flavor vs. emotion

cultural 

1. pumpkin spice: happy, calm
and so, candy cane and gingerbread: happy childhood memories,
2. flavor is defined as sensory impression of substances expressed by smell, taste, texture and emotion,
3.  we use adjectives associated to favors: sweet, sour, bitter,

psycho-somatic

4. (from ene vainik paper)

connecting sweetness to love and bitterness to anger is a quite abstract kind of decision and not truly related to any bodily sensation or imagination of respective tasting experience. The evaluative dichotomy pleasant vs unpleasant functions as a grounding in our knowledge, which reinforces if not causes us to see emotions and taste similar or analogous to each other. Why to choose the taste of bitter rather than salty or sour to be the opposite of sweet in the domain of emotions seems to rely on the inherent negativity or displeasing quality of how the bitter taste was culturally conceptualized. In a traditional rural economy both salty and sour taste accompanied the processes of food conservation and made sense as the by-products of the survival techniques. The taste of bitter, however, had no such excuse and could be evaluated not only as displeasing but also as “useless” from the viewpoint of survival. 

paper by edmund t. rolls, from oxford neurophysiology dpt. here's the abstract.

There are five types of taste receptor cell, sweet, salt, bitter, sour, and umami (protein taste). There are 1000 olfactory receptor genes each specifying a different type of receptor each for a set of odors. Tastes are primary, unlearned, rewards and punishers, and are important in emotion. Pheromones and some other olfactory stimuli are primary reinforcers, but for many odors the reward value is learned by stimulus–reinforcer association learning. The primary taste cortex in the anterior insula provides separate and combined representations of the taste, temperature, and texture (including fat texture) of food in the mouth independently of hunger and thus of reward value and pleasantness. One synapse on, in the orbito-frontal cortex, these sensory inputs are for some neurons combined by learning with olfactory and visual inputs, and these neurons encode food reward value in that they only respond to food when hungry, and in that activations correlate with subjective pleasantness. Cognitive factors, including word-level descriptions, and attention, modulate the representation of the reward value of taste, odor, and flavor in the orbito-frontal cortex and a region to which it projects, the anterior cingulate cortex. Further, there are individual differences in the representation of the reward value of food in the orbito-frontal cortex. Overeating and obesity are related in many cases to an increased reward value of the sensory inputs produced by foods, and their modulation by cognition and attention that override existing satiety signals.

in other words, emotions, as states elicited by instrumental reinforcers (e.g., a warm pleasant feeling produced by a soft caressing touch), can be seen to provide an evolutionary adaptive value account of why genes, for example, taste receptor genes, code for the reward or punisher value of some stimuli.

paper by shrikant patil addressing pheromones as sex scent signals,

take this with you: reward-punisher, taste receptor genes, evolutionary adaptative behavior,

evolutive

5. primary reinforcers: pheromones, (odors such as ripe fruit, and the smell of rotting food).
6. inter-species odors: odors of individuals may be pleasant because of major histo-compatibility complex genes, (e.g. same tribe, cultural region, etc). people smell like the foods they use. which specify olfactory receptors that signal reward produced be the smell of another individual with different immune system. 
6. The adaptive value is that offspring produced with an individual with a different immune system may have more diverse immune systems, and thereby greater resistance to disease. However,many odors only become reinforcers by a learned, stimulus–reinforcer association.
7. the odor of the cheese brie may be initially unpleasant, but may become pleasant after learned association with its taste and fatty texture (fatty texture is a primary reinforcer because of a high-energy value food).

wine and its rich associations  

                                                      above a eno-vino-pedia chart, very useful

Phi 2801 review topics for exam#1

AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

The monism/pluralism issue:

Monism: there is proper aim in aesthetics, interpretation should aim at satisfying this criteria.

Relativism: there are many equally good interpretations of AW,

Pluralism: there may be different interpretations of a AW, but that doesn't mean they are equally good. 

If art interpretation has a plurality of aims, it is quite possible that there are correct or true interpretations of works arrived in pursuit of some of these other aims that do not make statements about the artist’s intention. 

the pluralist is not saying that all interpretations are equally good. what the pluralist is saying is that given a thing to be interpreted there are different ways to interpret, different versions.

AESTHETICS

click this link for my explanation of aesthetic facts (please, read the info-consensus-best-consensus part).

Meaning in aesthetics:

is there meaning in AWs? there are 3 views:

Objectivism: meaning is something the thing has,
Subjectivism: something one brings to the thing,
Intersubjectivism: meaning is both objective and subjective, thus it's intersubjective. 

Intentionalism: in aesthetics is the view that AW's are expressions of the actual intentions of their creators. Interpretations of art works assert that a work expresses this or that actual intention, and are true only in the event that the intention in question is expressed in the work.

Aesthetic experience: Dewey and Beardsely believe that aesthetic properties emerge from the object and the individual's own taste. When these experiences are shared we obtain consensus on aesthetic properties. This seems to explain stuff such as wine, paintings, etc.

Beardsley and Dewey talk of aesthetic experience as unified or coherent, and complete.

Eddy Zemach adds that we also experience negative aesthetic properties as well – ugliness, dreariness and so on – so their characterization is both too narrow and has the wrong logical priority between aesthetic experience and aesthetic properties.

BEAUTY/PLEASURE

Disinterested pleasure:  Shaftesbury (eighteenth century) recognizes in the pleasurable response to beauty an impartiality, a lack of self-interest. He adopts the term "disinterested" from ethics to describe the pleasure recognized as associated with beauty.

For Kant desinterested means that the pleasure of beauty is like perceiving a solution to a problem, and enjoying it for its own sake, rather than because personal rewards are anticipated.

The pleasure-principle tradition:  Beauty evokes a pleasurable response. If while perceiving an object you do not experience pleasure, you are not perceiving beauty.

TASTE

1- taste needs first-hand experience. this is known as knowledge by acquaintance. Just as one cannot decide that soup is well-seasoned without actually sipping it, so one cannot conclude that music is lyrical and moving without hearing it. 

2-  though aesthetic taste is grounded in natural dispositions, it clearly requires cultivation.

Cultivation doesn't mean elitism. It means having access to the information.

3- taste is inter-subjective: one has it, but in addition, one learns about it through exchange of information with others, aesthetic notes can be learned.

4- judgements of taste are about objects: the statement "X is beautiful" is not just a report that it pleases the speaker, but a debatable claim that refers to qualities in X, that may be noticed and enjoyed by others.