Predicates of personal taste have attracted a lot of linguistic and philosophical attention. They express an analytical difficulty in determining whose knowledge or taste is being expressed. However, there predicates of personal taste such as delicious and tasty seem to be different from other kinds of predicates. As their name suggests, predicates of personal taste exhibit personal taste; thus are essentially subjective. Coincidently, they give rise to disagreements such as the one in the following dialogue:
Alphie: “Eggo Waffle Cereal is delicious.”
Betty: “Nuh uh, Eggo Waffle Cereal is not delicious”
The puzzle is this: intuitively, Alphie and Betty disagree with each other about some issue — namely, whether Eggo Waffle Cereal (EWC) is delicious. A characteristic property of disagreements is that the parties involved make incompatible assertions: the conjunction of the two propositions expressed is a contradiction. That (1) represents such a disagreement is confirmed by observing that Betty follows with a response ‘Nuh uh’…, is felicitous. The problem is both (1) and (2) are intuitions that
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Focusing on the case of delicious uttered by Alphie in (1), this statement is false if the agent has not tasted the object of deliciousness or there is something about the agent that makes her an unsuitable candidate for being an individual to whom the item is delicious — say because she doesn’t like maple syrup, which is one of the main ingredient in EWC. In general, the agent’s tastes are relevant unless something about the contexts enables them irrelevant — not having tasted the item in question, or perhaps not being among its ‘target audience’ (maple syrup example). The view that predicates of personal taste receives a first person oriented interpretation unless the agent’s tastes are considered to be irrelevant. First, it captures the observation that an example like (1) can be
A logical contradiction is an assertion or a claim that contains both a proposition and its denial given in the form p and not-p. In this case, both of these statements cannot both be true due to the law of noncontradiction. Similar to the principle of bivalence, this law states the declarative statement must be either true or false and cannot be both true at the same time in the same sense. A classic example of a logical contradiction is to assert that “it is raining and it is not raining.” The proposition p is “it is raining” and its denial not-p is “it is not raining.” Because “it is raining” and “it is not raining” cannot be both true at the same time, this statement leads to a logical contradiction when we assume the principle of bivalence or the law of noncontradiction. Some other examples would include statements such as “I know that nothing can be known” and “All general claims have exceptions.” Unlike a logical contradiction, a performative contradiction arises “when the content of an assertion contradicts the act of asserting it or the presuppositions of asserting
Contradictions are ideas or statements that oppose one another, such as paradox and irony. Paradox means that a statement contradicts itself, which may or may not be true; while irony is when you say one idea but mean another. For instance, The Declaration of Independence is one example which Americans show their contradictions. Thomas Jefferson wrote, “All men are created equal” at the same time Americans had slaves in their possession which evoked all African-Americans to obtain any natural rights as indicated in The Declaration of Independence (194). In addition, the paradox involved with this statement is a reason, which makes this country a travesty. All of these writers relate to The Declaration of Independence when dealing with contradictions
The speaker’s attitude, like the reader’s, is proven here to be that of gratification, too. Although he suffered through rocky situations in the past because of his bi-cultural upbringing, he has proven that he has overcome these experiences by clarifying his present knowledge of the difference between “persimmon” and “precision.”
These two examples can demonstrate how each person can use the two formulations of the Categorical Imperative to decide whether a maxim is moral or not. Throughout Kant’s, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, some questionable ideas are portrayed. These ideas conflict with the present views of most people living today. Works Cited Kant, Immanuel.
These statements assert that the negative ( or contradictory) of an alternative proposition is a conjunction which the conjuncts are the contradictions of the corresponding alternants. That the negative of a conjunctive is an alternative proposition in which the alternants are the contradictories of the corresponding conjuncts.
