This chapter contains sections titled: The Cultural State of the Coffeehouse A Personal Encounter A Few Steps Back Aesthetics and Liberalism The Power of the Consumer Three Capitalisms Complex and Lasting Beauty.

I consider the role of psychology and other sciences in telling us about our senses, via the issue of whether empirical findings show us that flavours are perceived partly with the sense of smell. I argue that scientific findings do not establish that we're wrong to think that flavours are just tasted. Non-naturalism, according to which our everyday conception of the senses does not involve empirical commitments of a kind that could be corrected by empirical findings is, I suggest, a (...) plausible view that is not easy to dismiss. (shrink)

I look at the ‘flavour-oscillation clocks’ proposed by D. V. Ahluwalia and two of his arguments suggesting that such clocks might behave in a way that threatens the geometricity of general relativity (GR). The first argument states that the behaviour of these clocks in the vicinity of a rotating gravitational source implies a non-geometrical element of gravity. I argue that the phenomenon is best seen as an instance of violation of the ‘clock hypothesis’ and therefore does not threaten the (...) geometrical nature of gravitation. Ahluwalia’s second argument, for the ‘incompleteness’ of general relativity, involves the idea that flavour-oscillation clocks can detect constant gravitational potentials. I argue that the purported ‘incompleteness-establishing’ result is in fact one that applies to all clocks. It is entirely derivable from general relativity, does not result in the observability of the potential, and is not at odds with any of general relativity’s foundations. (shrink)

According to cognitive psychology, virtually every sensory system influences the way in which flavours are experienced. However, it is less clear which systems are actually constitutive of flavour perception and which have merely causal influence. The paper focuses on the status of vision and audition, which are usually not treated as constitutive in the context of flavour perception. First, it is proposed that the mechanistic explanation debate provides conceptual resources which allow the constitutivity of sensory systems to be (...) assessed. Second, it is argued that the contemporary state of the art provides reasons for accepting the constitutive role of audition, but analogous evidence is not available in the case of vision. (shrink)

Following on from ecological theories of perception, such as the one proposed by [Gibson, J. J. . The senses considered as perceptual systems. Boston: Houghton Mifflin] this paper reviews the literature on the multisensory interactions underlying the perception of flavor in order to determine the extent to which it is really appropriate to consider flavor perception as a distinct perceptual system. We propose that the multisensory perception of flavor may be indicative of the fact that the taxonomy currently used to (...) define our senses is simply not appropriate. According to the view outlined here, the act of eating allows the different qualities of foodstuffs to be combined into unified percepts; and flavor can be used as a term to describe the combination of tastes, smells, trigeminal, and tactile sensations as well as the visual and auditory cues, that we perceive when tasting food. (shrink)

Linguists have often remarked upon the polysemous nature of love, whereby the term encompasses a wide diversity of emotional relationships. Several typologies have been constructed to account for this diversity. However, these tend to be restricted in scope, and fail to fully represent the range of experiences signified by the term ‘love’ in discourse. In the interest of generating an expanded typology of love, encompassing its varied forms, an enquiry was conducted into relevant concepts found across the world's cultures, focusing (...) on so-called untranslatable words. Through a quasi-systematic search of published and internet sources, 609 relevant words were identified. These were organised through a version of grounded theory into 14 categories, representing 14 different forms or ‘flavours’ of love. The result is an expanded theoretical treatment of love, allowing us to better appreciate the nuances of this most cherished and yet polysemous of concepts. (shrink)

This chapter argues that smell and flavour perception present distinctive challenges for phenomenological reflection, but that these difficulties can be addressed through a ‘gestaltist’ approach to perceptual organisation. I argue that the ‘chemical’ senses do not generally allow immediate access to ordinary objects like roses and apples, but rather to odours and flavours, the diffuse nature of which make it hard to get a grip on the associated perceptual phenomenology. Drawing on the work of gestalt psychologists and phenomenologists, I (...) outline a modality-neutral approach that emphasises the irreducibly structured nature of perceptual experience and is especially useful for thinking about experiences that are not targeted at ordinary physical objects. Such an approach can clarify and explain nebulous aspects of perceptual experience, illuminating elements of our smell and flavour experiences that may be indeterminate. (shrink)

