Both our criticism of agentive views and our positive account will draw from Carlson's environmental aesthetics, as laid out in his 2000 book _Aesthetics and the Environment_. In particular, we adopt Carlson's general recommendation for aesthetic appreciation: take things as what they are, and look at them in the light of the right kind of knowledge. He applies this to the appreciation of the natural environment thusly: > First, that, as in our appreciation of works of art, we must appreciate nature as what it in fact is, that is, as natural and as an environment. Second, it recommends that we must appreciate nature in light of our knowledge of what it is, that is, in light of knowledge provided by the natural sciences, especially the environmental sciences such as geology, biology, and ecology. The natural environmental model thus accommodates both the true character of nature and our normal experience and understanding of it. (Carlson, 2000, p. 6) This captures something intuitive about how we appreciate nature versus art. Appreciating mountains and cliff faces as the work of a divine artisan, rather than of natural forces, would be wrong-headed (cf. Carlson, 2000, Chapter 8); so would appreciating a Rembrandt as if it were the product of natural forces slopping paint together (cf. Danto 1974, p. 140). In both cases, appreciation is undermined by a failure to recognise what the object really is. Carlson argues that artworks and everyday objects call for _design appreciation_. With paradigmatic artworks,[^1] we recognise them as creations of designers, objects whose features are, as Gombrich puts it, each "the result of a decision by the artist" (Gombrich, 1950, p. 13, quoted in Carlson, 2000, p. 109). We appreciate such works by seeing how well the result realises the artist's design. The same approach extends to designed artifacts more generally. Carlson is explicit that functional objects are properly appreciated by seeing how their forms answer to what they are for: > This is in part the point of the much-repeated phrase 'form follows function.' The forms of all functional objects — buildings, airplanes, and appliances as well as landscapes — must be aesthetically appreciated in terms of how and how well such forms fit their functions. However, the cliché is frequently interpreted too narrowly. With anything functionally designed, not only its form, but much of its aesthetic interest and merit, 'follows function'. (Carlson, 2000, ch. 12, p. 188) So, on this account, a chair, or a bridge invite the same style of attentive appraisal as a painting – guided by knowledge of ends, materials, constraints, and the fit between purpose and realisation. For the natural environment, in contrast, Carlson recommends a different mode: order appreciation. Appreciation of things like trees or valleys cannot be grounded in considerations of how well a designer managed to realise her intentions, because they are not designed objects. Instead, Carlson recommends that the knowledge grounding appreciation of the natural world is appreciation of how the order we find has been shaped by natural forces: > On the assumption that order appreciation provides the correct model for the appreciation of nature, such appreciation has the following general form: An individual qua appreciator selects objects of appreciation from the things around him or her and focuses on the order imposed on these objects by the various forces, random and otherwise, that produce them. Moreover, the objects are selected in part by reference to a general nonaesthetic and nonartistic story that helps make them appreciable by making this order visible and intelligible. (Carlson, 2000, p. 119) In both modes, knowledge guides acts of aspection — ways of attending to an object that partly constitute its appreciation (Carlson, 2000, pp. 41–42, 106). But the character of this knowledge differs. In the case of design, we need functional and technical understanding: what the designer intended and what constraints they faced. In natural cases, we need an account of the processes that produced the order we perceive — knowledge that lets us see natural structures as effects of processes (Carlson, 2000, pp. 50, 60–61). Once a specific scientific account is in play, some cases will exhibit its order more clearly than others — which prevents order appreciation from flattening every natural object into equal appreciability (Carlson, 2000, pp. 118–119). It could be argued, however, that Carlson’s approach to aesthetics overlooks another important category of object of appreciation: people. Their character traits can be aesthetically as well as morally valuable — what is sometimes called _beauty of character_ (Gaut 2007; Paris 2018). Carlson's recommendation seems naturally extendable here: appropriate aesthetic appreciation of persons will depend on the right kind of person-directed knowledge.[^2][^3] %%one more sentence, but what? consider what is immediately before and after%% LLMs are manmade artefacts, so the natural first thought is that they admit design appreciation in the way other functional objects do. In the next section, we shall suggest that this cannot be the whole story. --- ## Footnotes [^1]: We will consider some non-paradigmatic artworks in Section 5. [^2]: Carlson stresses that ordinary descriptions of environments and more theoretical scientific, historical, and functional descriptions lie on a continuum, so that scientific and historical knowledge can deepen rather than displace practical familiarity as a basis for aesthetic appreciation (Carlson, 2000). By analogy, one might speculate that the sciences of mind and behaviour could relate to folk-psychological and biographical understanding in a similar way, so that in some cases empirical work on personality, emotion, or cognition might feed into the aesthetic appreciation of persons alongside the more everyday forms of knowledge stressed in the main text. [^3]: This personal appreciation also scales up to what we might call performance personalities. We respond to a comedian's improvisational skill or an orator's gravitas much as we respond to character in our friends, but now filtered through a public persona – genuine to the individual, yet artfully composed for performance. Recent scholarship has engaged with these performative dimensions, examining how performers construct and present public personas (Carroll 2013). Here too, Carlson's knowledge requirement bites: to appreciate such personas we need to understand both the individual and the conventions of the performance context.