Is it possible to err in judgments of fashion?
- Posted by Paul Gowder on April 2nd, 2009 filed in philosophy, scene
- 20 Comments »
In the last post, Mike made the following comment:
Show me a person who puts together an outfit that he or she believes to be stunning….. but that is completely bat-shit crazy…. and we’ve got relevant data re: IQ.
Wearing a trucker hat to be ironic = idiot douche bag. Wearing a trucker hat because one genuinely thinks it looks good (where one is not in the demo of an actual trucker) = person who is probably at least brilliant.
What are the truth conditions for a judgment of fashion? What kind of knowledge can we have that fashion beliefs are true or false? How, in short, do we know that trucker hats are ugly?
Clearly judgments of fashion don’t have the status of judgments of empirical fact, or of mathematics. The obvious approach is to equate them to aesthetic judgments and then apply one’s favored theory of those (kids, can we say subjective universal?).
But that seems suspicious to me. First, empirically, our judgments of fashion are much, much less consistent between a) time, b) culture, and c) individuals even within a culture than standards in aesthetic judgments generally. It’s unlikely that people will think the great Renaissance art unappealing anytime soon, while we already find Renaissance fashion unappealing. While different styles of art are often produced by different cultures, we tend to find it easier to recognize the beauty in cross-cultural art than in cross-cultural dress (compare your opinion of Rilke and your opinion of lederhosen).
Also, contra the Kantian approach to aesthetics, we recognize less normativity in judgments of fashion than in aesthetic judgments generally. If someone doesn’t like Eliot, we (if we are sensible) think that person is making a mistake, but if someone doesn’t like Dr. Martens, we don’t. At the extremes, of course, we do — if someone likes Uggs or Crocs, we think that person is making a mistake — but our judgments of other people’s judgments on art aren’t just limited to those extremes (where abstract expressionism and country are, perhaps, the Crocs and Uggs of visual art and music).
Fashion judgments seem, in short, to be subjective non-universal (and non-normative) rather than subjective universal. “Your clothes are ugly” means, in most cases, nothing more than “I get bad feelings from your clothes.” Does anyone want to defend anything more from judgments of fashion?
April 2nd, 2009 at 5:53 pm
Clearly judgments of fashion don’t have the status of judgments of empirical fact,
Judgment of empirical fact = we all observe the world the same way, and thus agree on things. If we had three eyes or super vision or could see quarks, we’d have different empirical facts.
I know you believe in an Objective Reality. Yet we’ve all evolved to see the world in a certain way…. and there are perhaps billions of different ways we could have evolved to see the world. So how can anyone say that an Objective Reality exists?
Putting that aside, sure, matters of fashion are not objective truths. (though, what are?) “Prove that trucker hats are ugly!” would be met with the following: “The majority considers it so. Therefore, it is so.” Or, “I have been socialized to believe that it is is.” Yet can’t we say that of many so-called truths?
“Your clothes are ugly” means, in most cases, nothing more than “I get bad feelings from your clothes.”
This could be said even of moral truths. “Slavery is wrong” means nothing more than, “It offends me.” If we had been Spartans, slavery wouldn’t have offended any of us. It wouldn’t even have entered into our consciousness that slavery was wrong.
Just because a culture has agreed on something (and conditioned us accordingly) doesn’t mean that something takes the status of objective truth. It also doesn’t mean it’s something we can just brush aside as, “That’s a matter of taste!”
Unless of course, you’re willing to join me in believing that moral truths are themselves merely subjective – and no different from matters of fashion.
Outside of math (and even that raises issues; is there such a thing as God’s Math?), “truth” is simply what the culture has declared the truth to be.
April 2nd, 2009 at 6:02 pm
See the excellent article “but mom, crop-tops -are- cute!” by sally haslanger. It’s online free, just google. Picked by the
Philosophers annual I believe.
April 2nd, 2009 at 8:05 pm
It’s easy to make fun of uggs living in California. Live a couple winters in Toronto and see if you’d tell a woman they look stupid, and expect that to matter!
April 2nd, 2009 at 8:23 pm
Gowder – This sounds suspiciously like you are trying to prep us for the announcement that you will only wear togas from here on out.
April 2nd, 2009 at 8:50 pm
Uggs are hot.
April 2nd, 2009 at 9:26 pm
X: Wow, I really did not expect to see feminist epistemology when I fired up that (brilliant) paper. (Appropriate though it is.)
