Two Thumbs Up: How Critics Aid Appreciation

By Stephanie Ross

“An expansive and witty examination of the usefulness of criticism” from the realm of professional tastemakers to the vast landscape of social media (Times Literary Supplement, UK).

Far from an elite practice reserved for the highly educated, criticism is all around us. We turn to the Yelp reviewers to help us pick restaurants, to Rotten Tomatoes to guide our movie choices, and to voices on social media for critiques on everything from political candidates to beach resorts. Yet even amid this sea of opinions, professional critics still hold considerable power in guiding how we make aesthetic judgements.

In Two Thumbs Up, philosopher Stephanie Ross examines how critics influence our decisions, and why that’s a good thing. Starting from David Hume’s conception of ideal critics, Ross refines his position and makes the case that review-based journalistic or consumer reporting criticism proves the best model for helping us find and appreciate quality.

Ross demonstrates how aesthetic and philosophical concerns permeate our lives, choices, and culture. Ultimately, whether we’re searching for the right wine or the best concert, Ross encourages us all to find and follow critics whose taste we share.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9780226705033

Book preview

TWO THUMBS UP

Two Thumbs Up

HOW CRITICS AID APPRECIATION

Stephanie Ross

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO AND LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2020 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2020

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-06428-4 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-70503-3 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226705033.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Ross, Stephanie, author.

Title: Two thumbs up : how critics aid appreciation / Stephanie Ross.

Description: Chicago : University of Chicago, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019053421 | ISBN 9780226064284 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226705033 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Hume, David, 1711–1776. | Art appreciation. | Aesthetics. | Art—Philosophy. | Art criticism.

Classification: LCC N75 .R67 2020 | DDC 701/.18—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019053421

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Preface

Introduction

1 · Taste and Preference

2 · Aesthetic Qualities

3 · Hume on the Standard of Taste

4 · Identifying Critics

5 · When Critics Disagree

6 · Comparing and Sharing Taste

7 · Some Applications

Appendix: A Checklist for Appreciation

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Preface

My first book, What Gardens Mean (University of Chicago Press, 1998), was an exercise in landscape aesthetics. It allowed me to happily think about gardens’ powers and their status as art. It was also one of those rare philosophical projects that required its author to travel. For quite some time thereafter, I cast about for a suitable follow-up. The project I eventually chose is summarized by my subtitle, How Critics Aid Appreciation. I found myself drawn to an interconnected set of issues that emerged as I repeatedly taught and pondered two key essays: Aesthetic Concepts, published by Frank Sibley in 1959; and Of the Standard of Taste, published by David Hume some two hundred years earlier. Between them these pieces raise compelling questions about how we engage with works of art and about whether some individuals are specially situated to serve as guides. Concerns about aesthetic realism and the objectivity of aesthetic claims are ever-present in the background.

My aim has been to write for a broad audience in addressing these questions—not just professional philosophers and philosophy students, but also humanists, generalists, art enthusiasts, autodidacts, and more. I examine a rich set of issues here. Since readers might want to pick and choose, pursuing some of the topics I take up but skipping others, I have prefaced each chapter with a précis that indicates its content. I have also created a brief appendix with a suggested checklist for appreciation. Examining it will allow readers to consider their own critical practice.

Introduction

Consider the careers of film critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert. Starting with the 1975 debut of Opening Soon at a Theater Near You on their local Chicago PBS affiliate, they held forth until Siskel’s death in 1999, rating films and entertaining an ever-growing audience with their opinionated analysis and captivating banter. They transitioned from print to electronic media (both began as film critics for Chicago daily papers) and presided over increasingly ambitious iterations of that first local show.¹ At the height of their popularity, Siskel and Ebert were said to reach 95 percent of the nation with their reviews.² Their personal relationship was competitive and rancorous. A 2013 retrospective published in Slate magazine compares their interactions to a peevish marriage and notes that tapings of the half-hour show would often take four to six hours because the two stars argued so vociferously about every little thing.³

I take away two important morals from this brief history. First, Siskel and Ebert’s long reign shows that arguing about art is both entertaining and engrossing. And second, they perfected a way to give aesthetic advice to a mass audience. There was a predictable structure to Siskel and Ebert’s programs. Generally several films were reviewed. The critics took turns leading the discussions. They called attention to details of character and plot, discussed nuances of acting, noted tone and mood, unpacked special effects. They also offered illuminating comparisons, ranking the current film against other work by the same artists and similar work by others. Short clips were shown throughout to support these various claims.

