Keywords

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

In the previous chapter we characterized the concept of aesthetic terms in terms of a mapping/reorganization among response spaces, schemata, and domains—hence the “RSD” in RSD model of aesthetic terms. Even more important than characterizing their concept is to understand the function aesthetic terms play in aesthetic-processes. In this chapter we shall explore that function, or, more precisely, functions.

Aesthetic judgements, even characterized by the RSD model, share a feature with other kinds of judgements: they deliver evaluations. The evaluations involved in an aesthetic-process can be interpreted non-cognitively—as affective responses—or cognitively—as a propositional result of applying aesthetic criteria. The obvious function of aesthetic terms and judgements seems to be to make explicit in a propositional manner an ineffable inner experience. My claim here is that in conducting that function, aesthetic terms and judgements actually fulfil the additional and more fundamental function of changing the constitution of the experience itself. My goal here is to explicate that an aesthetic judgement is the result of a process that articulates and summarizes evaluations in our inner experience, but that process transforms the experience itself.

1 Concept and Function

As pointed out in Chap. 6, aesthetic judgements figure in node 5 of our rough description of an aesthetic-process. Unlike aesthetic experience—which I interpreted as a subprocess—or aesthetic value—which I interpreted as a relation—aesthetic judgements present or express a particular state in the aesthetic-process; aesthetic judgements are outputs, so to speak, of aesthetic-processes. Aesthetic judgements, however, do not present an objective event in an aesthetic-process; but rather a subjective state in a person engaged in an aesthetic-process.

As in the case of aesthetic experience and value, aesthetic judgement must be understood not only by characterizing its concept, but also by grasping the role it plays in an aesthetic-process. We shall see that aesthetic judgements have two functions, which I label articulation and broadcasting. We have seen how aesthetic terms can be characterized in terms of semantic relations that allow them to express subjective states and to communicate qualities by metaphorical means. We shall see now that aesthetic judgements are not mere linguistic vehicles that capture qualities involved in an aesthetic experience, they modify the constitution of the experience itself.

1.1 Emphases and Perspectives

The differences among the views on aesthetic terms discussed in the previous chapter show that the issue of aesthetic terms is rather complex. Authors like Hungerland and Kivy even appear to contradict each other on topics like the existence of a fixed set of aesthetic terms. I believe that some of the authors’ differences can be explained as the result of their different emphases and perspectives. The differences between Hungerland and Kivy illustrate this. It is not hard to see that Hungerland tends to focus on subjective conditions of application, whereas Kivy tends to focus on objective semantic functions. If we consider this, Hungerland and Kivy complement rather than contradict each other. But this also illustrates my point that to understand aesthetic terms, in addition to characterizing them, we need to understand the role they play in the series of events occurring when an individual engages in an aesthetic transaction with the world.

Thus, instead of dwelling on the tensions between the different approaches, I shall try broadening our focus. In addressing aesthetic terms we may concentrate solely on their nature, or we can also address the reasons why we pass aesthetic judgements. And the ideas advanced in the previous chapter can help us to gain insight on why we pass aesthetic judgements. My argument is that the act of passing aesthetic judgements encourages clarifying our internal affective states. That clarification is achieved through the subjective changes that accompany the change of perspective induced by the metaphor-like reorganization and the mapping between response spaces and schemata. I shall refer to this clarification function as articulation. In a sense, the use of aesthetic terms refines our aesthetic experience. Now, in addition to the clarifying function, aesthetic descriptions, like any other description, has the more obvious function of conveying information from one individual to another. I refer to this function as the broadcasting function. Let us examine articulation first.

2 Articulation

We have seen that the differences between always and only aesthetic terms and mundane metaphor-like aesthetic terms do not represent a problem. However, for the sake of clarity, I address first the mundane aesthetic terms, as their use in aesthetic judgements illustrates more clearly their functions in aesthetic-processes.

