UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Matters of Taste Are Not "Mere Matters of Taste" Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/294061xx Author Chen, Stanley Hong-Sen Publication Date 2011 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Matters of Taste Are Not \Mere Matters of Taste" by Stanley Hong-Sen Chen A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor John MacFarlane, Co-chair Professor Barry Stroud, Co-chair Professor Line Mikkelsen Spring 2011 Matters of Taste Are Not \Mere Matters of Taste" Copyright 2011 by Stanley Hong-Sen Chen 1 Abstract Matters of Taste Are Not \Mere Matters of Taste" by Stanley Hong-Sen Chen Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy University of California, Berkeley Professor John MacFarlane, Co-chair Professor Barry Stroud, Co-chair It is common to accept subjectivism about matters of gustatory taste, the view that gustatory reasons and the truth of gustatory judgments are essentially dependent on our tastes or interests. In this dissertation, I argue against this commonplace by suggesting that examination of our gustatory practices does not drive us to gustatory subjectivism. I take up four aspects of our practices. First, we acquire new tastes. The acquisition of taste is, I suggest, done on the basis of gustatory reasons that are not essentially sourced in our tastes or interests. Subjectivism cannot allow such reasons, and understanding taste acquisitions in this manner allows us to make sense of certain \second-order" evaluative attitudes we take towards those acquisitions. Second, we resist accepting gustatory testimony, which may suggest that gustatory reasons are dependent on one's tastes. I argue against this suggestion by appealing to a gustatory value: that of abiding by one's own tastes. This gustatory value comes into conflict with epistemic values that demand that we believe reliable testimony, and this conflict makes sense of our resistance without presupposing subjectivism. Third, we nonchalantly engage in intractable taste disputes, which may again suggest that gustatory reasons are dependent on one's tastes. However, without presupposing sub- jectivism, we can make sense of our nonchalance in terms of the dialectical nonchalance we feel when we are faced with disagreements that inevitably violate their constitutive goal: that of resolution via non-question-begging arguments. Fourth, we compare and adjudicate between very different gustatory values. If those values are not measurable on a single scale, such \superhard" comparisons may motivate a subjectivist understanding of gustatory reasons. Here I suggest that the sense that such com- parisons might motivate subjectivism derives from the inaccurate assumption that rational comparisons must be made on the basis of an independent guide. Giving up the assumption, we can construe such comparisons case-by-case as ones in which either one side trumps the other overall, or reason is simply indifferent between them. i For Nigel, who feeds but has yet to dine. ii Contents Acknowledgments iv Introduction v 1 Bullshit Taste Acquisitions and Reasoned Gustatory Disagreement 1 1.1 Introduction . 1 1.2 An Appeal to Non-Bullshit Taste Acquisitions . 2 1.3 Is It Bullshit or Something Else? . 10 1.4 Standard and Non-Standard Contextualism . 15 1.5 Reasons to Think Something Delicious . 18 1.6 The Upshot of Taste Disagreement . 24 1.7 What's Next . 28 2 Gustatory Testimony and Gustatory Authenticity 30 2.1 Introduction . 30 2.2 Resistance: the Phenomenon . 32 2.3 The Acquaintance Principle . 34 2.4 Obstacles for the Skeptic's Explanation . 37 2.5 An Initial Objectivist Alternative . 40 2.6 Gustatory Authenticity . 46 2.7 Advantages of the Appeal to Authenticity . 53 2.8 Reluctance and Advice . 57 2.9 What About Freeness? . 59 3 Dialectically Ineffective Taste Disagreements 62 3.1 Introduction . 62 3.2 Which Are the Problematic Taste Disagreements? . 64 3.3 Varieties of Confusion: Irrelevance and Pluralism . 66 3.4 Pointing to Intractable Taste Disputes . 70 3.5 The Charge of Chauvinism, Avenues of Resistance . 72 3.6 Dialectical Nonchalance . 76 3.7 Objection: It's Not About Arguing! . 83 Contents iii 3.8 How About Some Positive Reasons? . 86 3.9 A General Epistemological Worry? . 88 4 Gustatory \Warrant" and \Superhard" Cases 92 4.1 Introduction . 92 4.2 How \Easy" is it to Judge Matters of Taste? . 94 4.3 The Making of Taste Assertions (Objectivism vs Contextualism) . 95 4.4 The Evaluation of Taste Assertions (Contextualism vs. Relativism) . 103 4.5 Making and Evaluating Taste Assertions (Differentiating Relativism from Ob- jectivism) . 105 4.6 \Superhard" Cases: Parity, Sort Of? . 109 4.7 Conclusion . 