Many experiential properties are naturally understood as dispositions such that e.g. a cake tastes good to you iff you are disposed to get gustatory pleasure when you eat it. Such dispositional analyses, however, face a challenge. It has been widely observed that one cannot properly assert “The cake tastes good to me” unless one has tried it. This acquaintance requirement is puzzling on the dispositional account because it should be possible to be disposed to like the cake even (...) if this disposition has never been manifested. We argue that familiar response strategies on behalf of the dispositionalist fail. These include appeals to conversational implicatures, expressivism, semantic presuppositions and norms of assertion. Against this background, we propose a new analysis in terms of what we call tendencies, where a tendency is a disposition that has been manifested. The acquaintance requirement comes out as an entailment. We point out a hitherto unnoticed parallel to sentences ascribing character traits such as “Hannah is brave,” and extend our tendency-based analysis to this domain. (shrink)

Sentences such as 'Chocolate tastes good' have been widely discussed as sentences that give rise to faultless disagreement. As such, they actually belong to the more general class of impersonal perception reports, which include 'The violin sounds / looks strange' as well sentences that are about an agent-centered situation such as 'It feels / seems like it is going to rain'. I maintain the view that faultless disagreement is due to first person-based genericity, which, roughly, consists in attributing a (...) property to anyone the speaker (or described agent) identifies with (which generally requires a first-person experience) (Moltmann 2010). Unlike my previous analysis (and similar analyses), this paper no longer makes use of experiencers or judges as implicit arguments of taste predicates, but argues that impersonal perception verbs (taste, look, feel, seem), have a logophoric character. More precisely, such verbs describe perceptual occurrences whose experiencer is identical to the agent of the utterance situation, described attitudinal situation, or the situations a generic operator may range over. Perceptual occurrences are sharply distinguished ontologically from perceptual experiences as well as perceptual objects, entities we refer to as ‘the taste of chocolate’, ‘the sound of the violin’, ‘the look of the violin’. Sentences about perceptual objects ('the taste of chocolate is good', 'the sound of the violin is great', 'the look of the violin is beautiful') also give rise to faultless disagreement, but the source of that is a first-person-based attribution of an evaluative predicate to an (objective) perceptual object. (shrink)

Simple taste predications come with an acquaintance requirement: they require the speaker to have had a certain kind of first-hand experience with the object of predication. For example, if I tell you that the creme caramel is delicious, you would ordinarily assume that I have actually tasted the creme caramel and am not simply relying on the testimony of others. The present essay argues in favor of a 'lightweight' expressivist account of the acquaintance requirement. This account consists of a recursive (...) semantics and an account of assertion; it is compatible with a number of different accounts of truth and content, including contextualism, relativism, and purer forms of expressivism. The principal argument in favor of this account is that it correctly predicts a wide range of data concerning how the acquaintance requirement interacts with Boolean connectives, generalized quantifiers, epistemic modals, and attitude verbs. (shrink)

This chapter discusses four principal themes of Scottish aesthetics over the course of the eighteenth century. The first is the question of ‘taste’ and its relation to the perception and reality of beauty. Does beauty exist independently of its being perceived, or is it in some sense the product of our perception? The second is the matter of aesthetic criticism. Can aesthetic judgements be rational, and if so on what basis? The third main topic is the rhetorical use of language. (...) Is oratory an art? If it is, how does rhetoric relate to literary and poetic language, to the expression of thought and the cogency of argument? Finally, is there something to be learned on these subjects from the study of the origins of language? On each of these topics, the Scottish philosophers had interesting, insightful, and in some cases enduringly important things to say. (shrink)

The analogy between gustatory taste and critical or aesthetic taste plays a recurring role in the history of aesthetics. Our interest in this article is in a particular way in which gustatory judgments are frequently thought to be analogous to critical judgments. It appears obvious to many that to know how a particular object tastes we must have tasted it for ourselves; the proof of the pudding, we are all told, is in the eating. And it has seemed just (...) as obvious to many philosophers that aesthetic judgment requires first-person experience. In this article we argue that, despite its initial appeal, the claim that gustatory and critical judgments are analogous in this way is mistaken. The two sorts of judgments are, as a matter of fact, similar in their epistemology, but earlier theorists have got things entirely backward—neither gustatory judgment nor aesthetic judgment requires first-hand acquaintance with their objects. Our particular focus in this article is on arguing that first-person experience is not required to know how an item of food or drink tastes. In fact, there are a wide variety of ways in which we can acquire this knowledge. (shrink)

