Perspectives on Taste

Aesthetics, Language, Metaphysics, and Experimental Philosophy

Jeremy Wyatt, Julia Zakkou, Dan Zeman, Jeremy Wyatt, Julia Zakkou, Dan Zeman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000579734
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

This book offers a sustained, interdisciplinary examination of taste. It addresses a range of topics that have been at the heart of lively debates in philosophy of language, linguistics, metaphysics, aesthetics, and experimental philosophy.

Our everyday lives are suffused with discussions about taste. We are quick to offer familiar platitudes about taste, but we struggle when facing the questions that matter—what taste is, how it is related to subjectivity, what distinguishes good from bad taste, why it is valuable to make and evaluate judgments about matters of taste, and what, exactly, we mean in speaking about these matters. The essays in this volume open up new, intersecting lines of research about these questions that cross traditional disciplinary boundaries. They address the notion of aesthetic taste; connections between taste and the natures of truth, disagreement, assertion, belief, retraction, linguistic context-sensitivity, and the semantics/pragmatics interface; experimental inquiry about taste; and metaphysical questions underlying ongoing discussions about taste.

Perspectives on Taste will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working in aesthetics, philosophy of language, linguistics, metaphysics, and experimental philosophy.

1 Introduction

Jeremy Wyatt, Julia Zakkou, and Dan Zeman

DOI: 10.4324/9781003184225-1

Our everyday lives are suffused with discussions about taste. These happen in a diverse array of situations, such as when we are enjoying a new drink at a café, discussing the avant-garde pieces that just arrived at the local gallery, comparing the grandeur of the Dolomites to the austerity of the Sahara, or determining whether an item of clothing is nice enough to warrant the price.

A characteristic aim of philosophy is to pinpoint issues that are prominent in our everyday thought and discourse but which, in ordinary contexts, we rarely take care to examine in a systematic way. Taste is a paradigm example of such an issue. We are quick to mouth the familiar platitudes about taste, but we struggle when facing the questions that matter—what taste is, how it is related to subjectivity, what distinguishes good from bad taste, why it is valuable to make and evaluate judgements about matters of taste, and what, exactly, we mean in speaking about these matters. This volume is a sustained, cross-disciplinary examination of these and related questions about taste. In designing and preparing the volume, our central aims have been to work toward unifying the extensive bodies of research on taste, whose major themes intersect in rather interesting ways, and to stimulate further cross-disciplinary research on this topic.

Taste is a long-standing occupation of philosophers. The notion of aesthetic taste, with its complex relationship to the notion of gustatory taste, came to the fore in 18th-century aesthetics and has continued to interest aestheticians until the present day.¹ Moreover, during the past 20 years, discourse about taste has been at the heart of lively debates among philosophers of language and linguists. A thorough study of taste discourse has promised illumination in connection with major topics such as the natures of truth and disagreement; the natures of and norms governing assertion, belief, and retraction; linguistic context sensitivity; and the semantics/pragmatics interface.² Additionally, while armchair inquiry has played a dominant role in these aesthetic and linguistic debates, many theorists have come to appreciate the relevance—indeed, the necessity—of experimental investigations into the phenomena that are discussed therein.³

In this volume, we bring together 13 state-of-the-art essays on taste by leading experts and up-and-coming scholars in the philosophy of language, linguistics, metaphysics, aesthetics, and experimental philosophy. In doing so, we wish to demonstrate how considering questions about taste that arise within neighbouring disciplines can spur new lines of research which would otherwise remain invisible. We also want to illustrate just how robust and exciting contemporary research on taste is, putting on display the ways in which it enables us to better understand ourselves and our evaluations of the world that we inhabit.

Part I: Aesthetics

The papers in Part I are devoted to issues that arise in connection with aesthetic taste, including the nature and aesthetic potential of gustatory taste, the value of aesthetic appreciation as a component of our aesthetic practices, and the nature of aesthetic taste.

Kevin Sweeney’s chapter (Chapter 2) examines the physiological trajectory that is involved in tasting something that one has consumed. He begins by offering a brief historical overview of theories of taste, focusing on the theories of Kant and Brillat-Savarin. Kant distinguishes the taste of sense from the taste of reflection, maintaining that the latter, in contrast to the former, is exercised in aesthetic judgement. He also maintains that it is impossible to make aesthetic judgements about the tastes of foods and drinks, since our evaluations of their tastes are based on immediate, rather than reflective and imaginative, hedonic reactions. By contrast, Brillat-Savarin emphasises that gustatory experience involves an interplay between taste and smell as well as an analysable temporal trajectory. In light of its complexity, Brillat-Savarin maintains that gustatory experience can in fact support reflective and imaginative gustatory evaluations of foods and drinks.

Sweeney takes Brillat-Savarin’s emphasis on the multisensory nature, temporal trajectory, and ensuing aesthetic potential of gustatory experience to be highly insightful, though he points out that contemporary scientific evidence indicates that there are some significant limitations in Brillat-Savarin’s account. Drawing on Brillat-Savarin’s insights, Sweeney argues that the integrity of the gustatory, or alimentary, trajectory is a highly important feature of gustatory experience, applying this view to the practice of wine tasting and, in particular, to the discernment of a wine’s terroir.

