Abstract

This paper explores some connections between flavour perception, emotion, and temporal experience. Focussing on the question, If you like that taste of X and I do not, are we tasting the same thing X?, I will approach it by looking at some differences between how experts and nonexperts ‘taste’. I will eventually answer that if by ‘the same thing’ we mean the overall flavour profile of a complex sensory object, then the answer must be negative. I will argue that there is indeed a relatively trivial sense in which one tastes the same thing, but that this is not an experience of flavour. In the process I will reject the view that there are real emergent flavour properties.