 The first major question concerning artistic evaluations is whether they are to be understood as a process of theoretical or of practical reasoning. The majority view among analytic philosophers of art now favors the former, and their view is that the conclusion of any act of reason-giving is, perhaps must be, a proposition, something to which one might give some degree of credence (or assent to believing) if the reasoning is good. But recent work has revived an earlier view, due to Arnold Isenberg (1949), that descriptions plus interpretations (“characterizations”) guide us to evaluations understood as “perceptions”. The objection to this view is that 