Scott at "Astral Codex Ten" recently had a skeptically tending discussion of taste (in the good taste and bad taste sense), Friendly and Hostile Analogies for Taste. As the title suggests, it is mostly about analogies, which is very ironic -- I assume unintentionally -- since historically one of the roles that has often been assigned to taste is sorting out whether analogies are good or bad. That is, analogical reasoning has often been regarded as involving a component requiring judgments of good taste about the fittingness of the analogy -- you need good taste in analogies to reason well with them. And the argument of the post arguably fails from the starting gate because there seems no objective sense for 'friendly' and 'hostile' here. As has been recognized at least since Hume, almost everything is analogous to almost everything, just in different ways and in different degrees, so obviously taste is analogous to all of the analogues given here, and its being so has in itself no relevance to any evaluation ('friendly' or 'hostile') of taste itself. But the post does do a helpful job of raising some important questions for the subject.
The post and the comments discussion jump around too much to say anything very unified about them, and actually giving my own view from scratch would be a rather more complex work than I presently have the time for. But a few points are worth noting that are relevant to improving not merely this discussion of taste but a lot of others as well; so take what follows to be just using this case as an example for points that are in fact worth considering in many other discussions.
(1) The discussion (not just in the post) suffers greatly from failing to distinguish at least three different senses of 'taste', which historically are usually distinguished as 'subjective taste', 'objective taste', and the 'faculty of taste' (sometimes called the 'sense of taste'). The 'faculty of taste' is our ability to sort things into categories like beautiful and ugly, reasonable and unreasonable, elegant and inelegant, striking and dull, funny and unfunny, and other such evaluative labels that are determined not by abstract proof but by judgment based on perception. 'Objective taste' is about things so evaluated (the 'objective' here has an old-fashioned meaning of 'having to do with the object of the faculty of taste, whatever that may be' rather than 'real') -- e.g., Jane Austen is a great novelist, sunsets are beautiful, such-and-such design is clumsy. 'Subjective taste' in this sense is concerned with indivudal use of the faculty of taste; it is related to personal preferences, but in practice people do not treat subjective taste as private in the way that some personal preferences are -- matters of taste are pretty much always shareable things.
(2) These distinctions are connected to what is generally called the paradox of taste -- people treat taste as non disputandum but very obviously dispute it, sometimes in the same breath. Subjective taste seems not disputable; but a very large portion of actual disputes people ever have are clearly about matters of objective taste. Indeed, there is an argument that could be made that almost all disputes that are not purely concerned with matters of memory or direct observation are about objective taste. We never stop disputing matters of taste; Scott can't even write a post skeptical of good taste and bad taste without arguing it as a matter of taste.
(3) That point is worth (a taste word) a little expansion. The arguments Scott gives in the post are in fact arguments based on judgments of taste. Here are some of the phrases that suggest that Scott uses:
mysterious
especially helpful
fraught
seems perverse
pointless
find it hard to believe
vaguely reasonable-sounding
fake
semi-fake
mostly be suspicious of
All of these are terms that can be associated with judgments of taste; some of them can be associated with other things, too, of course, but I think it can reasonably be argued that they are all in Scott's post capturing judgments of taste, either his own or, in some cases, of other people that his argument requires that we all be able to understand. The mysteriousness that Scott keeps accusing other accounts of taste as having, for instance, is not a structural feature of the accounts, but a negative judgment on the basis of his personal experience of adequacy and inadequacy in explanation. Obviously people who accept such accounts do not judge them to be mysterious in this way at all; Scott is effectively accusing people who put forward such accounts of having bad taste in explanations, just without using the words 'bad taste'.
(4) It is somewhat peculiar (a taste-word) -- given some of the points made -- that there is no discussion of scientific taste (to use Alexander Gerard's term from An Essay on Taste). It is a common view that there is an essential taste-component to both experimental design and theoretical development. For instance, people will argue that becoming a competent experimentalist requires getting a feel for elegance of experimental design; people will argue similar things for mathematical theorizing in physics or reasoning in scientific inquiry. And these are clearly concerned with objective taste. I would suggest that Scott and his particular readers would find it easier to navigate these issues by actually looking at matters of taste that directly impinge on their own interests. One does not expect most readers of Astral Codex Ten to be usually very informed about how fashion designers and avant-garde architects actually cultivate their sense of taste and how they communicate and argue their judgments of taste with others of similar background. It seems more reasonable (i.e. it is in better taste with regard to reasoning) to start with kinds of taste about which one is more likely to be informed.
