In case you've just beamed down from Mars John Carter Style, cinemasins is a Youtube channel that goes through films and points out
everything wrong with them -- every cliche, every plot hole, every bit that doesn't make sense.
And they also might embody something cool about the philosophy of art,
but you know if you leave a bag of toffee in a car on a hot day and it kind of
melts and all sticks together? Then it's really hard to break any of it off without all big bits of other stuff coming off as
well? That's kind of like what the philosophy of art is like.
It's very difficult to get into the question of 'How does art criticism work?' without getting stuck in questions like, 'What makes a work of
art good?' or 'What is the definition of art?' so as we go through this, bear in mind
there's a lot of other philosophy that comes along with it, even if we don't have time to get to it all.
We're traveling back to 1949.
The Berlin Airlift has just finished, China has just become communist, and a guy called Arnold Eisenberg
has just published a paper called "Critical Communication," talking about how art criticism works.
Eisenberg says that criticism like reviews of plays and movies and books and stuff
seems to have three elements
First of all, we've got the Value judgement, V, like, "I think that movie is bad."
Next we have the Reason, R, which points to some feature of the work like, "I think the movie is bad becuase the dialogue is stilted and unrealistic."
Lastly, we have the Norm, N,
which supports the value judgement by saying that all works with R are pro tanto V.
Pro tanto just means as far as it goes, or as far as R is present. So for instance,
"I think the movie is bad because the dialogue is stilted and unrealistic, and
all works with stilted, unrealistic dialogue are pro tanto bad. And there you go, that's our review of Man of Steel.
But Eisenberg said that we run into a problem.
N should be something that we can agree to. We should be able to say, "Oh yeah, all movies with stilted, unrealistic dialogue are bad."
Otherwise, the review is just a list of the reviewers' opinions.
We want a reason to believe V also, not just an explanation of why the critic thinks it.
Now, you might well be thinking that all reviews are just a hundred percent subjective
and a list of the reviewers' opinions, and you might well be right on that.
But don't jump the gun, because that's certainly not in line with how we use reviews.
We act as if reviews give us reason to think what they say. We seek them out and
we read them and use them to make decisions, and there is a criticism industry,
so we certainly act as if N supports V. And that's a problem because norms can be very difficult to agree on.
Remember our norm from before, "All works with stilted, unrealistic dialogue are bad."
Well, that's just not true. Some works deliberately have stilted, unrealistic dialogue.
Have you even seen Garth Marenghi's "Dark Place"? That's hilarious
because they deliberately made it bad and cheap.
There's also the problem of how do norms justify value judgments?
Take our norm from before, "All works with stilted, unrealistic dialogue are bad."
Well, why?
Why does a work need realistic dialogue in order to be good? Now nobody's saying that that question is
impossible to answer, but we are starting to get stuck in the toffee of what makes a work of art good.
Okay, so how does cinemasins fit in with all of this? Well, Eisenberg has quite a cool solution to the problem.
He says that reviews seem to have V, R, and N, but actually, they don't,
They don't have N at all, so we don't need to get bogged down in that.
A review is and should be just a list of the reviewers' subjective opinions and the features that those opinions are about.
When you read a review,
Eisenberg says its job is to draw your attention to features of the work that you might have missed, so that you can reappraise it yourself.
When the critic says something like, "The painting has a riot of color, "
they're prompting you to notice all the varied colors in the painting, and a good critic will be able to draw your attention to things
that you might have missed, so that you can make the most informed judgement possible.
Eisenberg says that the critic gives us new eyes, and we reappraise the work ourselves.
The actual criticism part, deciding whether it's good?
That's done by you. And this is why we do use reviews and act as if they give us reasons,
but we will also go against them sometimes. So ideally, a critic won't talk about whether the work of art was worthwhile overall
or whether they can justify their opinions to you.
They'll just list the features of the work and their reactions to them. And that is exactly what cinemasins do.
Jeremy the narrator just goes through the film scene by scene, he says "We've seen this bit before, it's a cliché,"
or, "This bit contradicts this other bit," or, "This bit doesn't work," just comprehensively goes through it.
Now even though they told me that they don't think that they're art critics
They might actually be a great model for understanding how Eisenberg says art criticism works.
Fast forward to 1962.
Bob Dylan has just released his first album, the first black student just enrolled at the University of Mississippi,
the world almost ends in Cuba, but then it's saved by the X-Men,
and Monroe Beardsley just published "On the Generality of Critical Reasons"
Beardsley says that there's a difference between liking a work of art and acknowledging that it's good.
A review doesn't try to persuade you to like a work of art,
it just tries to persuade you that it has a certain value. The critic needs some norm to justify their value judgment,
but one of the questions we had earlier was, how does that work?
How does a feature make a work of art good? Well Beardsley said that a work of art is good insofar as it produces desirable experiences.
Now the details of that theory are for another time,
but the point is that he took up this sticky toffee question which Eisenberg tried to sidestep.
The other problem with norms was that we can think of counter examples to them, right? Well Beardsley said that if we can make them
specific enough we might be able to get around that, and one thing that might help would be to make it genre-specific.
So for instance, our norm from before was, "All works with stilted, unrealistic dialogue are bad," and that works with Man of Steel,
but it didn't work with Dark Place, so we can change it to, "All serious works with stilted, unrealistic dialogue are bad."
Now on account of Beardsley's theories would take us right through the last 50 years of aesthetics,
but my point here is that this is still very much a live issue, and there's everything to play for
Eisenberg and cinemasins might be one model of criticism, but if a project like Beardsley's can be made to work,
then we might have room for your more traditional style of critics like the Nostalgia Critic and TheLitCritGuy
and especially my favorite critic Movie Bob who is a big fan of
looking at the bigger picture when it comes to appraising a work.
