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.) Even when astatement is true, it may have little or no cognitive value.At least two classes oftrue statements have little cognitive value.The first class includes statementsabout trivial or commonplace matters.The second sort includes statements forwhich no evidence is available.A true statement has cognitive value only when its audience has some reasonto believe that it is true.In short, the statement needs to be justified.(After all,knowledge is justified true belief.) This justification can, in some cases, beprovided by the reliability of the person who makes the statement.If I tell myfriends that it is raining, they are justified in believing that it is.In other cases, aperson s reliability, however great, cannot justify the person s statements.Suppose, for example, I merely state, without providing any justification, that Ihave witnessed a miracle.No matter how reliable I am, my statement has little orno cognitive value.As Hume argues, no one is so reliable that such testimonyought to be accepted.In general, statements on many topics have little or nocognitive value unless justification for them is provided.Discourse-dependent artworks generally do not lack cognitive value becausethey are about trivial or commonplace matters.On the contrary, they are generallystatements about important matters such as the nature of art, the role of images inthe modern world, mysticism, class struggle, relations between the sexes and soon.The trouble is that statements on these matters are instances of statementswhich are in need of justification.The mere statement of a view about art, thevalue of life in the modern world, or the construction of gender has little cognitivevalue.Since discourse-dependent artworks are simply statements about thesematters, they have little cognitive value.In defence of discourse-dependent artworks, one might urge that they arejustified by the associated discourse.An avant-garde artwork could, then, be asource of knowledge about some important and controversial matter.No doubtsometimes the discourses associated with avant-garde artworks justify the149ART AND KNOWLEDGEstatements they are used to make.When this is the case, however, the associateddiscourse is the item with cognitive value.A great deal of discourse on the natureof art is, for example, associated with Fountain.Some of this discourse hascontributed importantly to the understanding of arthood.This discourse justifiesthe statement (one of those Fountain may be used to make) that arthood involvesacceptance by an artworld.In this case, the associated discourse has cognitivevalue.Nothing is gained by contemplating the sculpture as well as becomingacquainted with the discourse.(Indeed, this is not an option, since the originalwork is lost.) Notice the difference between this case and the cases of artworksthat are not discourse-dependent.Even after one has read everything writtenabout, say, Rodin s Thinker, viewing the sculpture is still valuable.Indeed, onecan only discover the full aesthetic value of this sculpture by experiencing it.A final sort of artwork remains to be considered in this section.In this, themost advanced form of avant-garde art, no special semantic conventions areinvented or discovered and artworks do not represent in conjunction with adiscourse.Rather, quite simply, statements of natural languages become works ofart.I will refer to this sort of work as pure avant-garde art.Pure avant-gardeartworks have no more cognitive value than other artworks that rely exclusivelyon semantic representation.Moreover, they lack cognitive value for precisely thesame reasons that other such works do.The evolution of pure avant-garde art can be traced at least as far back as TheTreason of Images (1928 29) by René Magritte.This work is a painting of a pipeand of the words Ceci n est pas une pipe. This work is not yet pure avant-gardeart.It is still, in part, an illustration of a pipe.Nevertheless, this painting issignificant since the really important part of the work is the statement it makes.Without the painted words, the painting would not represent the fact that paintingsare distinct from the objects they depict.It would simply be an illustration ofa pipe.In the 1960s, another stage was reached in the evolution of pure avant-gardeart.This stage was reached by people who are usually classified as conceptualartists
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