Two common strategies have dominated attempts to account for the nature of taste. On the one side, we have an affectivist understanding of taste where aesthetic attribution has to do with the expression of a subjective response. On the other side, we find a non-affectivist approach according to which to judge something aesthetically is to epistemically track its main aesthetic properties. Our main argument will show that neither emotion nor perception can explain the nature of aesthetic taste single-handedly. In this (...) paper, our principal aim is to examine the relationship between perceptual discernment and emotional sensibility as we find it in the process of ascribing aesthetic qualities. Is it the nature of the specific aesthetic property in question which determines the way in which perception and emotion are balanced in aesthetic attribution, or is it, rather, something about how our sensory skills operate? One of the notions we would like to explore in greater detail in this context is the idea of attunement, or the way in which aesthetic agents can align themselves to the content of an artwork o in order to better grasp its content and significance. According to our proposed picture, the exercise of taste involves an adjustment of one’s emotional sensibility to the aesthetic character of o. From here, we will posit both emotional and perceptual training as part of an agent’s aesthetic education in her use of aesthetic terms. (shrink)

This book traces and explores the evolution of taste from a design perspective: what it is, how it works and what it does. Karin Tehve examines taste primarily through its recursive relationship to media. This ongoing process changes the relationship between designers and the public, and our understanding of the relationship of individuals to their social contexts. Through an analysis of taste, design is understood to be an active constituent of social life, not as autonomous from it. This book reclaims (...) a term long dismissed from interior design and unveils taste's role as a powerful social and political agent within systems of aesthetics, affecting both its producers and consumers. Each chapter discusses a taste concept or definition, analyzes its reciprocal relationship with media, and explores its implications for interior design. Illustrated with 70 images, taste's relationship to media is viewed through a variety of different lenses, including books, photography, magazines, internet, social media and algorithms. Written for students and scholars of interior design and related design fields, this book will be a helpful resource for all those interested in the question of taste, and is an invitation to produce and consume all media critically. (shrink)

Vol. 1. Logic of taste -- vol. 2. Pathology of taste -- vol. 3. Ethology of taste.

This book takes its point of departure from the work of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, whose book 'Distinction' is considered a classic work of sociological analysis. The topics dealt with are shown in the table of contents below. The book is distinctive in that it offers discussions of four methodologies/theories used in discussing taste: semiotics, psychoanalytic theory, sociological theory and Marxist theory and then applies these theories in the second part of the book to a variety of topics involving (...) taste, such as yogurt, dogs, the singer Celine Dion, ocean cruises, brands, smartphones, men's facial hair, and so on. Readers of the book will learn four methodologies they can use in analyzing taste and see how these methodologies were applied. (shrink)

“Forget Taste” rejects the classical notion of taste as a viable concept for the exercise of critical evaluation and proposes an alternative approach to critical evaluation based crucially on the idea of the constitutive purpose of the artwork. The goal of this paper is to advance an approach—which I call the purpose-driven approach—to the critical evaluation of artworks that develops from and refines the views of art evaluation presented in my previous work. This approach, in virtue of its focus on (...) the constitutive purposes of artworks, regards the artwork as typically singular. For that reason, it follows that this approach is pluralistic in contrast to the hedonic conception of the taste model popularized in the eighteenth century and which still recurs today, if sometimes only subconsciously, and that reduces critical evaluation to feelings of pleasure. I argue that the hedonic taste model, which is noncognitive and reductive, should be abandoned in favor of one that is cognitivist and pluralistic, namely, the purpose-driven approach. (shrink)

Aesthetic taste rose to prominence in the eighteenth century, and then quickly disappeared. Since the start of the 2000s, scholars have slowly returned to the main traditional concepts in aesthetics—beauty, the sublime, and aesthetic experience. Aesthetic taste, however, has lagged behind. I focus on two explanations for this downturn: aesthetics is too often associated with art alone and taste is thought to have no connection with anything objective. In this paper, I suggest that theories of aesthetic taste are still valuable. (...) While tastes will surely differ, individuals should explore the ways that their life and circumstances affect their taste and how they can become more intentional about developing their taste. Using prisons, engineering, and business, I show how theories of aesthetic taste can enter the contemporary scene by suggesting ways that it can influence their respective practices. (shrink)

