'True Judges': Expertise and Justification

Abstract

According to David Hume and followers, there are some people who can determine which aesthetic objects are of high worth (although Hume only mentions authors, not their works). They are reliable guides to the standard of taste.

I shall argue that the scope of proper aesthetic expertise is narrow. This leads aesthetic experts of various kinds to be “true judges” (to use Hume’s term) only within rather narrow realms. So how can true judges, or anyone else, pronounce on anything beyond their narrow areas of expertise with any degree of justification? I shall provide two models for how this may be justifiable, and in the process provide a gauge of aesthetic expertise.

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