We find that our judgements of taste should be universally agreed
upon, but this is not a claim to their logical truth. This is
illustrated by the fact that we do not think that something like
the truth of these judgements could be established, for example,
by enumerating natural properties. The only rather uncertain way
to establish their 'correctness' is by eliminating those aspects
of the involved experience, which might cloud the purity of the
judgement.13 Instead, this validity claim is exemplary:14 the
beautiful object is supposed to be an outstanding instance of a
'rule' that we cannot describe, but what kind of rule can this
be?15 For example, in an herbarium examples of plants are
depicted in such a way as to enable us to identify actual plants
in nature. Some conventional system is at work here: we must
understand the ways in which plants differ in general from their
representations to remark their resemblances. We must reconcile
differences in dimensionality, dimension, colour, mobility, et
cetera. On top of this conventional system we must be aware of the
various ways in which representations of distinct plants differ
from one another. There are, indeed, rules involved in such herbal
identifications, and each time we succeed in identifying a plant
we will be able to provide a satisfactory description of the
involved rule. Now, it cannot be this way with a concrete
beautiful thing being an exemplary case of a 'rule'. Clearly we do
not have herbarium-like books which have arranged all exemplary
cases of beautiful things into some hierarchy. Of course we do
have books representing the paintings of subsequent ages, periods,
styles, and painters, but, firstly, these are not books assembling
all and only aesthetically excellent paintings and, secondly, they
do not enable one to recognize beautiful artefacts of different
kinds, such as aeroplanes, novels, musical works, sculptures,
natural beauties, et cetera. To advocate the possibility or
desirability of such a rule-governed objectivism would clearly be
absurd. Apparently there is no satisfactory route for describing
rules that would enable us to recognize beauty whenever we are
supposed to be confronted with it, and there exists no system of
rules by way of which we could identify a third case of beauty
when confronted with two other acclaimed beautiful objects, nor
does the notion of an example of beauty have a sense. Now, this
might seem to furnish the suggestion that the meaning of 'beauty'
resides in some family resemblance. Again, however, since this
'family' would comprise every perceptible object, this would
merely beg the question. The idea then that beauty is exemplary of
some undescribable rule is metaphorical at best at least if
there is a literal sense in the first place to the involvement of
rules in more straightforward cases of meaning attribution.16 This
idea then of an undescribable rule needs elaboration.
An important part of the interpretation of this metaphor is that
in claiming universal validity we acknowledge that the free play