As Siskel and Ebert’s high ratings attest, this formula made for a very popular show. Viewers get a good sense of each of the films being rated. The fact that each segment offers evaluative claims about a film together with supporting evidence makes for a more in-depth experience than the typical movie trailer. Viewers enjoy a vicarious taste of each film, but they are also invited to engage their own critical machinery and form initial other-things-equal preferences. They are aided in this task by the give and take between the two critics. When Siskel and Ebert disagree, viewers can choose sides and decide which critic should hold sway. When Siskel and Ebert concur, viewers can appreciate the weight of accumulated evidence. The critics’ summary thumbs up/thumbs down verdicts provides useful counsel to movie-goers seeking help with their entertainment choices. In the days before the full flourishing of Rotten Tomatoes, Netflix Reviews, MRQE (Movie Review Query Engine), and individual blogposts too numerous to count, Siskel and Ebert’s columns and on-air performances provided both entertainment and truly practical criticism.

To appreciate the ubiquity of exchanges like those between Siskel and Ebert, consider the following dialogue from the hit CBS television series The Big Bang Theory. The four friends, all geeky graduate students at Cal Tech, are debating the merits of various movies:

Sheldon: "Oh look, Saturn 3 is on."

Raj: "I don’t want to watch Saturn 3, Deep Space 9 is better."

Sheldon: "How is Deep Space 9 better than Saturn 3?"

Raj: Simple subtraction will tell you it’s 6 better.

Leonard: "Compromise. Watch Babylon 5."

Later in the episode, the characters engage in a slightly more substantive bit of aesthetic disputation. This occurs after their friend Howard calls from the lab to inform them that he’s gotten the Mars Rover stuck in a ditch. Their discussion of crisis terminology, in keeping with the snippet of dialogue above, soon segues into bona fide arts analysis.

Leonard: Howard’s at the Mars Rover Lab, he says he’s in trouble, DEFCON 5.

Sheldon: DEFCON 5, well, there’s no need to rush.

Leonard: What?

Sheldon: DEFCON 5 means no danger, DEFCON 1 is a crisis.

Leonard: How can 5 not be worse than 1?

Raj: "Yeah, Star Trek 5 is worse than 1."

Sheldon: "First of all, that’s a comparison of quality, not intensity. Secondly, Star Trek 1 is orders of magnitude worse than Star Trek 5."

Raj: "Are you joking? Star Trek 5 is the standard against which all badness is measured."

Sheldon: "Star Trek 5 has specific failures in writing and direction, while Star Trek 1 fails across the board: art direction, costuming, music, sound editing."⁴

The first dispute, focused on nothing more than the numbers in the movie titles, satirizes the entire critical enterprise. But the second exchange concludes by citing just the sorts of considerations that carry weight in genuine critical disputes.

I offer these bits of dialogue to indicate the extent to which argument about art has trickled down to permeate popular culture. These comedic snippets, together with the shows Siskel and Ebert aired over the years, foreground the two issues I propose to explore in this book: the nature of aesthetic appreciation and the workings of critical advice. My pursuit of these matters will draw on rich resources from recent and contemporary philosophy. I will use Frank Sibley’s account of aesthetic qualities and David Hume’s characterization of ideal critics as templates for my investigation.⁵ I will also address the concerns raised by Jerrold Levinson in his astute pair of papers on Humean ideal critics.⁶ My goal is to set out and defend a neo-Humean theory that can provide answers to the following questions. How should we engage with works of art? What might enhance such encounters? Should some people’s views be privileged? Who should count as a critic? How do critics aid appreciation? What is the extent of critical disagreement? What follows about realism in aesthetics? I will touch on various other topics along the way, including gustatory taste, differences among the arts, bad art, empirical research on aesthetic preference, and the leveling effects of the internet.

