Taste

In plain terms

Two things about taste are obviously true and hard to hold together.

The first is that there is no arguing about it. People differ, and no argument settles whether someone should like a piece of music.

The second is that we do not actually believe this. Nobody thinks a person who ranks a jingle above Bach has merely different preferences, and Hume's own example is that anyone preferring a minor writer to Milton would be regarded as making an error rather than exercising a taste.

So either the second reaction is snobbery dressed up, or taste is a capacity that can be developed and can go wrong. Hume's answer is the second, and his ground is not the object but the judge: some people are better placed to judge, and the standard is their agreement over time.

As a philosopher would put it

Hume's solution locates the standard in the qualified critic, characterised by five features: delicacy of sentiment, practice, comparison, freedom from prejudice, and good sense. The joint verdict of such critics, sustained across time and cultures, is the standard of taste - which grounds normativity without positing a property in the object.

The circularity objection is immediate: identifying qualified critics requires knowing whose verdicts are good, which is what the standard was supposed to establish. Hume's reply appeals to durability - works that survive translation, distance and changing fashion have passed a test that no individual verdict can.

Kant takes the other route. The judgement of taste is disinterested, subjective, and yet demands universal assent, because the pleasure arises from a free play of faculties common to all. That secures normativity at the cost of a well-known instability, and Bourdieu's Distinction later argues empirically that taste tracks social position closely enough to make its claim to disinterest look like the mechanism by which class reproduces itself.

What is actually disputed

Whether taste can be wrong.

Subjectivists hold that aesthetic preferences are not the kind of thing that can be mistaken, and that appeals to standards are social power dressed as discernment - the position Bourdieu's evidence supports, since taste tracks education and class with uncomfortable precision.

Objectivists reply that the practice of criticism is unintelligible on that account: nobody spends decades learning to hear if there is nothing to get better at, and expertise transfers in aesthetics much as it does elsewhere.

Hume's circle remains unclosed. His durability criterion is genuinely useful and cannot be applied in the present, which is when judgements actually have to be made. And it favours what has been transmitted, which is a fact about institutions and archives as much as about merit - so a standard designed to escape prejudice inherits the prejudices of whatever was preserved.