Hamburgers!

Late night conversations are wonderful, even if it does mean you only get 5 hours of sleep for the next day... So we were having one of those last night with my argumentative roommates, and one of the more substantial conversations was wether one can know that something tastes good. As Jon has taken this to the blogs and requested a reply, I feel the need to respond. This seems, however, to me a very inefficient method of having an argument...

One can have the sensation of good taste when eating a particular food. And, being a realist, I believe that this taste is also attached to that actual, real food. However, I do not believe that this is actually knowledge. Knowledge, philisophically speaking, is justified true belief (well, that is actually debated, but we will work from that for now). How can one be justified that a food tastes good? The idea of taste seems to be particularly subjective. In order to have knowledge of a thing, it must be something that is true. Therefore, unless the taste of the food is objectively good, one can only have knowledge that one thinks a food tastes good to him. This is different from saying that a food tastes good. In order to make this claim, the person must have access to compare the taste to an objective standard. Unless taste then can be connected to something objective, (the only standard that comes to mind is beauty), we cannot know that a food tastes good. As per our discussion last night, beauty does not seem to apply to particular one-dimensional senses...To say a food tastes beautiful, or something smells beautiful, or something feels beautiful (feeling meaning using the sense of touch), does not seem to be a proper use of that term. Perhaps that is because beauty is at least partially an intellectual thing, and since these senses do not partake in the realm of ideas, they cannot be beautiful...Now, for a blind person, does touch take on beauty? This I don't know...

Anyway, perhaps that seems a bit picky, but I think it is an important distinction. One can know that a food tastes good to you. One cannot know that a food tastes good. A person is not evil if he does not like the taste of chocolate, for instance. ;-)

Oh, and this conversation started with the hypotheses that a person says McDonalds hamburgers are better than Burger King's burgers. Some times it doesn't take much, eh? ;-)

G'night