Regret is a slippery phenomenon. Fundamental questions about its fittingness conditions and functions have yet to be settled. Here, I offer a diagnosis of regret’s slippery character. Extending a suggestion made by Daniel Kahneman, I argue that regret comes in a range of emotional flavours, distinguished in the first instance by their phenomenology. While regret has received some attention from philosophers, its varied phenomenology has not been investigated. Yet the varied phenomenology of regret is significant: it reflects further variations in (...) its cognitive and motivational effects. As a result, I argue, different flavours of regret have different fittingness conditions and contribute to our lives in different ways. In Section I, I offer a preliminary sketch of regret and introduce the questions that drive my discussion. In Section II, I introduce regret’s different flavours. In Section III, I investigate their contrasting cognitive and motivational effects, with a view to determining their functions. In Section IV, I investigate what this implies concerning regret’s fittingness conditions—and, in particular, what constitutes a regrettable action. (shrink)

The goal of this brief note is to offer a generalisation of Gómez-Torrente argumentative strategy against perspectivism, which he has developed as a defence of color realism in (2016) and (2019) and then apply it to evaluative language. In particular, I want to defend the thesis that at least some aesthetic predicates can have non-evaluative reference. As an example, I will work with the predicate “tasty” (and its antonym “disgusting”) to argue that it some times refers to a non-subjective non-evaluative (...) property, flavour, which is more fundamental that the relational property of being tasty to someone. In other words, some times, when we say of something that it is tasty, we are not saying how it tastes to us or whether we like it, but just how it tastes period. (shrink)

By focusing on the caloric composition of hunted prey species, optimal foraging research has shown that hunters usually make economically rational prey choice decisions. However, research by meat scientists suggests that the gustatory appeal of wildlife meats may vary dramatically. In this study, behavioral research indicates that Mayangna and Miskito hunters in Nicaragua inconsistently pursue multiple prey types in the optimal diet set. We use cognitive methods, including unconstrained pile sorts and cultural consensus analysis, to investigate the hypothesis that these (...) partial preferences are influenced by considerations of meat flavor. Native informants exhibit high agreement on the relative appeal of different meats. Given the absence of other noteworthy differences between spider monkeys (Ateles geoffroyi) and howler monkeys (Alouatta palliata), the unappealing flavor of howler monkeys seems to be a factor in the partial preference for this species. (shrink)

Within contemporary philosophy of perception, it is commonly claimed that flavour experiences are paradigmatic examples of multimodal perceptual experiences. In fact, virtually any sensory system, including vision and audition, is believed to influence how we experience flavours. However, there is a strong intuition, often expressed in these works, that not all of these sensory systems make an equal contribution to the phenomenology of flavour experiences. More specifically, it seems that the activities of some sensory systems are constitutive for (...) flavour perception while others merely influence how we experience flavours. This paper aims to answer the question regarding the constitutive factors of flavour perception in a twofold way. First, a theoretical framework is developed, relying on debates regarding constitutivity in analytic metaphysics and philosophy of science, which defines the stronger and weaker senses in which the activities of sensory systems may be constitutive for flavour perception. Second, relying on empirical results in flavour science, the constitutive status of activities related to distinct sensory systems in the context of flavour perception is investigated. (shrink)

We continue developing the general theory of forcing notions built with the use of norms on possibilities, this time concentrating on ccc forcing notions and classifying them.

