the pattern or structure' and try to build it
into our account of the work itself.
3. Our ontology of art must make it possible for cases of multiple
composition, such as that described in our Twin Earth example,
to occur. But it must not identify multiple composition with the
independent presentation of the same structure. We must, in
other words, find a middle way between the excesses of the
structuralist view, which makes multiple composition too easy,
and the creationist view, which makes it impossible.
4. We want to avoid the inclusion of inessential elements as
constitutive of the work. Our earlier discussion suggests that
the composer's identity and the time of composition are such
inessential elements.
Another constraint may be derived from the arguments of earlier

chapters. We remarked in section 1 that an ontology of art works
should mesh with our preferred theory about the nature of
appreciation. And in Chapter 2 we derived the conclusion that
appreciation of the work is an appreciation of the artist's achieve-
ment. So we have
5. Our account of the nature of art works must contribute to our

understanding of the sense in which aesthetic appreciation is
the appreciation of a certain kind of performance.
There is one further issue that an ontology of art works must

decide, though the considerations at work here do not impose a
compelling constraint on our theory one way or the other. Our
first constraint tells us that a work's pattern or structure is intrinsic
to it. We have not yet given a very precise formulation to this idea.
We shall do so in the next section. And we must decide whether

this intrinsicality of structure is consistent with an intuition to
which I appealed in Section 3.8: that it makes sense to consider a
work's structure as subject to variation (of some perhaps minimal
kind) across possible worlds. We want to say, for instance that
'The Hammerklavier Sonata might have had a different sound
structure from the sound structure it does have.' I shall try to
reconcile the intrinsicality of structure with the possibility of
transworld variation of structure. The result will be presented in
Section 3.17.
11. WORKS AS ACTION TYPES
The hypothesis that most plausibly meets our constraints is, I

suggest, the following: a work of art is an action type. We arrive
at last at the ATH. To understand this proposal we shall have to
take a brief excursion through the theory of action.
I remarked in Section 1.2 that the type-token distinction has
application to actions and other events. (I treat actions as a subclass
of events.) There is a sense in which the same event can occur
more than once. What we have in that case is many event tokens
of the same event type. To add definiteness to our discussion I
shall adopt the framework of one particular clear and serviceable
theory of events; that due to Jaegwon KimY I think that Kim's
theory is a good one, but there certainly are problems about it that
I do not intend to discuss here. I hope that the things I am going
to say about art works in the context of Kim's theory could be
translated into the framework of some better theory of events, if
there is one.
Kim takes an event token of the simplest kind to have three
constitutive elements; an individual, a property and a time. Let us
mark off expressions which designate events by putting a * at each
end. Thus *John singing at time t* is an event which has as its
constitutive individual John, its constitutive property x is singing,
and its constitutive time t. An event can be something that occurs
throughout an interval of time, e.g. *John singing between hand
t2*. In that case the constitutive time is an interval rather than an
instant. (In what follows I shall not distinguish between instants
and intervals. To simplify the discussion further, I shall sometimes
delete reference to time altogether.)
Events can also be relational. ""Greg beating Alan at chess at time

tOo is an event with two constitutive objects, Greg and Alan, and a
constitutive relation (two place property), x beats y at chess. Now
suppose I use a certain strategy 5 to beat Alan. Then ""Greg beating
Alan at chess using strategy 5 at time tOo is an event which we can
think of as having four constitutive elements; Greg, Alan and
strategy 5, and a three-place relation x beats y at chess using strategy
z.
Turning to a more relevant case, consider the event which is
Beethoven's composition of the Hammerklavier Sonata. Part of
what this event involves is that Beethoven discovers a certain
sound structure. Now there is, presumably, a story we can tell
about the relevant circumstances of Beethoven's discovery. Telling
that story informs us about the nature of Beethoven's achievement.
If he cobbled the musical ideas together by acts of shameless
plagiarism from several other composers, that achievement was
not much. If he employed originality of melodic invention and
boldness in harmonisation it was considerable. Let us introduce at
this point the idea of a heuristic path.
In Section 2.11 I discussed the similarity between the assessment
of a work of art and the appraisal of a scientific theory. I suggested
that both kinds of appraisal are context relative. Theories that are
empirically equivalent in the sense of having the same observational
consequences may yet be differentially supported by the facts,
because of the ways in which these theories are generated. To
explain this idea some philosophers of science have found it useful
to introduce the idea of a heuristic: a set of assumptions and
directives about how to construct a theory. Scientific theories are
not - at least not usually - devised by some immediate flash of
insight. They are often painstakingly developed from simpler and
less realistic pictures of the world that may have little empirical
content, or from prior empirical theories that face anomalies of one
kind or another. A heuristic helps to guide the scientist's progress
towards his theory by providing him with a set of assumptions;
assumptions about what metaphysical constraints the new theory
must conform to, what kinds of analogical models may be appealed
to, what mathematical techniques are appropriate. Guided by a
strong heuristic, the scientist may proceed to construct his theory
in relative independence from empirical facts. The fewer facts that
are used in the construction of the theory (e.g. in the fixing of
parameters) the more facts will count as potential confirmation for
the theory when its empirical consequences are tested. On this

view a theory is not just a set of postulates together with their
consequences. It is the deductive closure of the postulates together
with the heuristic. It is this dual structure that is corroborated by
the evidence, and theories that are deductively equivalent can be
differentially confirmed, according to the ways in which their
heuristics differ. 15
In speaking of a scientist's 'heuristic path' to a theory I mean
the process whereby the theory was arrived at; the facts, methods
and assumptions employed, including analogical models, math-
ematical techniques and metaphysical ideas. I do not mean, of
course, that there is a uniform method for generating theories.
And I do not deny that any such method must rely at some stage
upon pure inspiration or invention on the scientist's part. Theory
construction is not in any sense a mechanical procedure. But it is
a process that is at least to some degree rational and rationally
reconstructible.
I wish to take over the spirit of this idea for our analysis of art
works, though it will undergo modification in the process. For our
previous discussion has made it plain that appreciation of an art
work is not merely the appreciation of a final product - a visual
pattern, a word or sound sequence - but an appreciation of the
artist's achievement in arriving at that pattern or structure. The
critic's task in helping us to appreciate the work is partly to help
us to see or experience things in the pattern or sequence that we
might otherwise miss. But it is more than this. It is to help us to
understand, by means of historical and biographical research, the
way in which the artist arrived at the final product. He must show
us in what ways the artist drew on existing works for his inspiration,
and how far that product was the result of an original conception.
He must show us what problems the artist had to resolve in order
to achieve his end result, and how he resolved them. His job, in
other words, is to trace, as closely as he can, the artist's heuristic
path to the final product.
When we specify a composer's heuristic path to a sound structure
we specify the aesthetically relevant facts about his actions in
coming to that sound structure. Thus in specifying Brahms's
heuristic path to Piano Sonata Opus 2 we will specify, amongst
other things, the influence of Liszt's composition on Brahms. This
idea clearly has application to the other art forms. Thus in specifying
an author's heuristic path to the word sequence that is his text we
will specify the influences on him, the sources of his ideas, the
conventions of genre to which he conformed. 16
Clearly, the task of specifying the artist's heuristic path to a
certain structure is a matter of rationally reconstructing the detailed
history of his creative thought, in so far as the information available
to us allows that to be done. Part of the difficulty of appreciating
works from alien or lost cultures lies in the almost total absence of
material upon which to base such a reconstruction. And even in
the most favourable cases the work of reconstruction can hardly
be done with the assurance of completeness. But what seems clear
is that critics do regard it as an essential part of their task to
understand, as completely as they can, the history of production
of a work, and to distil from it an account of the artistic problems
faced by the artist and the methods he used to overcome them; in
short, the artist's heuristic path. And this is not merely a useful
adjunct to critical activity, but an integral part of it. The heuristic
path is constitutive of the work itself.
Now *Beethoven's composition of the Hammerklavier Sonata*
can be seen to have amongst its constitutive elements three things:
Beethoven, the sound structure of the work, and Beethoven's
heuristic path to that sound structure. Adding to these things the
three place relation x discovers y via heuristic path z, and the time of
composition t, we have enough to specify the event in question.
Let us now introduce some more useful notation.
Following Kim, let '[A,P,t), denote the event which is the object
A having property P at time t (properties and relations will be
denoted by bold letters). A relational event can be expressed as
'[A,B,R,t]'; the event *A bearing the relation R to B at time t*. We
can then represent the event which is *Beethoven's composition
of the Hammerklavier Sonata* as [B,S,H,D,t] where B is Beethoven,
S is the sound structure of the work, H Beethoven's heuristic path
to S, D the (three-place) relation x discovers y via heuristic path z,
and t the time of composition.
Now we can introduce the distinction between types and tokens
in the following way. Suppose that John sings at time It and Fred
sings at time t2. We have two tokens of the same event type,
representable respectively as U,S,lt] and [F,S,t2]. What these two
events have in common after we subtract the identities of the
constitutive objects and the times of occurrence is the type of which
these events are both tokens. So let us denote such an event type
in this way: lx,S, t], where the x and the t are variables that replace
definite objects and times respectively. (Let us reserve 't for use as
time variable.)
Now if we have a relational event like *Greg beating Alan at
chess at t*, which we may represent as [G,A,B,t], we can abstract
from it the event type, victories at chess, of which there can be many
tokens. We represent that type as '[x,y,B,'t],. Now the same event
token may be a token of many distinct types. *Greg beating Alan
at chess* is also a token of the type chess victories by Greg, which
we may represent as [G,y,B,'t], and a token of the type chess defeats
of Alan, which we may represent as [x,A,B,'t]. These last two
event types have two constitutive elements. They are both partly
constituted by the relation x beats y at chess (B); and one is partly
constituted by the object Greg, the other by the object Alan.
Now consider the musical event [B,S,H,D,t]. This is an event
token from which we can derive, by our process of abstraction,
several distinct event types. Consider the type that we would
represent as [x,S,H,D,'t]. This is the event type, discovering of S via
heuristic path H. There can be many instances of this event type,
one for each pair of choices of replacement for x and 'to One
instance of it is the act of discovery performed by Beethoven
himself; this is an event that has actually occurred. Another
instance is Twin Beethoven's discovery on Twin Earth. This event
token has not, I take it, actually occurred, because Twin Earth does
not exist (I assume).
My proposal now is to identify Beethoven's Hammerklavier
Sonata with the event type [x,S,H,D,'t]. In general, an art work
will be an action type with two 'open places' (one for a person,
one for a time) and having three constitutive elements; a structure,
a heuristic and the relation x discovers y by means of z. This last D)
is a constant element in all art works. It is the other two elements
that serve to distinguish art works from one another. Consequently,
it is these two things that I shall speak of as constitutive of the
work, forgetting about D. Let us call these the work's 'identifying
elements'.
Let us see that this proposal meets all our constraints. First of
all, on the proposed identification it comes out true that the work
has two identifying elements, a structure and a heuristic. Alter
either of these things and you alter the identity of the work itself.
The type contains all the information necessary to appreciate the
work. Thus the proposal meets our first two constraints.
Secondly, the proposal makes it true that the work can be
composed more than once in the same possible world. The work
is composed by anyone who performs an action that instantiates
the event type [x,S,H,D,'t], as is the case in our hypothetical Twin
Earth example. But it is not, on this view, composed by anyone
simply in virtue of their having discovered the sound structure 5;
there will be many such discoverings that do not count as
composings of that work, because the discovery was not via
heuristic path H. Thus we make it possible for a work to be multiply
composed, but we are not excessively liberal in what we will count
as composition of the same work. Thus the proposal meets the
third constraint. The proposal meets our fourth constraint, because
the work is identified with a type that abstracts on the identity of
the composer and on the time of composition. These things are
not constitutive of the work.
Finally, our proposal meets the fifth constraint, because it makes
clear exactly in what sense it is true that the appreciation of a work
of art is an appreciation of the artist's performance. This turns out
to be literally true. The work is the action type that the artist
performs. In appreciating the work we are thereby appreciating
the artist's performance.
12. A QUESTION ABOUT HEURISTICS
Jerrold Levinson (in a personal communication) poses the following

problem for my account. According to me, the heuristic of the
work is determined by those factors that influence the artist in his
selection of the work's structure. But this leaves out important
artistic-cultural conditions that affect the aesthetic qualities of the
work even though the artist was unaware of them. Thus it is an
aesthetically relevant fact about Brahms's piano music that it bears
certain similarities to Liszt's, whether or not Brahms was influenced
by Liszt. Mere cultural proximity is enough; it does not need to be
causal proximity as well. In introducing the idea of a work's
heuristic I have certainly spoken of 'influences' on the artist;
Levinson's point is that I may need a conception of heuristic wider
than this. In fact, I have not attempted to provide necessary and
sufficient conditions for the judgement that two artists have
followed the same heuristic path. All I have done is to give the
example of Twin Earth cases; cases like this are certainly cases of
artists applying the same heuristic. Earth and Twin Earth are the
same in every qualitative respect. A fortiori, they are alike in respect

of influences on the artists, and also in respect of cultural proxirnities
about which the artist knows nothing. So even if I follow Levinson
in widening the concept of a heuristic to include factors unknown
to the artist I should still be able to appeal to the same cases of
heuristic identity. So my argument can certainly tolerate a more
liberal concept of heuristic.
The question remains as to whether we should include in the
heuristic of a work factors that the artist was unaware of. I think
we should. The principle upon which I have based the argument
of this book is that the appreciation of art works is the appreciation
of a certain kind of achievement. Now it is relevant, as I have said,
in finding out what someone's achievement is, to know what
others have done. Thus - to consider an example from another
area of human endeavour - our perception of Copernicus's achieve-
ment in advancing the heliocentric system of the world is affected
by the knowledge that Arab astronomers had put forward a system
similar in certain of its details two or three centuries before. 17 And
this fact is relevant whether or not Copernicus knew of the Arab
devices (this is disputed), though it might be said to be less relevant
if he did not know of it than if he did.
This suggests, then, that we should be prepared, when de-
scribing the heuristic of a work, to include facts unknown to the
artist if those facts are deemed relevant to an appreciation of his
achievement. The heuristic tells us how that achievement came
about, and in what relevant circumstances. I do not want to be
more specific than this in my general characterisation of the notion
of a heuristic. For there is much work to be done in deciding
exactly what kinds of facts are relevant to an appreciation of the
artist's achievement. About this there will be disagreement, and
those who disagree on this score will disagree about how the
heuristics of particular works ought to be characterised. I say only
this: whatever you consider relevant in this way, you must regard
as intrinsic to the work itself.
It may be said that if we take into account facts unknown to the
artist, the domain of things that might be taken into account in
the work's heuristic will expand intolerably. How can we rule out
facts about the cultures of the distant planets? And what of future
events? A work may have a great influence on future works, or it
may have none. Describing the heuristic of the work starts to look
like writing the history of the universe. But I think we do have a
reason for ignoring these facts about the larger context of the work.
They are facts that the artist could not have known about. The
reason it may be relevant to say that a work of Brahms is similar
to one of Liszt is that Brahms could have known about it even if
he did not Oust as Copernicus could have known about the work
of his Arab predecessors). But we are not in touch with the distant
planets, and no artist can know in advance what the influence of
his work will be. It is information that is available in principle to
the artist that is relevant to assessing his achievement. 'In principle'
here is, of course, vague. But I think there will be wide agreement
about how the idea is to be applied in particular cases.
13. REFERENTIAL PROPERTIES
Works of art sometimes have what we might call referential

properties. Goya's portrait of the Duke of Wellington depicts the
Duke. Carravagio's Martyrdom of St Peter depicts the crucifixion of
St Peter. In Tolstoy'S War and Peace Napoleon is referred to by
name. Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture makes reference to the defeat
of Napoleon in Russia. The ways in which painting, literature and
music refer to real people and events are rather different; we
have no well developed theory that explains the differences and
similarities between these ways. Nevertheless, it seems intuitively
clear that works of all these kinds (and others) do bear important
relations to things in the real world.
The thought that they do so may prompt an objection to the
theory here proposed. For, whatever the similarities between the
work of Tolstoy and the work of his twin on Twin Earth, these
words cannot have the same referential properties. Tolstoy refers
to Napoleon, but Tolstoy'S Twin is not referring to him; he refers
instead to an inhabitant of Twin Earth that Twin Earthers call
'Napoleon' (Earthers and Twin Earthers are not using the same
name when they utter 'Napoleon'; they are using two distinct but
homophonic names). So their works have different referential
properties. They cannot, therefore, be the same work. So one
might argue.
Now we may agree that referential properties are properties of
the work itself, or we may disagree. Suppose we agree. Then for
works which do have referential properties we shall not be able to
point to Twin Earth cases as cases of the multiple composition of
such works. But this does nothing to rule out Twin Earth cases as
cases of the multiple composition of works that have no referential
properties - and some works surely do not make reference to any
real thing (e.g. stories about imaginary societies in non-specifically
located galaxies, abstract paintings and non-programmatic music).
If these were the only kinds of cases I could appeal to they would
still establish my case. For my claim is merely that multiple
composition of the same work is not ruled out by general consider-
ations about the nature of art works. Further, Twin Earth cases are
merely one vivid kind of example of multiple composition. If they
are not available to us in connection with works that have referential
properties there may be other kinds of examples that we could
consider - fantastical examples, no doubt, but not more fantastical
than Twin Earth cases. Thus two authors, working independently
of one another in the same community might produce lexically
identical works, having the same kinds of artistic intentions,
influenced by the same literary tradition, making the same real-
world references. If everything that we would say in describing
the achievement of the one could be said of the other, I claim they
would be producing the same work.
We might, on the other hand, disagree that referential properties
are properties of the work, saying instead that they are rather
aesthetically irrelevant aspects of the work's composition. In fact,
this is the line I am inclined to adopt. I am inclined to say that it is
not an aesthetically relevant feature of Tolstoy'S War and Peace that
Tolstoy refers to Napoleon with his use of the name 'Napoleon',
though I concede that it is or may be an aesthetically relevant fact
about the work that the author refers to a real person whose real
characteristics bear certain relations to the activities of the character
described in the book. But that, of course, does not distinguish
Tolstoy'S work from Twin Tolstoy'S; for everything qualitative that
one may say about the activities of Napoleon may be said about
the activities of Twin Napoleon. But it would be a distraction from
our present concern for me to argue for this here. If I am right in
what I have said in the previous paragraph, it does not matter
which way you jump.
14. SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE THEORY
An advantage of the theory I have proposed is that it is ontologically

