Sanna Hirvonen

Both food and the sense of touch mainly were ignored throughout the history of Western philosophy. Times have changed, and finally, research is done on touch and on food even in Ango-American aesthetics. This paper brings the topics together by looking into the importance of touch in our aesthetic experiences of and around food. Once one turns away from the exalted realm of art and other exceptional experiences, it is evident that cooking and eating can provide important aesthetic pleasures in our everyday lives. I will argue that touch plays a fundamental role in three different, aesthetically important dimensions around eating. The first one is sensory and concerns the pleasures of the mouthfeel of food. The second is cognitive and relates to touch being a source of information about what is eaten. The third is the role of touch in the actions of cooking and having a meal.

Both food and the sense of touch were mainly ignored throughout the history of Western philosophy. Times have changed, and finally, research is done on touch and on food, even in Anglo-American aesthetics. This paper brings the topics together by looking into the importance of touch in our aesthetic experiences of and around food. Once one turns away from the exalted realm of art and other exceptional experiences, it is evident that cooking and eating can provide important aesthetic pleasures in our everyday lives. I will argue that touch plays a fundamental role in three different, aesthetically important dimensions around eating. The first one is sensory and concerns the pleasures of the mouthfeel of food. The second is cognitive and relates to touch being a source of information about what is eaten. The third is the role of touch in the actions of cooking and having a meal.

Judgments of personal taste such as “Haggis is delicious” are puzzling. On the one hand they express the speaker’s personal taste. On the other hand it is normal to disagree about the truth of such judgments. Giving semantics for predicates of taste that can accommodate both intuitions has proven challenging. Let us call the phenomenon that the truth of judgments of taste depends on variable tastes 'perspective dependence'. The thesis discusses two most popular semantic accounts for predicates of taste. Contextualists hold that the speaker’s perspective is an element of the content of predicates of taste. However, the view has trouble explaining what disagreements of taste are about, if speakers in fact make compatible judgments. Semantic relativism is a recent framework which is motivated by its alleged ability to explain both perspective dependence and disagreements. Relativists hold that whereas the content of a judgment of taste doesn’t refer to a perspective, it gets a truth value only when evaluated relative to a perspective. I argue that neither account is successful, and their fundamental mistake is to hold that people know that judgments of taste are perspective-dependent. I argue that majority of speakers take judgments of taste to be true or false irrespective of their personal preferences. If such “folk objectivism” is true, perspective-independent semantics for predicates of taste becomes a plausible view. However, a metaphysical presupposition that all the theorists agree on is that taste properties are perspective-dependent. Therefore a perspective-independent semantics will be committed to an error theory. I question the metasemantics behind the error theory and conclude that we should adopt a more externalist metasemantics. That allows us to explain how predicates of taste can be perspective-dependent despite of folk objectivism. The resulting perspectivalist view can thus account both for perspective dependence and for why people disagree about taste.

There is a long tradition in philosophy of treating morality and aesthetics alike when it comes to their metaphysics and philosophy of language. The anti-realist tradition has found both kinds of values problematic, leading to non-cognitivist and error theoretic accounts. This paper investigates whether judgments of taste are evaluative, and if so, what kind of values they attribute. Based on Sibley’s (2001) distinctions between different kinds of evaluative expressions I argue that judgments of taste are inherently evaluative. Nevertheless, the values they attribute are not metaphysically problematic as they are response-dependent, thus reducing to perfectly natural properties and relations.

When people choose what to eat, one of the main reasons is the taste of the food. Many people in the world do not have much choice in their diets given their poverty, but in the Western world, the average consumer enjoys an overwhelming variety of affordable foods. The focus of this entry is the role of taste in the food choices of those who do have a choice. With more choices comes more responsibility; deciding what to eat has a moral dimension as well since food choices have an enormous impact on the agent's health, the environment, and the well-being of other humans and animals. The core puzzle posed by taste is its involvement in the most common and ubiquitous cases of what look like weakness of will. Many people find certain foods morally bad because of their presumed or genuinely harmful consequences. For example, one might intend to become a vegetarian if one cares for animals and wants them not to suffer. However, despite of the intention, the person may fail to do so because of her high preferences for the taste of meat. Other examples include the wish to eat healthier or less fattening foods, but somehow the intention gets trumped because one is unable to resist the good taste of those foods. Tastes thus seem to have much more motivating force than often acknowledged. The ethical dimension of the issue is evident when one considers the failure of large masses of people to eat foods that they know to be better for themselves, the environment, the animals, and other people. The entry is structured as follows. Section "What Is Taste?" clarifies the notion of "taste." Section "Tastes as Reasons" discusses the relation of tastes and reasons. Section "The Puzzle of Unethical Food Choices" introduces the puzzle of unethical food choices. Sections "Bad Food Choices as a Consequence of Weakness of the Will" and "Bad Food as the Subjectively Rational Choice" discuss two alternative answers to the puzzle. Section "Are People Egoists?" considers whether ethical egoism might explain the unethical food choices. Section "Ethical Gourmandism" summarizes Korsmeyer's ethical gourmandism which holds that the taste of food depends on its moral properties. Section "Is There a Duty to Train One's Taste?" asks whether there might be a moral duty to train oneself to not prefer the bad foods.