To begin this exploration, let me offer tentative definitions of two key concepts. The first is appreciation. I understand this in the broad sense proposed by Ted Cohen in his paper Jokes.⁷ Cohen there sets out a three-part analogy, comparing arguments, jokes, and works of art. Each, he suggests, has its proper uptake: namely, persuasion, amusement, and appreciation. That is, successful arguments compel belief; successful jokes trigger laughter; successful works of art beget a distinctive sort of experience, one that is rewarding though not always pleasurable. Proper appreciation is responsive to a work’s constitutive properties and generally involves some understanding of what the artist was attempting as well as of what he or she in fact accomplished.

The second concept in need of clarification is that of criticism. In his recent book On Criticism, Noël Carroll proposes that critics are in the business of offering reasoned evaluations of works of art.⁸ This is meant to counter the claim that the main task of criticism is interpretation—that critics should indicate the meaning of works but stop short of providing overall evaluations. Carroll’s full analysis of the critical enterprise has critics engaging in six activities—description, classification, contextualization, elucidation, interpretation, and analysis—en route to delivering (and defending) that final summary evaluation.⁹ Carroll draws a distinction elsewhere between two types of critics, consumer reporters and taste makers. Consumer reporters try to predict which [works] most of their readership will love and which they will hate, while taste makers instead try to shape [and, presumably, expand] the taste of their readers.¹⁰ Peter Lamarque acknowledges a related distinction when he contrasts academic with journalistic critics in his book The Philosophy of Literature.¹¹ What Lamarque has in mind here is the difference between offering accounts of established works—the task of academic critics—versus assessing new ones—the task of journalistic critics. The latter assignment can be especially challenging since new works must be vetted without aid from the test of time.

The distinctions proposed by Carroll and Lamarque flag differences in the ways criticism is put to use. Consulting criticism in advance to help us allot scarce time and attention might seem the paradigm case. But we also look to criticism after the fact to refine and deepen our understanding of works we’ve already encountered. A related divide separates criticism that informs us about individual works from pieces that theorize about artistic wholes—a literary genre, an artistic movement, an artist’s oeuvre. Contrast online reviews, blog posts, and newspaper critiques with the landmark books by Charles Rosen on the classical style, Ernst Gombrich on realistic representation, Northrop Frye on the structure of fiction. More narrowly focused studies are also in the mix, for example, Helen Vendler on the poetry of Yeats, Stephen Greenblatt on the plays of Shakespeare, David Bordwell on Hong Kong action films, Cleanth Brooks on Southern literature. Note that many of the works just cited offer rewards even to those entirely unacquainted with the artists and works in question.

I suggest that we acknowledge a continuum linking the simplest examples of practical criticism, a basic thumbs up or thumbs down indicating which works to select—in effect, mere naming or pointing—to increasingly more detailed accounts setting out how and why works are to be savored, where this involves contextualizing those works, parsing their properties, proposing interpretations, and estimating their significance. I suspect that the American public has recourse to criticism most often in selecting films and restaurants. And here the simpler modes prevail. The movie industry provides previews (misleadingly called trailers). A preview literally presents a chunk or chunks of a movie. Preconcert lectures for classical music audiences often do something similar, presenting key themes to listen for during the actual performance. This extends even to the art of literature. Poetry reviews quote excerpts of the work under discussion, and while a comparable practice for novels is not very practical, this may be changing with the ascension of online vendors. Amazon.com tries to get publishers to provide tables of contents and sample pages and encourages users to nag publishers when these are not available. While restaurant reviews might seem an exception to this trend, they do provide descriptions of items on the menu. So readers with agile imaginations can perhaps vicariously sample the dishes described.

