The Motivational Structure of Appreciation

Bibliographic Data

ID4351272
AuthorsShanelle Van Der Berg (0000-0002-9634-2579, University of British Columbia), Servaas Van Der Berg (0000-0002-3487-4983, University of British Columbia, corresponding author)
Year2019
Volume69
Issue276
Pages445-466
Publication date2019-07-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Philosophical Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0031-8094 • E-ISSN: 1467-9213
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/pq/pqz004
OpenAlexW2914915845
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited27

On a widely held view in aesthetics, appreciation requires disinterested attention. George Dickie famously criticized a version of this view championed by the aesthetic attitude theorists. I revisit his criticisms and extract an overlooked challenge for accounts that seek to characterize appreciative engagement in terms of distinctive motivation: at minimum, the motivational profile such accounts propose must make a difference to how appreciative episodes unfold over time. I then develop a proposal to meet this challenge by drawing an analogy between how attention is guided in appreciation and how practical action is guided in ‘striving play’—a mode of game play recently foregrounded in the philosophy of games. On the resulting account, appreciation involves an ‘inverted’ motivational structure: the appreciating agent's attention is guided by cognitive goals taken up instrumentally, for the sake of the cognitive activity that results from attending under the guidance of those goals.

Action (physics) · Aesthetics · Analogy · Cognition · Epistemology · Philosophy of mind · Sociology · Emotions and Moral Behavior · Philosophical Ethics and Theory · Philosophy · Psychology · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment

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