So I'm just going to address parts of this or otherwise the responses will keep growing longer and longer and introducing more and more issues, and I can't figure out what anyone thinks is the point of doing that.
Count Lucanor wrote: ↑August 21st, 2020, 10:47 pm
If they are explicitly described and made public as aesthetic standards which people can adopt or reject, I would call those objective models, since they exist, despite the levels of abstraction required to devise and assimilate them, independently of the individuals.
I already explained this. The text strings, or sounds or whatever would exist independently of the individuals, but the meaning does not. You're disagreeing, as you explain below, because on my view, you have an incorrect--albeit quite popular--theory of meaning.
So we'd have to get into the brass tacks of our different theories of meaning, which would be a major tangent and which would take a long time to do.
If we cannot call something like a scientific research program or a philosophical program a subjective approach based on personal preferences, I don't think we can call an aesthetic program the same either.
You can't call most subjective approaches based on personal preferences, because the focus usually isn't personal preferences. They're subjective approaches
about things that are not personal preferences. In the case of aesthetic evaluations, we're talking about things that are only personal preferences. That's not the case when we're talking about things like rocks.
The explicitly attributed meanings of any expression can be described objectively,
"Described objectively" in the sense that we can personally correlate text strings with the meanings we assign, and the text strings will exist independently of us.
given the semantic codes are shared by the community of speakers.
First off, they're not
literally shared while being numerically distinct, because nominalism has things right. Aside from that, we can't actually observe anyone else's semantic activities. Because they're mental-only activities. We can only observe objective stuff correlated to those semantic activities. But since we can't ever observe the semantic activities of others, there's no way to begin to make a "key" to say just how similar the semantic activities are.
On the other hand, if the person involved in the analysis applies a set of rules previously defined as a conventional or standard criteria to evaluate aesthetic objects, a convention that surpasses the limits of the person's subjective preferences, something that is beyond him, except for its rejection or endorsement, then we can say that this analysis objectively corresponds to that model.
You could say that of course, but saying that A corresponds to B can't be done objectively--it's a mental activity that people have to engage in, where among other things, they're applying meanings, and the analysis itself isn't going to be objective. You can call anything whatever you like of course. The words don't matter, really. What matters is what's really going on ontologically, whatever we call it.
We can forget about surveys, they will produce no useful insights, and they are not what make something universal or correct. In any case, it's an issue of less importance whether any value assessment is universal or correct, since it is not about the actual state of the world, but about human interests.
You can't know "human interests" without surveying people! And you'll discover that different humans have different interests, of course. There will be many things said in common, too, of course (though again, you can't know this without surveying people), but those things have no more normative (at least) objective weight just because they're common. An individual can prefer something because it's common, but that's just an individual preference.
Yet, human interests are not just individual preferences,
Yes they are.
but social constructions
There's no such thing as socially-constructed mental phenomena. All you'd be talking about here are interests that people have in common and ways that their subjective interests can be influenced by environmental observations they make (which would include observations about the people around them). The interests themselves are something that only individuals can have, though.
objectively speaking, Cubism is a specific painting school with an identifiable mode of representation that contrasts with other modes of representation
Again, at best this would only be talking about something that many individuals executing Cubism had in common with each other--not all of them (unless you're just definitionally stipulating that "I'm not going to call x 'Cubism' unless the artist said y about it." None of that makes "Cubism has this mode of representation"
correct and other statements incorrect. You'd have to frame it as, "Most Cubist artists said such and such about their work."
Anyone could make an assessment of how apt were the technical means and the formal structure of the work to achieve the production of a meaningful statement in the art world,
Which would simply amount to something like "I have a preference that the artist does such and such this way relative to common practices."
How about we tackle less than 50 issues a post for the next round? Maybe we can try to keep making this more concise so that we can focus on one or two issues and settle something about them?