Accounting for tastes: on the epistemic significance of affective character

Abstract This article explores the epistemology of a particular dimension of perceptual experience: its affective character. This includes the ‘badness’ of, for example, the smell of garbage or the pain of a stubbed toe and the ‘goodness’ of the taste of chocolate, touch of sunshine, or sound of a musical chord. I take the view that affective character is epistemically significant, disclosing objective axiological relations in which elements (garbage, bodily harm, sunshine, chocolate, and consonance) stand to perceivers. To this end I analyze two representationalist approaches to valenced perception—evaluativism and attitudinalism—which serve as exemplars of, respectively, cognitivism and non-cognitivism . Cognitivists claim that valence supervenes on the empirically significant element of a perception—its content—while non-cognitivists suggest that it supervenes on elements that are not truth-apt and therefore not a direct source of the perception’s empirical significance. Considering principled objections that they each face, I propose a non-representationalist alternative—one that aims to explain not only why perceptual pleasure and pain are epistemically significant, but why they are themselves (non-instrumentally and pro tanto) good and bad for subjects.