Recipes are a cornerstone of all culinary cultures. They enable people to make a variety of dishes, and they are essential in transferring that knowledge from location to location and from one generation to the next. Despite of their importance, little philosophical work has been done on the nature of recipes. In this paper I formulate a realist account of recipes, and compare it to a constructivist account by Borghini (2015). Constructivists about recipes hold that the existence of recipes constitutively depends on a human fiat. I argue that constructivism faces challenges in making sense of some of our intuitions about recipes. In particular, there are cases where someone tries to imitate an existing dish and fails, but thinks they have succeeded. The resulting new dish and the recipe for it may come to live a life of their own, showing that the recipe came in to being without the performative act that the constructivist takes to be constitutively necessary. The realist account of recipes and dishes that I defend holds that a dish's identity depends on its core ingredients and its flavour profile, texture, temperature and look; a recipe's identity depends on the identity of a dish. So whenever a novel dish comes into being, in other words, a dish whose ingredients and flavour profile are different enough of some previous dish, a new recipe thereby also exists.

In this note, we discuss the possibility of humansplaining, where humansplaining is, in analogy to mansplaining, a human's act of unnecessarily and unjustly explaining something to an AI agent who is an expert on that topic. We argue that, assuming a suitably developed AI which is capable of being explained to in the first place, humansplaining would be bad for similar reasons as mansplaining and that the risk one runs of engaging in it would vary depending on the explained topic and in particular on whether the natures of the explainer, the explainee, or both allow them to have expertise in that area.

Semantic relativists hold that disagreements of taste are “faultless disagreements”, i.e. the speakers are expressing contradictory contents while neither of them is at fault. This paper argues that we should distinguish between subjectivist and objectivist uses of predicates of taste and only the former fits the pattern of faultless disagreements. Objectivist uses are made on the basis of an objectivist “folk” theory of taste which holds that there is an objective truth of the matter and hence, only one of the disagreeing parties can be right. Moreover, they constitute the majority of uses and hence the semantic theory should primarily be concerned with them. The problem is that objectivism as a metaphysical theory of taste is quite plausibly false. I argue that if one accepts the so-called “Principle of Semantic Competence” (Stojanovic, 2007) as the recent theorists systematically do, the semantics of predicates of taste should be objectivist (i.e. non-judge-dependent). Objectivist semantics coupled with the falsity of metaphysical objectivism about taste leads to an error theory of taste discourses.

Contextualist accounts of aesthetic predicates have difficulties explaining why we feel that speakers are disagreeing when they make true and compatible but superficially contradictory aesthetic judgments. One possible way to account for the disagreement is hybrid expressivism, which holds that the disagreement happens at the level of pragmatically conveyed, clashing contents about the speakers’ conative states. Marques defends such a strategy, combining dispositionalism about value, contextualism, and hybrid expressivism. This paper critically evaluates the plausibility of the suggested pragmatic mechanisms in conveying the kind of contents Marques takes to explain disagreements. The positive part suggests an alternative account of how aesthetic judgments are sources of information about speakers’ conative aesthetic states.

Moderate relativists such as Kölbel and Lasersohn have motivated the semantic framework by arguing that unlike contextualism, it can explain why there appear to be disagreements of taste. The solution relies on the relativist notion of a proposition whose truth depends on a judge parameter. This notion coupled with the view that contradicting propositions create an appearance of disagreement allegedly enables them to secure the right predictions. This paper questions the argumentative strategy by showing that there are no basis to infer pragmatic data from formal semantics. I then present a way to understand the relativist framework from the point of view of mental representation. The view put forward explains the missing relation between the semantic framework and pragmatics, and predicts why there is an appearance of disagreements about taste.