In the story “If you are what you eat , then what am I?” by Geeta Kothari, Kothari wants to inform the reader that many things can contribute to the person who you are today. In the story, Kothari utilizes food to symbolize her identity which she struggles to identify herself as American or Indian. Kothari purpose of writing this story is to notify young adults who are in the process of finding themselves to not worry much about what you believe makes you who you are rather than letting you become the person you are meant to be. Throughout the story, Kothari uses figurative language. Kothari states,” And the tuna in those sandwiches doesn’t look like this,pink and shiny, like an internal language”(Kothari 7). In other words, she compares the
A logically self-contradictory utterance is not only false, it cannot possibly describe anything. Therefore, it may also be called an impossible description. A tautological utterance, on the other hand, says something true, but it supplies no new information about the world. Therefore, from a common sense point of view, it is a superfluous description. There are at least, I will show, three other kinds of utterances which adequately can be called impossible descriptions and three which can be called superfluous descriptions. Only views which belong ...
In order to properly define judgments of perception and judgments of experience, one must first examine the general framework for thought that precedes them. Kant begins by breaking cognition into two distinct parts: analytic and synthetic judgments (p. 9). Analytic judgments are simply statements about the status of some object, and essentially serve as definitions. Analytic judgments are true by virtue, as they “express nothing in the predicate but what has...
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction- A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984)
In Let’s Talk About Love, Carl Wilson scripted his opinions on people’s tastes in music. Quoting the French philosopher and poet Paul Valéry, Wilson elucidated, “Tastes … are composed of a thousand distastes” (11). I disagree with Wilson; I believe that he portrayed the creation of taste backwards by arguing that a person’s likes in music are composed of the music he dislikes. Alternatively, my hypothesis is that a person’s dislikes in music are fashioned from the music he likes; the music he dislikes being the music that lacks traits of the music that he likes. There are many different genres of music that I like because their musical traits.
Food is very accessible. Therefore, it has been one of the top choices used in explaining semiotic theory. An important contributor to the semiotics of food is Mary Douglas. She applied her assumptions of semiotics of food as a social code. Douglas and her assistant generated a hierarchical description of the events when people take food. This description is listed below.
Gonzalez, Julina Roel. ""The Philosophy of Food," Edited by David M. Kaplan." Ed. Michael Goldman. Teaching Philosophy 36.2 (2013): 181-82. Print.
In this essay Hume creates the true judges who are required to have: delicacy of taste, practice in a specific art of taste, be free from prejudice in their determinations, and good sense to guide their judgments. In Hume’s view the judges allow for reasonable critiques of objects. Hume also pointed out that taste is not merely an opinion but has some physical quality which can be proved. So taste is not a sentiment but a determination. What was inconsistent in the triad of commonly held belief was that all taste is equal and so Hume replaced the faulty assumption with the true judges who can guide society’s sentiments.
Sentiments such as beauty, revenge, pleasure, pain, create moral motivation, and action, and are immune to falsity and truth. They are the foundation for which morals are built, and exist apart from any reasoning. Thesis: In moral motivation, the role of sentiment is to drive an intrinsically instilled presence within us to examine what we would deem a moral act or an immoral act, and act accordingly, and accurately upon the sentiments that apply. These sentiments may be assisted by reasons, but the reason alone does not drive us to do what we feel is necessary.
Grice’s theory of implicature centers on what he has named the “Cooperative Principle,” and how it relates directly to conversational implications that occur in our daily speech. In the implicature section of his essay “Logic and Conversation,” Grice explains that there are common goals of conversation that we try to achieve within our discussions. For example, some of these common goals are that there is a shared aim of the conversation, each person’s contributions to the conversation should be dependent upon each other, and the conversation continues until it is mutually agreed that it is over. In order to preserve these goals, we find it easiest, as cooperative human beings, to stick to the Cooperative Principle, and along with it, the maxims that Grice lays out. Based on an assumption that we do not generally deviate from this Cooperative Principle without good reason, we can find out things that are implicitly stated. Implicature is the part of our spoken language when these maxims are broken purposefully, and it involves the implicitly understood form of communication: things that are implied or suggested. While Grice’s theory of implicature is a very careful assessment of implied statements, there are some faults that are found within his argument. Because of these issues, Grice’s theory neither offers a solution to the formalist and infomalist problems, nor provides an infallible method of evaluating implicature in everyday conversation.