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Now sometimes it is said that knowledge is primarily knowledge-that, i.e. some elementary epistemic operator is a propositional operator/"attitude report". Or at least there is an invoked distinction between descriptive knowledge and knowledge-by-acquaintance, where the formerly is roughly propositional (or at least perhaps covers the obtaining of states of affairs).

At any rate, in English, I think I almost always see the concept of beauty applied as a predicate on objects, as in, "This painting is beautiful," and I can't recall a clear instance of this application being a propositional attitude report, as in, "It is beautiful that this painting exists/has the content it does" (or whatever). Just the same, the grammatical construction "beautiful that..." is permissible, and we do more often say comparable things like, "It's wonderful that..." or, "It's splendid that..."

Now, as far as my judgment of Kant goes, he uses cognition (or rather its German cognate) the way we (if "we" are "analytic philosophers") tend to use proposition. For example, we say that propositions are the primary bearers of truth-values, Kant says that truth is "the accordance of a cognition with its object." When Kant speaks of conceptions and intuitions as objective cognitions, he seems to contrast the apprehensive mode of intuition ("bare sensation") from a sentential mode (an intuition as an apprehension not of individual concept-applications, but of a sentential array of these applications).

And so he has an intricately intellectualized theory of aesthetics, one grounded in the "faculty of judgment," where for him, judgments are broadly equivalent to, or a possible subset of, cognitions. Not that he commits us to a doctrine of aesthetic cognition straightforwarldy, only that the source of cognition, in the faculty of judgment, also has this weird side-output, aesthetic representation, which is at least para-cognitive (so to say). As we (again, "analytic philosophers") are often tempted to emphasize knowledge-that over "smaller" term knowledge, is Kant implicitly committed to representing beauty (and sublimity) in terms of "beautiful-that" more than as a predicate on object terms? At the very least, the SEP article on Kant's aesthetics says:

More strongly, judgments of beauty are not to be understood as predicating the concept beauty of their objects: as he puts it later, “beauty is not a concept of the object” (§38, 290).

EDIT: Insofar as Kant holds that, "I think," accompanies all our representations(?), he does have a generic propositional (or cognitive, or whatever) operator that would perforce range over our aesthetic judgments. This doesn't "prove my point" (since, "I think that it is beautiful that..." is not inferrable from the bare apperception operation, of course), but I do wonder if a "beautiful-that" moment could be construed as a (non-factive) second-order propositional attitude report, applying to, "I imagine (that...)," here, then. Admittedly, "I think that I imagine that it is beautiful that..." doesn't sound at all like what Kant was trying to get across, though.

Kristian Berry
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    I think he denies that beauty can be predicated of an object not because he thinks it is *more* propositional, i.e. should instead be predicated of a proposition, but because he thinks it is *less* so. It is not even subsumption of an object under a concept:"*we do not use understanding to refer the presentation to the object so as to give rise to cognition; rather, we use imagination... to refer the presentation to the subject and his feeling of pleasure and displeasure.*" There is definitely an attitude there, but not a propositional one, more like evaluative attitude of expressivism. – Conifold Aug 08 '22 at 13:00
  • We should think of judgment as performing, generally speaking, a 3-place relation between object, predicate and *subject*. In cognitive judgments dependence on the latter mostly vanishes, so we get 2-place predication, but not in aesthetic judgments. See [Matherne, Kant on Aesthetic Autonomy](https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/p/pod/dod-idx/kant-on-aesthetic-autonomy-and-common-sense.pdf?c=phimp;idno=3521354.0019.024;format=pdf) on Kant's affinity to aesthetic expressivism. – Conifold Aug 08 '22 at 13:14
  • Beaty/the sublime is more of a feeling that arises from the free play of the faculties, ie. imagination and judgement finding ever more forms and possible cognitions in the same object that cannot be subsumed under any proposition/concept that would fully reflect it. Thus, in a sense, it is a predicate of the intuition, or even more precise the process of its cognition. That being said, Kant uses accordance of a *representation* (Vorstellung) with its object as definition of truth. Cognition is a bad/misleading translation IMHO. – Philip Klöcking Aug 08 '22 at 20:59
  • @PhilipKlöcking, first, Meiklejohn strikes again I guess, argh! Now, how far apart are a non-factive aesthetic propositional operator that only "correctly" applies to propositions about the subject and the imagination (in the relevant way), and an expressivist aesthetic term? Or rather, how difficult would it be to translate the language of the operator into the language of the term? OTOH, I don't have a lot riding on this idea (as far as my beliefs about Kant go, anyway), so if such a translation should seem unlikely or implausible, I hope that my thesis goes down without a fight. – Kristian Berry Aug 09 '22 at 00:21
  • @Conifold, I know you more than likely already know what I mean by "non-factive," but I'll just throw in the definition for other possible readers: **B**T does not imply T, "It is beautiful that X," does not mean, "It is true that X." – Kristian Berry Aug 09 '22 at 00:23
  • I think what you need is a view where the subject first cognitively judges some sort of propositional redux of an object comprising its "aesthetically salient" features, and then attaches an attitude to that. I do not think this fits Kant, but people do entertain such views, see e.g. [Deonna, Emotions as Attitudes](https://www.jstor.org/stable/24706252). – Conifold Aug 09 '22 at 10:13

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