What is Art? A Pragmatic Perspective

Scott-Phillips, T.

doi:10.1017/s1477175615000093

What is Art? A Pragmatic Perspective

Scott-Phillips, T.

Authors

T. Scott-Phillips

Abstract

What is art? Marcel Duchamp made this question pertinent when he developed his ‘Readymades’: ordinary, manufactured objects that he presented as art. In this paper, I use pragmatics – the branch of linguistics concerned with language use in context, and which has its historical roots in the philosophy of language – to argue that, if we accept that art is a form of communication, from artist to audience, then Duchamp was correct to claim that anything can be art, so long as it is presented as such.

Citation

Scott-Phillips, T. (2015). What is Art? A Pragmatic Perspective. Think, 14(40), 87-91. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1477175615000093

Journal Article Type	Article
Publication Date	Jun 1, 2015
Deposit Date	Nov 11, 2015
Publicly Available Date	Nov 13, 2015
Journal	Think
Print ISSN	1477-1756
Electronic ISSN	1755-1196
Publisher	Cambridge University Press
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	14
Issue	40
Pages	87-91
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1017/s1477175615000093

Files

Accepted Journal Article (757 Kb)
PDF

Copyright Statement
© The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2015. This paper has been published in a revised form, subsequent to editorial input by Cambridge University Press, in 'Think' (14: 40 (2015) 87-91) http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=THI