In addition to these aids that provide appreciators with sample chunks of the works in question, there is also a range of more contextualizing criticism. This includes arts appreciation courses—surveys of the visual arts, music, literature, and so on. Often organized historically, such enterprises situate particular works within appropriate periods, movements, genres, styles, as well as within the career arcs of individual artists. There are also more local contextualizing aids. Museum visitors spend much of their time reading labels and placards—so much so that some descry the distracting presence of books on the wall. And of course docents leading groups through museum galleries are providing additional exegesis. There is similar support for the performing arts. Not only do programs for live musical and theatrical works contain copious background information—entire essays setting out the origins, structure, and meaning of each piece. But these are often supplemented by live conversations—lecture discussions by the performers in advance of the presentation as well post mortems after the fact, talks by artists when shows of their work opens, readings by poets that intersperse accounts of how various poems came about with the presentation of the work.

The philosopher and critic Arthur Danto appeals to restaurant reviews in his introduction to The State of the Art to disparage what I would call practical criticism. Suggesting that much that passes for contemporary art criticism paints artists’ ambitions as no grander than those of chefs—to give pleasure to a clientele sufficiently advanced in taste and discrimination to be responsive to subtleties, artisanship, and an occasional audacity, Danto savages restaurant-review-style criticism in his typical bravura fashion.¹² He notes that the food critic compares dishes, makes recommendations, advises on the evenness and quality of service over time, carps, ecstacizes, keeps track of reputations, bestows and withdraws stars, then goes on to complain that the art critics for The New Yorker did something very similar in the 1950s. The reader was counseled on what galleries to visit, which artists were presenting what dishes for the refined eye, while the artist himself was measured against the connoisseur’s knowledge of what the artist had done before or what other artists were doing then.¹³

Contra Danto, and incorporating the distinctions sketched by Carroll and Lamarque, I want to make the case that restaurant review–style journalistic or consumer reporting criticism provides the best support for those seeking to find and fully appreciate worthy works.¹⁴ I believe that the activities Danto ascribes above to restaurant reviewers and art critics offer valuable and useful advice from which both diners and gallery goers can profit. And I believe this model holds across the arts. In what follows, I explore the threads set out in this introduction and build my case for a neo-Humean account of aesthetic debate and critical advice. Chapter 1 examines gustatory taste and inquires whether it is an appropriate model for aesthetic taste in general. Two opposing worries regarding reliance on critical advice—concerns about leveling and concerns about elitism—are also discussed. Chapter 2 sets out the justificatory structure of our arguments about art and proposes that aesthetic qualities play a basic role in such contestation. Competing accounts of aesthetic qualities are compared; a broadened understanding of this category emerges in the end. Chapter 3 presents and refines David Hume’s classic proposal regarding artistic and aesthetic debate, namely, that there is a set of ideal critics whose convergent judgments constitute a standard of taste. Chapter 4 takes up some challenges concerning the role played by the test of time in identifying the ideal Humean critics (if any) among us. Chapter 5 probes the possibility of disagreement among ideal critics and the prospects for realism in aesthetics. An argument between Alan Goldman, who supports non-realism, and Jerrold Levinson, who supports realism, is tracked to what appears to be a verificationist impasse. Two pieces of machinery are introduced to resolve this debate: the Suitability Requirement, a restriction that guides the assignment of works to critics; and Critic Clusters, a construct that provides a metric for comparing peer judgments among those critics. Chapter 6 turns to the relations between critics and those they advise. The discussion is organized around two challenges posed by Jerrold Levinson, the problem of training up (why abandon the works we like for more difficult works that critics recommend?) and the problem of authenticity (don’t we lose something of ourselves, and become more like everyone else, if we allow critics to shape our taste?). The end result is a more robust understanding of Alan Goldman’s advice that we each find and follow critics whose taste we share. Chapter 7 concludes by examining several applications of the account of critical advice defended here. Comparisons and contrasts with nature appreciation are entertained; literature, film, and architecture are taken up as test cases, as each presents particular appreciative challenges; and the intersection of criticism and identity politics is examined. In closing, thoughts on two normative issues—mean critics and bad art—complete an account of how practical criticism can be vibrant, creative, engrossing, and useful.