So is cinemasins art criticism, or does genuine art criticism require justifying norms?
I think this is an especially interesting question because a lot of the people who don't like cinemasins
are coming at it from this anti-Eisenberg angle of saying that art criticism needs more than just nitpicking.
And they themselves seem to think that they're not real critics because it's just comedy.
But if Eisenberg is right then they might just be the best critics out there
I hesitate to bring this up, but there might actually be a link here to Gamergate of all things.
Now, I've been observing Gamergate in much the same way as I've been observing the war in Syria.
It's something very far away that I can't really pretend that I understand, but I do appreciate that it's an awful thing.
But I do know that some pro-Gamergate people have been advocating this Eisenberg model of criticism for video games.
Just lists of features and reactions without appealing to larger justifying norms about what features make all video games pro tanto good or bad.
Now, I'm not really sure what to do with that link, but it's interesting that it's there...
That's someone at the--
I'm-- I'm, yeah, could you-- could someone get that 'cause I'm-- I'm rolling.
This is at-- this is on camera right now. It's exciting stuff. It's the postman.
It's a package.
It's a huge package!
Who's it for?
Who's it-- who's it f-- It's for me!?
It's for me!
It's-- it's f-- it's fragile.
Thanks, Ben. Let's have an unboxing video, an impromptu-- impromptu unboxing-- This is gonna take ages. I'll do it later at a different table.
What do you guys think?
Is cinemasins the future of art criticism? Next time, we could either stay with the philosophy of art and do the forging of art,
or we could do some metaphysics with "Does the future exist?" For more philosophical videos every Friday, please subscribe.
Last time we asked can you trust testimony?
So, let's see what you guys had to say. David Valouch and a few other people said that it's okay to believe
testimony if you have no reason to suppose that the person giving it is lying.
But why, though? Why are we justified in assuming that testimony is usually true when these special reasons aren't there?
What is it about testimony itself that makes it believable? That's what we're trying to get at here.
Omar Streete and a few other people said that we are justified in believing testimony because it's always been reliable in the past.
Unfortunately, we're then gonna run into the problem of induction, which is all about evidence, and are we sure that we can believe evidence, and so on.
And we can get into that another time.
So I think that we might still want to see if testimony has some kind of built-in justification for believing it,
something that just comes with testimony, so we don't have to get bogged down in the induction problem.
We were talking about acceptance principles, which are these ideas that it is okay to default believe whatever testimony you are given as true,
andYour2ndPlanB tried to come up with a new kind of acceptance principle
and said that if you ask for testimony,
then you must believe that there's some kind of way that you can get truth out of that. You must believe that asking for testimony and
receiving it is a useful thing to do with regards to finding out the truth.
So, if you're actually asking for information
you're kind of epistemically committed to being justified to believing it, and that's actually quite a cool idea. I like that.
I don't think it would work all the time, but, yeah. That's very interesting.
Lockvir Tompson tried to come up with a different kind of acceptance principle.
They said that humans are social animals, and within our systems it is socially and maybe even evolutionarily advantageous
to tell the truth. So, we can presume that people, as social animals, will generally tell us the truth if we ask for it.
That's quite a cool idea.
Although, I suppose that you better have some evidence for thinking that humans are social animals that isn't based on testimony.
So, you must actually have the evidence for that without having asked anybody else for it. Otherwise, you're gonna be going in a circle,
We were focusing on ordinary, everyday testimony like asking somebody for directions rather than expert testimony in a court,
but THUNK said that the distinction between those two might not actually be so clear, because if somebody has information that you lack
then they pretty much are an expert relative to you. Like, expertise is a relative thing, and I quite like that idea.
And also, Chris Davis pointed out that if somebody says they're an expert, you're probably gonna be believing them on the grounds of their testimony, like,
they will testify that they have some degree or qualifications or whatever.
So, if there's a problem with expert-- If there's problem with ordinary testimony,
then it is going to spill over into expert testimony. Fábio Reale said that it's harder to lie than it is to tell the truth.
No, it isn't
Shawn Ravenfire! Ah, damn you got me. Dah! I made the whole thing up. I'm sorry.
That's all the time we've got this week. Thank you very much for watching, and I will see you in the next episode. Bye!
Okay, here we go. It's from-- it's from Fortnum & Mason's. Wow! Let's-- let's open this-- open it...
Ugh, just gotta try and-- uuuuuuugh!
[Legend of Zelda chest opening music]
Whoa...
It's-- it's a birthday present for me!
With cheese biscuits and...
And biscuits biscuits and-- and whoa, so many biscuits!
Somebody sent me an enormous box full of biscuits. I'm not even-- oh, there's a card here. I'll t-try and open this with one hand
Here we go. To Olly, Ben, and Hannah, we hope this helps you get through revision. Best of luck on finals.
It's from my-- it's from my girlfriend's parents. They've sent me and my flatmates...
[Laughs] Like, loads and loads of biscuits! Wow, thank you guys. That's incredibly generous
[Laughs] This is great!
Man, these are really gonna help me with my-- with my--
build up to final exams. Look at that!
Clotted cream biscuits from Fortnum & Mason's. It's not just biscuits, there's-- there's like loads of chocolate biscuits and fudge and-- and eh...
Sauvignon blanc from New Zealand, my favorite country the world, and a bottle of Chateau Billecart-Sa Mon pink champagne.
This is-- this is f-- like, this is my girlfriend's parents. This is crazy, crazy generous!
Thank you so much guys. I'm actually meeting them for the first time tomorrow. I'm gonna have to be so, so nice.
