Taste and the history of science: introduction

Abstract

AbstractIn this introduction, we argue that the time is right to explore the role that taste has played in the history of science. For a long time, scientists, philosophers and historians regarded taste as incompatible with the production of knowledge, contrasting the apparent subjectivity of taste with the objectivity supposedly required by the sciences. In recent years, however, the intellectual foundations of this presumed incompatibility have broken down, presenting us with new opportunities to reassess how people use the sensory and mental operations of taste to obtain scientific knowledge. This introduction therefore begins by surveying the intellectual and scholarly landscape, seeking to explain the relative lack of attention to taste in the history of science, arguing that this inattention is misplaced. In turn, it continues by discussing the work that has led growing numbers of historians of science to take taste more seriously – most notably historical accounts revealing that the exclusion of taste from the domain of knowledge was the product of contingent circumstances that did not apply in early centuries, and may not apply today. Finally, by way of introducing the contributions to this issue, the introduction discusses the methodological innovations deployed by historians of science to better reckon not only with taste, but also with the forms of knowledge to which taste might lead.