1

Taste and Preference

Gustatory taste is the literal counterpart to taste in art. I begin this chapter by asking whether gustatory taste might be a model as well as a metaphor. That is, is gustatory taste improvable, malleable, non-fungible in a way that illuminates our interactions with works of art? I offer up as an example my intractable loathing of blue cheese (although I know that gourmands consider it a prized delicacy) and compare and contrast it with the lack of venturesomeness with which children greet new foods, on the one hand, and the salutary effects of oenophiles’ expansive descriptive vocabulary, on the other. My guides through this territory include Carolyn Korsmeyer, who probes the distinction between taste and Taste in her 1999 book Making Sense of Taste, and a group of philosophers who rigorously examined our talk about wine in a 2004 conference and subsequent publications.

With this background in place, I consider two opposing worries that arise regarding reliance on critical advice: concerns about leveling and concerns about elitism. The leveling worry applies to enterprises like Zagat and Wikipedia, where ratings and even knowledge are built from popular responses. I present the most preferred painting piece (or prank!) by the performance artists Komar and Melamid as a reductio of the leveling approach to critical assessment. The countervailing charge amounts to a worry about the entrenching of social privilege. Richard Shusterman’s critique of Hume and Pierre Bourdieu’s broader indictment of the notion of taste are examples of this view. Those who reject the concept of a canon would join in as fellow travelers on this issue. I believe that the neo-Humean view I set out in chapter 3 and further defend in chapters 4 and 5 will quiet this worry by anchoring evaluation in prior discernment of possessed properties and the interpretations that they ground.

GUSTATORY TASTE

In thinking about critics and how they shape our taste, it is tempting to look to literal taste—taste of the palate—as a first approximation of how taste might function in the broader realm of art. But questions immediately come to mind. How variable is gustatory taste? Are preferences for food and drink personal and idiosyncratic? Is this taste educable? Can we appeal to shared standards to resolve disagreement? Is there such a thing as expertise in tasting? If so, who can claim this authority? David Hume poses questions of this sort about taste in general in the relaxed and meandering introduction to his 1757 essay Of the Standard of Taste, a work that will occupy much of our attention in the pages that follow. Hume initially appears to endorse the Latin maxim De gustibus non est disputandum (There is no disputing of tastes).¹ This time-honored saying pronounces it futile to dispute about matters of taste. Since they have to do with personal preference, disputes of this sort seem irresolvable; the idea of sorting correct from incorrect judgments is a nonstarter.

Hume gradually unrolls his countervailing view in the course of his essay. But it is particularly tempting to adopt a sceptical point of view regarding gustatory taste. Consider an example. I dislike blue cheese. I know it is deemed a delicacy. I know it comes in many varieties and can be very expensive. I know it is considered an enhancement in many recipes and embellishes many dishes at high-end restaurants. Nonetheless, it makes me gag. I can’t imagine any regimen that might make me change my mind. Effusive praise from others, proffered bribes, equally vivid threats or penalties, programs of de-sensitization. Nothing would seem to turn the tide. I do agree that our gustatory preferences can change and mature. But I can’t imagine anything that might alter my intractable loathing of blue cheese. This example encourages us to see gustatory taste as entrenched and stubborn, not subject to rational persuasion. The fact that others like blue cheese does not seem to provide a compelling reason for me to come to like it, nor are admirers of this food likely to come up with further facts about blue cheese or overlooked aspects of its flavor that will convert me.

