Grice and Sibley on ᾀισθητικός

I had a free term at the Swimming-Pool Library -- I'm full time librarian --, and decided to take a course in Aesthetics, or Æsthetics, if you must. The number of idiocies I had to overhear moved me to order the two expensive hardback copies of Sibley: Sibley I and Sibley II -- the festschrift.

I knew of course of Sibley but was unaware of how much of a Gricean he was. Almost. He quotes extensively from Grice. Some recondite Grice, like "Some remarks about the senses".

Sibley is concerned with things like

i. Frogs are ugly.

Sureley they aren't. As every schoolboy knows. So what gives?

Sibley, like Grice, distinguishes between

αισθητικός

and

αισθητικός

To avoid equivocality, I will refer to them as

αισθητικός¹

and

αισθητικός²

The distinction is merely metalinguistic.

For Grice, and for Sibley,

ii. frogs can only be _bulky_, yellow, or whatever.

Only when we embed (ii) in the context of αισθητικός² do we yield i, frogs are ugly.

In other (clearer) words, aesthetic properties, so-called, are disjunctional and operational: they qualify the way primarily aesthetic or sensational properties affect us.

Enough to get tired when aestheticians start discussing 'art' INSTEAD!