conservative in a certain sense. That is, you do not have to believe

in any more kinds of entities as a result of accepting my arguments
than you did before you accepted them. I place art works in a
familiar ontological category: action types. I do not postulate a new
and ontologically obscure category of things, such as 'indicated
structures' to solve the problem of what art works are. Of course
the nature of action types is not pellucid, but at least they are
something we already have reason to countenance. There are, of
course, different ways of explicating action types; platonistic ways,
nominalistic ways, etc. These are not questions that need concern
us here. We can pass on questions about the ultimate nature of
action types to the committee of philosophers working on the
theory of actions and events.
We can now see that, while the artist does not create the work,
he does not discover it either. The work is the action type that he
performs in discovering the structure of the work. So rather than
create or discover the work, the artist performs it. However, I shall
use the expression 'enact' for what the artist does; to say that the
artist performs the work, while true, invites a confusion with what,
say, the orchestra does when it produces an instance of the work.
These are two very different things. The orchestra instantiates the
event type playing of sound structure 5; the composer instantiates
the event type, discovering of 5 via H. This lead us to another
important point.
I have said that it is conventional to think of musical and literary
works as types of which there can be many tokens, these tokens
being copies or performances of the work. But now we see that
this view cannot be right. On the theory presented here, the
instances of the work do not bear the right relation to the work
itself to count as tokens of it. A token of a type must, as we have
seen, exhaust the characteristics of the type. There cannot be
essential features of the type that are not displayed by any correct
token of it. But this is seen not to be the case when we consider
the relation of the work to its instances. The work has important
characteristics that one cannot know of by exposure simply to a
correct copy or performance of it. To understand the heuristic
which is partly constitutive of the work you must know some art
history. And the history of a work is not evident from an inspection,
however close, of an instance of it.
However, it is not difficult to see why people have been so
inclined to assimilate the relation of work-to-instance to that of
type-to-token. For the work is a type, and its instances are tokens.
But the type of which the instances are tokens is not the work
itself; it is the work's pattern or structure.
An objection to this proposal that might be made is that it does
not square with our ordinary practice of appreciation. After all, it
will be said, many people appreciate works when they know
nothing about their histories. But of course appreciation is not an
all or nothing affair. One does not have to know all the relevant
facts about a work's history in order to get anything at all out of
the work. And in the sense in which I speak of a work's history,
all of us normally know something of the work's history; we know
that it was produced by a human being rather than by a Martian,
for instance, and this is certainly a relevant piece of knowledge -
no less relevant, anyway, for being taken for granted. If we knew
absolutely nothing about the historical background to a work then
I think we would be in a position where we could not appreciate
it at all; but that is certainly not the situation we are normally in.
And just as people appreciate works to some extent on the basis
of a very partial understanding of the work's history, so they
appreciate the work on the basis of a very partial perception of its
structure. The trained critic can pick out and retain detail from the
sound structure of a musical work in a way that goes far beyond
the capacity of the ordinary listener, who still may be said to
appreciate the work to some degree. So I do not think that there
is, in fact, the asymmetry between the appreciation of structure
and the appreciation of history that is presupposed by this
objection.
In this essay I have not attempted to elaborate the theory by
reference to detailed historical cases. But at this point I think that
a general historical remark is in order. A good deal that has
happened in the development of art during this century, particu-
larly the visual arts, may be described as a revolt against traditional
aesthetics. The development of thoroughly non-representational
art is an obvious example. But we see also an attempt to refocus
aesthetic attention, moving away from the purely visual properties
of the work, and directing attention instead to the artist's activity.
Notorious examples of this are Duchamp's Fountain, a urinal
purchased and displayed by the artist, and Rauschenberg's Erased
De Kooning Drawing, a surface from which a drawing by De Kooning
has been carefully erased. 1s Considered from the point of view of
their pictorial qualities, works such as these seem very impover-
ished. Their interest is located in the activity that leads to these

objects being presented.
Many people find such works tedious and self-congratulatory.
From one point of view they are both. But if we take seriously the
hypothesis of this chapter, there is a more charitable way to
understand them. They may be seen as attempts to direct our
attention towards an important but neglected feature of the work;
its heuristic. In these works the heuristic is much more important
than the resulting pattern. They emphasise the fact that the pictorial
properties of works radically underdetermine the work's heuristic.
Simply by looking at Fountain we cannot tell whether it was
carefully made by the artist or merely purchased from a plumbing
suppliers. And a blank sheet of paper may never have had anything
drawn on it. Perhaps the lesson that we should draw from works
such as these is not that the traditionally prized aesthetic qualities
of beauty and form are no longer relevant to art. It is rather that
such qualities do not exhaust what is valuable in the work. Indeed,
such qualities as beauty and significance of form cannot be
identified in isolation from hypotheses about the nature of the
artist's activity. What I take from these works is an affirmation of
the view that the work itself is a kind of performance. And that is
what I am arguing for here.
Finally, let us return to a point made at the beginning of this
book; that we have provided a necessary but not a sufficient
condition for something to be an art work. Someone might, for
example, arrive at a certain word sequence via a certain heuristic
and in doing so enact an action type that is not an art work. This
will be the case if, for example, their text is that of a philosophy
article or computer instruction manual. We may put the point in a
way that again recalls Frege's discussion of the concept number.
On the basis of the A TH, we can say the works A and Bare
identical just in case they have the same heuristic and the same
pattern or structure. But we cannot appeal to this criterion in order
to define the concept art work; we cannot say that art works are
just those things that we identify and distinguish in this way. For
there will be action types that are not art works, but for which this
very criterion of identity is appropriate. We shall be reminded of
this point in Section 4.10.
15. THE PROBLEM OF PICTURES
Our theory is that an art work is an action type, with two identifying
elements; a structure and a heuristic. In literature the structure is
a sequence of word types, in music a sequence of sound types.
But what, then, of the visual arts? If a painting is to be regarded
as a work of art amenable to our analysiS we must decide what its
constitutive elements are to be. There is no particular difficulty
about the heuristic; just like any other kind of artist, the painter
takes a certain path to the end result that he produces. Whatever
that path is will determine the heuristic of his work. Is there
something analogous to a structure that is the end result of the
painter's activities? We may say that there is; what the painter
arrives at is a certain visual pattern, something that is instantiated
by the canvas that he paints. The painter's structure is a structure
of coloured shapes, and in this sense two works of visual art can
have the same structure without being the same work (as we saw
in the case of Guernica and its imaginary look-alike: these are works
that differ from the point of view of their heuristics).
This suggestion brings us to our second hypothesis: the IMH.
For if we take it that the work is constituted by a heuristic and
an abstract visual pattern, then the artist's canvas, with paint
distributed on its surface, cannot be constitutive of the work. It is
merely an instance of it. And a moment's reflection will convince
us that the artist's canvas could not be constitutive of the work.
For if it were, Picasso and Twin-Picasso on Twin Earth could not
enact the same work, for their actions employ different canvases.
The canvases of Picasso and of Twin Picasso are both instances of
the work, so in our imagined situation there are two instances of
that work. Paintings (and, by the same reasoning, sculptures) may
have more than one instance. To this extent that ATH entails the
IMH.
Someone who regards painting and sculpture as singular arts
might react in one of two ways. They might simply reject the ATH;
and perhaps it can be shown that there are reasons for doing that.
They might, on the other hand, accept the ATH, claiming that it
does not conflict with what people normally have in mind when
they claim that painting is a Singular art. Granted, they may say,
that in the bizarre situation where Twin Earth exists, Picasso's
Guernica and Twin Picasso's Twin Guernica are instances of the
same work; that does not show that paintings are reproducible in
the way that novels are. For the ATH does not entail that someone
who produces a copy - even a 'perfect' copy - of Guernica has
produced another instance of the work. It is this last claim that the
dualist is really concerned to deny, and there certainly are cogent-
sounding reasons for denying it.
If we are to decide this question properly, I think we must take
a close look at the arguments that have been given for saying that
painting is a singular art. This will be the task of the next chapter.
16. SUPERVENIENCE AGAIN
In Chapter 2 we left the issue of supervenience unresolved. I

rejected both the empiricist claim that aesthetic value supervenes
on pictorial properties, and Walton's thesis that the aesthetic value
of the work depends upon its pictorial properties and its category.
Perhaps it is just a matter of broadening our supervenience base a
little further. I suggested that Walton's account did not go far
enough; that there are aspects of a work's history of production
other than its category that must be regarded as determinants of
its aesthetic value. I have used the term 'heuristic' to denote
all the aesthetically relevant facts about the work's history of
production. So it seems natural to say that aesthetic value super-
venes on pictorial properties together with heuristic (generalising
in the obvious way to the non-visual arts).
But given the thesis of this chapter, we can see immediately that
such a supervenience claim reduces to a triviality. For suppose we
say that if two works have the same pictorial properties and the
same heuristic then they will have the same aesthetic value
(providing also for the appropriate kind of necessitation here).
Then we have said simply that if works are strictly identical they
will have the same aesthetic value, and that is obviously true. I
have claimed that works are identified in terms of their visual
appearance and their heuristics; it is not possible for distinct works
to be the same in both these respects. If a thesis of aesthetic
supervenience is to be of interest it should (a) specify conditions
the co-exemplification of which ensures sameness of aesthetic
value, and (b) specify conditions that numerically distinct works
are capable of satisfying. But I do not know of any such thesis.
In saying this I do not mean, of course, to exclude the possibility
that distinct works may have, on occasion, the same value. What I
claim is that there is no way to specify in advance a sufficient

condition for this. I suspect that the issue of supervenience in
aesthetics may turn out to be something of a red herring. 19
17. TRANSWORLD IDENTIFICATION OF WORKS
The contents of this section are slightly technical. The reader who
omits this section will be at no disadvantage, except in respect of
one claim in Section 4.16.
I want to go back to the issue raised in Section 3.10 concerning
the essential properties of art works. Could the Hammerklavier
Sonata have had a sound structure different from the structure it
in fact has? Could Emma have had a word sequence distinct from
the word sequence it in fact has? Could either of these works have
had histories distinct from their actual histories, to the extent that
the heuristics of these works might themselves have been different?
Intuitively we want positive answers to all these questions. At least
we feel that a work's structure or history could have been slightly
different from what it in fact is. But it seems that I am in no position
to argue that this intuition is correct. On the contrary, it is a
consequence of my theory that the work's structure and heuristic
are its identifying elements; the things from which it gets its very
identity; change either one, in however insignificant a way, and
you change the work itself.
However, I shall argue that there is a way of making sense of
our intuition within the framework of my theory. To understand
how, we need to introduce some ideas from philosophical logic.
Following Kripke, let us introduce the distinction between rigid
and non-rigid designators. 2O A designator is rigid if it designates
the same thing in all possible worlds where it designates anything.
Otherwise it is non-rigid. For instance, it seems intuitively correct
to say that 'Ronald Reagan' denotes the same individual (Ronald
Reagan) in all possible worlds in which it denotes anything, but
that 'the President of the US' denotes different individuals in
different worlds (and at different times in the same world). The
first expression is rigid, the second non-rigid. Now I make the
following claim: names of works of art, as those names usually
function, are non-rigid. An expression like 'The Mona Lisa' does
not denote the same thing in each possible world. Similarly for
names of musical and literary works. How this comes about I shall
now explain.
I have argued that the heuristic of an art work is integral to the
identity of the work itself. Now it will readily be seen that in
specifying the heuristic of a work we need to specify, among other
things, the influence of other works of art on the artist. Thus the
characterisation of many art works will involve reference to other
works, and it is not clear that this can be done in a way that avoids
circularity. (Suppose that two artists are simultaneously producing
distinct canvases. The progress of the one may influence that of
the other, and vice versa.) However, if we follow a suggestion of
David Lewis, I think circularity can be avoided. 2l Lewis noted a
similar problem in the causal theory of the mind: we characterise
mental states by their causal roles. But part of the causal role of a
given mental state may be its causal relations to other mental
states. Again, circularity threatens. In order to solve the problem
(and because he thinks that it is for other reasons correct to do so)
Lewis introduced a general method for defining what he calls
'theoretical terms'; terms introduced via an antecedently under-
stood vocabulary. Lewis suggests that we can define theoretical
terms in the follOwing way. We start off with a theory, T, that
contains a number of such terms, tt, ... , tn. By replacing these
terms with variables Xl, • . . X n, and prefixing a string of existential
quantifiers at the front of the resulting formula we obtain the
'Ramsey sentence' of T:
3x, .•. , 3xnT[XI, ... , Xn].
We can then define each theoretical term as follows:
tl = 'YI 3Y2' ... , 3Yn \;f Xl, • . . , \;f Xn(T[XI, ... , Xn] == YI
= Xl & ... & Yn = Xn).
And so on for each ti.
The theoretical terms then refer to those things which make up
the unique sequence that satisfies t[XI, ... ,Xn]. In any world
where that formula is uniquely satisfied the theoretical terms refer.
In a world where the formula is not uniquely satisfied because
there is more than one sequence of things that satisfy it the
theoretical terms do not refer. In a world where the formula is not
uniquely satisfied because there is no sequence that satisfies it, the
terms tI, ... ,tn may still be regarded as referring, as long as there
is a unique sequence of things that comes close to satisfying
T[XI, ... , Xn]. If no sequence comes close, then the terms do not
refer in that world. Lewis then applies this method to the task of
defining terms denoting mental states, developing thereby a causal
theory of the mind. 22
Now we can apply these ideas to our present problem in the
following way. Let T be our global art-historical theory; the theory
that tells us about all the art works there have ever been, exactly
what their structures are, exactly what their heuristics are. This is
a theory that art historians would like to have. What they have are
rough approximations to it, but let us suppose, for the sake of
simplicity, that they possess T. T contains names of art works, like
'Guernica', 'The Hammerklavier Sonata', 'Emma'. Some expressions
that we use to refer to works, such as 'Beethoven's Fifth Symphony' ,
seem to be descriptions rather than names in the ordinary sense.
But I shall assume that expressions like the one last mentioned are
used to pick out a work with a certain sound structure and heuristic,
rather than whatever work it is that comes fifth in the chronological
list of Beethoven's symphonies. If we replace all these names by
variables bound by initial existential quantifiers we get a statement
which might say that there is a work x, and a work y, and a work
z, and x has sound structure Sand y has sound structure Rand z
has sound structure U and x influenced y and y influenced z. This
is the Ramsey sentence of an imaginary (and grossly oversimplified)
musico-historical theory. The Ramsey sentence says that there are
a number of things that occupy a number of musico-historical
roles. The things which are musical works are then the things
which occupy these roles.
Now the first hypothesis of this book, the ATH, may be
interpreted as saying that the things which occupy these various
roles are all action types. (Think of T as having our constraints 1-5
built in.) T specifies the art history of the actual world; let us call
the class of worlds with the same art history as the actual world the
class of T-worlds. (The T-worlds are the worlds in which T is true.)
Now relative to the class of T-worlds, an expression like 'The Mona
Lisa' will be rigid; it will denote the same action type in each T-
world. This is easy to see. T specifies a structure and a heuristic
for each work. In any world where T is true 'The Mona Lisa' will
denote that action type with the structure and heuristic specified
by T. But the class of action types which can be art works - action
types of the form [x,S,H,D,'t] - are uniquely identified in terms of

a structure and a heuristic. Thus 'The Mona Lisa' denotes the same
thing in each T-world. There will, on the other hand, be worlds in
which 'The Mona Lisa' does not denote anything at all, because in
those worlds there are either two equally good competitors for the
role played by the Mona Lisa in our art history, or because there is
nothing that comes close to playing that role. But - and this is the
important point - there will be worlds in which 'The Mona Lisa'
denotes something other than what it denotes in the actual world.
These are amongst the worlds in which T turns out false, but not
so badly false that we cannot identify a sequence of objects in that
world as coming close to playing the art-historical roles played in
the actual world by the art works we are familiar with.
Thus we might say that, while names of art works are non-rigid,
because they do not denote the same things in each possible world,
they are 'quasi-rigid'. In each possible world in which things go
smoothly (in which T is true) they denote the same action type.23
In some other worlds in which things don't go quite smoothly
enough, they denote different action types. Thus there is a world
in which 'The Mona Lisa' denotes an action type that has a structure
or heuristic (or both) that deviates somewhat from the structure or
heuristic possessed by the action type to which that expression
refers in the actual world. How much deviation is possible is, on
this view, globally determined. Consider something that looks a
little bit different from the Mona Lisa. In one world, w, this thing
might not be the referent of 'The Mona Lisa', because there are
other respects in which w deviates too far from the actual world
for us to be able to identify a sequence of action types capable of
playing roles which are (overall) close to those specified in the
actual world art history. On the other hand there will be a world u
in which something that looks rather less like the Mona Lisa will
be the referent of 'The Mona Lisa', because u is a world which in
other respects come very close to being aT-world.
This, I think, is the result we want. That is, our intuitive
judgements of transworld identity for works are sensitive to global
features of the counterfactual situation we are considering. Let w
be a world in which only one art work is ever produced; one that
looks rather like the Mona Lisa. Would it be the referent of 'The
Mona Lisa'? It seems doubtful. But if we change our specification
of w to make it more and more closely approximate the T-worlds,
we get more confident about saying that this object is the referent
of 'The Mona Lisa'.
Thus we see that the question 'Could the Mona Lisa have looked
different from the way it does look?' is subject to a de relde dicto
ambiguity. If the question is 'Is there a possible world in which
the thing which actually occupies the Mona Lisa role has a different
look from the look it has in the actual world?', we have a de re
construal. The answer then is no: that particular thing preserves
its pictorial properties in all worlds where it exists at all. If the
question is, on the other hand, 'Is there a possible world in which
the thing occupying the Mona Lisa role in that world has a look
different from the look of the thing which occupies the Mona Lisa
role in the actual world?', we have a de dicto construal. The answer
then is yes: the Mona Lisa role is occupied by different things in
different worlds. These things do not all have the same pictorial
properties. (More properly, these things (action types) do not all
have the same identifying pattern.)
In summary, then, the theory I propose allows us to explain our
intuition that certain modal claims like 'the Mona Lisa could have
looked a bit different from the way it does look' are true. For on
this theory there will be worlds in which the referent of 'The Mona
Lisa' does look a little bit different from the way it actually looks.
And this is not because the action types that I identify with works
do not have their structures essentially - they do - but because
names of art works are non-rigid.
This is merely a brief aside on the question of the semantics for
art work denoting terms. There are considerable problems about
developing this theory in detail. It is not appropriate that we
should attempt to solve those problems here.
4
Authenticity
1. PRELIMINARIES
In this chapter we shall investigate the question raised in Section

