The Awesomeness of Bad Art

I love bad art.

Gather some friends and create some bad music. Cruise in a car covered with graffiti doodles. Hand a five-year-old crayons and free time and see what weirdness emerges.

Something worth celebrating happens. Although the art is "bad" in one sense -- it will win no prizes and astound no critics -- it wonderfully enriches the world. How?

[I can swim like a grasfl dolphin can you? by my daughter Kate, at age six]

[Angel and moonbug, by my son Davy, circa age five]

The awesomeness isn't due to impressive technique, honed by years of craft, like Rembrandt. It's not due to intrinsic beauty and color-mad insight, like Van Gogh. It's not due to challenging conventional interpretability and the boundaries of artistic tradition, like Picasso.

Nick Riggle argues that art draws most of its aesthetic value from shared aesthetic engagement, and I agree that's some of the sorcery. A Vengefull Kurtain Rods song, a Vogon poem, or a Mystical Anarchist "motorized cathedral" art car is a social act, deriving value from the connections it fosters and the shared practice of aesthetic valuing -- including, in the case of Vogon poetry, the shared practice of aesthetic loathing. Parents and children bond over the child's emerging abilities and tastes.

But I don't think that Riggle has quite struck to the heart of it. When I improvise on the piano alone at home, relishing the quirky turns of my intermediate jazz piano skills, the ghost of my old piano teacher Matt Dennis may hover nearby, but my minor participation in the social tradition of jazz creation is only part of the story. Similarly for grandma painting seascapes in the eldercare facility -- kitschy, flawed, excruciatingly hers. Similarly for the strange abstract doodles I sometimes sketch when bored at a faculty meetings, which I aesthetically enjoy probably more than I should.

It helps to consider why five-year-olds are better artists than eight-year-olds. Eight-year-olds draw conventional stick figures, conventional houses with two neat windows, a door, and a triangle roof with chimney, a standard rainbow, a standard sun. Four-year-olds have only an inkling of these conventions, invent their own weird solutions -- people as heads on towering legs with too many toes, cars that look like falling toast. At five and six and seven, they shape themselves more toward the generic. Kate's swimmer is generic, but her dolphin is wild and long -- and are those hills or waves or rainbows in the background? Davy's houses look standard, but the grass is sunflower tall, the chimneys jut precariously sideways, his angel's wings are small, and he hasn't figured out how to draw conventional nighttime stars.

Preschoolers and early elementary schoolers show more individuality in their art. It dances barefoot across your expectations. Their lines reflect distinctive aesthetic attempts. This distinctiveness is harder to discover in the more conventional art of later childhood and needs to be rediscovered later. Similarly for grandma, if she hasn't consumed too much Bob Ross. If her seascapes are generic, in one sense they are more competent and less "bad" than untrained attempts, but they have less point and are less valuable than a heartfelt effort that finds a different solution.

Bad art manifests the raw signature of the individual eye. It shows a mind grappling with an aesthetic challenge. If the artist judges it a failure and crosses it out, then their vision hasn't been realized. But if it is beloved in its strangeness -- if the creator affirms it as a successful completion of their artistic intention, then it's a distinctive achievement that reflects the mind and hand of the moment.

Our planet -- amazingly, awesomely, wondrously, beautifully, stunningly (to any aliens who might happen upon it amid the dark blandness of space) -- hosts five-year-olds who draw bugs on the moon and six-year-olds who draw impossibly long dolphins, teenagers doodling on cars, friends collaborating on goofy songs. If no one else would have done it the same way, then the work reflects your distinctive aesthetic encounter with the world. It's a piece of you made visible. Especially (but not only) for those who care about you, it's your individual eye, voice, and values that ignite its meaning.

Bad art can fail in two ways: When it's so generic that the artist vanishes or when the artist disowns it as failing to capture their aesthetic vision. If it passes the sibling tests of distinctiveness and affirmation, it is valuable.

A world devoid of weird, wild, uneven, wonderful artistic flailing would be a lesser world. Let a thousand lopsided flowers bloom!