Both Mike and Haslanger seem to be getting at, loosely, the same point, albeit with different normative evaluations: fashion as convention. (Where we might understand “ideology” as just a convention that’s really hard to spot as such, and has certain nasty power implications too.) And the contrast between the two seems to point out the problem with this account: conventionalism, while it might make sense of what we’re saying when we make fashion judgments, doesn’t explain how they came to be (evolution of in-group/out-group identification? social oppression? some combination of these?) or whether they’re good or bad.
Ed: I was thinking more spiked codpieces and big swords, a la Conan the Barbarian.
April 2nd, 2009 at 10:29 pm
(Where we might understand “ideology” as just a convention that’s really hard to spot as such, and has certain nasty power implications too.)
Yes. You are a rationalist, so you think we can reason to some moral truths. Yet we can’t weigh or measure our reasons.
Yet the reasons we have at all are matters of fashion.
Again, Sparta, slavery. We’d never have reasoned our way to the moral truth that slavery was wrong. It would not have even occurred to us. Equality of all men was not in.
Now the answer is obvious, though one might say that is just the fashion of the day.
Heck, best proof of the above is animal rights. Animals are tortured in factory farms. Not even debatable. Eating meat isn’t necessary; and for many, it leads to health problems. Yet we all eat meat and most of us don’t even see what the problem is.
100 years from now (if it goes into fashion), guys will look at animal rights like we look at slavery. Some future selves will say, “Man, I so would have been a vegetarian in 2009!” Bullshit.
Ideas – even first premises like “No person should be enslaved,” or “No sentient being should be necessarily harmed” are things that everyone agrees. It gets upload into the Matrix. We all accept it as true. Then we make our rationalist arguments, unaware that we’re doing so based on the fashion of our day!
April 3rd, 2009 at 10:12 am
I think this conversation suffers from a failure of precision. If we’re going to discuss sartorial realism, we ought to be clear about exactly what sartorial realism is. I don’t think moral realism necessarily commits the realist to thinking there’s a fact of the matter about every aspect of human behavior. Only that there are some such facts. Let’s take a digression about morals, and then return to fashion.
Over time, I’ve been trending toward a view that says that, yes, in the first instance, a kind of moral relativism is true. You won’t be convincing Caesar that summarily executing Gauls is a morally bad thing by force of argument (though perhaps, if I could mesmerize him through a speech, I could by power of rhetoric). This is just to recognize the obvious force of the argument from disagreement. But that moral agents are situated inside systems of moral thought, and that these systems reach different answers to first-order moral questions, is rather less dangerous to moral realism than people seem to think. And I think we can see why if we ask, What is a moral system? (Or, perhaps, what does it do?) There’s good psychological research showing that moral systems can be codified according to their sensitivity to a handful of factors. Reciprocity, fairness, purity, authority, group loyalty, &c. That is, while there is moral disagreement between people situated within different moral systems, those systems have a certain, predictable kind of second-order similarity. This, I think, just makes sense of a common-sense understanding of how moral systems are built. The Spartans highly valued purity, authority, and loyalty (loyalty to the group of Spartan citizens), and built a system of judgments and rules centered on those values. Modern liberals care about reciprocity and fairness, and not much else.
Moral systems are also, in the second-instance, intersubjective. While I’m not going to agree with a Spartan that he has the right to enslave a helot, it’s not as if his arguments will just sound like gibberish to me. He’ll blather on and on about the greatness of the Spartans and their state, and I’ll understand what he’s trying to say. I just prefer liberal, individualistic assumptions.
What’s the moral system doing? Rational agents face enormously complex coordination problems, and I think there’s a good argument that moral systems enable agents to coordinate their actions as part of a social whole. As a matter of fact, there are only so many values around which people structure their moral systems, and so there’s a bounded space within which moral systems exist. Whether this is a byproduct of the logic of natural selection or an interesting quirk of game theory is an interesting, but ultimately irrelevant, question. The upshot is that we can make sense of assertions, in the second instance, that different moral systems solve various of life’s coordination problems in better of worse ways.
That, in fact, is what I think much moral argument does. It points to concerns of problems and calls attention to the fact that the rival moral system doesn’t do much about it, though perhaps only in a very implicit, and ineffective, way. (And while moral realists have to account for the fact of disagreement, irrealists typically do a bad job of accounting for the fact of moral debate — it’s not just incoherent shouting). But the cash value of this argument is that a moral system’s solving various social problems and doing so in better or worse ways just are natural facts about moral propositions. I think that liberalism is a superior moral system, and demonstrably so, because liberal social structures are vastly better at fulfilling certain basic human needs. Bob Wright, the logic of capitalism, &c.
