Abstract

Experience and interpretation are two key topics of twentieth-century aesthetics that remain central today. Although aesthetic experience forms the core of John Dewey's Art as Experience, the book neglects the issue of interpretation. My essay explores this surprising lacuna in Dewey's aesthetic masterpiece. Dewey's pluralism, fallibilism, and critique of the quest for certainty should make the concept of interpretation very appealing, because fallibility and openness to plurality of perspectives are precisely what define the concept of interpretation and traditionally distinguish it from fact or truth. Dewey's neglect of interpretation in Art as Experience is even more puzzling when we recall that his early views on art and philosophy did not share this disregard but instead embraced the centrality of interpretation. My essay explores the possible reasons for this change of attitude, after demonstrating this change by comparing Dewey's dismissive view of interpretation in Art as Experience to his early essays where interpretation plays an important role.