NASSLLI 2018

An opinionated guide to predicates of personal taste

(w/ Pranav Anand)

This course is a focused examination of predicates of personal taste (PPTs) such as “tasty” and “fun”—the empirical discoveries, the theoretical landscape, their connection with subjective language. Recent work in formal semantics and philosophy of language has shown that the linguistic behavior of PPTs differs from that of other predicates (OPs) such as “round” and “popular”. We will address the nature of the PPT-OP distinction through the following basic questions:

  • Is the distinction categorical (as is often assumed in theoretical literature) or gradient (as subjectivity is treated in literature on sentiment analysis)?
  • Are PPTs special because of the semantics, the pragmatics, or the epistemology and psychology of taste?
  • Are other predicates involving judgment—aesthetic, moral, value—also PPTs? What is a reliable diagnostic across conceptual domains?

The course is structured in three parts. The first two days comprise a primer on the most-discussed empirical questions and will present a taxonomy of existing theories. Specifically, we will talk about truth-evaluabillity of PPTs, their conversational behavior, and normativity that differentiate PPTs from other expressions used to describe perception.

The next part focuses on less-studied puzzles. Day 3 will discuss overt tasters, introduced by “for” and “to”, and multiple perspectives made available in questions and attitude reports, but constrained within one sentence by general rules governing the interpretation of noun phrases. Day 4 will turn to the source of direct experience requirement associated with PPTs and its relation to evidentiality, as well as similar requirements imposed by psychological predicates and dispositional generics. We will also talk about the nature of predicates like “find” that ban OPs in their complements.

Finally, on Day 5, we will examine the cognitive science perspective on taste attribution. We will focus on the philosophical literature on perceptual attribution and personal epistemology, as well as on neurophysiological research on aesthetic judgment.