Children’s dislike of new foods provides another illustration of the irrationality of taste. A study in Contemporary Pediatrics reports that nearly two-thirds of parents report problems in this area.² Recalcitrance at the dinner table evokes familiar admonitions, with reluctant eaters exhorted to try just one bite, to clean their plates if they hope for dessert, or to think of other less fortunate children going hungry in distant parts of the world. Picky eating is such a common problem that googling reveals a wealth of websites offering counsel and advice.³ One such site proposes an evolutionary reason for this pattern: being standoffish and hard to please might protect children from poisoning and other culinary misadventures.⁴ The authors speculate that children’s instinctive desire for sweet and salty foods, and [their] instinctive aversion to sour and bitter tastes might be a trait left over from our ‘caveman’ days . . . [ensuring] that youngsters wouldn’t wander off and nibble on poisonous plants and berries, many of which are not sweet. This may be unconvincing as an evolutionary just-so story, given the wide variety of things children are willing to put in their mouths. Nonetheless, children’s stubborn rejection of new foods is so prevalent that researchers have named the pattern neophobia (fear of new foods) and report that neophobia reaches its peak between the ages of two and six years—when rejection of vegetables reaches an all-time high.

A recent venture chronicled in the New York Times underscores this theme. Six second graders from PS 295 in Brooklyn were treated to a $220 seven-course tasting meal at Daniel Boulud’s exclusive Manhattan restaurant Daniel.⁵ A video posted on the Times website presented their (predictable) reactions to caviar, arugula, lobster salad, fish cured with smoked red paprika, and much, much more. Comments from the children included It tastes like soap and It’s disgusting, although there was also an exclamation of Awesome. The favorite courses seemed to be beef and dessert. Some might have moral qualms about eager adults, let alone unappreciative children, consuming $220 meals in an era when food pantries struggle to serve a growing clientele. Clearly the second graders would need some sort of gradual program (habituation? desensitization?) to inculcate a genuine liking for many of the components of their luncheon feast. The advice dispensed on various picky-eating websites emphasizes the importance of building venturesomeness slowly and gradually. Reluctant children should be exhorted to take a bite or try a taste. They should not be offered food rewards—a cookie if you first eat a mouthful of broccoli—as this might encourage deleterious culinary habits. The fact that most children gradually enlarge their set of acceptable foods suggests that our initial prejudices can be reformed and our horizons expanded. Does this tilt the scales in favor of objectivity and persuasion when it comes to gustatory taste? What if our tastes broaden but don’t converge? That would still seem to leave gustatory taste a realm of rampant subjectivity.

Some facts appear to counterbalance claims of the irrationality of taste. For example, subscribers to Consumer Reports can find articles evaluating ice creams, peanut butter, breakfast cereals, and more. At the very least, this presumes that experts can be identified, that objective aspects of tasting and eating can be shared, and that competing varieties of a given type of food can be rated and ranked. Consider too the growing claque of self-described foodies who go about pursuing, analyzing, and savoring encounters with food.⁶ They read food magazines, attend tastings, follow culinary blogs, pore over restaurant reviews, watch TV shows devoted to food and cooking⁷, use vacations to pursue culinary tourism. This too presupposes some degree of intersubjectivity. Foodies have recently extended to other comestibles the attention that oenophiles have traditionally devoted to wine. Aficionados can not only frequent wine tastings but also attend tastings of beer, single malt scotch, tea, coffee, olive oil, honey, chocolate, and cheese. At such events, discrimination is taught and modelled, rankings are proposed and defended. The notion of terroir, originally a term for capturing the way a wine’s taste can evidence the soil in which its grapes were grown (and, more broadly, the climate and geography of its home vineyard and the culture of its producing nation) is applied to these other products as well.

Which of these divergent attitudes toward taste should prevail? In her masterful 1999 book Making Sense of Taste, Carolyn Korsmeyer traces the fortunes of gustatory taste, showing how it has been misunderstood by laypeople and disparaged by Western philosophy. Part of her mission is to rehabilitate literal taste as a cognitive as well as a pleasure-processing faculty. I would like to follow in some of her footsteps as she argues that gustatory taste is not simply stubborn, ignorant, and brute, but can indeed be a proper source of aesthetic assessment and appreciation. After filling out in more detail the received view of taste, I will track Korsmeyer’s journey through some scientific and philosophical changes rung on this notion.