3.15: are there any singular arts? My hypothesis is that there are
not; that art works of every kind may have many instances. This
thesis is what I have called the Instance Multiplicity Hypothesis
(IMH). For the moment let us consider the hypothesis in the
following form. Let us say that a copy is a correct copy of
an original painting if the two share exactly the same pictorial
properties. Then the hypothesis is that any correct copy of the
original is an instance of the work that the original is an instance
oU
A methodological note: I think that the IMH should be accepted
unless there can be shown to be convincing arguments against it.
This is why I shall concentrate my attention on rebutting arguments
that purport to show that the IMH is false, (though a positive
argument in its favour does, I believe, emerge from these rebuttals).
The reason for adopting his strategy is this. Opponents of the IMH
agree, I think, that on their view the singularity of painting and
sculpture constitutes an exception to the general rule that a work
of art is instantiable on many occasions. Works of as disparate
kinds as novels, symphonies, tragedies, ballets and etchings are
agreed to be multiple (though it will be said by some that works
of the last kind have only that limited multiplicity alluded to in
Section 1.10). Now in these matters I think that our natural
inclination is for uniformity; exceptions are granted when there is
a good reason for doing so. If there is, indeed, no good reason for
doing so in this case then we should accept the IMH.
2. IS THE IMH REVISIONARY?
Many of the arguments against the IMH that I shall consider are
not presented by their advocates as arguments for a position, but
85
rather as explanations for something that their advocates take to

be obviously true. That is to say, some writers take it to be a datum
that painting and sculpture are singular arts; they see their task as
that of explaining why this is so. They do not think that it is
something that we need to be convinced of. Now one reason that
someone might take this view is because he takes the view that
whether an art form is singular or not is something decided by
practice. And since we obviously treat painting and sculpture as
singular then these arts just are singular arts. On this view, while
it is possible for me to advocate a revision of our practice in this
regard, it is not open to me to argue that these works are not
singular, because that would be tantamount to arguing that they
are not generally regarded as singular, which is obviously not the
case.
Nelson Goodman argues for something like this position when
he argues that our decisions about 'locating' works in the various
art forms as physical objects, texts or classes of performances (these
are his options for painting, literature and music respectively) must
reflect an antecedent practice with respect to these kinds. If a kind
of work is clearly treated as singular then no theory can be correct
that choses to treat it as multiple. In a later attempt to clarify the
theory of Languages of Art, Goodman says:
I have not maintained that painting is inalterably autographic.

For an art to become allographic depends upon establishment
of a practice of classifying instances into works in a manner
independent of history of production. If and when reproductions
of a picture come to be accepted as no less original instances
than the initial painting, so that the latter has only the sort of
special interest or value that attaches to the manuscript or first
edition of a literary work, then indeed the art could become
allographic (1972, p. 136).2
So, in advocating the IMH, am I advancing an essentially

revisionary claim? There is a further question that we must ask. If
the IMH is revisionary, in the sense that it is inconsistent with our
practice with respect to paintings and sculptures, must it be false?
That is, is it conceivable that, while painting is treated as singular,
it is not in fact singular? Could practice be based on a mistake
about the nature of painting? The line of reasoning I have just
described tends to ignore this question, assuming that practice
Authenticity 87
determines whether an art form is singular or not. But this is not

obviously true.
Let us take the first question first. I do not believe that our
commonly accepted practices with respect to the treatment of
paintings are inconsistent with the claim that painting is a multiple
art. It is true that all of us who have anything to do with art treat
the painter's canvas as a very special object; we prefer to see the
original rather than any copy. We are not, on the other hand, so
anxious to read the author's manuscript of his novel. But it is
unclear whether this asymmetry in our attitudes towards these
two art forms is due to a conviction on our part that the artist's
canvas is the work itself, and therefore something for which there
can be, even in principle, no substitute, or due merely to a
recognition that, as things currently stand, the original canvas is
likely to have aesthetic features not reproducible in a copy; that
the technology of reproduction is just not currently that good. If
the latter hypothesis is right then our practice in the treatment of
works in the categories painting and the novel (for example) is
compatible with a theory that acknowledges no difference in
principle between these two categories in respect of instantiability,
but which notes merely that, while it is relatively easy to reproduce
a literary work correctly, we are currently unable to reproduce in
an acceptable way works of visual art. This situation mayor may
not change in the future. But if it did change, and acceptable
reproduction became possible in the visual arts, we would probably
come to treat original canvases as much less valuable than we do
now. And in doing so we would be acknowledging a technological
change, not a conceptual one. At that point technology would
enable us to exploit the pre-existent conditions for identity within
works of the kind painting. It would not alter the nature of those
conditions. (At this point, of course, I simply anticipate the outcome
of the rest of this chapter. That is, I assume that there are no
principled reasons for denying to painting the status of a multiple
art.)
But suppose that it could be shown that the way we treat
paintings (and that includes, of course, what we say about them)
reveals a community-wide acceptance of the view that painting is
singular. It by no means follows from this that painting is singular;
it is possible that we are mistaken about this. Imagine that there is
a community somewhere whose members appreciate art much as
we do but who insist that a novel is identical with the author's
autograph copy. In this society literary works are copies, but

readers much prefer to read the autograph copy, and claim to get
a kind of aesthetic satisfaction from so doing that they cannot get
by reading any other copy, even a correctly spelt one. In this
society, literature is treated as a singular art. (At least, if our
treatment of painting is a treatment of it as singular, then theirs is
a similar treatment of litererature.) But we would surely not want
to say of these people that, for them, literature is a singular art;
that their concept of literature is a different one from the one that
we have. We would want to say that they are mistaken about the
nature of literature. And the reason that we would be so confident
in condemning them as mistaken is, I think, the belief we have
that their conception of the singularity of literature could not be
defended by appeal to any plaUSible theory of aesthetic value or
aesthetic appreciation. The singularity or otherwise of an art form
is not something merely to be insisted on; if an art form is singular
that must be because there is some fact about the way in which
the aesthetic features of works of that kind differ - in kind or in
manner of possession - from the aesthetic features of works that
belong to non-singular kinds. Without a difference at this level the
insistence on duality seems quite unmotivated. And indeed, those
who have argued for the importance of authenticity for works of
visual art have often tried to show that the visual arts do differ
from others in respect of the sorts of features that count as
aesthetically relevant and in the work's manner of possessing those
features. (As we shall see, Goodman himself offers an argument
of this kind.) The arguments that have taken this form are amongst
those that we shall consider further on. But it does seem as if such
arguments are what is required. The issue cannot be decided one
way or the other simply by appeal to community practices. To
decide the question I think we must draw upon some principled
conception of the aesthetic and of the nature of appreciation.
Questions about identity within the work cannot be shunted off
into a siding marked 'the logic of art works'. They must, as I said
at the beginning of this book, be answered in a way that fits into
the best overall theory about the nature of the aesthetic. So
naturally I shall draw heavily on the results of earlier chapters in
coming to a view of our present topic.
Authenticity 89
3. AN IMPORTANT DIFFERENCE BETWEEN VISUAL AND

NON-VISUAL ARTS
As a way of introducing the first substantive objection to the IMH

let us recall the distinction that was made in the previous chapter
(Section 3.5) between correct and incorrect instances of the work.
In literature and music we have the possibility that an instance of
the work is incorrect to some degree, and this is as true of the
original instance as of any other. Thus the author's MS can be
spelt incorrectly, and the composer's score can have notes in the
wrong places. (Let us forget for the moment that the composer's
score is not really an instance of the work, but rather an instance
of a recipe for performing the work.) In both these arts the item
produced by the artist is subject to the possibility of correction.
The artist may later correct his own work, or we may decide later
that a correction is obviously required (though there will be cases
where it is unclear whether editorial intervention is called for).
And this possibility simply underlines the fact that the artist's
original MS is not identical with the work, but is merely a reflection-
perhaps an imperfect reflection - of it.
But when we consider painting, the situation that presents itself
is quite different from this. The artist's canvas is not subject to
correction in the same way. In the course of painting the work,
the artist may change various elements in it, but once he has
completed it there is no sense in which we can alter the work to
make it 'correct', even if we have reason to suspect that the artist
would have changed it himself. Thus we regard the finished canvas
as inviolable in a way that we do not regard the author's MS or
the composer's score.
Nicholas Wolterstorff has suggested that this asymmetry merely
illustrates the ontological difference between painting and sculpture
and the other arts. As we saw in Section 3.6, Wolterstorff supposes
that in music (and in literature as well) the work is a 'norm kind',
an abstract entity that determines the correctness or incorrectness
of any of its instances. The painter's product, on the other hand,
is his canvas - a unique physical object. And this explains why
the canvas is inviolable; the work is not something over and above
the canvas, and against which the canvas may be judged. The
canvas is the work. This is how Wolterstorff explains the singularity
of painting and sculpture. 3
Wolterstorff has certainly pointed to an interesting difference
between painting and arts like literature and music. The question
is whether the distinction is to be explained in the way that he
favours. 1 do not believe that it must be explained in this way; that
is, 1 believe that the asymmetry is consistent with the IMH. For
the inviolability of the canvas is surely consistent with the idea
that the canvas is not the work but merely one instance of it. What
we would then have to say is that the canvas is an uncorrectable
instance of the work; that it is the visual pattern of the original
that sets the standard of correctness for other instances of the
work. To be a correct instance of the work any other picture must
have exactly that visual pattern, no matter how convinced we may
be that the original contains a mistake (however the concept of a
'mistake' in painting is to be explicated).
Now 1 think it will be replied: If this is the correct view of the
matter, we are still owed an account of why there is this asymmetry
between painting and the literary and musical arts. Why is it that
the painter's canvas, but not the author's MS, is an infallible guide
to the standard of correctness in the work? The key to the answer
is contained in a point that 1 have already stressed and to which 1
return again and again in this essay. (I am indebted to Jane
Tannahill who showed how the argument could be applied in the
present case and to Alan Musgrave who showed me that an earlier
argument was unsound.) To appreciate a work we have to be in a
position to assess the artist's achievement in arriving at the finished
product, be it painted surface, text or score. But there is between
painting on the one hand and literature and music on the other
an important difference concerning what is relevant to that
assessment. Part - a very large part - of what the painter's
achievement consists in is his success or otherwise in actually
putting paint on the canvas. It is not merely the choices that he
makes about the distribution of colours that matter. It matters how
he implements those choices by physical interaction with the
medium. But in literature and music it is the artist's choice of a
word or note that matters - not how good he is at registering these
choices on paper (or whatever medium it is that he uses). We are
not interested in the quality of an author's handwriting, and we
easily forgive him if he is a bad speller. Thus if it seems to us fairly
clear that a text or score contains a straightforward error on the
author's or composer's part we are prepared to correct his work
so as to bring it into conformity with what we believe to be his
intentions. The way the text or score looks is irrelevant to our
Authenticity 91
appreciation of it. But to adopt the same practice in respect of a

painter's work - to alter the appearance of his canvas - would be
to falsify, to whatever extent, his achievement; to make unavailable
to future audiences something relevant to the appreciation of the
work. To correct a text or score on the other hand (in those cases
where the weight of evidence heavily favours the correction) is
rather to clarify the artist's achievement and thereby to bring to
light some aspect of the work that would otherwise be hidden or
ambiguous.
(In the light of this discussion we see what is wrong with the
theory advocated by Croce and Collingwood that a work of art is
something mental- a structure of ideas in the mind of the painter. 4
For this view fails to recognise the essential connection between
appreciation of the work and appreciation of the artist's achieve-
ment in successfully embodying his aesthetic vision in pigments
on a surface.)
So while Wolterstorff is right to say that correctability is a feature
of music and of literature but not a feature of painting, he goes
wrong in offering this as an argument against the IMH.
4. THE INTENTIONAL FALLACY
There is another point worth mentioning here that connects with

our earlier criticisms of empiricism. It is one feature of the
empiricist's view that there is an 'intentional fallacy' - the fallacy
of believing that there is something aesthetically relevant about
the artist's intentions; what matters are the words in the text, not
what the author intended in writing them. There are many
objections to this view, but one of them should be apparent from
our discussion of the correctability of a text. It is true that we
regard a text as correctable when it contains an obvious mistake.
But 'mistake' must mean here 'something not in conformity with
the author's intentions'. We do not correct the spelling of a poem
bye. e. cummings, because we believe that he intended that some
of the words in his poems be incorrectly spelt. If this idea of 'what
the author intended' did not regulate our practice we would either
be unable to correct the text at all, or we would have complete
critical anarchy, with no limits to the degree of possible correction.
That is, we would have to say either that the text must stand on
its own, uncorrectable even when it clearly fails to correspond to
the author's intentions, because that intention is irrelevant, or that

there is no end to the amount of correcting that we can do. If we
are going to improve the author's spelling, why not improve his
metaphors as well? Both of these extremes are clearly unacceptable,
and would make nonsense of critical practice. But what else, other
than a desire to abide by the author's intentions, could be the
justification for this practice? In this respect at least, the intentional
fallacy is no fallacy. 5
In fact, our identification of the work with a kind of performance
renders the view of Wimsatt and Beardsley (and others who follow
them) wholly untenable. For we cannot appreciate an artistic
performance unless we have some idea about what the artist
intended to do. To separate the text from the artist's intention is
not to facilitate criticism of it, but to take what is merely part of
the work and use it to engage in a pseudo-artistic project of the
critic's own devising.
5. ANTI-EMPIRICISM AND THE IMH
We shall now return to the issue that we left unresolved at the

end of Chapter 2. The question was this: what is the effect of
abandoning empiricism on the IMH? One effect was obvious; we
lose access to one argument in favour of the IMH. But is there a
more devastating result lurking here? Is anti-empiricism actually
inconsistent with the IMH?
I think it is true to say that much of the literature on the
IMH has assumed the following dialectical structure. For a while
empiricism prevailed, and people were hard put to find arguments
to the conclusion that the authentic object is aesthetically privileged,
in which case it is difficult to see why the authentic object should
be identified with the work rather than with one of possibly many
instances of it. Empiricism then came under attack from people
who argued that the work's history contributes to its aesthetic
value. And many of the people who attacked empiricism in this
way seem to have thought that this was enough to establish the
aesthetically privileged status of the original. The principle which
lurks in the background of these contributions seems to be this:
since a work's aesthetic properties are partly determined by its
history, and since the original canvas has a history different
Authenticity 93
from that of any copy of it, the original has a different aesthetic
status to that of any such copy.6
An example of someone who argues in this way is Mark Sagoff,
a passionate and sometimes intemperate opponent of the IMH.
'The authentic and the inauthentic', he says, 'are aesthetically
different not necessarily because they look different, but because
they are different things' (1978, p. 459). The IMH is dependent,
he says, upon a facile identification of the aesthetic with the
peripheral or surface features of things (i.e. empiricism). But we
do not appreciate art works merely for how they look but for the
sorts of things they are. Plastic trees may look like real ones,
but no person of sensibility wants them in his garden. Robotic
substitutes may look and behave like our loved ones, but only a
moral imbecile would be happy to swap. He sums up: I Appreciation
is historical because it identifies an art work as the result of a
particular process; it is relational in that it judges a work, so
identified, in the context of others similar to it in period, place and
kind. Appreciation is cognitive, finally, because our feelings make
us aware of the properties (not merely the surfaces) of things'
(1978, p. 466, italics in the original).
There is much in this statement that is true. Appreciation certainly
is historical since appreciating the work means understanding the
actions of the artist; and that is a matter of inference from the
historical record. It is relational because we need to know to what
extent the artist drew on other works and artists for inspiration. It
is cognitive in that it involves knowing a good deal about the work
that is not immediately perceptible at its surface. But it simply does
not follow from any of these truths that the original canvas itself
is aesthetically privileged. For exactly the same considerations,
historical, relational and cognitive, apply to those arts where
authenticity is admitted by everyone to have no special place. A
novel is an essentially historical product and must be judged as
such; it is the product of an artist trying to solve problems of
plotting, characterisation and style, drawing as he does so on other
writers and other works. Someone who knows nothing of the
Gothic novel, and does not know that Northanger Abbey is intended
as a witty satire on the genre, can appreciate that work only in
the most impoverished way. Someone who did not know that
Richardson's Pamela was the first English novel of character would
probably find the work tedious in the extreme. And what, in their
ignorance, would such a person make of Fielding's satire of it,
Shamela? These are merely some obvious examples of the applica-

