Perspectives on Taste : Aesthetics, Language, Metaphysics and Experimental 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.

Jeremy Wyatt is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Waikato. He is an editor or co-editor of Pluralisms in Truth and Logic (2018), The Nature of Truth: Classic and Contemporary Perspectives, 2nd ed. (2021), and Truth: Concept Meets Property (Synthese, 2021). His articles have appeared in Philosophical Studies, The Philosophical Quarterly, Synthese, American Philosophical Quarterly, and Inquiry.

Julia Zakkou is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bielefeld, Germany. She is the author of Faultless Disagreement (2019) and a co-editor of the Inquiry special issue Semantic Variability (2021). Her articles have appeared in Philosophers’ Imprint, Philosophical Studies, Synthese, Semantics and Pragmatics, Mind and Language, Philosophy Compass, Inquiry, and Thought.

Dan Zeman is Adjunct Professor at the University of Warsaw. He is a co-editor of Relativism about Value (2012) and New Work on Disagreement (Synthese, forthcoming). His articles have appeared in Thought, Dialectica, Linguistics and Philosophy, Philosophia, Critica, Inquiry, and Theoria. His monograph Disagreement in Semantics (co-authored with Mihai Hîncu) is forthcoming with Routledge.