Eggo Waffle Cereal Is Delicious

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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 …show more content…

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

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