Suprising Response to von Glasersfeld

I did not expect he would go off on mystics like that. I sense some kernel of truth that mystics and the like perceive some very important realities but we are not able to access their perceptions because of the limits imposed on us by the subjectivity of those perceptions. I can see how it is frustrating to be stuck in this position, but I also do not see how it justifies taking up RD.

Q&A Question Two

If we need others to share our aesthetic judgment because, “They ought to share it on pain of making a judgment which is incorrect or inappropriate [. . .] we don't want them to make incorrect judgments.” Why do we care if they make the wrong aesthetic judgments? (If we accept this as true it seems that aesthetic judgment is not objective but totally conditional on social coercion, therefore making the 'wrongness' of anyones judgment impossible.)

To address this we need to assume several things. Mostly that the action of experiencing beauty is a fundamentally subjective activity. This activity can be influenced and changed by normalization caused by social externalities to the subject experiencing beauty. For example, a person's experience of beauty in a piece of music will be affected by her social condition.

The drive to correct others seems to be fueled by the misperception that the experience of beauty is objective, or atleast the same between all individuals. While there does seem to be some basic agreement over what is beautiful, once we realize that there is no reason to legislate on the experience itself there seems like no reason to force our judgments on others. For some reason people still try to force their aesthetic judgments on others. 

I'm not arguing that reality is relative to each person's judgments and thus their judgments should not be subjected to reason. I am arguing that some areas of human experience, such as the experience of the aesthetic, can not effectively be regulated on the basis of reason.

Q&A Question One

Is the experience of beauty largely the same between individuals before we add in social/normative aesthetic judgments?

Judgments of beauty appear to be similar before aesthetic judgment are normalized by social processes. For instance, flowers are often considered beautiful independently across varied cultures (Native American Cultures, Persia, China). These cultures presumably are not all incidentally socializing their members to judge that flowers are beautiful. Therefore there is some natural consensus that flowers are in some way beautiful, and this consensus may apply to many other things that are generally considered beautiful.

We cannot certainly determine that the natural experience of beauty is largely the same between people, but it seems likely that there are some innate criteria that people agree on when they consider something beautiful, and these things are not socially transmitted.