Evaluating Food and Beverage Experience: Paradoxes of the Normativity

This article is concerned with an analysis of semantics and the normativity of evaluative judgments, in which “aesthetic concepts” and “predicates of personal taste” are used in the context of the evaluation of selected cultural forms (foods and beverages). Qualitative data obtained through semi-structured interviews with representatives in four categories of actors in the cultural field (non-experts, fans, makers, and professional critics) are analyzed. In the light of the findings, theories of aesthetic judgment are critically assessed, which on the one hand, postulate the categorical semantic and normative difference between aesthetic concepts and predicates of personal taste and, on the other hand, conceive aesthetic disputes from an epistemological point of view and do not sufficiently take into account their pragmatic context. In conclusion, a functional analysis of the semantics and normativity of evaluative judgments is presented, in which the speakers use terms from the field of aesthetics.