115 Bibliography 118 iv Acknowledgments Besides showering me with kindness and often undeserved patience, my dissertation advisors have provided me with different but equally laudable support over the past number of years. I am grateful to Barry Stroud for always providing a context for my jumbled thoughts and jumbled writing; and for his exceedingly long vision and refined philosophical sensibilities. I am grateful to John MacFarlane for his untiring dedication to slogging through even the little steps (and missteps) of my work, and always with an artful balance of technical skill and sensitivity to philosophical importance. I'd also like to thank my outside reader, Line Mikkelsen, for helping me even on such unreasonably short notice. I am also grateful to Mike Rieppel, for being an excellent sounding board, and George Tsai, for keeping my philosophical curiosity alive, and to both for the many helpful conver- sations. Many other grad students helped me along academically. I'd like to thank: Erica Klempner, for conversations about aesthetics and testimony; Lindsay Crawford, for conversa- tions about disagreement; Kerstin Haase, for conversations about objectivity in ethics; James Stazicker, for conversations about metaphysics and color; Matt Parrott, who I learn from just by teaching with; Berislav Marusic, for forcing me to seriously worry about skepticism; the many grad students who have helped me with various semantics stuff; and the many grad students who have begrudgingly engaged with some form of my \meta"-philosophical worries. I'd like also to thank Dave Lynaugh and Janet Groome for greasing the wheels of bureaucracy, and Local123 and Commonwealth for letting me (and the other downtrodden) work in their spaces. And then there was all that life outside of academia. Thank you to Mike, Anna, Lindsay and Bill for the regular \keeping ourselves sane" happy hours; to Anna for cooking me through the first year; to Bill for Berlin; and to Zack and Nishaant, for showing me an intellectual life outside of academia. Finally, I cannot be more grateful to Chanel for her unwavering love and support (not to mention delightful dining companionship!); and to my family, who continue to make things possible for me. v Introduction It is not just philosophical commonplace to think that matters of gustatory taste| what is delicious, tasty, scrumptious, and so on|are \merely subjective." It is also just commonplace, period. For instance, it is a commonplace refrain, even among those who professionally write about and critically judge food, that matters of taste are, well, \mere matters of taste!" We use the very label of the issue as an idiom to express what is \merely subjective." This dissertation attempts to question this refrain. But not very directly. For one, I say nothing in the dissertation directly about the metaphysics of, say, the property (if it is one) of deliciousness. So, for instance, I do not deal with any scientific facts about “flavor compounds" or our ability to detect “flavor." One may wonder how one could possibly determine whether something is subjective or objective|whether something's nature essentially depends on us or not|without saying something directly about the metaphysics|i.e., the nature|of the thing. Hopefully, some philosophers will agree with me that \saying something directly about the metaphysics" is not the only thing|maybe even not the most important thing|to do in figuring out what we can say about whether some matter is subjective or objective (or something in between). What I focus on instead is what we are to say about how we talk and think about matters of gustatory taste, as well as how we act in relation to such matters. This is because, before we can say that everything we think about matters of taste is all wrong, or all right, or somewhere in between, we have to know what it is we even think and how it is we even speak about such things.1 Furthermore, even focusing on this latter issue, I say nothing of very general principle about it. Instead, I just take up a number of things that some philosophers have thought would suggest that we think or talk about matters of taste as if they were merely subjective. I consider whether the acquisition of taste; our attitudes towards gustatory testimony and advice; the way we go about disagreeing about matters of taste; and the way we compare gustatory goods show us something about whether we are best understood as thinking of matters of taste as merely subjective. I consider, that is, whether these phenomena \point to" (ceteris paribus) subjectivism. I will argue that they do not. This may amount to arguing that they point instead to objectivism, if objectivism is thought to be just the denial 1Another thing to keep in mind here is that it is plausible that even a \direct" metaphysician will (eventually?) have to use our ordinary concepts competently; this may put restrictions on how much we can ignore how it is we talk and think, even when we are doing metaphysics.