Maggots Are Delicious, Sunsets Hideous

Abstract

Abstract On the one hand, judgments about taste and aesthetics seem somehow more subjective than other judgments—those about matters of descriptive fact, for instance. On the other hand, it seems we sometimes genuinely disagree in virtue of making different taste and aesthetic judgments. And many theorists think that in order to ground genuine disagreement, judgments must have contradictory contents—contents that cannot both be true. Most semantic theories of taste and aesthetic predicates, including contextualism and truth relativism, attempt to account for the comparative subjectivity of taste and aesthetic judgments while preserving this supposed contradiction datum. This chapter presents results from three studies suggesting that while most people think they can disagree about taste and aesthetics, this is not because they think their judgments in this domain preclude one another’s truth. Indeed, the results suggest that many people do not regard judgments of taste and aesthetics as truth-apt at all.