Last night four of us stayed up very late discussing this particularly puzzling question:

Can we know that something tastes good?

My opinion is yes.

We most certainly can know that some things taste good to us. As long as the sense of taste is reliable, then there's a correspondence between the flavor and me, and from this point of view it seems like knowledge.

The crux of the debate hinged on what knowledge is, and whether or not taste is proper justification.

My view of the issue is that we know things according to certain modes proper to those things. Therefore the justification of our knowledge should be according to the mode that we know it. And taste is known through our tongue's tasting (and smell, actually). Therefore we can know whether or not something tastes good.

I dunno, it all seems clear to me. Dustin, you can post your position on your blog or in my comments, so that people can understand your view.

This objection seems the most cogent: taste is not true or false. Therefore taste is not a matter of knowledge. But the proposition, "this tastes good" can be a matter of knowledge (as it's propositional) therefore I am not persuaded by this objection.

A silly discussion, I know, but the real issue was epistemology and, at least to some degree, the necessary conditions of justification. At one point I found myself defending the law of non-contradiction, which was disturbingly self-contradictory.

Another issue was whether or not certainty is a condition of knowledge. I'd say no, because inductive reasoning seems to bring things probabalistically to light in such a way that I still am able to claim to know them. In other words, it's the most likely truth, but I'm still justified in believing it through my inductive argument because there's not sufficeint contrary justification. And so it would be irresponsible not to believe it.

I think the most interesting part of the discussion was on the nature of beauty. We examined, at one point, whether or not taste could be beautiful. It fit one of the signs of a beautiful thing: it inspires desire. However, considering this definition, we had to ask, "Is beauty present to every sense?" And it seems a strange thing to say "This feels beautiful." It occured to me that I'm most comfortable saying "beauty" when I'm talking about sight and hearing. Then someone asked a great question: what about brail? So deaf people can experience beauty through words, like us, but they do it with their fingers. This showed conclusively that ideas, primarily, are beautiful.

Now, ideas are immaterial realities. This seems indisputable. Ideas are most definitely not matter. You can never touch an idea or test one with an instrument. So, if beauty deals mainly with ideas, then beauty itself must be immaterial. And so Plato is right. (For an Aristotelian, beauty is immaterial but always bound in matter. If you're a Thomist, you have a hybrid of these two views, because you see beauty as existing eternally in the mind of God as the exemplar cause of beautiful things on earth: in this way Thomas obviously doesn't seem very Aristotelian, and I'm not sure he isn't a Platonist here.)

Bum bum bum!

I've been becoming a more confirmed in a more Platonic metaphysics lately, even though I've been spending a lot of time in St. Thomas Aquinas.

*later update*

I added a bit about brail because I remembered it and it's insightful and important.