But couldn’t we adopt a view like this about sartorial realism. Sure, a Renaissance courtier will look at my business suit and say, “That’s stupid. It doesn’t have a codpiece! Or any doublets!” I’ll say, “Those things are silly.” And he’ll say, “But they broadcast your status, and they’re sharp looking.” To be sure, that conversation reveals what is probably an irreconcilable first-order disagreement about whether codpieces are stupid, but the conversation itself makes sense only if there is an underlying agreement on (the relevance of?) certain facts of the matter about the functions of clothing. And there are many such facts. Clothing should keep you warm, look sharp, advertise your status, &c. And isn’t that a kind of sartorial realism?
April 3rd, 2009 at 10:30 am
Steve, Does that line give a realist account to just about anything that can be the object of rational agency?
If so, that might not be a problem, but I suspect it is. Distinguish two propositions:
1) There are true facts about X (realism).
2) Acting as if there are true facts about X serves some purpose, and judgments about X-facts can be better or worse in virtue of better or worse serving that purpose.
I take it we think there’s a difference between those two propositions? Your argument seems to merge them.
One reason we should think that there’s a difference between them is that judgments of correctness and judgments of purpose-serving-belief can easily come apart. For example, it might serve lots of useful purposes to accept Newtonian rather than Einsteinian physics (like making it much easier to do calculations). But there are (at least less disputedly than on moral and aesthetic terrain) true facts about physics, and they run in this example in the opposite direction from the purpose-serving beliefs.
That example doesn’t directly refute the notion that the existence of more or less purpose-serving beliefs entails the existence of true facts, but it makes the style of thinking behind it feel a little more dubious by showing that those purpose-serving beliefs need not be the same as the true facts in cases where realism is generally accepted.
April 3rd, 2009 at 10:41 am
Actually, perhaps I’m misunderstanding your argument. Perhaps it’s not the beliefs that serve a purpose but the behaviors underlying them? In which case, it might account for fashion and moral judgments, but would poorly account for other kinds of judgments that seem to fall in similar categories. Aesthetic judgments, for example, seem to fail the Steve-realism test here, because there isn’t a purpose that my painting in the cubist rather than the abstract expressionist style (say) serves.
April 3rd, 2009 at 10:53 am
I’m not entirely certain it’s so easy to distinguish propositions (1) and (2), at least in this context. I must confess I haven’t worked out the details of the view, and I suspect that this is its most problematic aspect. If pressed, I imagine I’d say I’m only pushing a very weak realism, which trades on certain facts about intersubjectivity. (Simon Blackburn, anyone?) We probably can’t adopt a rigid realism or cognitivism about everyday, first-order moral judgments. But we can for higher-order judgments about the properties of moral systems. Of course, I’ve kicked the can down the road because those judgments rest on first-order judgments of a different kind — e.g., that happiness is good, or that a certain view about human flourishing is correct. But I suspect it will be possible, in the future when we have a better understanding of human biology and psychology, to have a fully-fleshed out view that roots these judgments about moral systems in facts about human nature. Doing so will require unceremoniously ignoring the naturalistic fallacy, among other controversies, but maybe that’s the best we get.
I’m prepared to accept as plausible the hypothesis that there is a certain kind of realism about most things subject to rational agency. The problem is that I’ve drained all the force out of realism. I mean, it’s not like the hardcore realist is going to embrace the view I outlined above.
Incidentally, we have now discovered what BigLaw associates (me) do after being laid off. They push convoluted defenses of esoteric metaethical views on the internet, and enjoy it vastly more than another day of work.
April 3rd, 2009 at 10:54 am
Damn you HTML tags!
True. And your suggestion about art is an interesting one. Perhaps painting is not related to coordination problem-solving in the same way as fashion and law?
April 3rd, 2009 at 11:13 am
Steve, this clearly means that what you should really be doing is embracing the end of the biglaw lifestyle and, e.g., going off to pick up a PhD. Join the dark side.
On the can-kicking, I used to think that sort of thing was more of a problem than I think it is now. It now seems to me that it does say something to say “this behavior serves the end of making people happy,” if only because we’re committed by our ordinary practices of reasoning and living in the world to like things that make ourselves (and, by extension, others) happy. That is, it all comes down to transcendental arguments anyways.
April 3rd, 2009 at 11:32 am
So now there are three competing positions on fashion judgments: my expressivism, Mike/Haslanger conventionalism, and Steve’s pragmatic realism. Any more?
