Abstract

What does a person understand when she understands an artwork? In this article I propose to model aesthetic understanding—understanding of a particular work in terms of its particular aesthetic character—on our understanding of another person’s intentional action. Following Anscombe’s account of action explanation in Intention (2000 [1957]), to understand another’s intentional action is to grasp a teleological order or structure that relates what the person does to why they are doing it and how they are getting it done. Similarly, to understand an artwork is to grasp an implementational order that relates what aesthetic features an artwork possesses, how these features are implemented in the work, and why the work, with those features, has whatever aesthetic value they lend to it. I motivate this conception of aesthetic understanding by arguing that it makes good sense of the explanatory demands we place upon aesthetic expertise.