Aesthetic acquaintance in practice

Abstract Can we form legitimate aesthetic beliefs about objects without engaging with them first-hand? The Acquaintance Principle (AP)—the claim that aesthetic judgments must be based on first-hand engagement and cannot be transmitted via testimony—used to be “well-entrenched” in aesthetics, but today there is a near consensus that it fails. Optimists about aesthetic testimony argue that there are counter-examples to AP, and even Pessimists about aesthetic testimony, who defend some version of AP, reformulate it to accommodate various cases. I argue that the power of Pessimism has been underappreciated. By leveraging Robert Hopkins’s idea that AP is a practice-governing rule, I show that the view is immune to a range of purported problem cases and is even compatible with Optimism. The argument for the presumption that AP is a practice-governing rule is abductive, and the upshot is surprising: if AP is a practice-governing rule, then aesthetic valuing is a social practice.