What Makes for High Taste?
Reflections on Aesthetic Discernment and Its Philosophical Undercurrents
Dawn at a small French bakery. The air is cool, morning fog still hugging the earth. Inside, a master baker moves with fluid precision, their hands knowing exactly when the dough has reached the right consistency, how much tension each fold requires. They sense, before any conscious analysis, when something in a recipe needs adjustment. This immediate recognition—preceding rationalization yet born of deep practice—exemplifies what we might call high taste.
High taste, where excellence is recognized before it can be explained, appears across creative and technical domains. The phenomenon transcends synonymy with technical expertise or rule-following, suggesting a deeper capacity that develops through sustained engagement with a craft. It’s this cultivated sensitivity that allows high taste practitioners to leverage the historicity of established principles and innovate towards new forms and dimensions of aesthetic expression and realization.
I’m interested in understanding how high taste develops—both in individuals and across cultural contexts. In doing so, we open up some fundamental questions about the nature of aesthetic discernment. What enables this immediate recognition of excellence? How does such judgment arise from sustained engagement? These background questions guide our investigation of high taste as a dynamic evaluative process. In the sections that follow, we’ll explore how aesthetic experience, practical knowledge, and self-reflection converge to form high taste—and how this convergence unfolds into broader philosophical inquiries about tradition, innovation, and meta-taste.
High Taste: A Dynamic Evaluative Process
High taste arises through cultivated discernment within a domain, where aesthetic experience sharpens perception and judgment. Think of a chef who senses imbalance in a dish before identifying the missing element, or the jazz musician that hears a solo and knows it works before rationalizing why. Or a senior software architect evaluating a system that immediately recognizes unnecessary complexity. These judgments feel immediate but develop through recursive engagement, refinement, and perceptual calibration.
At its core, high taste is not just about individual preference but about structured refinement.
Three interrelated mechanisms form its foundation:
Compression and internalization of principles
High taste develops through an embodied understanding of structure and form, allowing for real-time judgment beyond rigid rule application.
Sensitivity to inflection points
The most discerning practitioners recognize critical moments when convention ceases to serve its function, demanding refinement or reinvention.
Historical awareness
Understanding how evaluative frameworks evolve enables meaningful contribution, preventing the repetition of past disruptions as empty gestures.
The highest refinement of taste emerges in the ability to navigate this space fluidly, applying principles with precision and breaking them with intention.
In attempting to distinguish high taste from technical expertise, high taste could be said to surpass technical expertise by temporally integrating pattern recognition, contextual awareness, and an intuitive grasp of proportion. The most refined practitioners understand when established principles ensure excellence and when modifying or transgressing them leads to something greater.
Our chef, familiar with classical flavor pairings, similarly senses when an unconventional combination enhances a dish. A literary editor perceives the rhythm of a sentence and adjusts its structure to maximize impact. A software architect evaluates modular design and selects the most elegant solution, balancing (among other things) efficiency with maintainability.
Sustained participation, iterative refinement, and engagement with new contexts strengthen one's taste capacity. While dimensions like coherence, proportionality, and efficiency remain central to judgment, their application varies with circumstances. Mastery emerges through a sensitivity that allows for both adherence to convention and strategic adaptation.
Epistemological Foundations of High Taste
This analysis adopts a neo-Kantian framework that reconceptualizes the relationship between universal aesthetic principles and cultural contingency, while acknowledging the fundamentally embodied nature of aesthetic judgment. The compression and internalization of principles, rather than contradicting Kantian universality, reveals how transcendental aesthetic capacities manifest through embodied practice. This ‘principled contingency’ helps us understand how universal aspects of aesthetic judgment—proportion, harmony, coherence—emerge through historically specific forms and embodied engagement, without being reducible to either in isolation. For more, check out the SEP entries on aesthetic experience (Peacocke, 2023) and the concept of taste (Shelley, 2022).
Meta-Taste: Reflecting on Taste Itself
Where high taste operates within a domain, meta-taste reflects on the structure of taste itself. Someone engaging their faculty for meta-taste does not simply make judgments; they interrogate the criteria and structure behind them.
As an example, a meta-taste thinker might analyze how classical music conventions shape our perception of musical quality. A high-meta-taste thinker would go further, examining how those conventions emerged in the first place, whether they are contingent or necessary, and how new frameworks might supersede them.
Meta-taste is not detached theorization but an embodied, self-reflective engagement with evaluative structures. When a musician with meta-taste examines harmonic conventions, this examination occurs through active engagement with their instrument, where theoretical understanding emerges within rather than alongside physical practice. This embodied dimension explains how meta-taste enhances rather than interrupts practical mastery—theoretical insight develops through, rather than apart from, sensorimotor refinement.
I would think that a well-developed sense of meta-taste deepens one’s evaluative capacity of, but is not required for, high taste. Some practitioners develop extraordinary high taste without ever explicitly reflecting on the nature of their discernment. However, those who do actively instantiate meta-taste in their practice refine not only their ability to judge but their understanding of judgment itself.