Using a metaphor involves reorganizing a referential domain. Since aesthetic experiences are ineffable, as pointed out by Zangwill, metaphorical domain reorganizations helps us to focus the attention of our interlocutor on some relevant feature of the object being metaphorically described. For example, the use of the term ‘balanced’ to describe a picture redirects attention to the even distribution of shapes, or colours. Now, this redirection of attention occurs not only in the interlocutor, but also in the speaker himself. This change in attention, of course, is only a subjective change. Metaphorical reorganizations have no influence on the physical objective world. What changes is the perspective from which we contemplate that world. Thus, the act of using mundane metaphor-like aesthetic terms involves a subjective change in both the speaker and the interlocutor. For example, when Kivy uses the term ‘balanced’ to qualify certain picture the first thing we realize is that he does not intend to literally point out a mechanical feature of the picture. We come to understand that Kivy is pointing out an aesthetic feature some pictures possess. Implicit in this realization is the understanding that some pictures are balanced and others are not. That is, our perspective changes in the sense that we realize there is a balanced/unbalanced partition in the domain of pictures. We have changed the way we perceive the world of pictures. Now, the way we perceive the world determine what properties we discern in it, and, as we discussed in Chap. 7, those properties are constitutive of the aesthetic experience. That is, the act of using an aesthetic term influences the very constitution of our aesthetic experience.

Moreover, simultaneous to the reorganization, the act of using an aesthetic term associates particular terms of a schema with corresponding possible affective responses. Our perspective changes; and that change occurs in a way that also gives us clarity about our own affective inner world.

The kind of clarification described above is what I call articulation. It occurs as part of the events involved in setting an appropriate mapping/reorganization as described by the RSD model. The clarification cannot be carried out by means of non-aesthetic descriptions like “this painting uses pale colours, predominantly blues and greens, and has kneeling figures in the foreground”, since this type of descriptions are intended to convey information publicly accessible and thus there is nothing special within us to realize. The clarification can neither be carried out by descriptions like “John’s aesthetic experience was two minutes long”, since this type of descriptions only summarize surface characteristics of the experience. By contrast, the appropriate use of aesthetic terms sets relations among the responses, terms and domain through the subjective events involved in the articulation. By setting the RSD model relations, a change in our subjective state occurs; a change in the way we experience our own experience, so to speak.

Articulation can thus help us explain why we pass aesthetic judgements: passing aesthetic judgements turns the vague affective state of a person into something more definite, something clearer even to the person himself. This occurs with metaphor-like as wells as always and only aesthetic terms. Qualifying an object as beautiful, for example, establishes that there is a certain relation between the presence of the object and our affective response to it. At the same time, it implies that the use of the schema to which the term ‘beautiful’ belongs adequately covers the possibilities of our responses, since it coherently maps our possible responses to the terms in the schema. Finally, the use of the term ‘beautiful’ in a description tells us the location of our specific response in the space of affective responses, it tells us where we are in the response space, so to speak.

2.1 Definition of Articulation

The articulation of aesthetic experience can be defined in terms of the conditions of expressive mapping and communicative reorganization. The process of articulation can be seen as the series of subjective events and changes associated with fulfilling, mostly unconsciously, the conditions for correctly applying genuine aesthetic terms.

The condition for correctly applying aesthetic terms is the simultaneous existence of an adequate expressive mapping and communicative reorganization. When this condition is fulfilled a series of events occurs within the person. A crucial event is identifying one’s subjective state, since to successfully pass an aesthetic judgement one needs to be minimally aware of the affective state to be expressed in the judgement. In a sense, mapping a response space gives us a general chart of our possible subjective states in terms of a family of terms. But we need not only the chart of our inner world, we also need to determine our current location on that chart. The act of determining that location involves choosing adequate schemata, mappings and reorganizations, and, more importantly, the particular subjective clarification by change of perspective that accompanies that act. For convenience, I label the process of clarification and subjective change by choosing schemata, mappings and reorganizations a process of subjective articulation. Let us characterize it.

2.1.1 Subjective Articulation

Subjective articulation is the process by which the conditions of application of an aesthetic term—in order to express the inner state of a person engaged in contemplation—are actualized. It consists in performing the actual mappings and reorganizations required by the expressive mapping and communicative reorganization conditions. Actualizing those conditions is accompanied by a series of events that change the constitution of the individual’s aesthetic experience. Subjective articulation thus include a clarification, by means of a change of perspective, of the subjective state of the individual.

Due to the existence of confusing responses, the nature of response spaces seems to need matching complex schemata to provide different terms to express the different possibilities of our inner experiences. We have seen that choosing the right schema to perform a mapping/reorganization is a rather subtle balancing act. There is no non-arbitrary way to choose among different alternatives of schema and their corresponding mapping/reorganization. Apart from the existence of clearly opposite combinations (full-pleasure and full-displeasure) in a response space, there are few constraints within the structures of the response spaces and the schemata that can be objectively considered to decide in favour of one mapping/reorganization over another. These finer, relatively arbitrary, and mostly unconscious decisions on which schema to choose are part of the subjective articulation.

