Expanding Davies’s Pragmatic Constraint: A Pragmatist Principle for Philosophizing about Art

Winner of the Fabian Dorsch ESA Essay Prize. David Davies advocates a methodological principle he calls the ‘pragmatic constraint’, according to which ontology of art is answerable to epistemology of art, or ‘those features of our creative, critical, appreciative, and individuative practices in the arts that would withstand rational scrutiny’. This principle, while widely endorsed, has faced scepticism, charges of vagueness, and ambiguity concerning what counts as an instance of its correct application. I propose a similar principle that avoids these problems while doing the work for which the pragmatic constraint is meant, and one that is expanded in scope to apply to philosophy of art generally. Drawing on ideas from classical pragmatism, this new ‘pragmatist principle’ holds that (1) philosophy of art should centrally deal with philosophical problems that could arise for a reflective practitioner in the course of artistic practice, and (2) the solutions offered to those problems should be able to make some positive difference for, or tie back into and inform, future artistic practice, with ‘practice’ here including both art’s creation and its reception.