Rebecca Wallbank and Jon Robson (Chapter 3) direct our attention to the characteristic values and goals of our aesthetic practices, exploring the status that aesthetic appreciation has within these practices. Their central aim is to argue that we should not take aesthetic appreciation to be the sine qua non of our aesthetic practices but should instead recognise that these practices are underwritten by other values and goals that have unique roles to play. Among the values and goals that they discuss are having true aesthetic beliefs, including ones that are based on testimony, as well as having interpersonal aesthetic interactions that are prompted by engagement with artworks. In emphasising the significance of these goals and values, Wallbank and Robson aim to resist the tempting picture of aesthetic practice according to which it canonically consists of an individual solitarily and autonomously exercising their aesthetic taste in an attempt to appreciate artworks. On their alternative picture, our aesthetic practices are highly social insofar as they are underwritten by essentially social values and goals.

Irene Martínez Marín and Elisabeth Schellekens (Chapter 4) explore the nature of aesthetic taste itself. Martínez Marín and Schellekens’ primary goal is to reconcile two compelling ideas about aesthetic taste. The first is that aesthetic taste is subjective, insofar as one’s aesthetic taste involves one’s personal preferences, likings, and dislikings and the resultant emotional responses that one has to the perceived aesthetic character of artworks. The second is that aesthetic taste is objective, insofar as it involves the perception of distinctively aesthetic properties that are possessed by artworks.

Their proposed reconciliation rests on the idea that an aesthetic agent can attune themselves more or less well to an artwork by adjusting their emotional dispositions to the aesthetic properties that the artwork exhibits. On this account, aesthetic taste involves perception, as we must rely on perception in coming to know which aesthetic properties artworks exhibit. Aesthetic taste also involves emotion, as developing one’s aesthetic taste doesn’t just consist in the ability to perceptually recognise artworks’ aesthetic properties but also in the disposition to have emotional responses that are appropriate in light of those properties. Martínez Marín and Schellekens emphasise that this process of attunement is meant to be bi-directional in that improving one’s aesthetic perception can improve one’s emotional dispositions towards artworks and vice versa.

Part II: Experimental Philosophy

The papers in Part II represent significant contributions to the experimental literature on taste. Constant Bonard, Florian Cova, and Steve Humbert-Droz (Chapter 5) investigate a puzzle that arises in light of what extant empirical research has taught us about ordinary subjects’ attitudes towards aesthetic issues. This research strongly indicates that ordinary subjects are aesthetic subjectivists in the sense that they are disinclined to posit objective aesthetic facts and that when it comes to aesthetic disagreements, they are also disinclined to describe either party as being mistaken. On the other hand, it seems that when engaging in aesthetic evaluation, we routinely describe some persons as having either ‘good taste’ or ‘bad taste’ with respect to certain matters. In this regard, our ordinary aesthetic practices seem to involve tendencies that can be fairly described as objectivist. The puzzle is whether we can resolve the apparent conflict between our subjectivist and objectivist aesthetic tendencies. This conflict is closely related to the ‘paradox of taste’ that was highlighted by Hume (1757/1875) and Kant (1790), and it is also clearly related to the tension between the subjectivity and objectivity of aesthetic taste that is detailed by Martínez Marín and Schellekens.

To investigate this conflict, Bonard, Cova, and Humbert-Droz performed an experiment that was designed to determine whether their participants, a representative sample of the US population, in fact exhibited both subjectivist and objectivist aesthetic tendencies. They report a range of interesting findings. Two particularly important findings are (i) that 93% of their participants reported that they have said that one person has better taste in works of art than another person and (ii) that when asked to provide open-ended answers explaining how they think about good and bad taste, the participants’ answers were split between more subjectivist and more objectivist conceptions of good and bad taste. The latter finding indicates that the subjectivism–objectivism tension is indeed a feature of our ordinary aesthetic practices, especially if we think of this tension as arising at the population level.

Lastly, it is worth noting that 92.5% of Bonard, Cova, and Humbert-Droz’s participants agreed that people can improve their aesthetic taste and that when asked how people could improve their taste, only 4.5% emphasised perception. This means that a rather small minority of their participants associated perceptual improvement with the improvement of aesthetic taste. It is also notable that Bonard, Cova, and Humbert-Droz don’t mention any associations by their participants of taste improvement with the improvement of one’s emotional responses to artworks.

This suggests that Bonard, Cova, and Humbert-Droz’s participants weren’t inclined to think of the improvement of aesthetic taste as involving what Martínez Marín and Schellekens call ‘attunement.’ It is of course open to Martínez Marín and Schellekens to respond that the improvement of aesthetic taste does involve attunement even though ordinary subjects aren’t typically aware of this fact. It may also be that if the participants’ responses are reanalysed with Martínez Marín and Schellekens’s views in mind, the responses will turn out to fit well with their views.

Markus Kneer’s discussion (Chapter 6) begins with the observation that over the past fifteen years, philosophers of language and linguists have put forward many analyses of perspective-dependent expressions, including predicates of personal taste (e.g. ‘fun,’ ‘tasty,’ and ‘cool’) and epistemic modals (e.g. epistemic ‘might’ and ‘probably’). This much is common knowledge. However, what is observed less often is that these analyses generate interesting empirical predictions which can be properly evaluated only by way of empirical inquiry. Kneer offers a survey of the relatively few experimental studies concerning people’s judgements about truth assessment and retraction in connection with these expressions. He also describes the results of a batt...