Full Description
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.
Contents
1. Introduction 2. The Trajectory of Gustatory Taste 3. Over-Appreciating Appreciation 4. Aesthetic Taste: Perceptual Discernment or Emotional Sensibility? 5. De Gustibus Est Disputandum: an Empirical Investigation of the Folk Concept of Aesthetic Taste 6. Contextualism vs. Relativism: More Empirical Data 7. Disagreements and Disputes about Matters of Taste 8. How to Canberra-Plan Disagreement: Platitudes, Taste, Preferences 9. Non-Indexical Contextualism, Relativism, and Retraction 10. Perspectival Content and Semantic Composition 11. Exploring Valence in Judgments of Taste 12. Differences of Taste: Analyzing Phenomenal and Non-Phenomenal Appearance Sentences 13. Individual and Stage-Level Predicates of Personal Taste: Another Argument for Genericity as the Source of Faultless Disagreement 14. Taste and the Ontology of Impersonal Perception Reports