We are often confronted with attempts to debunk our aesthetic tastes, like: “You only like jazz because you’re a pretentious hipster,” or, “Your love of the Western canon is just colonialism speaking.” Such debunking arguments often try to give a socio-historical accounting, intended to de-legitimize our tastes by showing that they arise from processes uninterested in real aesthetic value. One common version is the Art Populist debunk: that claims of aesthetic expertise in esoteric arts are really just elitist (...) gatekeeping. Then we have its mirror twin, the Art Expert debunk: that the populist love of simple arts serves the interests of profiteering entertainment corporations dispensing simplified slop. Suppose we accept one of these debunking argument. How are we supposed to got on? Are we supposed to not like the things we like, or force ourselves to choke down food we don’t enjoy? And suppose we accept both of these debunking arguments — what then? Are we supposed to simply give up our grip on beauty altogether? This is hard to imagine. Aesthetic debunking arguments have a harder time getting a grip on us, because aesthetic life involves a distinctively tight relationship between our felt aesthetic phenomena and our aesthetic judgments. Aesthetic life gives us phenomenal resistance to debunking arguments, when our felt loves lag behind our endorsed beliefs. I suggest a way through that offers a livable accommodation. We may be able to treat such debunking arguments, not as targeting the positive content of our taste, but as targeting the boundaries and limitations on our taste. That is, a Populist may not be able to debunk my deep felt love of opera, but they may be able to debunk my dismissal of dance-pop. In this case, we can take onboard both the Art Expert’s and the Art Populist’s debunking arguments, as targeting different varieties of narrowness and dismissal. These debunkings, then, move us, not towards aesthetic nihilism, but aesthetic expansionism. (shrink)

Using a vague predicate can make commitments about the appropriate use of that predicate in the remaining part of the discourse. For instance, if I assert that some particular pig is fat, I am committed to judging any fatter pig to be fat as well. We can model this update effect by recognizing that truth depends both on the state of the world and on the state of the discourse: the truth conditions of ‘This pig is fat’ rule out evaluation (...) points for which the pig in question in world w is thinner than the cutoff for fatness in the discourse d. Then disagreements about taste are disagreements about the discourse. Unlike disagreements about the world, disagreements about the discourse can be faultless, given that none of the discourse participants has privileged authority to make pronouncements about conventions for appropriate use of a predicate. Thus on the dynamic view developed here, whether or not a dispute about taste turns out to be faultless depends in part on predictable features of the previous discourse. On this account, faultless disagreement involving predicates of personal taste does not force relativizing truth to a judge or assessor. (shrink)

The first part of the following text does make the map of an answer to the question of knowing if and how it is possible to speak of beautiful art in the context of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment. There is an appeal to the conditions of the freedom of the imagination, to an interpretation of representation as exemplification and to a reference to aesthetic purposes and constraints. This way it will be made evident it is possible (...) to think the judgment by means of which one declares a work of art a beautiful one as a pure judgment of taste and the artistic beauty as free beauty. Starting from a reflection on what it does mean to speak of aesthetic purposes and constraints, it will be put at stake, in the second part of the text, the univocity of meaning of the notion of taste in Kant’s third Critique. Perhaps in the case of the pure judgment of taste by means of which one declares a work of art a beautiful one it is mandatory to appeal not only to taste as aesthetic power of judgment, but to another taste: a corpus which is narrowly connected with the mechanical, compulsory and academic side of beautiful art. (shrink)

This chapter discusses four principal themes of Scottish aesthetics over the course of the eighteenth century. The first is the question of ‘taste’ and its relation to the perception and reality of beauty. Does beauty exist independently of its being perceived, or is it in some sense the product of our perception? The second is the matter of aesthetic criticism. Can aesthetic judgements be rational, and if so on what basis? The third main topic is the rhetorical use of language. (...) Is oratory an art? If it is, how does rhetoric relate to literary and poetic language, to the expression of thought and the cogency of argument? Finally, is there something to be learned on these subjects from the study of the origins of language? On each of these topics, the Scottish philosophers had interesting, insightful, and in some cases enduringly important things to say. (shrink)