Everything Is Sandcastles

Yesterday, Rivka Weinberg spoke at UCR from her forthcoming book, The Meaning of It All, on how time erodes meaning. As is often noted, in a thousand years it will (probably) be as though you had never lived. Everything you strived for will have crumbled to dust. Weinberg doesn't argue that this renders our efforts entirely meaningless -- but it does deprive them of a meaning they would have had, if they had endured. We ought to admit, she says, that this is disheartening, rather than brushing it off with a breezy recommendation to "live in the moment".

Weinberg carves out an exception to time's corrosive power: what she calls atelic goods (drawing on Kieran Setiya's work on the "midlife crisis"). Atelic goods are complete in the moment: strolling through the woods, enjoying a sunset, licking an ice cream cone. Contrast these with telic goods, which aim toward an endpoint: walking to the store, taking the perfect sunset photo, finishing the cone.

In her talk, Weinberg argued that time drained meaning from telic goods -- not entirely, but substantially -- while leaving atelic goods mostly untouched. Yet she cautioned against retreating wholly into atelic pleasures. A life composed only of strolls and sunsets would be vapid. Telic goods, like building a career and cultivating long-term relationships, are essential to a full life.

But during the discussion period, Weinberg introduced the idea of sandcastles as an interesting middle case. (I don't recall this in the talk itself, but it moved fast and I haven't seen a written version.) Building a sandcastle is telic: It unfolds over time and can be interrupted before completion. But it's also ephemeral. Nothing is lost if the sandcastle is gone tomorrow. It was never meant to last, any more than an ice cream cone.

Maybe everything is sandcastles.

Weinberg gave examples of paradigmatic telic goods whose meanings are ravaged by time: Martin Luther King's activism, Jonas Salk's work on the polio vaccine. In a thousand years -- or ten thousand, almost certainly a billion -- it will be as if King and Salk had never existed. But should King have felt disappointed that his activism wouldn't ripple through deep time? Maybe not. Maybe he should have regarded it as a sandcastle: designed for a particular time, not reduced in meaning because it didn't endure forever.

When I raised this during Q&A, I didn't fully grasp Weinberg's reply. The sandcastle example is hers, so I might not be doing her view full justice -- but let me run with the idea.

If we think of all of our projects as sandcastle building, then they aren't necessarily ravaged by time. Of course, many will be wiped away too early. The waves will sweep in before your castle is complete or while you were still relishing its beauty. A rude stranger might trample it. Maybe almost every truly important project loses its impact before we're ready. But that's not an inevitability built into the structure of telic meaning and the nature of time. It's a contingent fact about the fragile, unstable nature of our chosen projects in a risky world.

Maybe, by shaping our intentions differently, or thinking about our projects differently, we reduce their vulnerability. Suppose I build a sandcastle knowing there's a 50% chance it will be swept away before I finish -- and thus, perhaps, not intending to finish but intending only to get as far as I can. If the wave comes early, I can still be disappointed -- but the wave no longer robs the act of its intended meaning. I did, in fact, get as far as I could. And if I build right at the water's edge, knowing there's a 90% chance I won't complete the castle's final envisioned tower, then finishing is a delightful surprise: a bonus meaning, so to speak, beyond my expectation. If brevity is the default intention and expectation, then the collapse of my castles does not deprive my actions of their expected or intended meaning, while unlikely endurance adds meaning relative to base line.

Could we adopt the same attitude to our relationships and careers? The waves of life could sweep them away any day. A realistic sense of hazard might be folded into the intention itself. I intend to start a marriage and nurture it -- not with the expectation that we will still be happily together at eighty, but with the hope that we might. If we make it, wonderful! Like a sandcastle surviving high tide. If it happens, I'm surprised and delighted, and I'll do what I can for that. Similarly, I intend to begin a career and pursue it. If the wave comes, well, the plan was always only to build toward something that I knew from the start would sooner or later be taken by the surf.

There will still be grief and regret. Things rarely go as well as they might have gone. But if I fully embrace this mindset (let's be honest: I can't), my projects won't have less meaning than intended, even if the waves take them sooner than I would have liked.