High-Meta-Taste: The Recursive Scrutiny of Taste Structures
So far we've introduced high taste and meta-taste as related but distinct dimensions involved in applied aesthetics. But can meta-taste itself be valenced 'high' or 'low'? Where high taste refines judgment within a domain and meta-taste reflects on criteria shaping that judgment, high-meta-taste recursively examines how evaluative structures themselves evolve. One could argue that this very essay exercises high-meta-taste, shifting its focus beyond individual aesthetic judgments to the mechanisms of taste itself, as they manifest across domains.
Organizing the forms of taste we've discussed so far:
High taste involves the application of evaluative principles with increasing precision.
Meta-taste is exercised when one examines the criteria that shape those evaluative principles.
High-meta-taste examines the underlying mechanisms that shape and evolve evaluative participation itself.
This interplay between continuity and transformation mirrors the evolution of a fundamental conceptual understanding in science. Einstein and Infeld, in The Evolution of Physics (1938/1966), describe how fundamental scientific concepts often undergo redefinition when applied in new contexts:
A line of thought developed in one branch of science can very often be applied to the description of events apparently quite different in character. In this process the original concepts are often modified so as to advance the understanding both of those phenomena from which they sprang and of those to which they are newly applied.
Just as physics advanced by distinguishing heat from temperature, high taste evolves by refining evaluative categories. The ability to differentiate surface-level markers of quality from deeper structural insights is what allows practitioners to advance beyond mastery into innovation. However, this model of recursive engagement is open to a potential philosophical challenge, you might quip, for how do we distinguish productive reflection from infinite regress?
Productive vs. Diminishing Returns in Meta-Reflection
Here we adopt a pragmatic stance: we shall say meta-reflection strengthens discernment when it refines primary taste development. In other words, we bias toward a view that meta-reflection is most valuable when it feeds back into practical application. If the activity of meta-reflection becomes self-referential to the point of detachment from engagement (taste exercised, as it were), it ceases to serve its function.
Framed in terms of the three interrelated dimensions invoked at the start, effective meta-reflection presumably enhances the compression of principles, sharpens sensitivity to inflection points, and deepens historical awareness. When meta-reflection becomes detached from these mechanisms, it loses its capacity to enhance practical judgment.
Return to our friend the chef, now contemplating the nature of umami. In this moment of reflection, we find them engaging in an act of refinement—testing, adjusting, and internalizing subtle nuances of taste that enhance their culinary instincts. Their reflection is not idle; it feeds back into their practice, sharpening their capacity for intuitive and precise experience and flavor construction.
Contrast this with a chef who, rather than refining their instincts through experimentation and attunement, becomes preoccupied with the epistemology of taste in a detached, abstract manner. If they merely theorize about the definition of umami, endlessly debating its conceptual boundaries without applying their insights to improve their craft, their reflection is wont to spiral into recursion without application. This contrast serves to illustrate the difference between productive meta-reflection, which enhances mastery, and abstraction untethered from practice.
High-meta-taste remains grounded in judgment. It interrogates evaluative structures but does not detach from participation. When applied effectively, high-meta-taste enables the individual to intentionally reshape their discernment and renegotiate their relationship with the supraordinate aesthetic paradigms themselves.
The Social and Collective Dimensions of Taste Formation
As we’ve been alluding to, taste develops through a complex interplay between individual embodiment and institutional frameworks. A chef’s culinary acuity emerges from individual sensorimotor refinement, but also from social kitchens and gastronomic traditions. These frameworks—whether formal (conservatories, museums, professional associations) or informal (artistic movements, cultural scenes, online communities)—serve as sites of dynamic negotiation between tradition and innovation.
'Communities of discernment' operate through multiple, often competing mechanisms of legitimation. Consider how contemporary art values emerge through tension between institutional gatekeepers (galleries, museums, critics) and decentralized networks (artist collectives, social media, emerging markets). This multiplicity of evaluative frameworks creates space for what we might call "productive instability"—where competing standards of excellence generate opportunities for aesthetic innovation.
It could be said that these 'communities of discernment' (about some thing) define the conditions for high taste. For example, it would be pretty reasonable to say a film critic may refine their judgment in dialogue with cinematic history, peer criticism, and audience reception. There's an inherent dynamism, a responsiveness, to a practitioners exercised high taste.
Institutionalization vs. decentralization: Some aesthetic standards become institutionalized (e.g., Michelin stars, literary canons), while others emerge organically through decentralized cultural shifts (e.g., the evolution of streetwear into high fashion, exemplified by Virgil Abloh’s influence at Louis Vuitton or Balenciaga’s redefinition of couture).
Collective rupture and reintegration: Periods of disruption—where practitioners challenge established norms—often precede the emergence of new frameworks that redefine high taste for a generation.
These periods of historical upheaval coincident with paradigm shifts reinforce the social and collective dimensions of taste formation: new aesthetic paradigms (that is, what gets considered 'good' or 'beautiful') typically only gained traction through adoption in broader communities of practice.