Modern views of poetry tend to concord with Wallace Stevens’s insistence that “God and the imagination are one,” assuming that the only meaning there is in the natural world is that which the poet makes. But Denise Levertov held instead that the poet’s word is a response to the beauty of the world as given by God, and that the poet’s task is to invite the reader to resonate with that experience. Drawing on current research from neurocognitive poetics that indicates (...) how readers experience beauty in language, this essay seeks to demonstrate how Levertov’s poem, “O Taste and See,” embodies an invitation for the reader to engage one’s senses in the discovery of God through the beauty of poetry and created being. (shrink)

Taste as Experience puts the pleasure of food at the center of human experience. It shows how the sense of taste informs our preferences for and relationship to nature, pushes us toward ethical practices of consumption, and impresses upon us the importance of aesthetics. Eating is often dismissed as a necessary aspect of survival, and our personal enjoyment of food is considered a quirk. Nicola Perullo sees food as the only portion of the world we take in on a daily (...) basis, constituting our first and most significant encounter with the earth. Perullo has long observed people's food practices and has listened to their food experiences. He draws on years of research to explain the complex meanings behind our food choices and the thinking that accompanies our gustatory actions. He also considers our indifference toward food as a force influencing us as much as engagement. For Perullo, taste is value and wisdom. It cannot be reduced to mere chemical or cultural factors but embodies the quality and quantity of our earthly experience. (shrink)

In this paper, I investigate the relation between recipes and taste. In particular, I do three things. First, I sketch and articulate different versions of essentialism, a view that I take to reflect our pre-theoretical intuitions on the matter. Roughly, on this view, taste is essentially related to recipes—either by contributing to their identity or by being otherwise strongly related to it. Second, I argue that no version of essentialism is really convincing; hence, I conclude, recipes and taste are not (...) essentially related. Third, after drawing some general lessons from the discussion, I lay the ground for an alternative approach to account for that relation. My final suggestion will be that the main source of the relation between recipes and taste is not to be found in recipes themselves and their essences, but in dishes—i.e., the concrete instances of a recipe. (shrink)

It is commonplace to consider taste as the organ through which we know beauty and enjoy beautiful things. Looking beyond this facade, the newest translation of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben's work lays bare the far-from-comforting character of a fault line that irremediably divides the human subject. At the crossroads of truth and beauty, cognition and pleasure, taste appears as a knowledge that is not known and a pleasure that is not enjoyed. From this vantage point, aesthetics and economics, Homo aestheticus (...) and Homo economicus reveal their secret and uncanny complicity. With Taste, Agamben takes a step into the history of philosophy, reaching to the very origins of aesthetics, to critically recover the roots of a cardinal concept for Western culture. Agamben is the rare writer whose ideas and works have a broad appeal across many fields, and with taste he turns his critical eye to the realm of Western art and aesthetics. Originally written in 1979, this essay illuminates a key category in his most recent writings, promising to engage not only the author's readers in philosophy, sociology and literary criticism but also his growing audience among art theorists and historians as well. (shrink)

What do professional wrestling, Pot Noodle and Feng Shui have in common? Well, not much - but they all appear in this book.Critic and cultural philosopher Peter Trifonas and art historian Effie Balomenos explore the curious concept of good - and bad - taste. At once an absurd and yet entirely everyday concept, taste defines us. Our choices, from the most personal (our friends or lovers) to the most general (our politics), are all partly dependent on it.But where does taste (...) come from? Is there a true standard of taste? Are we slaves to the cruel whims of fashion? Who's in control?Good Taste is an enthralling exploration of the cultural history of an idea. In this enticing book - divided into chapters exploring cultural artefacts of absolutely all kinds - Trifonas and Balomenos warn: you are what you choose!Highlights include: TV chefs · Ozzy Osbourne and Reality TV · The 70s fashion conspiracy · Disney · Madonna · Lamborghini · The history of cleavage · High heels · Elvis · Body piercing · Hip-hop · Oprah Winfrey · Ageing rock bands · Turn-ups · Harry Potter · Fake tans and much, much more ... (shrink)