Now, the result of a process of subjective articulation is that the individual becomes aware of the specificity of the experience in which he is engaged. After clarifying our inner experience, we get, so to speak, the coordinates of that experience. In this sense, we pass an aesthetic judgement not to advance an objective statement of the state of affairs, but to elucidate our subjective state. In a sense, using aesthetic terms contributes to making us aware of the aesthetic character of our experience. The subjective state of a person—unlike aesthetic experience, which is a process, or aesthetic value, which is a relation—is one of the many individual events in an aesthetic-process. Since the different elements of the aesthetic-process are interdependent, the articulation occurring in the experience also results in a sort of articulation of the aesthetic-process in general. Hence, using an aesthetic term in a judgement serves also to articulate an aesthetic-process, to make an aesthetic-process more definite. In the wider context of aesthetic-processes, the main role of aesthetic judgements is to encourage the articulation of aesthetic-processes. The aesthetic-process is determined by a multitude of events that correlate with each other in an systemic manner; but none of these events by itself is enough to characterize and individualize the process. However, passing an aesthetic judgement about the object involved in the aesthetic experience encourages the person engaged in the aesthetic process to become aware of the character and individuality of the experience. Aesthetic terms thus play a very central role in aesthetic-processes.

We can define process articulation as the process of organizing and charting the different aspects of an aesthetic-process. The aspects involved in process-articulation are the same as the ones in subjective articulation: a domain of objects, a family of terms that organize that domain, and a response space.

2.1.2 Aesthetic Articulation

Process-articulation is the process that sets the specific relations among the objects of appreciation, the terms that describes them, and the pleasure-relations (recall that responses spaces are constituted by the second coordinate of the elements in pleasure-relations) necessary to locate us in a concrete spot in relation to the events involved in the experience.

For example, the process articulation involved in passing a judgement like ‘this picture is balanced’ includes the decision to employ the schema {balanced, unbalanced}, rather than, for instance, the colour schema. This decision depends in part on realizing that the first schema is more appropriate, as its structure places in the foreground the “balanced” property—perhaps drawing attention to the analogy between even distribution of mass and even distribution of shapes and colours—and it is also suitable to express the possibilities (pleasure, displeasure) of our subjective experience. The schema choice must provide an appropriate mapping/reorganization. Since the suitability of schemata depend on context, habit and often on personal and subjective circumstances (since the decisions are made by an individual with some particular skills, knowledge, familiarities, experiences, and so forth), the ability to choose schemata and setting appropriate mapping/reorganizations is a skill that improves with experience and practice.

Now, by the time an individual has passed a judgement his perspective would have changed, he would have achieved a mapping of his response space, and located himself utilizing that mapping: he would have elucidated and structured his experience. As we discussed, the perspective change induces a change in the properties we can discern in the world. The constitution of the experience itself is different after the judgement has been passed. Furthermore, the inner subjective state at the core of the experience is no longer merely a vague feeling of ‘I like it!’; our decisions and changes of perspective have clarified the experience in such a way that it can be expressed in a complex propositional way; as an aesthetic judgement. In other words, by attempting to express the non-cognitive evaluation at the core of our experience we turn that crude evaluation into something with a much richer structure and cognitive content.

3 Broadcasting Function

Aesthetic terms fulfil the function of conveying information among different individuals. But they do so in a particular way, which we shall explore here.

As we have seen, authors like Hungerland and Kivy have pointed out different peculiarities of aesthetic terms. For Hungerland, aesthetic terms describe things in an idiosyncratic manner; as things look to the individual making the description. For Kivy, aesthetic terms play a function in terminal judgements—judgements that do not lead to further consequences or actions. Aesthetic terms certainly convey information, but, in the model presented here, the way aesthetic terms broadcast information is connected with their articulation function.

Aesthetic judgements function as outputs that distribute information to other parts of aesthetic-processes and to the exterior of the process. This is their broadcasting function. It is not difficult to see that broadcasting is not independent of articulation. An aesthetic judgement identifies a core element in an aesthetic process; the subjective state of the individual engaged in appreciating an object. Publicly expressing the state, however, must be carried out by conceptual and linguistic means. The need for a conceptual or linguistic summary of our subjective state prompts us to look for the best choices to clarify and communicate the process, that is, to conduct a process of subjective articulation. Identifying and expressing our subjective states occurs by describing the appreciated objects with an aesthetic term. In simple terms, we need to clarify our subjective state in an aesthetic episode before we can share it with someone else.

