Katharina Felka: "No Praise for Unknown Cake"

Katharina Felka, University of Graz: "No Praise for Unknown Cake: What is the Source of the Acquaintance Requirement for Statements of Personal Taste?"

Abstract
Statements of personal taste appear to be subject to an acquaintance requirement. A sentence like ‘The cake is tasty to me’, for instance, can only be uttered legitimately if the speaker has tried the cake. Various authors have argued that the acquaintance requirement is due to peculiarities in the semantics or pragmatics of predicates of personal taste. In the paper we critically discuss these proposals and reject them in favour of an epistemic account of the phenomenon, and rebut possible objections.