Abstract

The principal aim of Eddy Zemach’s book is to articulate and demonstrate the correctness of a realistic understanding of aesthetic sentences, sentences the surface grammar of which consists in the attribution of an aesthetic property to an item. Zemach is content to represent realism in aesthetics as the view that aesthetic sentences have genuine truth values, describe or misdescribe matters of fact, are objectively true or false depending on whether they correspond to reality, are true if and only if the aesthetic properties they ascribe to things really characterize those things. He is aware that this characterization of realism will not be thought adequate on a minimalist theory of truth, but dismisses the view of those who, like Paul Horwich, advocate a deflationary theory of truth, asserting that this records a special nonrealistic sense of truth. But the difference between a realist and a nonrealist sense of truth is left unexplained.