Dan Kim

Well, tl;dr verion:
When we see a certain play being made in a game of baseball, so long as we're all in agreement about the rules of the game and our various goals during play (that we're playing to win, that we play according to the rules, we're not throwing the game for cash, etc.), we can easily pass judgement on whether the play was a good one or not. When either goals or rules are in question, judgements have to be suspended until we're clear again on rules and goals. (For example, someone says "OUT!" and a players says "What? We're playing basketball", "rule set A or rule set B?", "I thought rule set A was this, not that - you can't use a ball like that", "That's not a ball, THIS is a ball", and so on down the rabbit hole until you build up agreement again...)

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Now that's fine for an explicit game like baseball, but out in the world of implicit games -- the world of natural language and thought -- we have a problem: judgements can't be suspended until until we're clear on the rules and goals. Rather, any time we make a move at all, we're kicking up a cloud of judgements, rules and goals, all mixed up together. Any time we say "that's a blue square", we're not scraping conceptual content off the world and making raw empirical observations -- the sort of thing we'd expect to get universal agreement about -- instead we're making an appeal to others to play along in a game where 'blue' and 'square' are moves that behave in useful ways. And by the way, just to complicate matters, other are simultaneously making such appeals, perhaps hoping for other games and behaviours.

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In short, when we say "that's blue" we're doing a lot of things at once:
a) saying that this usage of "blue" OUGHT to be the correct one
b) that we're carrying on as if this IS the correct usage
c) that the domain(s) under which that usage IS correct OUGHT to be ones in use
d) that we're carrying on as if the domain(s) under which that usage IS correct is/are the ones in use
Of course, there's such a thing as getting "blue" wrong, and if the goals and/or meanings are far enough apart or truly incompatible, you may never get agreement. (e.g. someone says it was a 'blue' Monday and this is the first time the word's been used that way... is this incorrect use? Depends on what your goals are and the other meanings in play -- if you're measuring colours with a scientific instrument, saying this is weird is useless... if you're writing a novel, this might be brilliant and instantly become the right way to describe THAT kind of Monday. But you'll be hard pressed to get a unified meaning of blue that works for ALL goals, future and present).

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Anyway, the point is that the art that I'M interested in is the kind where the goals and rules are explicitly up for grabs. I think art of this kind (or perhaps taking this stance toward art) allows us to wave off snooty critics and political fist-shakers and returns art safely to a community of individual imaginations.

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