Furthermore, the function of articulation can explain the peculiar features pointed out by Hungerland and Kivy. The act of uttering an aesthetic judgement is an event that expresses a subjective state through subjective events (all events involved in subjective articulation are subjective). As we discussed in the previous chapter, always and only aesthetic terms are domain invariant, that means that, for instance, the term elegant in ‘John is elegant’, can be applied to any domain. That also means that the only way to challenge a judgement like ‘John is elegant’ is to incur in an inadequate response space mapping. But such mappings are completely subjective, so there is no way in which objective conditions can challenge this kind of judgements. Consistently with Hungerland’s approach, we would say that always and only aesthetic terms are meant to express subjective perspectives. On the other hand, articulation in mundane metaphor-like terms explains Kivy’s view. Recall that in order to make sense of descriptions like ‘this picture is balanced’ we need to realize that the sentence does no refer literally to a mechanical property. We need to interpret the sentence not only to realize what the interlocutor intends to communicate with the metaphor, but also whether the judgement is a positive or a negative one, and, therefore, what subjective state prompted him to use the term. Interpreting someone else’s aesthetic descriptions thus involves a sort of mirroring subjective articulation in which we need to guess the mapping/reorganization implicit in the speaker’s sentence. Kivy claims that aesthetic judgements are terminal, but a weaker notion of terminality may be more useful here. After all, there is evidence that actual terminality in aesthetic terms and judgements is weaker than initially proposed by Kivy. Some aesthetic descriptions, in art criticism, for instance, are not terminal in Kivy’s sense, since they can lead to further actions or changes in attitude. A positive review of a painting by a prestigious critic may prompt us to, for example, go to a museum and see the picture. A bad review may induce us to change our opinion about the picture’s author. Thus, let us define a constrained notion of terminality in terms of our aesthetic as process theory: I say that the processes of subjective-articulation and process-articulation are terminal if they cannot lead to anything else but events in further aesthetic-processes. Although aesthetic description may lead to actions like contemplating a painting in a museum, or to changes in attitude like depreciating the work of a formerly appreciated artist, those events ultimately become part of new aesthetic-processes. To contemplate a painting in a museum is part of the process of aesthetic experience, and to change our attitude towards an artist’s work amounts to a change in preferences and values. These events can be accounted for in terms of the aesthetic as process theory. A further advantage is that these events are in accord with the dynamic character of aesthetic value.

The weaker notion of terminality can help us to address with more detail the broadcasting function. As we know, the events in subjective and process articulation are subjective, and their resulting function—clarifying subjective states—is also strictly subjective. But an aesthetic judgement performs an objective broadcasting function when its aesthetic description makes information available to external agents that can eventually participate in further aesthetic processes. Aesthetic descriptions have a propositional content that allows the linguistic delivering of evaluations to other members of a community, including from its past—via the judgements we read in a book, for example—and to its future members. The process of articulation makes rich and clear cognitive evaluations available to ourselves and, by summarizing these relations in a public description, other members of the community. An aesthetic judgement articulates a private state, but by making it public it also broadcasts the perspective from which an object should be seen. It publicly places the object in a system of relations between subjective states, families of terms, and referential domains that connects the object with past aesthetic judgements, since those judgements share the same articulation mechanism. An aesthetic judgement publicly relates the object to aesthetic responses, thus situating the objects in the realm of the aesthetically relevant. It gives the object a place in the community’s framework of the aesthetically relevant. Thus, in addition to articulating the process, the term associated with a subjective state enables us to perform a quick classification of the experience as belonging to the same class as past aesthetic experiences, while it also enables us to share this classification with other people by linguistic means. The aesthetic term is thus terminal in the sense defined above, as it only leads to other aesthetic-process events.