bility to literature of the claim of the last chapter: that all works
must be judged in terms of what the artist achieved. And it is
clear, I think, that the same considerations apply to music. To
appreciate the musical work is to appreciate the composer's use of
available musical conventions, the extent of his own innovation,
the way the work comments on, satirises or quotes from available
compositions, the ways in which the composer has overcome
problems posed by the limitations of an instrument, the need to
set a certain text to music, etc. But to simplify a little, and because
we have said much about music in the previous chapter, let us
concentrate in this section on the case of literature. It will be clear,
I think, how the arguments that follow will be applicable to the
musical case.
The question that we now seem to be faced with is this: how is
it possible - as it clearly is possible - to combine a historical, anti-
empiricist account of literary appreciation with the view that
authenticity is irrelevant in literature? By saying, I suggest, the
following. To appreciate the work fully we have to appreciate its
history; we have to know things about the work that cannot be
read off from the text. But if we have the relevant information
about the work's history, and any correctly spelt copy of the text,
then we are in a position to appreciate it. Reading the original MS
would not put us in any better position to appreciate the work as
a historical product than would reading any correct copy. There
is more to appreciating a literary work than just knowing what
sequence of words make up the text, but what more there is is not
a matter of which copy you are reading, it is a matter of what
(historical) propositions you know.
Thus the possibility of correct copies in literature in no way
conflicts with an anti-empiricist approach to art works of that kind.
But this suggests that the following argument may be used to show
that there is no conflict of that kind for painting and sculpture
either. The correct copy of the painting or sculpture is one that
looks exactly like the original. Now appreciation in the visual arts
requires access to two things; to the pattern of the work (its visual
structure) and to its history (heuristic). But if a copy looks exactly
like the original there is nothing about the pattern of the work that
one can learn by looking at the original that one cannot learn by
looking at the copy. To appreciate the work requires not merely
that we look at the pattern (or rather at some instantiation of it)
Authenticity 95
but that we look at the pattern in the light of the relevant

information about the work's history. But again, if the copy looks
exactly like the original then there should be no difference in terms
of appreciation between looking at the original in the light of this
information and looking at the copy in the light of the same
information. 50 just as my reading of The Scarlet Letter is informed
by (among other things) my belief that it is a nineteenth-century
symbolist novel, and just as the operation of that belief is unim-
peded by my knowledge that the copy I am reading was produced
last year in New York, so my viewing of Girl Asleep at a Table is
informed by my belief that the work is a Dutch seventeenth-
century interior, and so the operation of that belief is unimpeded
by my knowledge that what I am looking at is a correct copy
produced last week in London.
We can now see why it is no argument for the aesthetic
importance of authenticity merely to point out that a work's history
is aesthetically relevant. For the argument is convincing only if one
is not prepared to make the distinction between the work and its
instance(s) for arts like painting - if, in other words, one thinks
that talk of the history of the work is equivalent to talk of the
history of the painter's canvas (or whatever it is that the authentic
object is). For art forms where we are prepared to make this
distinction, as in literature, the argument is clearly unsound. Thus
the argument cannot be used to establish the conclusion that
painting and sculpture are singular arts; any attempt to so use it
merely begs the question. What we need here, and what such
arguments as this do not provide us with, is a premise that points
to features possessed by paintings and sculptures and not by
literary and musical works, and which indicates how the possession
of these features in the one case and their lack in the other makes
painting singular but literature not. We need, in other words, a
differential explanation.
It might be argued at this point that since appreciation is
agreed to be a historical matter, the original canvas may contain
information relevant to appreciation that may be lacking in a correct
copy; evidence of overpainting, for example, visible only through
X-ray analysis. But this argument must apply equally well to
literature. Evidence for the dating of a work or concerning the
process of revision may be found in the original M5 but not in the
correct copy. Clearly, the sense in which literature is a multiple art
must be a sense which allows the original M5 to have the kind of
privileged status just alluded to. When we say that the MS is not
aesthetically privileged we mean, presumably, that qua exemplar
of the text - qua object that displays a certain word sequence - the
MS is no better than any other such sequence. And this kind of
equality among instances has a natural analogue in painting. For
the original canvas, qua exemplar of the work's pattern, is no
better than any other correct instance of the work (at least where
that instance has the same dimensions as the original). In various
other ways, no doubt, the authentic item in both literature and in
painting does have a preferred status over other instances. Once
again, this argument for singularity in painting does not effectively
distinguish painting from admittedly non-singular arts like litera-
ture. We have still not found our differential explanation.
Where should we look for such a differential explanation? The
most promising features from this point of view will be those to
do with the artist's physical relationship to the canvas (or whatever
the original instance consists of). For it is the physical relationship
that distinguishes the original from the copy, and the nature of
this physical relationship in painting seems to be different from
and more important than the physical relationship of the author
to his MS. We shall examine this idea in the next two sections.
6. THE ARTIST'S RELATION TO THE WORK
One argument that may sound attractive here is this. In painting,

but not in literature, the aesthetic qualities of the work are a direct
result of the artist's physical interaction with the canvas. As we
saw in Section 4.3, the aesthetic value of the work is directly related
to the skill, judgement and imagination that the artist exercised in
applying his paints. But the relations between the author and his
text are different from this. The text is merely a conventional record
of the author's intentions about how any copy of the work is to be
spelt. The way in which the author records this intention is, matters
of convenience aside, irrelevant. Admiring the quality of the
author's handwriting is no part of admiring the literary qualities
of his work. Thus while the physical relation of the artist to the
canvas is an important factor in determining the aesthetic qualities
of the painting, it is not an important factor in determining the
qualities of the literary work. But if this relation is aesthetically
important it shows that the original canvas is in an aesthetically
Authenticity 97
privileged position, for it is only with that canvas that the artist
came into that relation.
One reason for suspicion about this argument is that it would,
if it were sound, apply to cases that we would be unwilling to
apply it to. Consider a movie. Much of the aesthetic value of the
work is dependent upon the skill, judgement and imagination with
which the cameraman exposes the film in his camera. The film in
the camera is like the canvas to which the artist applies paint. The
cameraman produces his effects by exposing the film roll to the
play of light. One may say, therefore, that there is an important
physical relationship between the cameraman and the aesthetic
qualities of his work. But the cameraman has that physical relation
only to the original roll of film that he exposed, and not to any
copy made from it. But while we are interested in seeing a high
quality copy of the film we do not insist - and nor would it be
reasonable for us to insist - that we see the original of the film.
It might be objected against this that we never see the original -
in the sense of 'original' used here - of the movie anyway, because
the original is a negative from which a positive has to be processed.
So there is no such thing as viewing the original of the work
(unless for some bizarre reason one wants to view the negative)
and it is therefore unsurprising that people do not press to be
shown the original. But this argument is not applicable to video
film, in which a positive is produced immediately by exposure to
light. And I have not noticed any tendency to regard the original
piece of video film as aesthetically privileged.
What, then, is wrong with the argument that I have just now
sketched concerning the physical relationship between the artist
and the canvas? Why does it fail to establish the intended result
that the original is aesthetically privileged? It is certainly true that
the artist's physical relation to the canvas is important: to appreciate
the work we need to know something about the nature of this
relation; we need to know something about how the paint was
applied. Does the application of the paint display the use of
significant compositional skills? Does it display skill in the represen-
tation of complex three dimensional objects? These are all questions
that are potentially relevant in forming our opinion of the work.
But in this sense the original is not aesthetically privileged over
any correct copy. That is, there is nothing aesthetically relevant
about the artist's physical relation to the work that can be appreci-
ated by looking at the original but not by looking at any correct
copy. In the sense relevant to appreciation the correct copy

embodies or displays the aesthetic qualities of the work as well (or
as badly) as the original does. For we can appreciate the artist's
skill or technique on the basis of an examination of a correct copy
just as much as on the basis of an examination of the original. Of
course, skill or technique is not something that is directly percep-
tible in the canvas: to appreciate it one must know something
about, say, the means at the artist's disposal for putting on paint.
But if, given that knowledge and exposure to the original canvas,
one can appreciate, to whatever extent, the artist's skill, then one
can surely appreciate that skill if a perfect copy is substituted for
the original. And this is borne out by our practice. We do, typically,
show people reproductions of paintings, not even very good ones,
and invite them to admire, or at least to consider, the artistic skills
which they display, even though the copy is one that the artist
never touched. And surely we do succeed to some extent in
appreciating the artist's skill on the basis of what we see in, for
example, books of art reproductions. Of course we take ourselves
to be getting a very incomplete appreciation of the skill embodied
in the work from looking at such reproductions, but this is because
they are never quite good enough. They lack features crucial to
our understanding of the artist's work. The better the reproduction,
the more comfortable we feel about using it to display the embodied
skills that contribute to the work's merit. So continuity consider-
ations suggest the following: if we can get a limited appreciation
of the painter's skill from imperfect copies, why should we not get
a full appreciation of this skill from a perfect copy?
Thus while I admit the differential significance for painting and
literature of the artist's physical relation to the authentic object, I
do not see in this any grounds for saying that the authentic object
is aesthetically privileged. And the reason I do not see this is
because I do not see any grounds for saying that appreciation of
the work via the original need be any different from appreciation
of it via a correct copy.
7. COUNTERFACTUAL DEPENDENCE
There are many forms that the argument I have just considered
may take, and they are not all equivalent. I shall consider one
other variant of the argument, because I think it is an interesting
Authenticity 99
one and because some version of it seems to be implicit in many

of the discussions of this question.
To understand the argument let us consider again the issue
raised in Section 3.3 about the way in which performance means
is integral to the identity of a musical work. One of the arguments
that Levinson put forward for this view is that 'the aesthetic content
of a musical work is determined not only by its sound structure
. . . but also in part by the actual means of production chosen for
making that structure audible'. Levinson gives a telling example
of this:
Beethoven's Hammerklavier Sonata is a sublime, craggy and

heaven storming piece of music. The closing passages ... are
surely among the most imposing and awesome in all music.
However, if we understand the very sounds of the Hammer-
klavier Sonata to originate from a full-range synthesizer, as
opposed to a mere 88-key piano of metal, wood, and felt, it
no longer seems so sublime, so craggy, so awesome. The
aesthetic qualities of the Hammerklavier Sonata depend in part
on the strain that its sound structure imposes on the sonic
capabilities of the piano ... (1980, pp. 17-18).
And in 'Categories of Art' Kendal Walton makes a similar point:
The energy and brilliance of a fast violin or piano passage derives

not merely from the absolute speed of the music . . . but from
the fact that it is fast for that particular medium. In electronic music
different pitches can succeed one another at any frequency up
to and including that at which they are no longer separately
distinguishable. Because of this it is difficult to make electronic
music sound fast ... (1970, p. 350. Italics in the original).
The point being made here is that what we hear in a musical

work, and therefore the way in which the work is experienced
aesthetically, may at least in some cases be affected by our beliefs
about the means used to produce those sounds. 7
Now someone might want to argue by analogy with the musical
case in the following way. Just as our appreciation of the sounds
in a musical work is partly a function of our recognition that the
work is being played on certain instruments, so our appreciation
of the visual pattern of a painting is partially dependent upon our
recognition that the pattern was created in a certain way. A line

that seems fine and delicate if we believe it to have been produced
with a manually guided paintbrush may not seem fine and delicate
when we believe it to have been produced by a machine that is
capable of making lines that are narrower and more regular that
the human hand can hope to make. 8
That this should be so is quite in keeping with our claim that
the appreciation of a work is an appreciation of a performance. For
to appreciate a performance we must understand what means the
performer was using to facilitate his action.
But then we seem to have an argument for saying that original
and copy differ aesthetically, at least if we assumed that the copy
is produced in some way materially different from the way in
which the original was produced. The artist's fine and delicate
line, having been mechanically reproduced in the copy, is no
longer so fine and delicate. In that case it is not true, as I have
been assuming, that the work can be appreciated as much via the
copy as via the original. The copy, though there is a sense in which
it looks the same as the original, will be responded to in a crucially
different way.
But this argument cannot be correct, for the same reason
that the argument previously considered cannot be. Consider
photography. For the sake of convenience, let us concentrate on
the case of single frame 'stills' instead of on cinematic photography.
And let us consider only cameras that produce a positive directly,
rather than by the processing of a negative. We may admire a
photograph partly because of the way the depth of field was
adjusted in order to produce a certain effect. And we would surely
admire this quality in a (correct) copy of the original just as much
as in the original itself. But the visual appearance of the copy is
not directly the result of the photographer's manipulation of depth
of field, for the copy was mechanically reproduced from the
original. (Imagine also, to make the example clearer, that there is
a purely mechanical way of producing copies of photographs that
requires the application of no human skill, just as some 'super
xeroxing machine' might automatically turn out perfect copies of
paintings.) Any argument of the kind presented here that is
designed to show that copies of paintings must affect us differen-
tially if they are produced in a way different from the original
ought also to show that authenticity plays a role in photography
that it manifestly does not play.
Authenticity 101
How is it that we are unaffected in our judgements of a

photograph by thoughts about the manner of production of the
copy that we happen to be looking at (unless, of course, we have
reason to think that the manner of production has had a deleterious
effect on its appearance)? I suggest that the reason is that we
recogise the closely-knit counterfactual dependence of the copy on
the original. The copy of the original positive has the appearance
it has exactly because the original has the appearance it has. And
if the original had looked any different from the way it does, the
(correct) copy would have differed in appearance from the way it
actually looks in exactly the same way. The process of copying
preserves continuity between cause and effect. Any change in the
original would have caused a corresponding change in the copy.
Our recognition of this closeness of dependence is, I suggest, what
enables us to appreciate the copy as if it were directly the product
of the photographer's skill rather than, as is actually the case,
indirectly the product of that skill. And the same thing may be
said about copies of paintings where the copies involved are
produced by some means designed to make them correct in our
sense. Because the copy is constructed so as to look exactly like
the original there is a very real sense in which the line in the copy
is fine and delicate because the artist created a fine and delicate
line, by means of a brush, on the original. If the line had been less
delicate - if the artist's performance had not been so successful -
the line in the copy would have been correspondingly less delicate. 9
The same cannot be said, of course, when we are comparing
causally independent pictures. Imagine two original paintings
being compared; there is a striking similarity between them in that
they both contain a line of the same width and curved in the same
way. But one of the paintings was produced by conventional
means with a paint brush, the other by the use of technical drawing
instruments that enabled the lines on it to be drawn with ease.
Perhaps we would say that in the one case the line was fine and
delicate and that in the other case it was not. But the truth of this
claim does not affect the status of copies of either work. Because
of the strong counterfactual dependence between copy and original
we would make the same judgements about copies that we would
make about the originals from which they were copied - assuming,
that is, that we know the relevant facts about the means used to
produce the appearance of the originals.
8. HISTORICAL UNIQUENESS
Now suppose that someone admits that we can appreciate the

artist's skill via an examination of the correct copy just as easily as
via the original. He may still insist that the absence of a direct
relationship between the artist and the copy is aesthetically rele-
vant. The aesthetic appreciation of the work is more than just an
appreciation of the pattern together with an appreciation of the
skill that went into making it. It is also an appreciation of the fact
that this is the object produced by the artist.
Can this last be a genuinely aesthetic feature of the work? I claim
that it is not. While we must not, like the empiricist, draw the
boundaries of the aesthetic too narrowly, we must not draw them
too widely either. It may be very interesting to know that this is
the object worked on by the artist. It may be a satisfying experience
to see that object. We may be disappointed to learn that what we
took to be an original was merely a copy. But the thoughts,
experiences and disappointments that we get in this way are not,
I believe, aesthetic ones. And the reason is that we have the
same kinds of thoughts, experiences and disappointments on
confronting objects of no possible aesthetic value, in situations that
we do not think of as aesthetic situations in any way. I may want
to see the boots worn by Napoleon at Waterloo; I would be
disappointed to learn that the boots on display in the museum are
merely perfect replicas of Napoleon's boots. They would not satisfy
me; the vital link with the past would be broken. But this concern
is a purely historical one. The boots have, let us suppose, no
aesthetic interest; they are not beautiful boots. So it seems that
while it may be of interest to me that the canvas I am looking at
be painted by the artist's hand, that interest is of a kind that arises
in paradigmatically non-aesthetic situations. In that case there is
no reason to think that the interest is genuinely aesthetic in kind.
I do not think that this is a knock-down argument against
someone who wants to insist that being the original canvas painted
by the artist is an aesthetic feature of the work, and therefore a
feature that gives the canvas an aesthetic status that no copy can
have. It might be argued that, while authenticity in this sense is a
feature that is important to us in non-aesthetic situations (as with
Napoleon's boots), it has an interest in aesthetic situations that
renders the feature, in these situations, an aesthetic one. Anyone
who argued in this way would then have to explain why a feature
Authenticity 103
that seems to interest us in exactly the same way in the two

different kinds of situations is actually of aesthetic interest in the
one case and not in the other. I do not say that this cannot be
done. But to my knowledge it has not been done, and I am content
with my present argument until such time as it is done.
However, I will say in defence of my distinction between
aesthetic and purely historical features of a work that it fits in well
with the theory of art works that we have developed in the previous
two chapters. Aesthetic appreciation, we have decided, is an
appreciation of the artist's achievement. 50 any feature that an
object has is not an aesthetic feature if it makes no contribution
towards the assessment of the artist's achievement. But, as I have
already argued, any correct copy of a painting is adequate, in
the sense that viewing it enables us to appreciate the artist's
achievement to just the same extent that viewing the authentic
instance does. There is nothing about the artist's achievement that
is accessible via the original that is not accessible via the correct
copy. 50 the property, possessed by the original but not by the
copy, of being made by the artist himself, is an historically
determined property that is not relevant to an aesthetic judgement
of the work.
The argument we have just been considering connects with a
remark of 5agoff's that I mentioned earlier but did not comment
upon: his analogy between our concern for art and our concern
for people and the environment. His point was that to say that
any copy of the painting will do as long as it looks like the original
is as crass as to say that I don't mind plastic trees in my garden or
artfully contrived robots instead of my friends and lovers. But to
say this is to obscure the difference between our aesthetic concerns
and our concerns for things other than art works. I don't want
plastic trees or robots, but that is because my concern for the
environment and for people is not primarily an aesthetic concern.
It would be a sad comment on me if it was. And there is no
problem for my theory in the possibility that a person may prefer
to posses an original painting rather than any copy of it; I would
prefer an original, just as I prefer antiques to reproductions. For
this preference need not be regarded as an aesthetic preference; it
is a preference for an object with certain historical associations.
After all, people often like to possess the M55 of novels and poems.
But the possibility that this kind of preference is on occasion
rational does not threaten the multiple instantiability of poetry or
the novel. Why should it threaten multiple instantiability for

