AAP 2026 CONFERENCE

Regarding folk intuition about aesthetic normativism, empirical evidence presents conflicting results: according to Cova and Pain’s (2012) study, folk intuitions deny the idea that aesthetic judgments are normative. This result undermines Kant’s view that it is common sense that aesthetic judgments are normative. But Andow’s (2022) study reveals more complex findings, which show that folk intuition, in some cases, endorses a normative perspective. Harnessing the two-dimensional semantics, this paper aims to reconcile this conflict by arguing that the folk account of aesthetic anti-realism is conditional. To support this claim, a small-scale empirical study was conducted. The results show that people tend to adopt an incompatibilist view in imagined scenarios, but a compatibilist view in actual-world contexts. Finally, this paper proposes a conditional reinterpretation of Kant’s “subjective universality”.