Tasting Flavors

Perceptual experience enables us to know features of objects in our environment. But what does the experience of tasting enable us to know? By tasting we discover the tastes of foods or liquids; but what are tastes? An objectivist sees tastes as properties of foods and drinks, which are there anyway, independent of how we experience them. On this view, tasting provides us with perceptual knowledge of real features of foods and liquids. By contrast, a subjectivist sees tastes as just features of our own experience: sensations on the tongue answerable to nothing other than themselves. Tastes, on this view, are not in the foods; rather foods give rise to tastes in us. A metaphysics of tastes that sees them not as properties of foods but as parts of our experience makes the epistemology of tasting an aspect of self-knowledge. Knowing how something tastes is being immediately aware of a certain sort of experience that occurs when we are eating or drinking. On this view, we can know all about tastes so long as we know all about our experience. However, this simple subjectivist story fails to do justice to the epistemology of tasting. The experiences generated when tasting are not unisensory but multisensory, though unified. They are perceptions of flavor and due to touch, taste, and smell. A satisfactory metaphysics and epistemology of flavor leaves room for flavors as configurations of sapid, odorous, and tactile properties of the food and liquids we consume.