[remember this meme from 2007?]

When Is a Theory Superficial?

by Jeremy Pober and Eric Schwitzgebel

Twelve years ago, one of us (ES) distinguished two kinds of theories: superficial and deep. Nearly any phenomenon can be approached in a superficial or deep manner. A superficial judge of human beauty treats it as skin deep. A superficial reading of Shakespeare takes characters at their word and focuses on the obvious aspects of each scene. A superficial housecleaning ignores the backsides and undersides of household items.

And of course one can have a superficial theory of belief. Phenomenal dispositionalism is intended to be such a theory. According to phenomenal dispositionalism, whether someone believes that P is a matter of whether they have certain behavioral, phenomenal (i.e., experiential), and cognitive dispositions, specifically, the dispositions that are "stereotypical" of a person who believes that P. Compare: To be an extravert just is to have the behavioral, phenomenal, and cognitive dispositions stereotypical of extraversion.

Superficial theories contrast with deep theories. Among theories of belief, the main contrast has been with the computationalist, representationalist functionalism made famous by Jerry Fodor (1987) and recently defended by Jake Quilty-Dunn and Eric Mandelbaum.

But what makes a theory of some property P superficial (or deep)? Twelve years ago, ES offered an answer: It depends on the theory's relationship to surface properties. Surface properties are observable features of a phenomenon that a theory of P is designed to explain (in a loose sense of "observable"[1]).

What relation to surface properties must a theory have to be superficial or deep? Back in 2013, ES said that "relative to a class of surface phenomena... a property is superficial if it identifies possession of the property simply with patterns in the surface phenomena" (2013, 77). And a theory is deep "relative to a class of surface phenomena... if it identifies possession of the property with some feature other than patterns in those same surface phenomena -- some feature that presumably explains or causes or underwrites those surface patterns" (ibid.).

This definition fits our toy examples above. A superficial judge of beauty relies on the most easily observable physical patterns, a superficial reading of Shakespeare focuses on surface-level dialogue, and a superficial house-cleaning treats looking clean as clean.

However, we have reason to be unsatisfied with this definition. [ES thanks JP for emphasizing this point in a series of discussions.]

Consider poison, a "causal concept" in David Armstrong (1968)'s sense: a concept defined by its causes and/or effects. Poison can be defined in terms of biologically harming a person when ingested (with refinements to differentiate poisoning from, say, drinking lava).[2] If I explain a death by saying that a person was poisoned, you can infer that the death was caused by ingestion rather than, say, hypothermia. That's informative -- but much less informative than saying that the person ingested cyanide, because chemical types like cyanide are defined structurally, allowing detailed explanations of how they interact with human physiology.

A theory of health that only has non-structural causal concepts like "poison" (or "medicine") would be a superficial theory of health. A deep theory, in contrast, invokes underlying mechanisms.

Yet, by ES's 2013 definition, a theory appealing to poison wouldn't count as superficial, because ingesting poison isn't merely related to death as two parts of a superficial pattern. Poison causes death.[3]

In a new draft, ES proposes a revised definition: a theory of property P is superficial if "whether an entity has property [P] is determined (that is, constituted or grounded...) entirely by superficial facts about that entity", where superficial facts are readily observed facts. For causal concepts, being the cause of is a constitutive relationship. This new definition thus accommodates causal superficialism, where poisons cause death and medicines cause recoveries, as inferable from readily observable relationships (such as randomized controlled trials), without appeal to deeper structural features.

That's a good thing! Otherwise, phenomenal dispositionalism only counts as a superficial theory of belief if dispositions don't cause their manifestations. Some philosophers of mind (e.g., Ryle 1949) indeed view dispositions non-causally. But others, like Armstrong (1968), propose a "realist" conception: Dispositions are type-identical to their causal bases. Fragility, for example, is identified with the microstructural features that cause fragile objects to break when struck.[4]