3.1 Locally Terminal Aesthetic Terms

By uttering an aesthetic description like ‘O is A’, the speaker turns public a private experience. The speaker is not only carrying the information contained in ‘O is A’ from one person to another; he is also making himself and his interlocutor participate in many of the events involved in articulation; they become somehow aware of the speaker’s subjective state, and its associated expressive mapping and communicative reorganization. Schemata in communicative reorganizations offer more flexible mappings and are thus better suited to sharing these implicit events. This is the reason why mundane terms are used in aesthetic descriptions: metaphors are utilized to facilitate presenting an efficient summary of the subjective relations among objects, terms and experience to our interlocutor.

Now, Kivy’s proposal of terminality does not refer to the content of the judgements or its conditions of application, but rather to what aesthetic judgements do, or, rather, what they do not do. Analogously, I have used the functions of aesthetic judgements to characterize them. But, of course, there is a very salient difference between Kivy’s approach and mine. Kivy characterizes the function of aesthetic judgements in a negative way; by referring to what they do not do—they do not lead to further actions or arguments. The model presented here offers a function-based positive characterization of aesthetic judgements: aesthetic judgements do articulate individual aesthetic-processes and they do broadcast those states, such broadcasting is terminal but in a weaker sense than the one proposed by Kivy.

Further elucidation on the nature of aesthetic judgements can be achieved in a positive manner by summarizing some facts related to their functions. First, expressing a subjective state consists of clarifying such a state and presenting it in such a way that it agrees with the appropriate conditions of application of aesthetic terms and with our actual experience. Second, since the application of aesthetic judgements depends on the application of schemata, which is constrained only by the existence of adequate reorganizations and mappings, there is no set of “characteristically” aesthetic terms but only more or less suitable schemata. Third, aesthetic descriptions have the primary function of making ourselves or someone else aware of our subjective state and articulation process; this is the reason why they are terminal—in the weak sense. Fourth, aesthetic descriptions, like ‘O is A’, convey public information that becomes part of the personal and collective aesthetic experience; it becomes part of the culture. This also means that aesthetic judgements can play a role in other persons’ eventual aesthetic-processes. This aspect show the importance of distinguishing between Kivy’s notion of terminality and my weaker notion. Aesthetic terms must be seen as being locally—constrained to aesthetic processes—terminal, so to speak.

4 Unifying Approaches

We are now in position to go back to our initial discussion on the various views on aesthetic terms and show that the RSD model dissipates the inconsistencies and unify the diverse views. In the previous chapter, we discussed the issue of the aesthetic/nonaesthetic distinction. Since the conditions of use of aesthetic terms stipulated by the RSD model allow a wide range of variation in conducting successful mapping/reorganizations, there is a wide spectrum of terms that can be used as aesthetic terms. According to Kivy, those terms show that there is no aesthetic/nonaesthetic distinction. The characteristics of mundane aesthetic terms resemble metaphors, but there is a class of limiting-case aesthetic terms whose mappings are domain invariant; those terms are always and only aesthetic terms—beautiful, ugly, elegant, etc.—and they seem to justify Sibley and Hungerland’s view that there is an aesthetic/nonaesthetic distinction. The RSD model can reconcile distinctionists and antidistinctionists, since their positions can be seen as the result of concentrating on different shades in the spectrum of aesthetic terms: on the one hand, there is no fixed list of aesthetic terms but a whole range of possibilities. But on the other hand, there is a distinctive class of aesthetic terms, a limiting case in the spectrum, that shows that distinctionits have a point. The RSD model has plenty of room for both views. The RSD model does not entail the existence of a clear-cut distinction between aesthetic and non-aesthetic terms but it allows the existence of limiting cases. Metaphoric resilience and universal applicability, in accord with De Clercq’s view, are features of terms with domain-invariant mappings, but such features are a special case of compliance permitted by the RSD model and not intrinsic characteristics of all aesthetic terms. In this way, both the acceptance and denial of the distinction between aesthetic and non-aesthetic terms are justified to some extent.

