Echoing a distinction made by David Wiggins in his discussion of the relation of identity, this paper investigates whether aesthetic adjectives such as 'beautiful' are sortal-relative or merely sortal-dependent. The hypothesis guiding the paper is that aesthetic adjectives, though probably sortal-dependent in general, are sortal-relative only when used to characterize multifunctional artefacts. This means that multifunctional artefacts should be unique in allowing the following situation to occur: for some object x there are sortals K and K′ such that x is a beautiful K and also a K′, but not a beautiful K′. Examples of multifunctional artefacts show that this is indeed a possibility. However, that multifunctional artefacts are unique in this respect will be demonstrated by a more principled argument, taking into account the nature of functions on the one hand, and the nature of artefact-classification on the other hand. © 2005 British Society of Aesthetics.
CITATION STYLE
De Clercq, R. (2005). The aesthetic peculiarity of multifunctional artefacts. British Journal of Aesthetics, 45(4), 412–425. https://doi.org/10.1093/aesthj/ayi051
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