(5) Several of the arguments in the post and in the comments on the post seem clearly to suggest that taste is actually a social sense. This fits quite well with a major strand in historical theories of taste. For instance, John Stuart Mill holds that good taste is the cultivated ability to make usually accurate justifications about what people with the relevant background and familiarity with the experiences would generally prefer. As a utilitarian, Mill holds that the standard of taste is the greatest happiness principle -- beautiful objects, for instance, are those the experience of which increase overall happiness -- so it's not surprising that he thinks it has the social element, but he's not the only one. Kant, for instance, holds that judgments of taste are judgments of what is valid for human experience in general, requiring the sort of free play of imagination that makes it possible for us to take a higher stance than a selfish point of view.
But it's odd (another taste-word) to describe what are in fact very common and ordinary social interactions but to use derogatory terms like 'priesthood of semi-fake justifications'. This at least needs much more exploration if it's not to be mysterious (another taste word). If it's about how things are 'landing' in the general experience of a given social group, how are the justifications fake or semi-fake, rather than the way things are actually justified in this case? How is it a 'priesthood' in the derogatory sense to be a member of one's own social circle? Because that's what many of the descriptions would then amount to -- the 'friendly' and 'hostile' analogies are really then just positive and negative descriptions of 'being a member of a particular social group with its own shared interests and experiences'.
An example. One could very well call Bay Area rationalists a 'priesthood covering themselves with a fig leaf of semi-fake justifications', and it would in fact describe how many people regard them, i.e., as faddish people trying to justify their taste in fads as rigorously rational. But the negativeness of the description would be purely rhetorical if it reduced to meaning that they were members of a particular social circle who often had a good sense of how other people in that social circle would judge things. Well, of course: that's how social interaction in a social circle tends to go. You would expect Bay Area rationalists often to have a good sense of how Bay Area rationalists would experience and judge things if they experienced them in a certain way; you would not find it surprising that this would change over time if the social structure and social interactions of Bay Area rationalists also changed over time; you would not be surprised to discover that some Bay Area rationalists were better at correctly anticipating what Bay Area rationalists in general would regard as good or bad, although you probably would be surprised if someone regarded as himself as a Bay Area rationalist and had no sense of how Bay Area rationalists in general would see things.
And so on with any other social circle. Avant garde circles, for instance, arise when people who share intensive interest and familiarity with artistic techniques begin focusing on art that is specifically trying to express those techniques as means of originality. This is one reason why avant garde circles tend to denigrate 'kitsch', because 'kitsch' is the farthest pole from avant garde -- kitsch is art that wholly subordinates considerations of technique to the creation of typical (i.e., unoriginal) sentimental experiences like 'uplift' or 'excitement' or 'coziness'. Social circles with a taste for kitsch are social circles in which people don't really care about artistic techniques in themselves; thus they tend to denigrate the avant garde. But if taste is a matter of how a social circle experiences things, then when people make these kinds of judgments, there's nothing fake or semi-fake about them; they are describing how things actually are evaluatively received by the social circle. Their justifications are tendentious, but they are correct in their context: kitschy things rarely express technical originality very well; avant garde things are usually very poor sources of typical sentimental experiences. These are facts about human experience.
Of course, one might hold that taste is not about how things are received in the experiences of a social group. But then it would seem that you could only assess things like fakeness and semi-fakeness by looking at the reasoning people use in particular cases, not in the very general and generic way the post does. And it seems that one's assessment of accounts of taste is not going to be very good (another taste word) until one first determines this point. (Which is why historically people have usually started here, rather than trying to start with an overall assessment of all of taste on a general level in the Astral Codex Ten manner.)