April 3rd, 2009 at 12:26 pm
How to formulate the view very simply:
A moral proposition does not directly refer to any fact of the matter. Moral properties are not, as the vulgar view would have it, metaphysically independent. But a person’s adopting a proposition as true leads him to act in ways that are conducive to his and others’ flourishing, or not. The judgment’s contribution to human flourishing (or lack thereof), however, is a fact of the matter. If we adopt the view that the morally good things are those things, and those only, that constitute or contribute to human flourishing, then an identifiable moral realism becomes viable. Something like this is true of any goal-oriented rational behavior, including law, manners, and, possibly, cultural artifacts like fashion (though possibly not enterprises that are in some way purely creative or expressive). Perhaps the view outlined here is really a realism of rationality, and each of these are special cases. This view invites difficult regress problems, though not if we entirely sever the connection between the grounds for justifying a normative ethics and a metaethics, or if we decide not to care about regress problems. (The latter solution might be called the Hume-Gowder hypothesis.)
April 5th, 2009 at 10:13 am
I’m inclined to treat fashion sense similarly to moral and aesthetic judgements more generally and point to my extrapolated volition as the objective-subjective final arbiter. There may be different valuations of some fashion concept based on time and circumstance, but I see no problem with that, because my extrapolation should be capable of distinguishing and valuing each time-point separately.
Rob Zahra
April 12th, 2009 at 9:51 pm
[...] Starting with some metaethics, Philosophy, et cetera. provides both a potential objection to Parfit’s Triviality Objection and a guest post by Jeff Sebo: ‘What is Constructivism?’. Following in tune, The Space of Reasons challenges a certain theory of desire with an over-intellectualization, in part 1 of The “Guise of the Good” Theory of Desires. Additionally, The Ends of Thought provides some insight on Intentionality and the Object of Moral Perception: Ricoeur’s Challenge, and Uncommon Priors finishes out the section, posing the question: Is it possible to err in judgments of fashion? [...]
April 13th, 2009 at 6:08 am
The blog post treats judgments of fashion as judgments of approval or disapproval. There can be such judgments, and I agree they are “even less objective” (so to speak) than judgments about art. But there are also judgments about fashion which don’t come with concomitant approval or disapproval. For example, a person may think “My outfit makes me look smart” or “My outfit connotes an artistic demeanor” or “My oufit is good for an academic job interview.” These judgments have a more objective character.
In other words, while it is debatable whether artworks have an instrumental function, fashion clearly does, and in that capacity, fashion yields the basis for more objectie judgments than does art.
April 13th, 2009 at 8:38 am
Kris, that’s really interesting. I wonder what the status of those judgments is? They seem to be at least somewhat agent relative, in that it’s possible for two people to disagree on them without either being able to appeal to a fact of the matter. (“That outfit makes you look like a pimp.” “No it doesn’t, Dad!” It’s not clear in what sense this dispute can really be resolved by an appeal to some kind of facts.)
I want to say that to the extent there are facts, those kind of facts really are conventional. My outfit makes me look like a pimp, if it does, just because it’s the sort of outfit that pimps happen to wear. In a different society, where pimps dressed differently, my outfit wouldn’t make me look like a pimp.
Note also that this sort of judgment is sometimes inextricably connected with a judgment of approval or disapproval. An ex-girlfriend once told me to stop wearing white shirts with black jeans on the grounds that it made me “look like a waiter.” The implication here was that looking like a waiter was for some reason legitimate grounds for disapproval — presumably not moral disapproval, but fashion disapproval.
April 13th, 2009 at 8:53 am
There are some facts of the matters regarding the instrumental purposes of clothing that are shared by all, or nearly all, people. “That jacket won’t keep you warm in really cold temperatures,” &c. These appeal to facts about the non-human world, or to conventions that are so general as to be shared by all humans (at that point I don’t see much use in calling it a convention as opposed to a fact about “human nature” or whatever). There are some that are narrower, making judgments with respect to conventions enforced by particular societies: “The broad lapels, sharp and narrow pinstripes, and double-breasted cut make you look like the awesome businessman you are, 80s guy,” or “That halter top is slutty.” Those are less fact-like than the warm-jacket statement, but they have an objective form and can be usefully assessed for correspondence to the conventions. And then you have statements relating personal taste, e.g., “I think that jacket is ugly.”
Perhaps a sliding scale of factitude? Sure, there’s lots of confusion because people have a habit of expressing statements of the third kind in the form of statements of the first kind, but there’s a lot of room for factual disagreement, or for something sort of like it.