In his original articulation of phenomenal dispositionalism, ES expressed willingness to accept such a realist view (2002, 273n18). This version of dispositionalism can be considered equivalent to a version of functionalism (which holds that mental states can be defined in terms of their causal relations to inputs, outputs, and other mental states). Georges Rey (1997) calls this type of functionalism superficial functionalism, where all functional/causal roles are defined only in relation to behavior, thought, experience, and "similar" states (e.g., desire is similar to belief, so a superficial functionalist theory of belief can include relations to desires).[5]

Of course, deep theories also often employ causal explanations. So if causal superficial theories are possible, what distinguishes them from deep theories? The answer is that causal posits in superficial theories have minimal explanatory content, whereas deep theories have excess explanatory content.[6] Posits with minimal explanatory content explain all that they were posited to explain and no more, whereas posits with excess content make further falsifiable predictions.

Consider the difference between a geneticist working right after Gregor Mendel published his work on heritability, and one working after Franklin, Watson, and Crick had mapped the structure of DNA and demonstrated how it instantiated genetic material. Mendel's theory, which gives us the posits of trait, gene, allele, and dominant/recessive, is a powerful theory (much like belief/desire psychology), but it doesn't explain how genes and alleles have the properties that they do. An allele is just the genetic material for a variant in phenotype, e.g., blood type A versus B or O. But in the initial Mendelian framework, it was defined as "whatever is responsible for variance in (e.g.) blood type".

[illustration of Mendel's superficial causal theory; image source]

Contrast with someone working in the latter half of the 20th century. They know that genetic information is realized in DNA (& RNA), which via its repeating base patterns and double helix structure, acts as a base code for the information that constitutes alleles. In other words, they know how genes carry genetic information.[7]

Superficial theories needn't be acausal, but if they posit causal relationships, those relationships must exist among the readily observable features, without invoking hidden structures or mechanisms that yield additional explanatory content. In contrast, the later 20th century theory makes many more falsifiable predictions -- those that follow from the structure of DNA -- and thus has excess explanatory content.

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[1] This might not match the sense of "observable" sometimes used in philosophy of science. Dennett (1994) defines observable from his perspective of "urbane verificationism" and, for a theory of attitudes, takes the same list of surface properties to be observable as ES: behavior, thought, and experience.

[2] More precisely, poison is always a two-place predicate, poison-for-S where S is some group of organisms such as a species. When no such group is specified, we can treat instances of poison as poison-for-humans. We are ignoring contact poisons and other complications.

[3] Thus the distinction between superficial and deep theories is not a distinction about noncausal versus causal explanations. Consequently, the superficial/deep distinction as applied to the attitudes does not end up reducing to Devin Curry's distinction between beliefs as properties of persons and beliefs as "cogs" of cognitive science (Curry 2021).

[4] The standard way of defining a causal basis is in terms of physical properties, such as microstructural properties defining "fragility". However this is not a strict requirement. One can posit a mental kind (as in Quilty-Dunn and Mandelbaum 2018 where representations are the causal bases of dispositions constitutive of belief stereotypes) or even a higher-order kind (as in Prior, Pargetter, and Jackson 1982).

[5] Rey (1994; 1997) invokes this term in a debate with Dan Dennett that parallels the debate between ES and Quilty-Dunn and Mandelbaum. While the overall debate turns on different issues, the definition of superficialist theories of belief lines up. Examples of this sort of functionalism plausibly include David Armstrong (1968), the David Lewis of "An Argument for the Identity Theory" (1966) but maybe not the David Lewis of "Mad Pain and Martin Pain" (1980), and Adam Pautz 2021).

[6] Term adopted from Lakatos's (1968) notion of "excess" explanatory content.

[7] The DNA example also lets us talk about different levels or degrees of depth. The late 20th century theory of a gene is a deep one, but so is a theory mid-way between that and Mendel's. In the first years of the 20th century scientists identified chromosomes as the realizer of genes, but did not know that chromosomes were made of DNA (they thought they were proteins). This theory too is deep -- there are excess predictions made by the assignment of genetic material to chromosomes -- but not as deep as later views, because not nearly as many excess predictions were made. We can tentatively call such a theory formally deep, whereas a theory that more fully explains how the posit in question (genes, beliefs) has the properties that it does is substantively deep.