We can also account for Sibley’s description of how metaphor and art criticism helps us to refine our use of aesthetic terms. Sibley believes that the exercise of aesthetic sensitivity is what characterizes aesthetic terms and that we gain proficiency in applying aesthetic terms through several special methods that help us develop such sensitivity. The RSD model does not need to resort to any special faculty or sensitivity to account for our progressive gaining of proficiency in applying aesthetic terms. The ways by which we gain proficiency in using aesthetic terms, as described by Sibley, can be seen as the ways in which we acquire proficiency in choosing schemata, mappings and reorganizations; that is, proficiency in articulating our aesthetic experience. As we have seen, choosing appropriate terms involves a delicate balancing act in which we must mind not only what schema is appropriate to express our subjective states, but also that the schema must force an appropriate reorganization onto the domain of objects. Since the balancing act is not easy, it makes sense to envisage that people progressively gain the skills to perform it. We become proficient in this balancing act through a process of learning that can be described in the same terms as Sibley describes how the critic’s guidance helps us to learn the correct use of aesthetic terms: we learn by familiarization with paradigmatic cases of the usage of aesthetic terms, that is by paradigmatic cases of articulation; by diverse sorts of exemplification and by trial and error, that is by contrasting good examples of articulation with poor ones; and by reiteration. All these ways of learning can be interpreted simply as a progressive development of the skills involved in using and choosing schemata/mappings/reorganizations in the RSD model. It must be emphasized that these skills do not involve any special faculties (like a faculty of taste) since the events in processes of subjective and process articulation involve only our regular cognitive, linguistic and introspective capabilities. The role of art criticism is thus to show examples of “good” articulations, that is, examples of appropriate schemata/mapping/reorganization choices, which serve as guides, as controlled contexts to develop proficiency in articulating aesthetic experiences.

In order to account for Hungerland’s characterization of aesthetic terms—in terms of the distinction looks/is, it is necessary to bring aesthetic descriptions into the picture. As discussed above, in the RSD model the events involved are strictly subjective; this is consistent with Hungerland’s idea that there is no objective conditions that can challenge an aesthetic description. More specifically, Hungerland’s view is that aesthetic terms do not admit the is/looks distinction because they are devised to describe how things may look to a person under certain circumstances. In the RSD model, one of the characteristics of aesthetic terms is that they make us see things in a particular way; a way determined by how a schema reorganizes the domain of objects of appreciation. This is true for metaphorical aesthetic terms, but not for terms such as beautiful or elegant. The absence of an is/looks distinction in these cases results from domain invariance: if the subjective conditions for the correct application of a term like ‘elegant’ are fulfilled, the only possible source of error in applying the term would be to make a categorical mistake, but since these kind of terms are domain invariant there is no possibility to establish an objective distinction between something really being elegant and just looking elegant. In this way, the RSD model accounts for Hungerland’s ideas in metaphorical as well as literal cases of aesthetic terms.

Finally, the RSD model can account for Kivy’s terminality approach, with some constraints. In the RSD model the usage of an aesthetic term articulates an aesthetic experience. The circumstances that ground the passing of an aesthetic judgement begin and end in the subjective. Even when an aesthetic judgement is made public, we can only agree or disagree with the description by carrying out our own processes of articulation, which is also a subjective event. This explains why aesthetic descriptions do not lead to arguments on objective matters, actions or changes in attitude (or at least actions and attitudes intended to modify objective circumstances). In a sense, aesthetic descriptions are merely “aesthetic-process terminal” because the role of passing aesthetic judgements involves a sort of “closed loop” that starts with subjective experiences and ends with an enhancement (or an expression) of them. But the loop never reaches the realm of the objective. Aesthetic episodes are terminal in the context of aesthetic-processes. For example, an aesthetic description can be a description made by an art critic to explain an abstract work of art that would otherwise be inaccessible. This critical description makes the artwork available to its audience, and thus it can lead to changes of attitude towards the work and to further aesthetic-processes. This aesthetic description becomes engaged in attitude changes and further aesthetic-processes. Now, aesthetic descriptions and the articulation that leads to them are subjective and they always remain in the realm of the subjective. They may even become part of our value repository and thus participate in further aesthetic-processes. But their influence is still terminal, in the constrained sense, since their role begins and ends in an aesthetic-process: they are terminal in the local context of aesthetic-processes.

Aesthetic terms are terminal in the sense of being aesthetic-process closed. Now, when an aesthetic judgement is made public, it conveys information about certain quality of the object that can be picked up by other people. This information can affect objective circumstances in different ways, but the most relevant of those ways consist in ending up in new aesthetic experiences or even in new processes of articulation of aesthetic experiences. This further supports the idea that a better characterization of aesthetic terms is in terms of aesthetic-process local terminality, since the information conveyed by an aesthetic judgement may result in further arguments or actions related to aesthetic experiences; that is, in larger “loops” involving aspects such as aesthetic experiences or the developing of aesthetic values. We have actually described such loops as long term feedback pathways in our description of aesthetic process in Chap. 6.