paintings and sculptures?
So while it is true that aesthetic appreciation is essentially
historical in the sense that it involves an awareness of the artist's
achievement, I suggest that it is not historical in the quite different
sense of involving a concern for the historical uniqueness of a
particular object or person. Such a concern may be rational and
legitimate, and the same object - a painter's canvas for example -
may be the object of both kinds of interest. An art object may be
valued for both aesthetic and non-aesthetic reasons. But a
distinction between the two must somewhere be drawn. I have
drawn it in accordance with the dictates of my theory. Opponents
of the IMH must now tell us where they intend to draw it.
9. THE PROBLEM OF ARCHITECTURE
Distinguishing these interests helps, incidentally, to shed light on

our attitude towards the status of architectural works. Are they
singular or multiple? Goodman and others have noted that we
sometimes identify an architectural work with a particular building,
sometimes allowing multiplicity of instances instead. We are as
resistent to giving a copy of the Parthenon status within the work
as we are in the case of the Mona Lisa. Multiple instances of
Bauhaus worker housing seem, on the other hand, perfectly
acceptable. 10
Richard Wollheim thinks that questions of work identity must
be. settled by reference to the artist's theory of work identity; and
architecture might seem a good example of this.11 It may be that
while Iktinos and Kallikrates saw building as singular, Bauhaus
thinking embraced multiplicity. But these considerations cannot
be what decides the matter. No author can make his novel a
singular work by stipulating that it be so. Artists can be as mistaken
about aesthetics as scientists can be (and often are) about scientific
method. Anyway, appeal to the artist's theory cannot explain our
feeling that some architecture is multiple and some not. Few would
abandon their resistance to multiple copies of the Parthenon simply
because it was discovered that the designers of that work did, after
all, think of their work as multiple. And it will not do to insist that
its unreproducibility is a result of the fact that part of what is
constitutive of the Parthenon is its Athenian setting. For the
Authenticity 105
Parthenon itself, if removed to Disneyland, would still be the

Parthenon, however deplorable its new environment might be.
What makes us unwilling to say that the Parthenon is multiple?
Surely it is that the Parthenon in Athens, considered as a particular
object, has culturally important associations that no copy of it can
have. Thus it is a less trivial example of the phenomenon illustrated
earlier by Napoleon's boots. It is in this sense that the Parthenon
is unreproducible. So the intuition that the Parthenon is singular
while the Bauhaus apartment block is not - an intuition I suspect
that many of us share - is explained as a failure to distinguish
aesthetic from purely historical properties. And the result is that
the historical status of the Parthenon inhibits us from recognising
its multiplicity; something that does not happen in the case of the
apartment block. Shut out the noise from the purely historical
interest that we have in certain buildings, and architecture will be
seen quite generally as multiple.
10. FORGERIES AND REPRODUCTIONS
Mark Sagoff has another argument that we should take note of at

this point. 12 The argument is interesting because it relies upon the
premise that appreciation of the work is an appreciation of the
artist's performance: a premise that has been heavily endorsed in
this essay. Sagoff considers the case of the forger who produces
an exact replica of an original painting. And he argues that the
forgery, perfectly though it may replicate the appearance of the
original, does not have the same aesthetic status as the original
from which it is copied on grounds to do with the work's history
of production. The painter of the original and the forger are solving
different kinds of problems; the original artist's problems are to do
with the translation of ideas into paint; the forger's with how best
to reproduce a given pattern. Thus the forger's activity is parasitic
on the activity of the original artist. Sagoff confuses the issue by
going on to say that 'the forgery lacks cognitive importance: it
merely repeats the solutions to problems already solved' (1977,
p. 146). Presumably he wants to say that, if there is any problem-
solving done by the forger, it is less significant than the problem-
solving done by the original artist. This argument would apply
equally to non-deceptive copies; that is, to copies that are not
forgeries.
Sagoff does not give the details of this argument, but it can be
filled out in an instructive way. (Here I am indebted once again to
Jane Tannahill.) The case in point concerns the production of a
copy B of an original painting A, where the production of the copy
requires the use of artistic skills, but skills different from (and
perhaps less significant than) the skills of the original artist. In
performing the act of copying, the copyist instantiates an action
type; that is, he arrives at a certain visual pattern via a heuristic.
The heuristic of this action type may be summed up in the
directive: produce a visual pattern, by means of paints and brushes,
indistinguishable from A. Let us suppose for the moment that this
action type constitutes an art work. If it does, the copyist produces
an art work distinct from the art work enacted by the original artist
in his production of A. Thus A and B instantiate different works.
We have, therefore, a case of a copying procedure that leads to a
correct copy of a work, but not to something that is an instance of
the work.
Now it might be objected here that this argument cannot be
correct, because a parallel situation may arise concerning the
forgery (or more generally copying) of literary works. Thus suppose
that someone forges a certain illuminated manuscript of the
thirteenth century. That manuscript A', is an instance of a work,
The Bible, let us suppose. Now the forger's production, B', required
considerable artistic skill in its production. But that would not
prevent us from saying that A' and B' are instances of the same
work: The Bible. However, this reply is inadequate, for there is an
obvious difference between the two cases. The skills that go into
the production of B' (and, incidentally, of A') are not skills applied
to the task of making B' an instance of The Bible. However
artistically unskillful the forger was, the result of his activities, B',
would still be a correct instance of The Bible, as long as it was
correctly spelt. What determines the work that B' instantiates has
nothing to do with its producer's artistic skills, and this, we have
agreed, is not true for the forged painting in Sagoff's example.
There the argument depended upon the observation that the
employment of distinct artistic skills in the production of A and B
brought it about that A and B are instances of distinct works. It
seems that we must agree with Sagoff that A and B instantiate
different works.
We might accept Sagoff's argument, and accept, consequentially,
that it refutes the IMH in the form: any correct copy is an instance
Authenticity 107
of the work. If we do accept the argument an easy reformulation

will avoid the problem: any correct copy produced by means that
do not require artistic skills in order to make the copy an instance
of a work of that kind is an instance of the work. This still allows
that paintings may have many instances, and so is quite in keeping
with the spirit of the IMH. And Sagoff's argument does not apply
to copies produced without the exercise of artistic skills. We can
imagine that there might be a super-xeroxing machine, that requires
no artistic skills to bring about the replication of the original. The
original is fed in at one end and the correct copy emerges at the
other. Anyone who wants to argue that a copy produced in this
way is not an instance of the work would seem to be forced to the
unwelcome conclusion that printing does not preserve identity
within the literary work.
But perhaps we do not have to accept Sagoff's argument. Perhaps
we can deny that the action type instantiated by the forger
constitutes an art work. That action type is constituted by a
heuristic and a visual pattern. But I have repeatedly stressed that
not every such action type is an art work. The mapmaker follows
a heuristic to arrive at the visual pattern of his map; but he does
not enact an action type that we would count as an art work, even
if he employs artistic skills in the process. And indeed most of us
(including, I suspect, Sagoff) would not count the forgers actions
as productive of any new art object. In that case it is not true that
A and B instantiate different art works. B is not the original instance
of any work at all, it is just a copy (cleverly produced) of A. So A
and B may be counted as instances of the same work.
Now SagOff does acknowledge a distinction between forgeries
and reproductions, and he has an argument to the effect that
reproductions as well as forgeries are not aesthetically the same as
their originals. The relation of the reproduction to the original' he
says 'is one of denotation, not of similarity.' The copy does not
duplicate the appearance of the original, it represents it. A Cezanne
landscape, for example, represents a certain area of terrain. The
reproduction, on the other hand, represents Cezanne's picture.
Thus '[t]he reproduction and the original differ in medium and in
subject matter; these aesthetic qualities are hardly the same' (1977,
p. 145).
Sagoff explicitly assumes that the reproductions here under
consideration are photographic reproductions. If photographic
reproductions may be said to represent rather than to duplicate
the appearance of the original, the same thing can hardly be said
of the copy produced by our super-xeroxing machine, which, we
will assume, produces a copy by non-photographic means (and
must do, if it is to preserve the surface texture of the original). If
the super-xerox copy has different representational qualities from
the original it would be hard to reject the conclusion that the print
pulled from Durer's plate represents the plate rather than the
knight that is intended to be represented. But I think we should
go further, and resist the impression of exclusiveness in Sagoff's
contrast between representing and duplicating. The same copy of
a picture may both represent the picture (if it is produced by some
means, e.g. photography, that generates a relation of represen-
tation) and duplicate it. Qua representation the copy represents
Cezanne's picture; qua duplicate it represents the landscape, just
as the original does. If the argument that Sagoff is using here is
effectively to show that no copy of a picture can be aesthetically
the same as the original, it would have to show that there can be
no such thing as the duplication of a picture. And that seems
obviously false.
11. GOODMAN'S PROJECT
The hypothesis we are considering is that if one picture exactly

replicates the pictorial properties of another then both are instances
of the same work. And we have argued for this on the grounds
that there is no difference in aesthetic value between two such
pictures; each gives us, we may say, as much 'access' to the work
as the other does. And this is clearly the reason that we feel that
literature is a multiple art; the correctly spelt copy gives the same
access to the work as does the original MS.
Now Nelson Goodman opposes this argument because he
believes that there is a difference in aesthetic value between the
original and such a copy. We shall examine his objection to the
argument and see whether it is correct. But let us note that
Goodman himself wants sharply to distinguish the issue of whether
original and copy have the same aesthetic value from the question
of whether painting is multiple. He thinks that even if the original
and the copy differ aesthetically it does not follow that painting is
singular; aesthetic difference between instances within a work is
not sufficient to preclude there being many instances of the work.
In music there clearly are aesthetic differences between correct
Authenticity 109
performances of the same work, but such performances are all

equally instances of the work. 13 As I have pointed out in Section
4.1, Goodman thinks that painting is singular because he thinks
that our antecedent practice makes it singular. We have considered
and rejected this argument. So in considering Goodman's argument
to the effect that there is an aesthetic difference between original
and correct copy we are considering an argument that might be
used to block the road we are taking to the IMH. That Goodman
himself is not interested in using the argument for this purpose -
because he thinks he has another argument that effectively blocks
the way - is unimportant to us (though it is worth noting that at
least one of Goodman's arguments does seem to be offered as an
argument against the IMH. We shall examine this argument in
Section 4.14).
12. LOOKING
Goodman's argument proceeds in two stages. His first strategy is

to put pressure on the idea that two pictures might look exactly
alike (share the same pictorial properties). For them to look alike
(which means, from now on, 'look exactly alike') they must
presumably be such that no one can tell them apart by looking at
them. But here, clearly, we need some concept of 'merely' looking.
Looking at the two pictures through a microscope I may be able to
tell them apart, but this would not refute the claim that they look
alike. Looking at pictures through a microscope is not merely
looking at them. But what, then, is merely looking? If someone
wears correcting glasses, is he merely looking at the pictures? And
Goodman points to the case of 'miniature illuminations . . . that
we can hardly distinguish from the crudest copies without using a
strong glass' (1968, p. 101). How much magnification is permitted?
It is not clear what this argument is supposed to show. It may
be taken, I think, as showing that there is some vagueness in the
idea of merely looking. It would be very hard to specify exactly
what it is merely to look at a picture, rather than to look at it in
some way that would be regarded as not an appropriate way to
appreciate its aesthetic qualities (e.g. through a microscope). But
Goodman must show that there is more than mere vagueness
involved here: he must show that there is no coherent standard
according to which we could say that any two pictures look exactly
alike. For there is a difference between the claim that there are
some pairs of pictures about which it is indeterminate whether

they look alike - that is the claim of vagueness - and the claim
that no two pictures can ever be said to look alike - that is the
claim of incoherence. Goodman, with his insistence that the
instances of a literary work must all be spelt exactly the same, shows
an unfortunate tendency to assimilate vagueness to incoherence; no
clear concept, no concept at all. But we have already seen that this
is an unworkable project with respect to the case of literary works
and their instances; what counts as an instance of a literary work
turns out to be ineluctably vague. In music the situation is even
more dramatic. For here it is not even possible to specify precisely
what is to count as a correct instance of the work. One simple and
obvious reason for thinking this is that the conventional means for
specifying the tempo at which a work is to be played (e.g. andante)
are vague: there is no clear-cut division between a work being
played andante and it being played andantino. Goodman's tactic in
the face of this difficulty is to say that tempo specification is no
part of the specification of what it takes for a performance to be
correct. But this is clearly a move of desperation. Would a note-
perfect performance of the Hammerklavier Sonata that lasted for
ten years be correct?14 Not in any sense of 'correct' that complies
with the way we actually judge the correctness of a performance.
Goodman has here lost sight of his decision to make the classifi-
cation of works sensitive to antecedent practice! It cannot be a
serious objection to the IMH that it has the consequence that the
criteria of correctness within a work of the kinds painting and
sculpture are vague in exactly the same way that they are in music,
which is admitted to be a multiple art.
However, if the concept of looking alike is merely vague rather
than incoherent it must be shown that there are some clearly
imaginable cases of pictures that look alike. And so there are.
Imagine now that there is a machine capable of producing copies
of paintings and sculptures that actually replicate the molecular
constitution of the original. 15 Such copies could not be said to differ
in appearance from their originals. No one, however well trained,
however favoured by lighting conditions, quality of eyesight or
optical aids could ever tell the difference between the appearances
of the two. Being chemically the same as their originals, such
copies would age at the same rate as their originals. The copy and
the original would look alike, not merely now but in the future as
well, assuming that they were kept under the same conditions.
Authenticity 111
Molecule-for-molecule replication is not something that we can

currently achieve. It may, for all I know, be physically impossible
to achieve it; the assumption that we could achieve it may violate
some law of nature. If molecule-for-molecule replication were the
only way to achieve correctness in a copy, there would then be no
physically possible worlds in which paintings can have more than
one correct instance. It would be interesting to know whether this
is in fact the case, but that question is of limited relevance to the
present dispute. For Goodman's argument is clearly one about the
nature of painting and its difference from the other arts; it is not
an argument about what the laws of nature are. Consider the
following analogous case. Suppose the laws of nature, because of
their implications for the strength of materials, preclude the taking
of more than n prints from a single plate, for some n. Then there
would be no physically possible worlds in which prints exist in
editions of more than n. But surely people in some physically
impossible world who are able to produce more than n of a given
print are still producing prints. It is not an intrinsic characteristic
of prints that they appear in editions of at most n. That is just a
fact about the limitations (in some sense necessary limitations) on
our technology. Why should we not be prepared to say the same
about painting?
13. LOOKING AND AESTHETIC DISCRIMINATION
Goodman's arguments do not end at this point. He concedes 'for

the sake of the argument' that there is a clear sense in which a
copy can be said to look exactly like the original from which it is
copied. Would there be any aesthetic difference, he asks, between
the original and the perfect copy? His answer is yes; 'the pictures
differ aesthetically for me now even if no one will ever be able to
tell them apart merely by looking at them' (1968, p. 106). The
reason is this. Suppose I confront two pictures that, it seems to
me, look exactly alike. They may indeed look exactly alike, but all
that I can know is that they seem to look alike; that is, my present
inability to tell them apart is consistent with a possible future state
of affairs in which, by diligent observation, I come to discriminate
between them. But in that case the fact that I know that one is an
original and one a copy constitutes an aesthetic difference between
them because it will affect the way in which I look at them in the
future. I will be on the lookout for differences between them, even

if, as a matter of fact, there are no such differences to be discovered.
This argument is remarkably unconvincing. First of all, a
moment's reflection will persuade us that exactly the same kind of
argument could be employed to show that no copy of a literary
work can have the same value as the original. Goodman says that
the standard we use to determine the correctness of a copy of a
literary work is sameness of spelling with the original. Let us
assume that this is right. Could we ever be certain that a given
copy was correct in this sense? We could never be absolutely sure.
No matter how many times the copy has been checked against the
original it remains possible that there is a typographical mistake
that has been overlooked. So knowing that the one is a copy and
the other an original may, if I am sufficiently interested, affect my
reading of the copy, because I will always be on the lookout for as
yet undiscovered mistakes. Of course we think of proof reading
as a mechanical activity that is in principle effectively decidable.
But in practice, of course, there always remains, no matter how
many times the spelling is checked, the possibility of an undetected
error. This probability will become insignificantly small after a
certain number of checks have been run. But suppose that our
imaginary technology of super-xeroxing machines is so reliable
that the probability of an error in the copying process is also
insignificantly small. Then there would seem to be no difference
between painting and literature when it comes to assessing the
significance of possible mistakes in the copying process. So we may
conclude that there is always an aesthetically relevant difference
between the original M5 and the copy, and that the original
occupies an aesthetically privileged position. Clearly there is
something wrong with this argument; but equally clearly it is
structurally the same as Goodman's argument just described. So
there must be something wrong with Goodman's argument as
well.
Goodman may reply that the two arguments are indeed struc-
turally the same as I have stated them, but that his own argument
contains a further step that I have not mentioned. And the further
step is to say that the search for a difference between two pictures,
fruitless though it may be, constitutes a training in aesthetic
perception. I may, as a result of my efforts to detect a difference
between them, improve my ability to discern aesthetically relevant
features in these and other works. This is how I make sense of
Authenticity 113
Goodman's remark that 'although I cannot tell the pictures apart