This paper explores taste in the context of phenomenology and outlines possibilities for situating a phenomenological approach to taste within the framework of educational theory. In such an approach, taste emerges as a complex interaction between all senses and as interplay between recollection and anticipation. In this respect, taste-experience is indicative of a privileged but hitherto relatively unexplored access to cognition. It is a sensory encounter that encompasses possibilities for learning, not only about taste but also about other subjects through (...) taste. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship between common sense and taste in the history of aesthetic thought. “Common sense” guarantees the communication of tastes through different modalities. It can either facilitate agreement among individuals, fostering mutual understanding and envisaging a universal aesthetic community, or provoke disagreement. In the former scenario, common sense is literally common to everyone, while in the latter case, it implies diversity and dissensus. By associating the concept of taste with judgement and the sensible (Arendt and Rancière), (...) we scrutinize some contemporary political interpretations of Kantian aesthetics. Through this analysis, we illustrate that common sense is intertwined with certain metaphysical assumptions that not only hinder its claims of universality but also introduce structural paradoxes within the system of aesthetic judgment. In the last section of the article, we explore these paradoxes, proposing another communicability beyond the confines of the judgment of taste or subjective limitations. (shrink)

Today, a consistent part of our everyday interaction with art and aesthetic artefacts occurs through digital media, and our preferences and choices are systematically tracked and analyzed by algorithms in ways that are far from transparent. Our consumption is constantly documented, and then, we are fed back through tailored information. We are therefore witnessing the emergence of a complex interrelation between our aesthetic choices, their digital elaboration, and also the production of content and the dynamics of creative processes. All are (...) involved in a process of mutual influences, and are partially determined by the invisible guiding hand of algorithms. -/- With regard to this topic, this paper will introduce some key issues concerning the role of algorithms in aesthetic domains, such as taste detection and formation, cultural consumption and production, and showing how aesthetics can contribute to the ongoing debate about the impact of today’s “algorithmic culture”. (shrink)

Acquired taste is an integral part of the cultivation of taste. In this essay, I identify acquired taste as a form of intentional belief acquisition or adaptive preference formation, distinguishing it from ordinary or discovered taste. This account of acquired taste allows for the role of self-deception in the development of taste. I discuss the value of acquired taste in the overall development of taste as well as the ways that an over-reliance on acquired taste can distort overall taste.

In this series of dialogues, Derrida discusses and elaborates on some of the central themes of his work, such as the problems of genesis, justice, authorship and death. Combining autobiographical reflection with philosophical enquiry, Derrida illuminates the ideas that have characterized his thought from its beginning to the present day. If there is one feature that links these contributions, it is the theme of singularity - the uniqueness of the individual, the resistance of existence to philosophy, the temporality of the (...) singular and exceptional moment, and the problem of exemplarity. The second half of this book contains an essay by Maurizio Ferraris, in which he explores the questions of indication, time and the inscription of the transcendental in the empirical. A work of outstanding philosophy and scholarship, the essay is developed in close proximity to Derrida and in dialogue with figures such as Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Kant, Hegel and Heidegger. It thereby provides a useful introduction to the philosophy of one of Italy's most prominent philosophers as well as an excellent complement to Derrida's own ideas. A Taste for the Secret consists of material that has never before appeared in English. It will be of interest to second-year undergraduates, graduate students and academics in philosophy, modern languages, literature, literary theory and the humanities generally. (shrink)

According to contextualism, the extension of claims of personal taste is dependent on the context of utterance. According to truth relativism, their extension depends on the context of assessment. On this view, when the taste preferences of a speaker change, so does the truth value of a previously uttered taste claim, and the speaker might be required to retract it. Both views make strong empirical assumptions, which are here put to the test in three experiments with over 740 participants. It (...) turns out that the linguistic behaviour of ordinary English speakers is consistent with contextualist predictions and inconsistent with the predictions of the most widely discussed form of truth relativism advocated by John MacFarlane. (shrink)