Let us apply the term received view to the attitude toward gustatory taste conveyed by the De gustibus maxim. Such taste is disparaged for being variable and idiosyncratic. As my examples have suggested, gustatory taste also appears stubborn and intransigent, based more on whim than on objective assessment of the foodstuffs being sampled. If gustatory taste is not susceptible to rational persuasion, then it is not a candidate for refinement and education. I have labeled this the received view of taste to indicate that many of us would likely endorse it, at least initially. Some of us flesh out this picture with some quasi-scientific lore—a sense of the tongue as the locus of taste, with a traditional map subdividing it into regions sensitive to different basic tastes. Old time accounts of taste suggested that there are four basic modalities—sour, sweet, salty, and bitter—with dedicated taste-buds attuned to each occupying different sections of the tongue. This familiar story is twice wrong, in that recent research has found out that taste buds don’t specialize. They are all responsive to all the basic flavors, though some may be more finely attuned to one of those. Thus that old map is outmoded. Moreover, the so-called basic flavors no longer comprise the set of four just listed; a fifth flavor, umami, was added in the early twentieth century. It is the robust flavor associated with glutamate, present in certain meats, mushrooms and Asian sauces (soy sauce, fermented fish sauce). Some suggest that there is also a sixth basic flavor linked to fats.

Overly simple versions of the received view must also be corrected to indicate that the sense of taste doesn’t emanate solely from the tongue. Or to put it another way, the sense of taste partners with the senses of smell and touch to deliver a full and complete gustatory experience. While Korsmeyer distinguishes Taste from taste to separate out general aesthetic appreciation from more narrow sensory discernment, she draws a further contrast within the latter realm, distinguishing taste sensation, owed solely to the tongue, from taste experience, which results from the three senses working in concert.⁸ Brillat-Savarin drew a similar distinction when he contrasted direct with complete and reflective taste sensations.⁹ Present-day philosopher Kent Bach also acknowledges this partnership through his contrast between taste and flavor.¹⁰ This interdependence does penetrate the received view to some extent. At the very least, many of us know that when a cold clogs our nose and blocks our sense of smell, we taste with much less acuity. We also acknowledge that both taste and smell operate on a bell curve, becoming less sensitive as we age. Nutritional problems in later life arise in part because food doesn’t taste as appetizing to oldsters as it used to. While many might realize that taste and smell work in tandem, acknowledging the role of touch can require a bit more prompting. But the texture of foods, as well as hotness in both its literal (e.g., temperature) and metaphorical (e.g., chili peppers) senses, contribute to our overall gustatory experience.

Some might disparage the sense of taste because it needs the aid of other senses to deliver a full experience. This suggests that gustatory taste alone is inadequate. The fact that taste always seems to involve some degree of hedonic inflection—like or dislike, pleasure or displeasure—is an additional source of concern. Not only does the connection with pleasure situate taste as potentially frivolous, at least from a Puritan point of view, but the hedonic dimensions of taste set it up to be abused; they invite us to link taste with excess and self-indulgence. In all these respects, taste seems rooted in the body and its needs. Here is the worry that emerges: taste caters to, can be controlled by, our less admirable desires and impulses. Korsmeyer incorporates many of these criticisms when she lays out what she calls the hierarchy of the senses, an implicit division that gives pride of place to sight and hearing while simultaneously demoting touch, smell, and taste as lower and inferior capacities. Korsmeyer traces this tradition back to the ancient Greek philosophers. The fact that sight and hearing operate at a distance from their objects, together with the fact that these senses are pre-eminent ways of attaining knowledge of the physical world, sets up an unflattering contrast with the remaining three senses.

Consider first the fact