merely by looking at them now, the fact that the left-hand one is
the original and the right-hand one a forgery constitutes an
aesthetic difference between them for me now because knowledge
of this fact . . . assigns the present looking a role as training
towards such a perceptual discrimination' (1968, p. 105). And this
point, Goodman might say, does not apply to the literary case; the
search for typographical errors in a novel does not constitute a
training in the perception of the aesthetically relevant qualities of
the literary work.
There are two questions to ask about this reply. First, is this
really a point of disanalogy between the visual and the literary
arts? Secondly, does the training effect of the looking constitute a
genuine aesthetic difference between the original and the copy?
As to the first question, it seems that there is no disanalogy here;
training in the recognition of notational characters is a training in
the recognition of aesthetically relevant features of the literary
work. It is true that we do not usually regard spelling itself as an
aesthetically relevant feature of a work, but it certainly may be, as
in this poem bye. e. cummings: 16
Q:dwo
we know of anything which can
be as dull as one englishman?
A: to
Here the non-standard spelling is something that it may be

legitimate to cite in defending an aesthetic judgement about the
poem, and for that reason constitutes an aesthetically relevant
feature. So the ability to determine spelling is the ability to perceive
an aesthetically relevant feature.
Goodman pays much attention to the fact that we use a notation
system in literature but not in painting. And a notation system
which is adequate in Goodman's sense must make discrimination
among examples of characters in the system 'theoretically possible'
(1968, p. 136). This means, roughly speaking, that the differences
between characters must be finite. It may be thought that a point
could be made here in Goodman's defence to the effect that where,
as in literature, a proper notation is available, discrimination
between instances of different characters is an elementary task,
learned when we acquire the skill to write our language. So one
should not speak of a training in the perception of character

differences in the same way that we talk about a training in the
discrimination of putatively identical pictures.
But as Goodman himself recognises, the actual practice of writing
is something from which the requirements he lays down on a
notational system are at best an idealisation. 17 Letters can be hard
to distinguish from one another, and there does not seem to be
any theoretical limit to how hard it can be to distinguish them. So
it may be said of the texts that we actually encounter (particularly
handwritten ones) that character differentiation is a skill refinable
without limit - and presumably an important skill for the critic
who may have to determine the text of a work from the autograph.
We could, perhaps, overcome this difficulty be enforcing a canonical
way of producing letters (typewriters do this to some extent). But
this possibility cannot justify our present attitude towards the
relative status of copies in literature and in painting.
Goodman makes another dubious assumption. (Here I am
indebted to David Lewis). He assumes that the process of trying
to distinguish between putatively identical pictures will increase
our powers of aesthetic discrimination. But it may be that the best
way to tell whether there is any difference in appearance between
two pictures is to use a method that does not rely upon or
bring about a refinement of our aesthetic discrimination. When
astronomers want to decide whether there is a hitherto undis-
covered planet at a certain place in the sky where they have
predicted that it will be; they take photographs of the same section
of sky at different times. They then put the two photographs in a
machine which flashes up images from the one and then from the
other in quick succession and at the same place in the observer's
visual field. This is reckoned to be the best way of telling between
the two. Any difference between them shows up as movement
against a stable background. Now such a device might be very
useful if we are doubtful as to whether there is a difference between
two pictures; more useful, perhaps, than trying to focus on 'gestalt'
or 'regional' qualities of the work, which would be the connoisseur's
way of looking at them. But employing it is unlikely to increase
one's aesthetic sensitivity.
But despite these serious objections, let us grant to Goodman
that there is some important connection between the search for
pictorial differences and the development of an aesthetic sensibility.
Our second question was this: does the training effect induced
Authenticity 115
by the attempt to distinguish copy from original constitute an

aesthetically relevant difference between them? Surely it does not.
For there is an aesthetic difference between two pictures if and
only if there is an aesthetically relevant characteristic (perhaps a
broadly relational one) which the one has and the other lacks. But
the training effect is not the result of, nor does it imply, any such
aesthetic asymmetry between the two pictures. Suppose I look at
pictures A and B, believing, of A, that it is the copy, and of B that
it is the original. I then examine them with a view to discovering
pictorial differences (which I fail to find, because there are none).
A training effect results. But exactly the same training effect would
have resulted if both A and B had been perfect copies of the same,
now lost, original. And what aesthetically relevant difference could
there be, even on Goodman's theory, between these two copies?
Suppose that there are two bar bells of exactly the same weight. I
lift them in order to detect a difference in their weights, and the
act of lifting increases my muscular strength. But this training
effect is not evidence that there is any difference between them
except their numerical distinctness.
14. FORGERY AGAIN
Goodman has one further argument against the IMH. And this
time, I think, that argument must be construed as an argument
directly against the IMH, rather than against the claim that copy
and original must be aesthetically alike. (We shall see why as the
argument proceeds.)
The argument is given as an explanation of why there can be
forgeries of paintings but not of literary works. Goodman agrees
that there can be a forgery of a literary work in the restricted sense
that there can be a forgery of some instance of it, as in our case of
the forged illuminated Bible. But his claim is that forgery proper is
possible in painting exactly because painting is a singular art;
forgery of the authentic instance of the work is forgery of the work
itself. What he then gives us is an argument to the effect that
painting is singular. The argument is that if painting were multiple
there would be no way to decide what is a genuine instance of the
work. In literature and music 'there is ... a theoretically decisive
test for compliance' (1968, p. 117). A copy of a book is correct if
and only if it is correctly spelt; a musical performance is correct if
and only if it is played in accordance with the score. But
[i]n painting, on the contrary, with no such alphabet of charac-

ters, none of the pictorial properties - none of the properties the
picture has as such - is distinguished as constitutive; no such
feature can be dismissed as contingent, and no deviation as
insignificant. The only way of ascertaining that the Lucretia before
us is genuine is thus to establish the historical fact that it is the
actual object made by Rembrandt (1968, p. 116).
Thus Goodman is telling us that the only test that we have for
genuineness in painting is one that forces us to the conclusion that
only one instance of the work - the author's canvas - is genuine.
We may wonder exactly what Goodman means by 'genuine'. If
he means by it what we mean here by 'authentic' (being produced
by the artist himself) then he is certainly right to conclude that
only the original canvas is genuine. But if that is what he means
then there is nothing to be got out of his comparison between the
test for correctness in the copy of a novel and the test for
genuineness in a painting. For these are clearly tests for different
things. A test for genuineness as applied to literature would be a
test that enabled us to identify the author's MS. But if genuineness
is thought of as being properly analogous to correctness in literature
then surely we may quickly retort to Goodman that the test for
genuineness in a painting is whether or not the copy under
consideration looks exactly like the original. Goodman's response
to this is to say that there is no such test because of the absence of
an alphabet of characters for painting. Our having an alphabet of
characters for literature (and in an extended but legitimate sense
for music as well) is what provides the 'theoretically decisive test
for compliance'. We simply compare each copy letter for letter,
and we compare the performance note for note with the score (this
time of course comparing notes as played with notes as written).
Our task, in these cases, is discrete and finite. When every note or
letter has been checked our task is done. But in painting there is
no such mechanical procedure to be gone through. Any visual
comparison that concludes that the original and the copy look alike
can be overturned by a later, more refined comparison.
But we have already seen that, in the case of literature, the
availability of such a checking does not render the test for
correctness epistemologically secure, simply because any checking
Authenticity 117
can be done wrongly. So just as it is always possible that two

pictures, pronounced to be visually identical, are in fact not, so it
is possible that two copies of a novel, pronounced to be spelt the
same, in fact are not. So there is no relevant difference in principle
between the test for correctness in literature and the test for
correctness in painting that I have proposed; at least there is no
difference between them with respect to their immunity from error,
and that is the important point here. But we may say further that
when we turn to a comparison between music and painting,
even the theoretical difference between their checking procedures
collapses under pressure. We have already seen that whether or
not a musical performance complies with a score is not, as Goodman
supposes, susceptible of a theoretically decisive answer. In that
case I can see no reason why the absence of a theoretically decisive
test for correctness in painting should be a barrier to our regarding
that art form as multiple.
15. LOOKING REVISITED
Goodman has tried to show that, even if there is a sense in which

pictures may be said to look alike, there will be aesthetic differences
between them. We have seen that this argument fails. But there is
another argument to the same conclusion hinted at in the litera-
ture. IS The most plausible version of it that I know of was put to
me by Graham Oddie and David Ward.
Let us say that two pictures look alike if no one with merely
human powers of observation, using only such means of examin-
ation as are deemed appropriate as aids to the appreciation of
paintings, will ever be able to tell them apart. Because of the
vagueness of 'merely human powers' and 'appropriate means' this
notion of looking alike will be vague. We have argued that this in
itself is no barrier to the employment of the notion. However,
'looks like' will surely not be a transitive relation. There will be
pictures A, Band C such that A and B look alike, Band C look
alike, but A and C do not. Take an imperceptible difference and
double it; you may have a perceptible difference. Now consider
two perfect copies CI and C2 of an original o. While CI and 0 look
exactly alike, and C2 and 0 look exactly alike, CI and C2 may not.
Assume, in fact, that they do not look alike, and that the perceptible
difference between them is aesthetically relevant. In virtue, then,
of the perceptible difference between them, Cl possesses some

aesthetic property P which C2 lacks. But this shows that we cannot
maintain what we have been assuming all along; that the correct
copy of the picture has all and only all the aesthetic properties
possessed by the original. For on the assumption that it does we
would have to conclude that 0 possessed P and ~P, which is a
contradiction.
It seems to follow from this that there is no such thing as the
unique look of a picture. For any account of the look of a picture
is going to have it that 0 and Cl share the same look, and that 0
and C2 share the same look. But these looks are different. 0 has as
many looks as there are (possible) correct copies of 0 that are
pairwise distinct in look.
Further, if this view is correct, the original and the class of correct
copies of it do not give the same access to the work's aesthetic
qualities. For suppose that there are two critics, who know exactly
the same facts about a work W; critic A is exposed to copy Cl , critic
B to copy C2• In virtue of the perceptible differences between Cl
and C2, A comes to a judgement about W different in some degree
from the judgement that B comes to about W. Both their judgements
are rationally made; the differences between them are entirely due
to the perceptible differences between Cl and C2 • But then Cl and
C2, while both being correct instances of the work, do not give the
same access to the aesthetic properties of W; the judgement that
you come to about the work depends crucially upon which instance
you happen to be examining. But surely this establishes that 0,
the authentic instance, is aesthetically privileged, because the only
way to be sure that you do not get into the situation just described
is to make sure that you are examining 0 and not any copy of it,
even one that looks like O. And surely that gives us a reason for
saying that painting is a singular art; the original plays a role in
appreciation of the work that cannot be played by any other
copy.
But Pavel Tichy has pointed out to me that the argument depends
upon a too restricted notion of what it is for pictures to look alike.
For two pictures to look alike it is not enough that no-one will ever
be able to tell them apart by looking at them in isolation from all
other objects. For while 0 and Cl may look alike when compared
in isolation, they will be seen to look different from one another
when compared with C2• 0 looks like C2 and Cl does not - and
that is a perceptible difference between them. (The same argument
Authenticity 119
shows, of course, that there is a perceptible difference between 0

and C2.)
This underlines a point that has already been granted; that
looking the same is a highly non-effective notion. To be sure that
two pictures look the same we would have to compare them
not merely with each other, but with all other copies. But the
impossibility of certainty in this area does not preclude us ever
having reasonable grounds for believing that the two pictures do,
in fact, look alike. We might know, for instance, that the copy was
produced from the original by a particularly reliable method.
In this context it is worth pointing out that the air of unreality
attending our talk of pictures looking alike in some highly non-
effective sense can be at least partly dispelled. For an acceptable
practice of copying that meets our aesthetic needs could be
introduced without our having to satisfy the requirement of
absolute indistinguishability. And this possibility depends upon
there being a necessary degree of tolerance in the relation between
visual perception and aesthetic response. There are perceptible
differences between the authentic instance as viewed on one
occasion and the same instance as viewed on another. And our
practice in the criticism and appreciation of paintings is and must
be tolerant of such differences if art appreciation is to have any
kind of intersubjectivity. Thus critics make judgements about
paintings, based on their observation of the work on many
occasions, when they know full well that the work as viewed on
one occasion will look slightly different from the way it looks on
another. Conditions of lighting within the same gallery fluctuate
quite noticeably, and transporting the work to another place can
certainly result in an altered 'look'. Further, it is notorious that the
appearance of a work is something that changes over time due to
intrinsic changes in the constitution of the substances used in the
work. Yet critics compare their judgements about a canvas with
the judgements of other critics about the same canvas made under
widely differing conditions at different times and places. And these
judgements are put forward as having intersubjective validity.
They are not spontaneous reports of current sensation; if they were
they would not be of interest to others. Art criticism is regarded
as a community activity; the judgements of one critic may be
contradicted, affirmed, refined and developed by others. And this
process is supported by argument and counterargument, including
arguments to the effect that another critic has simply missed a fine
detail in the appearance of the work. But this kind of critical

interaction would be impossible if it were a condition of intersubjec-
tive comparison of judgements that the critics all based their
opinions and arguments on the perception of a visual pattern that
was absolutely identical on all occasions of look.
Of course, if we had reason to think that the appearance of a
work fluctuated wildly from one occasion of look to another, critical
communication would become impossible, or at least it would
become a much more hazardous enterprise. (There are real prob-
lems about how we are to appreciate works that have noticeably
deteriorated.) But the fact is that we do regard the original canvas
as instantiating the work on different occasions and under different
circumstances, without setting strict limits to the amount of
variation in its appearance that is regarded as tolerable. And
indeed, it is difficult to see how we could set such strict limits.
But then it seems entirely arbitrary for us to say that, in virtue of
the fact that there is a small but perceptible difference between the
two copies, neither of which can be distinguished from the original,
neither copy genuinely instantiates the work. My judgement of a
work, based on an examination of Cl , and yours based on an
examination of C2, need be no less comparable as judgements
about the work than they would be if you saw the original in Paris
last week and I saw the original in New York a year ago.
With this I conclude the defence of the IMH.
16. WORKS AND THEIR INSTANCES
Having completed our defence of the IMH, we may conclude that

paintings and sculptures are capable of having many instances.
But under what conditions are we to say that two instances are
instances of the same work? This question arises also, of course,
for the other major art forms we have been considering; literature
and music. It will be useful to consider these three together. Let
us first of all discuss the notion of something being a correct instance
of the work. Perhaps the simplest thing one could do would be to
invoke the following criteria:
Authenticity 121
1. Looking like the original (for painting);

2. being played in accordance with the same score (for music);
3. being spelt like the original (for literature).
Simple as these conditions for identity within the work are, I am

inclined to reject them. And my rejection of them is based on the
decision recorded at the beginning of this book: to make our theory
of art works sensitive to facts about appreciation. Let us concentrate
for the moment on painting. The crucial notion that we have
employed throughout is that of two objects (original and copy)
providing the same access to the work. The copy of the painting
is a correct instance of the work if the substitution of the copy for
the original will not affect appreciation of the work. But then the
claim that original and copy provide the same access to the work
is a modal claim. It is not just the claim that, as a matter of fact,
no one did, does or will appreciate anything in the work by looking
at the original that they did, do, or will not appreciate by looking
at the copy. That might tum out to be true just because nobody
looks very closely at either. The claim is rather that if the copy
were substituted for the original, appreciation of the work would
be unaffected. Now formally to spell out the content of such a claim
would be extremely difficult. For a start we would have to find an
adequate theory of the semantics for subjunctive conditionals in
order to express the claim, and subjunctive conditionals are very
much a disputed area at present. And in a sense the project would
be self-defeating. For we would probably be less certain that the
formalisation correctly expressed the subjunctive claim than we
are about what the intuitive content of the subjunctive claim is.
But one thing is clear: that the claim involves the substitution of
copy for original in counterfactual situations (i.e., in possible
worlds other than the actual world). Now we have allowed that
the appearance of a work is something that may vary across
possible worlds. That is, we have argued for the truth of such
claims as 'the Mona Lisa might have looked different from the way
it actually looks' (Section 3.17). So in substituting copy for original
in other possible worlds, we want the appearance of the copy to
vary as the appearance of the original varies. And this recalls what
was said in Section 4.7: that the copy must be produced in such a
way that if the original had looked different from the way it actually
looks, the copy would look correspondingly different. But then it
is clear that something is an instance of the work only if it is a
copy of the original. Mere accidental sameness of appearance, as

in our Guernica and Twin Guernica examples, will not do. All
correct instances of the work must be such that their appearance
counterfactually depends upon the appearance of the original, and
that is not true of pictures that just happen to look the same.
Similar conditions apply in literature and music. Suppose that a
twentieth-century author, Pierre Menard as we may call him,
produces a text that is spelt the same as Cervantes's Don Quixote
but written in ignorance of it. 19 His work, call it Quixote*, is a
distinct work from that of Cervantes; same text, different heuristic.
Quixote and Quixote* differ in various ways to do with their histories
of production, and hence in ways to do with their meanings (since
we identify the meaning of a work with its intended meaning; see
above, Section 4.3). Let us call Cervantes's autograph of the Quixote
Ql, and Menard's autograph of Quixote* Q2. Ql is an instance of
Quixote, and Q2 is an instance of Quixote*. Further, I claim, Ql is
not an instance of Quixote* and Q2 is not an instance of Quixote.
And the reason is that the spelling of Ql is not causally connected
to the spelling of Q2. In worlds where the spelling of Ql differs
from its spelling in the actual world, we cannot expect the spelling
of Q2 to vary concomitantly.
Similarly in music. A performance of Smith's First Symphony
may sound just like a performance of Jones's Ninth. But they are
not both instances of the same work. They lack the requisite causal
connection, which in this case we would have to specify in terms
of relatedness to a common original score token. If Smith had
scored his symphony in a slightly different way any correct
performance of it would have sounded different from the way it
actually sounds. But the performance of Jones's symphony would
not have sounded different.
Thus the view we are lead to is that conditions 1-3 provide
necessary but not sufficient conditions for correctness within the
work for the various arts. Let us formulate an extra kind of
condition. Let us consider visual and literary works together,
giving music a slightly different treatment. Let A be the authentic
instance (canvas or MS) of some work W. Let us say that B bears
the copy* relation to A if B is a copy of A, or B is a copy of a copy
of A, or ... etc. Then to be correct instances of W, Band C must
(i) bear the copy* relation to A;

