Jeremy Wyatt

Dan Zeman

Julia Zakkou

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.

Aesthetics, Language, Metaphysics, and Experimental Philosophy

Perspectives on Taste

People fight a lot. Both about objective and about subjective matters. But while at least one party to a dispute must be wrong in a disagreement about objective matters, it seems that both parties can be right when it comes to subjective ones: it seems that there can be faultless disagreements. But how is this possible? How can people disagree with one another if they are both right? And why should they? Over the last 15 years, various philosophers and linguists have argued that we have to become relativists about truth to explain what is going on. This book shows that we can dispense with relativism. It combines a conservative semantic claim with a novel pragmatic one to develop the superiority approach. The book discusses both classic and recent, as well as general and debate-specific literature in philosophy and linguistics and provides an introduction as well as an original contribution to the recent debate on the semantics and pragmatics of perspectival expressions.

Julia Zakkou

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