How Individual Taste Shapes Cultural Evolution
Acknowledging the contingent relationship of the development of taste in an individual is not to say that individual refinement doesn't somehow contribute to the broader evolution of aesthetic standards—they do and it does! Abstractly, we might conceive the relationship of influence between individual and paradigm(s) in which they are situated as an iterative process:
Micro-level shifts accumulate into macro-level changes. Just as individual high taste filters innovations, elevating some while letting others fade, the interplay of discrete artistic and aesthetic choices across disciplines coalesces into broader cultural transformations. This dynamic is evident in the way Impressionism’s rejection of academic realism laid the groundwork for abstraction, which in turn fueled Modernist experimentation, eventually leading to the conceptual provocations of Postmodernism. Each micro-level recalibration—a painter's decision to embrace visible brushstrokes, a musician’s shift toward atonality—contributes to the cumulative momentum of large-scale aesthetic evolution.
Paradigm shifts occur when meta-taste reaches a critical mass. Widespread interrogation of aesthetic norms often marks the onset of major cultural change, a phenomenon strikingly evident in the art movements of the 20th century. The aftermaths of WWI and WWII saw the radical reconfiguration of aesthetic values, as Dadaism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and Postmodernism emerged as responses to the disillusionment and sociopolitical ruptures of their times. Each movement, in its own way, challenged entrenched artistic conventions, redefining the aesthetic paradigms of its era. These shifts were not merely stylistic but deeply philosophical, and invited folks to question the very function of art in society. Just as meta-taste interrogates the criteria shaping evaluative principles, these movements reframed the foundational assumptions governing artistic production and reception. Such transformations illustrate how high-meta-taste, when exercised at scale, can serve as a catalyst for profound cultural and intellectual evolution.
Tradition, rupture, and reintegration structure taste evolution. Movements that rupture past conventions—whether the radical abstraction of Kandinsky or the fragmented narratives of postmodern literature—do not erase history but rather engage in a dialectical process with it. Over time, what once seemed subversive becomes incorporated into the canon, influencing new generations who, in turn, generate their own innovations. The oscillation between rejection and assimilation mirrors the interplay of high taste and meta-taste, where discernment operates both within and against inherited frameworks. This cyclical interplay is what sustains the evolution of aesthetic sensibility, ensuring that taste remains a living, responsive, and adaptive phenomenon rather than a fixed hierarchy of value. Individual high taste filters innovations, elevating some while letting others fade.
In short, high taste individuals simultaneously reflect their cultural context while actively shaping the trajectory of aesthetic sensibilities.
Temporal Dynamics: Paradigm Shifts in Taste Evolution
How does individual refinement scale into broader aesthetic shifts? The discussion of taste evolution through “tradition, rupture, and reintegration” suggests a dialectical historical process but leaves the mechanisms of genuine paradigm shifts underspecified.
Here we draw from Kuhn's analysis of scientific revolutions. While scientific revolutions often replace prior frameworks, aesthetic paradigm shifts tend to preserve and transform them. Both, however, involve structured disruption—where past structures are either superseded or reconstituted at higher levels of sophistication.
Consider how, as a movement, modernist painting didn't simply reject representation but reconfigured the relationship between representation and abstraction. Similarly, contemporary cuisine hasn't abandoned classical technique but has fundamentally restructured its relationship to tradition. These transformations exemplify how aesthetic paradigm shifts operate through what we might call "constructive disruption"—where challenge to existing frameworks serves not to eliminate but to reconstitute them at a higher level of sophistication.
Embodied Cognition and Adaptive Mastery
The "Compression and internalization of principles" mechanism mentioned at the beginning certainly seems to gesture toward embodied knowledge, but the relationship between bodily experience and aesthetic judgment warrants further theorization. The phenomenology of taste, as discussed in Dewey’s Art as Experience (1934), suggests that high taste is not purely intellectual but deeply rooted in sensorimotor engagement. A chef’s palate, a dancer’s kinesthetic awareness, and a musician’s tactile sensitivity illustrate how embodied cognition underlies high taste formation.
Thus far, we've developed a case which says taste develops through cycles of engagement, challenge, and refinement. Each judgment recalibrates perception, ensuring responsiveness across changing contexts. The highest form of taste integrates specific discriminators into holistic evaluation while remaining open to new insights.
High taste develops through participation and refinement. Meta-taste sharpens evaluative precision, while high-meta-taste enables a restructuring of taste’s conceptual architecture. Each level deepens attunement to structure, variation, and meaning.
Closing Thoughts
Taste evolves as a living negotiation—compression enables intuition, sensitivity guides innovation, and historical awareness ensures continuity. It is through this balance of refinement and disruption that aesthetic sensibilities shape, and are shaped by, cultural evolution.
Questions emerging from this analysis point toward future investigations:
How do collective aesthetic paradigms become embodied in individual sensorimotor systems?
What role does meta-taste play in mediating between embodied experience and cultural evolution?
How do power relations within communities of discernment shape the development of evaluative frameworks?
cf: Desnobberizing good eating and drinking (2023)
thanks for reading.