Sensorimotor enactivism takes perceptual experience to be constituted by a kind of attunement to sensorimotor contingencies – law‐like relations between sensory inputs and bodily activity. The chemical senses have traditionally been construed as especially simple and passive, and a number of philosophers have argued that flavour and smell are problem cases for the sensorimotor approach. In this article, I respond to these objections to the sensorimotor approach, and in doing so offer the beginnings of a sensorimotor account of the (...) chemical senses. (shrink)

This paper discusses one of the major problems for resemblance nominalism, posed by Bertrand Russell in 1911–12, and often referred to as Russell’s regress. It is the problem that resemblance must either be a universal, thus refuting a thorough nominalism, or must itself resemble other resemblances to count as a resemblance, which ultimately leads to an infinite regress of resemblances. I am going to discuss two solutions that have been proposed to this problem. I will then attempt to show in (...) how far these are unsatisfactory, and propose my own solution which treats resemblance as a subject-relative phenomenon. My aim is to show that, on my account, there is no infinite regress and therefore no problem. (shrink)

It is helpful to recall the postmodern flavour of Blondel's method as one reflects on the connection between science and consciousness. How is speed knowledge as generated by the speed of technological advancement reconciled with the relative slowness of human life? The question arising from contemporary experience is whether science has any intrinsic ethical dimension.

Color conveys critical information about the flavor of food and drink by providing clues as to edibility, flavor identity, and flavor intensity. Despite the fact that more than 100 published papers have investigated the influence of color on flavor perception in humans, surprisingly little research has considered how cognitive and contextual constraints may mediate color–flavor interactions. In this review, we argue that the discrepancies demonstrated in previously-published color–flavor studies may, at least in part, reflect differences in the sensory expectations that (...) different people generate as a result of their prior associative experiences. We propose that color–flavor interactions in flavor perception cannot be understood solely in terms of the principles of multisensory integration but that the role of higher-level cognitive factors, such as expectations, must also be considered. (shrink)

Heterochromatin remains condensed throughout the cell cycle, is generally transcriptionally inert and is built and maintainedbygroupsoffactors witheachgroupmember sharing a similar function. In mammals, these groups include sequence-specific transcriptional repressors, functionalRNAandproteinsinvolvedinDNAandhistone methylation. Heterochromatin is cemented together via interactions within and between each protein group and ismaintainedbythecell’sreplicationmachinery.Itcanbe constitutive (permanent) or facultative (developmentally regulated) and be any size, from a gene promotor to a whole genome. By studying the formation of facultative heterochromatin, we have gained information about how heterochromatin is assembled. We have (...) discovered that there are many different architectural plans for the building of heterochromatin, leading to a seemingly never-ending variety of heterochromatic loci, with each built according to a general rule. (shrink)

How did vanilla, once a rare luxury, become a global sensation? Rather than taking the vanilla flavor of vanilla beans as a pre-existing natural fact, this essay argues that the sensory experience that came to be recognized as vanilla was a hybrid artifact produced by an expanding global trade in a diverse set of pleasurable substances, including cured beans from artificially pollinated vanilla orchids, synthetic vanillin, sugar, and a far-flung miscellany of other botanical and chemical materials. Global trade and large-scale (...) production resulted not in the production of a homogenous, stable commodity, but in a range of local vanillas, heterogeneous mixtures with a range of qualities and virtues. As local commercial and regulatory interests competed to define the origins, and thus the market value, of authentic vanilla flavor, scientific experts were called upon to adjudicate these rival claims. In the United States, these debates played out in the context of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act, where efforts to define and chemically enforce a ‘standard’ vanilla extract, in contradistinction from adulterated, ‘imitation’ extracts, clashed with the interests of makers and users of both synthetic and ‘genuine’ vanilla flavorings. As regulatory chemists grappled with the growing variety of vanillas, they were required to determine the appropriate chemical components of genuine vanilla, and consequently to delimit the subjective sensory effects proper to the flavor. Nonetheless, the materials, experiences, and meanings popularly associated with vanilla flavor continued to exceed the limits prescribed by officials. (shrink)