Jeremy Bentham catalogued a wide variety of uses for dead bodies in what was likely his last essay, ‘Auto-Icon’. Dead bodies could be preserved and transformed into statues and used, among other ways, as theatrical props, commemorative statues, and building materials. Auto-Iconism would eliminate the need for coffins and graveyards – as well as funeral rituals, clerics to preside over the funerals, and, arguably, the entire religious establishment. This essay offers a reading of ‘Auto-Icon’ as a bad joke: impolite, unrefined, (...) and in bad taste. The thought is that ‘Auto-Icon’ makes fun of the religious desire for immortality – continuing Bentham’s attacks on the religious establishment in this regard – as well as Bentham’s own pretensions to immortality, and of pretensions to good taste generally. As a bad joke, ‘Auto-Icon’ is an exercise both in the liberty of opinion and in the liberty of taste. (shrink)

“Parting is such sweet sorrow.” Taste metaphors provide a rich vocabulary for describing emotional experience, potentially serving as an adaptive mechanism for conveying abstract emotional concepts using concrete verbal references to our shared experience. We theorized that the popularity of these expressions results from the close association with hedonic valence shared by these two domains of experience. To explore the possibility that this affective quality underlies the semantic similarity of these domains, we used a behavioral “odd-one-out” task in an online (...) sample of 1059 participants in order to examine the semantic similarity of concepts related to emotion, taste, and color, another rich source of sensory metaphors. We found that the semantic similarity of emotion and taste concepts was greater than that of emotion and color concepts. Importantly, the similarity of taste and emotion concepts was strongly related to their similarity in hedonic valence, a relationship which was also significantly greater than that present between color and emotion. These results suggest that the common core of valence between taste and emotion concepts allows us to bridge the conceptual divide between our shared sensory environment and our internal emotional experience. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Philosophers' Denigration of Fashion Taste and Style Genius Love of Beauty as A Moral (Or Proto‐moral) Motive Conclusion.

ABSTRACTWide-ranging semantic flexibility is often considered a magic cure for contextualism to account for all kinds of troubling data. In particular, it seems to offer a way to account for our intuitions regarding embedded perspectival sentences. As has been pointed out by Lasersohn [2009. “Relative Truth, Speaker Commitment, and Control of Implicit Arguments.” Synthese 166 : 359â374], however, the semantic flexibility does not present a remedy for all kinds of embeddings. In particular, it seems ineffective when it comes to embeddings (...) under operators with truth evaluative adverbs such as ‘correctly believes that’ and ‘incorrectly believes that’ and under factive verbs. This paper takes a closer look at the problematic embedding data with respect to predicates of personal taste. It argues that there is indeed no semantic solution for contextualism but a pragmatic way out. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Taste and Discernment Delicacy of Taste and the Supertasters Practices and Comparisons Who Are the True Judges of Wine? Experts and Projects Experts and Evaluation Ideal and Izeal experts ‐ And You The Canon and Ideal Critics: The Special Relationship Levinson's Problems The Canon and Wine Wine Canons and Ideal Wine Critics Taste, the Competencies and Trust Iconic or Iconoclastic Critics Conclusion Notes.

It may be that Kant’s inherently communal concept of taste is a morally laden notion that blurs the line between the good and the beautiful, on the one hand, and moral evaluation and aesthetic appreciation, on the other. In particular, it can be shown how, on Kant’s view, moralistic factors, such as considerations of social appropriateness, enter into estimations of aesthetic value. Moreover, Kant’s tendency to overlap taste and morals suggests an underlying assumption operative in Kant’s aesthetics. According to this (...) ‘decency assumption’, as I have termed it, taste is first and foremost a trait of people with certain supposedly refined socio-moral characteristics. Kant also seems to think that having good taste and a morally good character go hand in hand. Even though we do find separate sets of ultimate principles in Kant’s ethics and aesthetics, the aforesaid assumption nevertheless implies a shared ground between these two branches of philosophy and thereby links them tightly together, contrary to the common view that ethics and aesthetics are distinct enterprises. In addition, Kant’s morally laden conception of taste will be shortly examined in relation to the Enlightenment project as Kant saw it and our contemporary world. (shrink)

Nicola Perullo's Taste as Experience draws on the author's philosophical background and his experience as a professor of aesthetics at a culinary institute. He aims to understand the experience of taste, analyzing it into three 'modes of access': pleasure, knowledge, and indifference. His perspective, influenced by Dewey, illuminates various elements of taste, eating, and drinking.