(ii) look like, or be spelt like, A.
Authenticity 123
Now consider the case of music. Let PI and P2 be musical

performances, performed from score tokens TI and T2. Then PI
and P2 are correct instances (performances) of the work W if
(i) TI and T2 bear the copy* relation to 0 (the original score

token ofW);
(ii) TI and T2 are notationally the same as 0;
(iii) PI and P2 are correctly performed in accordance with TI and
T2.
We require, therefore, that an instance of the work bear a kind of

causal relation to the original painting, MS or score (since copying
requires a causal interaction). It will be objected that if I read
something notationally identical to Cervantes's Don Quixote I have
read that work, regardless of how my copy was produced. 20 What
is true in such a situation is that I have read the text of that work,
since Quixote and Quixote* have the same text. But in reading the
text of a work one is not necessarily reading an instance of that
work (though of course with overwhelming probability the two
things coincide). And this is merely a consequence of my claim
that a work is not exhausted by its text. Cervantes's and Menard's
works share the same text but they are not the same work. Strictly
speaking, on my account one cannot read a literary work, since a
literary work is not a text. One reads the text that is partly constitutive
of the work; and analogous things must be said for music and
painting.
I have suggested that the correct instances of a painting are those
copies that look exactly like the original. But we have made a
distinction between being an instance of a work, and being a
correct instance of it. We have yet to decide the wider question of
what it takes for something to be an instance of a painting. Here a
much greater area of vagueness opens up, as it does also in
literature and music. Is a bowdlerised version of Lady Chatterley'S
Lover an instance of the work? Is an appallingly bad performance
of the Hammerklavier Sonata (with more wrong notes than correct
ones) an instance of the work? Such questions hardly seem
decidable in a general way; we must rely heavily on intuition to
decide in particular cases. Anyway, such questions are relatively
unimportant. What we need is a tolerably clear idea of what it
takes for something to be a correct instance of a work. We now have
answers to that question for literature, music and painting. Once
we accept that there may be correct instances of Guernica other

than the authentic instance, I think we will be able to accept that
much else can count as an incorrect instance of it; a good quality
reproduction in a book on art history for instance. Where we draw
the line I do not know. Is a poor quality copy of Guernica done as
a student's exercise an instance of the work? The question may be
as unanswerable (and as uninteresting) as the analogous question
which arises with respect to the awful performance of the Hammer-
klavier Sonata.
17. THE PROBLEM OF PRINTS
In Section 1.9 I commented on the problematic status of art forms

like prints and bronze casting. They are agreed on all hands to be
multiple; no one instance of the work is identical with the work.
But the conventional view is that works of this kind can have as
instances only those items that are authentic in the sense that they
are pulled from the original plate or cast in the original mould. It is
now clear what we should say about these art forms. Consider a
copy of Durer's The Knight, Death and the Devil, not pulled from
the original plate, but copied from an authentic instance and
not visually distinguishable from it. Because of the likeness in
appearance of the two, and because of the counterfactual depen-
dence of the appearance of the one on the appearance of the other,
the copy itself may count as an instance of the work. Thus while
we retain for the arts of print making and casting (as we do for
the other arts) the requirement of a causal connection to the
authentic instance of the work, we do not demand that every
instance be pulled from the original plate or cast in the original
mould. Thus for prints and bronzes there are authentic instances
(more than one, usually) and non authentic instances, all with
equal status within the work itself.
18. AUTOGRAPHICIALLOGRAPHIC AGAIN
We are now in a position to comment on Goodman's distinction

between autographic and allographic arts (explained in Section
Authenticity 125
1.10). We must bear in mind our distinction between instances and

correct instances. We have agreed that nothing very interesting
can be said about the notion of being an instance. At least, that
notion is parasitic on the notion of being a correct instance.
Concentrating on the latter notion first, we can say that no art
form is autographic. Being a correct instance of a work of any kind
is always partly a matter of history of production. But in no case is
it entirely decided by causal-historical considerations. It is also a
matter of non-causally defined similarity relation, pictorial or
notational. Something can then be said to be an instance simpliciter
of a work if its production is causally linked to the original canvas,
MS or score, and if it bears something close to the relevant similarity
relation to the original. How close is close enough will vary from
case to case. But it is intuitively clear that the unintelligible copy
of the novel, the unrecognisable performance of the sonata and
the millionth print, pulled when the plate has been worn blank,
will not count as instances at all.
Strictly speaking then, all art forms in which identification of
instances is possible are allographic. Identity within the work is
determined not only by history of production. But when Goodman
speaks of allographic arts he often seems to have in mind arts
where identity within the work is not at all a matter of history of
production. In the paradigmatically allographic arts of literature
and music, Goodman stresses that notational correctness is necess-
ary and sufficient for identity within the work. So it is tempting to
think of the autographiclallographic distinction as corresponding
to the wholly causaVnever causal distinction for means of work
identification. Cut the cake in this way and the result is: no
art form is either autographic or allographic. But however we
understand the distinction, it turns out not to distinguish any art
from any other.
19. EMBODIMENT
We are now at the end of our investigations. We have found no

unanswerable objection to the claim that painting is a multiple art,
and therefore no unanswerable objection to the IMH. At the end
of Chapter 3 we decided that all works are action types, these
action types having two individuating components: a structure
(visual pattern, sound or word structure) and a heuristic. How-

ever, there is a difference between painting and the literary and
musical arts that we must not allow to be obscured by the
similarities that we have noted. It is that works in the plastic arts
are essentially embodied. No work in the category painting can
exist that is not executed by the artist using an appropriate medium,
while a poem or piece of music may be allowed to exist without
its being anywhere inscribed or performed.
Some people will object to the conception of a work of any kind
that remains wholly private to the artist. But I think that it is not
unintuitive to say that the poet who completes a Haiku (short works
are the most plausible cases) 'in his head' just before his death in
a motor accident has produced a work that we shall unfortunately
never know about. What may well be true is that works of any
kind cannot be produced unless some works of that kind are public
property. Whether, and if so, in exactly what sense this claim is
true is a complex issue that I shall not here enquire into. But its
truth, under any reasonable interpretation, is surely consistent
with the idea that some individual poems or musical works may
exist in a wholly private way.
The reason why paintings (and carved sculptures) must be
embodied is clear from our discussion in Section 4.3. It is intrinsic
to the nature of painting and sculpture that the artist achieve not
merely a mental conception of the work but the execution of it as
well. In literature and music embodiment via inscription is trivially
achievable and, when it does take place, may be achieved in any
number of ways; anything from which spelling or sequence of
notes is recoverable will do. But the exact way in which the artist
instantiates the pattern of his painting is part of what we assess
when we assess the work itself.
This is not a general truth about the plastic arts. Sol Lewitt, for
instance, produces the instructions for instantiating his works,
which may then be produced by other persons. But works such as
these belong to a category different from the category of paintings
as normally understood.
Now it may be that the truth of the essential embodiment claim
for paintings and the like has been in some way influential in
promoting the view that these arts are singular. A painting must
be embodied; that which embodies it must be the work. But it is
not possible to interpolate a sound argument here, simply because
embodiment is equally a condition on prints and casts (at least a
Authenticity 127
plate or mould must be made) which are agreed not to be singular

arts.
The essential embodiment of painting and sculpture is capturable
within the conception of art works offered here. For it will be part
of the specification of the heuristic of a work of these kinds that
the artist arrived at the pattern of the work by some means that
involves its concrete expression in a medium using certain tools
and techniques. And this is not true of literature and music. It is
not part of the specification of the heuristic of a novel to say how
the writer formed the letters on the page. How he did so, whether
he used some other means of embodiment, whether he did not
embody the work at all; these are not facts about the work itself.
20. CONCLUSIONS
As a way of bringing the conclusions of this chapter into sharp

focus, let us recall the complaint I made in Section 1.7: that the
consideration of forgery has tended to obscure rather than to
illuminate the problem of the aesthetic status of copies in the visual
arts. Let us pose a question:
(*) If a canvas is discovered to have a history of production

different from the history it was previously thought to have, can
it be legitimate to revise our opinion of its aesthetic worth?
This question has been raised on a number of occasions, perhaps

most often and most dramatically in connection with a painting
called The Supper at Emmaus, certified in 1937 as being by Vermeer,
and discovered eight years later to be by Han van Meegeren, a
twentieth-century artist who had failed to make a reputation on
his own account. Looking at this and other van Meegeren fakes
today it is hard to see how they could have been highly praised
by those who thought that they were by Vermeer.21
Our answer to the question (*) must be yes, on the grounds that
a work's history of production is intrinsic to it. But we must be
careful to notice that not all such discoveries should induce a
change in evaluation of the work. Let us contrast some cases.
(A) Consider again the case of van Meegeren's faked Supper at

Emmaus. Importantly, this is not a copy of any painting by
Vermeer. It must be regarded as the original canvas of a work
by van Meegeren that he falsely represented as being by Vermeer.
The case for reassessing its value is clear on the basis of what
was said in Chapters 2 and 3. Van Meegeren misrepresented the
heuristic of that work, something that is integral to the work's
very identity. When we discovered that the work was a twentieth-
century product we discovered something vitally relevant about
the kind of achievement that it represents. Since van Meegeren
had three hundred years more of art history to draw upon than
Vermeer (including Vermeer's complete ouevres) his achievement
in painting The Supper at Emmaus is quite different (probably
much less) than Vermeer's would have been if he had painted
it. To alter radically one's evaluation in the light of that discovery
displays (or may display - people's motives are no doubt
complicated in such matters) sensitivity to the aesthetics of
painting rather than snobbery.
(B) Consider now a case where it is discovered that a canvas X

is not an original, as was previously thought, but a copy
mechanically produced from the original and looking exactly like
it. We would have in that case no reason to reassess the
aesthetic status of X (though the discovery would no doubt be a
disappointment to the investor). The discovery would not give
grounds for revising our opinion about which work we are
examining, and that is what should determine our assessment
of X.
(C) Finally, let us consider an even more unlikely example. X

and Yare canvases identical in look, but they are originals
produced independently by different artists. In that case it is
most unlikely that they are instances of the same work (though
they might be: recall Twin Earth cases). Assume that they are
not. X is by Smith, painted in 1940; Y is by Jones, painted in
1980. But due to a curator's confusion, X is displayed as the
work of Jones, Y as the work of Smith. Here, as in (A), the
discovery of the confusion should occasion a reassessment.
Thoughts that we had about X prior to the discovery would no
longer be appropriate. We would have been judging it as an
Authenticity 129
instance of a work that it was not actually an instance of. Similarly

for Y.
These are judgements we must accept if we are to accept the

IMH in the form offered here. It may be supposed that such a
combination of results is merely bizarre. But they should not be
harshly judged, I think, until the attempt has been made to
construct a systematic aesthetic theory that delivers different
results. If this book does no more than provoke such a construction
it will have succeeded greatly.
Notes
1 Introduction
1. See Stolnitz (1960) and Dickie (1969) for versions of the functional
view.
2. See Dickie ibid.
3. See Peirce (1931-5), vol. IV, para. 537.
4. See Wollheim (1968), and see also p. 177 of the second ed. See also
Stevenson (1957) and Rudner (1950).
5. The Vatican Pieta was badly damaged by blows with a hammer in
1972. See Sagoff (1978) for comment. The Last Supper has been decaying
slowly for many years due to the operation of damp and other forces.
For a review of the current situation see Connaissance des Arts, no. 395,
January 1985.
6. See Wolterstorff (1980). See Section 3.6 below for comment.
7. See e.g. the collection of essays in Dutton (ed.) (1983). See also my
review of the volume, Currie (1985a).
8. See Frege (1884).
9. Mackie (1977) p. 15. Mackie's anti-realism about aesthetic value is
discussed by McDowell (1983), who argues that Mackie's conception
of an objective world is ultimately incoherent.
10. See Goodman (1968) ch. 3. See also Goodman (1978).
11. See Lewis (1984) Introduction.
2 Empiricism
1. See e.g. Beardsley (1958) pp. 31-2.
2. See Wimsatt and Beardsley (1946).
3. See e.g. Rudner (1972) and Kulka (1981).
4. See Sibley (1958) and (1965). I base the account that follows on Sibley'S
ideas, but in emphasis and manner of exposition it differs considerably
from Sibley'S own.
5. See Boyd (1980) for a useful account of these ideas.
6. See Moore (1922) p. 261 and Hare (1952) p. 145. For formulations of
supervenience see Kim (1978) and Currie (1984).
7. Someone who comes close to the view of aesthetic supervenience
expressed in (SI) is Mary Mothersill (1984, p. 344). She offers this
definition of what it is to be an aesthetic property:
(M) </> is an aesthetic property if and only if V x(</>x :J V y( </>y == x
and y are indistinguishable»
where 'indistinguishable' means 'perceptually indistinguishable'.
Mothersill's definition faces a number of problems, but the failure to
specify for it any modal force creates especial difficulties. In a world
in which nothing has </>, </> automatically satisfies the condition of the
130
Notes 131
definition and so counts as an aesthetic property. For example, being

a unicorn turns out to be an aesthetic property according to (M).
8. See Lewis (1973) and Stalnaker (1976) for influential accounts of
possible worlds.
9. Let us formalise (52) more precisely as
(52) VwVxVyVP*VA«P*wX == P*r#}::> (AwX == AwY»
where P* ranges over exhaustive specifications of pictorial properties,
A ranges over aesthetic properties, and 'Aua' means 'a has property
A in world w'. (52) is equivalent to
(52') V wV P*V A[ 3 x(P*wX and AwX} ::> Vy(P*wy ::> Ar#}].
Formulations of supervenience in the form of (52') are considered by
Simon Blackburn, in his (1984) pp. 183-7, and in his (1985) (though
the formulation there is slightly different). Blackburn argues that such
formulations suggest a certain kind of anti-realism about the class of
supervening properties. Roger Scruton, on the other hand, argues for
aesthetic anti-realism on the grounds that aesthetic properties fail to
supervene on any of the works other properties, and that there is no
principled ground for adjudicating between attributions of conflicting
aesthetic properties (see Scruton (1974) pp. 36-8). A non-empiricist
supervenience thesis is discussed in Levinson (1983). (52) and (53) are
distinguished, along with a number of intermediate positions, in
McFetridge (1985) Appendix. Kim's 'weak' and 'strong' supervenience
theses correspond to our (52) and (53) respectively, so long as all
occurrences of the necessity operator are interpreted as equivalent to
unrestricted possible worlds quantifiers (see Kim (1984».
10. See Frege (1892).
11. It is used in this sense by David Daiches (who is concerned with the
case of literature): 'Only wide reading gives one an awareness of the
possibilities of the medium and enables one to develop taste, which is
simply the sum of discriminations made available by attentive reading
in a large variety of literary modes' (Daiches (1969) p. 177, italics in
the original). Daiches's essay is an excellent account of the ways in
which aesthetic appreciation is essentially comparative, as I argue
further on in this chapter.
12. Thus I seem to disagree with Philip Pettit: ' ... the characterization of
a picture by reference to the sort of thing it represents . . ., unlike the
judgement of particular representational value, must be expected to
be pictorially supervenient' (Pettit (1983) p. 20). But Pettit may intend
this claim to be taken as revisable in the light of his distinction (made
later in the same essay) between primitive and rectified aesthetic
judgements.
13. See e.g. Wimsatt and Beardsley again.
14. See Walton (1970).
15. This objection was suggested to me by John Watkins.
16. See Kulka ibid.
17. See Meyer (1967).
18. See Gombrich (1977) p. 29.
132 Notes
19, See e.g. Popper (1934).
20. For an account of these ideas see Worrall (1978). This idea was first
developed by Imre Lakatos and Elie Zahar.
3 Art Works as Action Types

