Thursday, March 10, 2011

(AP) Open Concepts and Classical Definability

Morris Weitz claims that art is an indefinable-because-open concept. I want tentatively to suggest that he conflates indefinability and openness, overlooking in the process the possibility of a definable-yet-open conception of art.

Furthermore, Weitz -- or perhaps Wartenberg -- apparently assumes that a satisfactory definition of art must be an "intensional" one (a specification of the necessary and jointly sufficient conditions required of each member of the set under consideration). But Weitz's preferred extensional (in this case, ostensive) definition of art is still, obviously enough, a definition.

Even so, I remain hopeful that we might construct a satisfactory -- however inclusive and broad -- intensional definition of art.  I will offer my own (closed, intensional, classical) definition of art in a later post.

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