The Primacy of Practice in the Ontology of Art

Abstract

Analytic ontology of art over the past thirty‐odd years might strike an outsider as a philosophical “badlands,” a realm populated by entities as diverse as norm‐kinds, indicated structures, action‐types, continuants, and performances. Clearly, one might think, there is serious need here for principled constraints upon the imaginative activities of theorists. It is not surprising, therefore, that methodology in the ontology of art has become more self‐conscious over the past few years. Amie Thomasson, for example, has argued that ontology of art can only be a form of conceptual analysis of the concepts of the “grounders” of artwork terms, and I have defended what I have termed the ‘pragmatic constraint’ in the ontology of art, a constraint that informs the work of a number of other writers.1 But meta‐ontology remains a somewhat refined study in comparison to the headier domain of ontology. To underline the importance of methodology in the ontology of art, I want to illustrate the serious implications of methodological choices and, in particular, the serious implications of what I believe to be misguided methodological choices. I shall take, as a case study, Julian Dodd's defense of what he terms the ‘simple view’ in musical ontology. While my article focuses on Dodd's account, I think the lessons to be drawn are of much wider significance.

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