Aristotle claims that character friends are similar to each other. How should we understand this similarity, and what role does it play in friendship? In the paper, I argue that a broad similarity of ‘tastes’—which I understand as the appreciation of relatively good ends—is at least a facilitating condition on the formation of character friendship. This is because it (i) facilitates seeing the other as good in the first place, which is essential to character friendship; and (ii) enables the (...) friends to spend time and share in activities together, which is characteristic of character friendship. (shrink)

I consider the role of psychology and other sciences in telling us about our senses, via the issue of whether empirical findings show us that flavours are perceived partly with the sense of smell. I argue that scientific findings do not establish that we're wrong to think that flavours are just tasted. Non-naturalism, according to which our everyday conception of the senses does not involve empirical commitments of a kind that could be corrected by empirical findings is, I suggest, a (...) plausible view that is not easy to dismiss. (shrink)

“There’s no disputing about taste.” That’s got a nice ring to it, but it’s not quite the ring of truth. While there’s definitely something right about the aphorism – there’s a reason why it is, after all, an aphorism, and why its utterance tends to produce so much nodding of heads and muttering of “just so” and “yes, quite” – it’s surprisingly difficult to put one’s finger on just what the truth in the neighborhood is, exactly. One thing that’s pretty (...) clear is that what’s right about the aphorism, that there’s no disputing about taste, isn’t that there’s no disputing about taste. There’s heaps of disputing about taste. People engage in disputes about which movies, music, paintings, literature, meals, furniture, architectural styles, etc. are good, beautiful, tasty, fun, elegant, ugly, disgusting, etc. all the time. This is obvious to anyone who has watched dueling-movie-critics shows, read theater reviews, or negotiated with a group or partner about which movie or restaurant to go to, or which sofa or painting to put in the living room. It takes great care and good aim to fling a brick without hitting somebody who’s engaged in a dispute about taste. (shrink)

A series of recent experimental studies have cast doubt on the existence of a traditional tension that aestheticians have noted in our aesthetic judgments and practices, viz. the problem of taste. The existence of the problem has been acknowledged since Hume and Kant, though not enough has been done to analyse it in depth. In this paper, we remedy this by proposing six possible conceptualizations of it. Drawing on our analysis of the problem of taste, we argue that the experimental (...) results in question are not a real challenge to its existence. By contrast, they provide empirical evidence in its support. (shrink)

The sense of taste has served as a governing metaphor for aesthetic discernment for several centuries, and recent philosophical perspectives on this history have invited literal, gustatory taste into aesthetic relevance. This paper summarizes the disposition of taste in aesthetics by means of three stories, the most recent of which considers food in terms of aesthetics and its employment in works of art. I conclude with some reflections on the odd position that taste has achieved in the postmodern art world, (...) and I make a case for the often unnoticed role that bodily senses have in the apprehension of art. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X XI XII Coda Appendix Acknowledgements.

Advocates of veganism often assume that food enjoyment has little moral weight, because it involves mere taste pleasure. Because of the triviality of taste pleasure, they consider it obvious that harming animals to secure particular tastes is ‘unnecessary’. After discussing the elements of taste, defending the importance of taste, exploring what ‘unnecessary harm’ means, and introducing a number of taste related thought experiments, I argue that harm to animals is not always unnecessary, when what's at stake is taste. However, (...) by supplementing considerations involving necessity with considerations of character, I conclude that vegans are often, though not always, praiseworthy. (shrink)

This paper reviews the claim that certain predicates, including what are called predicates of personal taste, have a sometimes-hidden element for a judge or experiencer. This claim was advanced in my own earlier work, as well as a number of other papers. My main goal here is to review some of the arguments in favor of this claim, and along the way, to present some of my earlier unpublished work on the matter. In much of the earlier literature, this claim (...) was part of a debate between relativists, contextualists, and others about the semantics of ‘subjective’ or ‘perspectival’ predicates. I shall argue here that these issues are independent. Whether we opt for experiencer or judge parameters is independent of whether we prefer relativist semantics to any other kind. (shrink)