1. See Wollheim (1968) Sections 35-7.
2. See Levinson (1980a).
3. In correspondence Levinson makes it clear that the second interpret-
ation was intended.
4. See Wolterstorff (1980) pt 2.
5. See Goodman (1968) p. 115.
6. See Wolterstorff ibid., pp. 61-2.
7. See Levinson ibid., p. 7.
8. See ibid., p. 20.
9. See ibid., p. 14.
10. See Frege (1884) Section 66.
11. See Anderson (1982).
12. First introduced by Putnam in his (1975).
13. There must of course be other differences between Earth and Twin
Earth. They have, for instance, different spatial locations. These
differences would begin to show up if we had powerful telescopes,
or started to travel through the universe. But assume that we never
transcend our local environment.
14. See e.g. Kim (1976).
15. For a case study in the application of a heuristic in physical theory
see Zahar (1972).
16. See Jocelyn Harris's study of the influence of Richardson on Jane
Austen, Harris (1980).
17. See e.g. Kennedy and Roberts (1959) and Veselowsky (1973). The
Persian and Damascene astronomers were working with a geocentric
system. The similarities between their systems and that of Copernicus
is a matter of certain technical devices for accommodating the eccen-
tricities of the planets.
18. Duchamp wrote in 1917: 'Whether Mr Mutt [the work was signed 'R.
Mutt'] with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance.
He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its
useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view -
created a new thought for that object' (see d'Hamoncourt and McShine
(1973) p. 283).
19. The content of this section was suggested to me during correspondence
with Crispin Wright. See his (1985).
20. See Kripke (1972).
21. See Lewis (1970).
22. See Lewis (1972).
23. Art work deSignators differ in this respect from designators of mental
states. On the hypothesis of realisational plasticity discussed in Section
2.2, pain may designate some quite different state from the state it
designates in the actual world, in another world where T (,folk
Notes 133
psychology') is true. This is why I call art work designators 'quasi-

rigid'. (They are still, of course, non-rigid in the proper sense.)
4 Authenticity
1. In this chapter I am variously indebted to the ideas and arguments of
Meager (1958-9) p. 28; Wacker (1980); Margolis (1965) especially p. 62;
Strawson (1966) p. 183; Harrison (1967-8) especially pp. 12~1; and
Ralls (1972).
2. Goodman speaks of reproductions being accepted as original instances,
which is not to the point. No reproduction can be the original instance
of a work. The question is whether they may be accepted as instances.
This may be connected with Goodman's tendency to conflate originality
and genuineness. See Section 4.14 for discussion. Wollheim's view
resembles Goodman's in some respects: he argues that one of the
things that determines the principle of individuation for a work is the
artist's theory about how works of that kind should be individuated
(see Wollheim (1978) especially p. 39, and see also text to note 11
below).
3. See Wolterstorff (1980) pp. 71-3.
4. 'When we have achieved the work within us, conceived definitely
and vividly a figure or statue, or found a musical motive, expression
is born and is complete; there is no need for anything else .... The
work of art is always internal; and what is called external is no longer
a work of art' (Croce (1922) pp. 5~1). See also Collingwood (1938)
p. 142. For the constitutive role of technique see Isenberg (1946). See
also Section 4.19 below.
5. See Hyslop (1984) for a similar argument. I develop the case for
intentional criticism in my (1985b) and (1986).
6. Amongst those who have argued for aesthetic sameness of original
and correct copy on empiricist grounds are Mothersill (1961) especially
pp. 422-3; Lessing (1965) especially p. 463; Kulka (1981) especially
p. 338; Ralls (1972) especially p. 4. Amongst those who have argued
for the aesthetic uniqueness of the original on the grounds that
empiricism is false are Meyer (1967), Cormier (1974), Hoaglund (1976),
Sagoff (1977, 1978) and Dutton (1979).
7. See also the interesting argument of Dutton (1979). Colin Radford
says that when we discover that the painting is a fake it will 'look
different' (Radford (1978) p. 74).
8. David Wiggins seems to be making this point when he talks of means
as constitutive of aesthetic effect (see Wiggins (1978) p. 58). See also
Levinson (1980b) p. 379. Clive Bell has a variant of this argument: 'the
actual lines and colours and spaces in a work of art are caused by
something in the mind of the artist which is not present in the mind
of the imitator' (1914) p. 65.
9. This point was suggested to me by a discussion with Colin McGinn.
But McGinn may disagree with my conclusions.
10. See Goodman (1968) p. 221 and Margolis (1983) p. 167.
11. See Wollheim (1978).
134 Notes
12. See Sagoff (1977).

13. See Goodman ibid., p. 196.
14. See Webster (1971) for this and other criticisms of Goodman's account
of notation in music.
15. See Battin (1979-80).
16. Cummings (1968). This example was suggested to me by Elizabeth
Harlow.
17. See Goodman ibid., ch. IV.
18. Intimations of this objection are to be found in Lord (1977) and Carrier
(1980).
19. In the well known story by Borges (1944), Menard, having read Don
Quixote at an earlier time, determines to recreate the work word by
word, and partially succeeds in doing so. Borges remarks: 'To compose
Don Quixote at the beginning of the seventeenth century was a
reasonable, necessary and perhaps inevitable undertaking; at the
beginning of the twentieth century, it is almost impossible .... In
spite of these obstacles, the fragmentary Don Quixote of Menard is
more subtle than that of Cervantes.'
The story as Borges gives it does not quite fit what we want here,
for Menard has read and to some degree recollects Don Quixote. For
our purposes we must assume that he works in ignorance of Cervantes's
story. For philosophical comment on this example see Danto (1981)
ch. 2; Lewis (1978); and Saville (1971).
20. See Goodman (1978) p. 50.
21. See Godley (1967) and Werness (1983) for details of this fascinating
story. The case continues to stimulate journalistic comment - see e.g.
Levin (1983).
References
Abbreviations:
APQ = American Philosophical Quarterly
BJA = British Journal of Aesthetics
JAAC = Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
JP = Journal of Philosophy
PQ = Philosophical Quarterly
PR = Philosophical Review
PS = Philosophical Studies
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Index
Occurrences of names in the references are not included in the index.
Only significant occurrences of names used for illustrative purposes (e.g.
'Beethoven', 'Pamela') are included in the index.
action theory 1, 66, 75; see also passim; explained 8; and

events IMH 9; satisfies constraints
action types 3-4,7,62; and forgery 66,70-1
and reproduction 107; works Austen, J. 4,5,93
as x, 7-8, 66-71 authenticity: explained 5-6,9-10;
aesthetic judgements: and the and the IMH 9, Ch. 4 passim
artist's achievement 41-3; autographidallographic:
relative to communities 38--9; explained 14-15; rejected
and science 44-5 124-5
aesthetic properties: and art-
historical properties 40-1; Battin, E. P. 134
empiricist test for 25; and Bauhaus 104
historical uniqueness 102-4; Baxandall, M. xi
and identity 28; inessential to Beardsley, M.: and intentional
the work 48--9; and fallacy 18, 92, 130, 131; and
intransitivity 11; and pictorial supervenience 22
properties 19-20; plasticity Beethoven, L. van 50-2, 5~0, 62-
of 19-20; relativised 31, 38 3,99
aesthetic training 112-15 Bell, C. 133
alphabet, none in painting 116 Binkley, T. 18
Anderson, J. 60-1,132 Blackburn, s. 131
antiques 103 Borges, J. L. 134
appreciation of works: and artist's Boyd, R. 130
achievement 65,68; does Brahms, J. 50
theory square with facts
about? 76; and historical canvas: defined 46; inviolable
propositions 94 89-91; not the work 78
architecture 104-5 Carrier, D. 134
artist's performance: and copies of categories of art 28--34
the work 97-8, 101; and Cervantes, M. de 122-3, 134
correction of instances 90-1; Cezanne, P. 36
as integral to work 42; in character differentiation 113-14
music 94 Collingwood, R. G. 91, 133
astronomy: discovery in 114; Constable, J. 41
history of 72, 132 constraints on theory 64-6,70-1
ATH (action type hypothesis): and Copernicus, N. 72-3
art-historical roles 82; and copy" relation 122-3
copies 79; defended see Ch. 3 Cormier, R. 133
139
140 Index
counterfactual dependence 9~ genuineness 116

101,121-2 Giotto 3!HJ
creation of works 56-7, 75 Godley, J. (Lord Kilbracken) 134
criticism and intersubjectivity 119- Gombrich, E. H.: Art andfllusion
20 30; on paintings as
Croce, B. 91, 133 experiments 41, 131
cubism 35 Goodman, N.: on aesthetic
cummings,e.e. 91,113,134 features 88; on aesthetic
Currie, G. 131, 133 training 112-13, 114-15; on
architecture 104; on
Daiches, D. 131 autographidallographic 14-
Danto, A. 134 15, 124-5; on classifying
definitions 1-2,77; Lewis on 81 instances 86, 133; on correct
de re/de dicto 84 instances 54-5; on forgery
d'Harnoncourt, A. 132 115-17; on looking 109-15; on
Dickie, G. 2, 130 notation 113-14; on
differential explanation 9!HJ structure 48, 53; on value and
dualism: and empiricism 28, 46-7; multiplicity 10S-9
explained 6; Wollheim on 4- Gothic Novel, the 93
6; Wolterstorff on 89-91 guernicas 29
Duchamp, M. 76-7, 132
Dutton, D. 130 Haldane, J. xii
Hammerklavier Sonata 99
Hare, R. M. 130
electronic music 99 Harlow, E. 134
empiricism, aesthetic: argument Harris, J. 132
against 34-9; and dualism Harrison, A. 133
28, 46-7; explained 17-18; is heuristic: and the critic ~9; in
false 43; and IMH 27--8, 133; forgery and reproduction
and scientific empiricism 42- 106-7; objection concerning
3; and supervenience 1~25; 71-3; path of the scientist 67-
the term defended 26-7; 8
Walton against 2~31 historical uniqueness of the work
empiricist's account of the work: 102-4
explained 46-9; Levinson history of production of the work:
against 50-3 effect on aesthetic properties
event(s): Kim's theory 66-7, 69; 61; empiricist's exclusion of
types and tokens 3-4, 69-70 26; heuristic role of 21; and
evidential support 44-5 the IMH 92-6
Hoaglund, J. 133
Fielding, H. 93 Hyslop, A. 133
forgery: Goodman on 115-17; and
the IMH 10-11; and identity: and aesthetic properties
reproductions 105--8; van 28, 88; and architecture 104-
Meegeren's 127--8 5; criteria for 120-4; of and
Francis of Assisi, Saint 20, 35 within works 9-10
Frege, G.: on definitions 11, 130; Iktinos 104
on number 58, 132; on sense IMH (instance multiplicity
24,131 hypothesis): and empiricism
Index 141
IMH - continued Margolis, J. 133

27--8, 92-6; explained 8; and Martians, their artistic talents 36-
forgery 10--11; grounds for 9
accepting 88; and inviolability Meager, R. 133
of the canvas 90--1; possible Menard, Pierre 122-3, 134
amendment to lOfr7; Meyer, L. 40--1, 131, 133
revisionary? 86-8; unrefuted Michelangelo 4
43; and visual arts 78-9 mind and body 20, 132-3
instances of works: correct and Mondrian, P. 30
incorrect 53-5, 89; criteria for Moore, G. E. 20, 130
120-4; defined 5; vagueness Mothersill, M. 130, 133
of 123--4 movies 97
intentional fallacy x, 91-2, 133 multiple arts: explained 8; see also
intentions, artist's 2, 91-2 IMH
Isenberg, A. 133 Musgrave, A. xii, 90
musical works: means of
Kallikrates 104 performing 49--50; their
Keating, T. 10 structure 48
Kennedy, E. 132
Kim, J.: on events 66,69, 132; on Napoleon Bonaparte, his boots
supervenience 130--1 102,105
Kripke, S. 80, 132 norm kinds 10, 55-6, 89
Kulka, T. 130,131, 133 notation system 113-14
Lacy, A. xii
Lakatos, I. 132 Oddie, G. xii, 117
Leonardo da Vinci 4 ontology: and appreciation 11-12;
Lessing, A. 133 and epistemology x
Levin, B. 134
Levinson, J.: his account of works paintings Ch. 4 passim; as a
57-61; ambiguity in his thesis category of art 28; as
51-3, 132; on creation of experiments 41-2, 45; their
works 56, 61; on musical structure 78
works 49--53; his objection Palmer, S. 10
71-3; on performance means Pamela and Shamela 93--4
49--50, 99, 133 Parthenon,The 1~5
Lewis, D. xii, 15, 81, 114, 130, 131, pattern of the work: and
134 empiricism 47; explained 19
Lewitt, S. 126 Peirce, C. S. 3, 130
Liszt, F. 50 performance means 49--50,99
looking: Goodman on 109--15; Pettit, P. 131
intransitive 117-19; and photography 100
tolerance 119; vague 109--11 physical relation to work, artist's
Lord, C. 134 96-101
Picasso, P. 29, 34-5
McDowell, J. 130 pictorial properties: and aesthetic
Mcfetridge, I. 131 properties 20; explained 19;
McGinn, C. xii, 133 Goodman on 116
Mackie, J. L. 12,130 Popper, K. R. 42, 132
142 Index
possible worlds: explained 22, 131; structure of the work: as constituent

physically 23, 111; and of work 70; as essential 48,
properties of works 48-9,51- 65--6, 82-4; pure and applied
2; and theories 81-2 49-50
Prall, D. 17 supervenience: doubts about 79-
prints and casts 14-15, 124 80; explained 20; strong 23-
Putnam, H. 62, 132 5, 27, 131; weak 22, 130
Tannahill, J. xii, 90
Radford, C. 133 taste 21, 24-5, 131
Ralls, A. 133 tempo 110
Ramsey sentence 81 Tichy, P. xii, 118
Rauschenberg, R. 76 Twin Earth 9,62-3, 71-2, 73-4, 78-
referential properties 73-4 9, 128, 132
Rembrandt 116 types and tokens: a confusion
representational properties 25--6, concerning 75--6; explained
131 3; of situations 61-2; as
reproductions of works: aesthetic structure 48; Wollheim on 4-
status of 43, 128, 133; and 5
appreciation 98; and forgery
105-8; molecule-for-molecule
110-11; as representations van Meegeren, H. 10, 127-8, 134
107-8; and technology 87 Vermeer, J. 127-8
Richardson, S. 93 Veselowsky, I. N. 132
rigid designation 80; quasi- 83, visual art Ch. 4 passim; essentially
132-3 embodied 126-7
Roberts, V. 132
Rudner, R. 130
Wacker, J. 133
Walton, K.: on categories of art
28-34, 131; on criteria of
Sagoff, M.: on aesthetic and non- category membership 35--6;
aesthetic 103, 134; and disagreement with 39-40,79;
empiricism 93, 133; and and IMH 43; on performance
forgery 105-8 means 99; revision of
Saville, A. 134 empiricism inadequate 41;
Scruton, R. 131 sympathy for empiricism 34
Sibley, F. 19-21, 25, 130 Webster, W. 134
singular arts: explained 8; and Ward, D. xii, 117
intransitivity 118; painting Watkins, J. xii, 131
and sculpture as 78; see also Watling, J. xii
IMH Werness, H. 134
spelling: aesthetically relevant 113; Wiggins, D. 133
as criterion of textual identity Wilson, B. xii
112 Wimsatt, W. 18, 92, 130, 131
Stalnaker, R. 131 Wollheim, R.: on artist's theory of
Stevenson, C. L. 130 work identity 104, 133; on
Stolnitz, J. 130 structure 48, 53; his theory
Strawson, P. F. 133 4-6
Index 143
Wolterstorff, N.: argument for structures 57-61; as norm

dualism 89-91, 133; and kinds 55--6, 89; as structure
correct instances 53; and 46-9
creation of works 57; his Worrall, J. 132
theory of works 10, 55--6, 132 Wright, C. xii, 132
works of art: as action types x,7,
66-71, 75; as created 56-7, 61-
4; as ideas 91, 135; as indicated Zahar, E. G. 132

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AN ONTOLOGY OF ART

Pal grave Macmillan

Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1989 978-0-333-46076-4

First published in the United States of America in 1989

10. A conclusion about aesthetic value 41

3 Art Works as Action Types 46

6. The artist's relation to the work 96

Recent work in aesthetics displays a tendency to regard an art

assumptions often turn out to be highly questionable. And to the

I feel that I have had an extraordinary amount of help from friends

I have no definition of art; no set of necessary and sufficient

works are distinguished from other things by their being singled

my copy of the novel? What is the relation of Beethoven's

2. TYPES AND TOKENS

The philosopher C. S. Peirce is responsible for a distinction

token of some event or action type. In our example we have

What I shall do now is describe a theory about the nature of art

extensional - identified in terms of their members - no set can

lacks something aesthetically important. Aesthetic value resides,

work is a type, of which there can be many tokens. Works of the

4. ART WORKS AS ACTION TYPES

It is my purpose here to attack this theory at all its crucial points. I

duality between kinds of works of art; all kinds of works belong to

5. THE MULTIPLICITY OF INSTANCES

6. SOME LOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS

of the type which is the work, as my brief explanation of the ATH

when we specify the circumstances under which an object is an

7. THE PROBLEM OF FORGERY

otherwise of non-deceptive copying procedures in the visual arts.

8. ONTOLOGY AND APPRECIATION

I am arguing here for theses which are supposed to apply to all

the categories envisaged by the dualistic theory that I am opposing

Nelson Goodman has drawn a distinction between what he calls

work's instances is possible at all, the distinction between auto-

One final comment before I begin the argument. It hardly needs

number of occasions. We simply have no dear idea about what

In this chapter we shall begin our investigations by considering an

wrong to say that what is aesthetically valuable in the literary work

2. EMPIRICISM AND SUPERVENIENCE

Empiricists face an immediate problem: exactly what can be seen

by merely looking at a picture? This turns out to be a tremendously

indefinitely many different colour combinations which, in various

discriminations between, pictures. While admitting that there is

Monroe Beardsley, reflecting on his earlier empiricism, says 'I

(51) 't:/x't:/y (x and y share the same pictorial properties ~ x and y

where x and yare variables that range over pictures.

(52) VxVyVw (x and y have the same pictorial properties in W::::l

(52) can be contrasted with a stronger thesis (for the expression of

(53) V xV yV uV W (x has the same pictorial properties in u that y

than (52). As we have seen, the empiricist's motive is to separate

taste is a person who knows all the relevant non-pictorial facts

Given the supervenience thesis, what properties will count as

intentional interaction between painter and subject. Properties like

It may be said that in using 'empiricism' to describe the doctrine

empirical availability of certain aspects of that history. Thus it is

(53') VxVyVuVw (x in u and y in w are identically spelt :::::> they

where identity of spelling is a matter of sameness of letters,

(53") V x V y V u V w (x in u and y in w have identical scores :::::>

5. EMPIRICISM AND THE IMH

Let us now connect empiricism with one of the hypotheses of this

the work. To do this would be to divorce questions about identity

6. A FIRST ARGUMENT AGAINST EMPIRICISM

I shall offer a number of arguments against empiricism, all involving