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The Epistemological Power of Taste

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 July 2021

LOUISE RICHARDSON Open the ORCID record for LOUISE RICHARDSON [Opens in a new window]
LOUISE RICHARDSON*
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UNIVERSITY OF [email protected]
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Abstract

It is generally accepted that sight—the capacity to see or to have visual experiences—has the power to give us knowledge about things in the environment and some of their properties in a distinctive way. Seeing the goose on the lake puts me in a position to know that it is there and that it has certain properties. And it does this by, when all goes well, presenting us with these features of the goose. One might even think that it is part of what it is to be a perceptual capacity that it has this kind of epistemological power, such that a capacity that lacked this power could not be perceptual. My focus in this essay is the sense of taste—the capacity to taste things or to have taste experiences. It has sometimes been suggested that taste lacks sight-like epistemological power. I argue that taste has epistemological power of the same kind as does sight, but that as a matter of contingent fact, that power often goes unexercised in our contemporary environment. We can know about things by tasting them in the same kind of way as we can know about things by seeing them, but we often do not. I then consider the significance of this conclusion. I suggest that in one way, it matters little, because our primary interest in taste (in marked contrast to our other senses) is not epistemic but aesthetic. But, I end by suggesting, it can matter ethically.

Keywords

tasteperceptionknowledgenudging
Type
Article
Information
Journal of the American Philosophical Association , Volume 7 , Issue 3 , Fall 2021 , pp. 398 - 416
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Philosophical Association

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Footnotes

Thanks to two anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions and to various audiences who have given me invaluable feedback, including students at my department's weekend away in 2019.

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