In my dissertation, I examine the human capability to form aesthetic judgments, such as “x is beautiful”. I do it from the viewpoint of contemporary evolutionary aesthetics and propose a way to grasp the concept of aesthetic judging tailored for this field.

Aesthetic judgment is one of the core concepts in philosophical aesthetics. It is common for evolutionary aestheticians to employ it without positioning their research in relation to the philosophical accounts. The focus has been on different instances of perceiving aesthetic value, but the question of how aesthetic value is – and can be – perceived has remained under the radar. This is problematic since taking something as an instance of aesthetic judgment depends on the way aesthetic judging is conceptualized. Shedding light on what is meant with aesthetic judging clarifies what evolutionary aesthetics explains as well as gives tools to evaluate its research outcomes and formulate future research questions.

The objective of this dissertation is to provide perspectives on how the act of aesthetic judging could and should be understood in contemporary evolutionary aesthetics. Rather than providing a general definition as an answer to the question of what aesthetic judging is, I focus on how aesthetic judging functions in relation to the general functioning of the aesthetic agent (person forming aesthetic judgments). Doing so, I position myself within the proximate evolutionary level asking causal “how questions” about perceiving aesthetic value.

My results presented in five independent articles support the following claims:

The field of evolutionary aesthetics is moving towards proximate level explanations (article I).

From the third-person perspective, aesthetic judging functions as an interface – an indirect information provider – between aesthetic experience and an observer (article II).

From the first-person perspective and looking at the behavior of aesthetic judging, aesthetic judging should be seen as metacognitive activity (at least second-order inference) rather than a non-interpretational reflex (article III).

Looking at the cognitive mechanisms at play, aesthetic judging does not necessarily rely on innate traits even if it was considered universally human (article IV).

An explanation of (a) how an aesthetic agent making aesthetic judgments actually functions and (b) how an aesthetic agent can potentially function that way constitute different levels of abstraction rather than competing same-level explanations (article V).

The results suggest that aesthetic judging should be seen as a plastically (or domain-generally) realized functional module or collection of modules. Modularity of aesthetic judging allows seeing aesthetic judging as an activity but keeping the concept open enough to accommodate different cultural ways in which it can be realized as well as different contexts within which an individual can employ it.

This dissertation is, to my knowledge, the first attempt to clarify the concept aesthetic judging in contemporary evolutionary aesthetics. Used here as a functional rather than an empirical concept, it calls for philosophical analysis tailored for evolutionary aesthetics specifically, where scholars operate back and forth philosophical and empirical explanations. I defend the usefulness of terminology of philosophical aesthetics for the field of evolutionary aesthetics, provide an up-to-date functionalist account of the concept aesthetic judging, and call for further exchange between traditional philosophical and more empirically informed aesthetics.