The Evaluative Dimension of Judgements of Taste

There is a long tradition in philosophy of treating morality and aesthetics alike when it comes to their metaphysics and philosophy of language. The anti-realist tradition has found both kinds of values problematic, leading to non-cognitivist and error theoretic accounts. This paper investigates whether judgments of taste are evaluative, and if so, what kind of values they attribute. Based on Sibley’s (2001) distinctions between different kinds of evaluative expressions I argue that judgments of taste are inherently evaluative. Nevertheless, the values they attribute are not metaphysically problematic as they are response-dependent, thus reducing to perfectly natural properties and relations.