It is well known that the appearance of food, particularly its color, can influence flavor perception and identification. However, food studies involving the manipulation of product color face inevitable limitations, from extrinsic flavors introduced by food coloring to the cost in development time and resources in order to produce different product variants. One solution lies in modern virtual reality technology, which has become increasingly accessible, sophisticated, and widespread over the past years. In the present study, we investigated whether making a (...) coffee look milkier in a VR environment can alter its perceived flavor and liking. Thirty-two United Kingdom consumers were given four samples of black cold brew coffee at 4 and 8% sucrose concentration. They wore VR headsets throughout the study and viewed the same coffee in a virtual setting. The color of the beverage was manipulated in VR, such that participants saw either a dark brown or light brown liquid as they sipped the coffee. A full factorial design was used so that each participant tasted each sweetness x color combination, Participants reported sweetness, creaminess, and liking for each sample. Results revealed that beverage color as viewed in VR significantly influenced perceived creaminess, with the light brown coffee rated to be creamier than dark brown coffee. However, beverage color did not influence perceived sweetness or liking. The present study supports the role of VR as a means of conducting food perception studies, either to gain a better understanding of multisensory integration, or, from an industry perspective, to enable rapid product testing when it may be time-intensive or costly to produce the same range of products in the real-world. Furthermore, it opens potential future opportunities for VR to promote healthy eating behavior by manipulating the visual appearance of foods. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

Collapse models predict the spontaneous collapse of the wave function, in order to avoid the emergence of macroscopic superpositions. In their mass-dependent formulation, they claim that the collapse of any system’s wave function depends on its mass. Neutral K, D, B mesons are oscillating systems that are given by Nature as superposition of two distinct mass eigenstates. Thus they are unique laboratory for testing collapse models that are sensitive to the mass. In this paper we derive—for the single mesons and (...) bipartite entangled mesons—the effect of the mass-proportional CSL (Continuous Spontaneous Localization) collapse model on the dynamics on neutral mesons. We compare the theoretical prediction with experimental data from different accelerator facilities. (shrink)

"The essence of literature may be compared to the various plants and trees," Liu Hseih writes, "alike in the fact that they are rooted in the soil, yet different in their flavor and their fragrance, their exposure to the sun."1 The character of each work is manifest in its unique savor and in its scent. In other works, the uniqueness of a work can be savored: texts may echo other works, but the personality of any work is instantaneously verified by (...) what Liu Hseih calls wei, flavor, and hsiu, fragrance. It is this uniqueness that persists and survives innumerable bad imitations, shifts in circumstances, lost phonetics, and changing styles. It is what remains fresh in the classics and enables the contemporary reader to feel a sense of discovery and newness. Liu Hseih says that of these lasting works that their "roots are deep, their foliage luxuriant, their expression succinct yet rich; the things described were familiar, but their ramifications are far-reaching: so, although they were written in the past, they have a lasting savor that remains fresh."2 · 1. Liu Hseih, Wen-hsin tiao-lung chu, ed. Fan Wen-lan , p. 519; Shih, The Literary Mind and the Carving of the Dragons , p. 232.· 2. Liu Hseih, p. 22; Shih, p. 24. Although the same Chinese word wei is used in this passage, I have translated it as "savor" to stress the combination of qualities inherent in a work rather than restrict these qualities to a single "flavor." Eugene Eoyang is an associate professor of comparative literature and of East Asian languages and literatures at Indiana State University. He has contributed over fifty translations to Sunflower Splendor: Three Thousand Years of Chinese Poetry and is the author of an anthology of Chinese fiction, Links in the Chain. (shrink)

Robert L. Smale’s work looks in detail at the origins of Bolivia’s labour movement in the tin mines of the early 20th century. This provides a good starting point for an account of the rapid rise of Trotskyism in the period leading up to the national revolution of 1952, a phenomenon described in detail in S. Sándor John’s book. Sándor John’s work in particular is important in understanding both the strengths and limitations of the Trotskyist POR, which was not able (...) to displace rival nationalist organisations to achieve political hegemony in the struggles of the second half of the 20th century. (shrink)

The mammalian chromosome is longitudinally heterogeneous in structure and function and this is the basis for the specific banding patterns produced by various chromosome staining techniques. The two most frequently used techniques are G, or Giemsa banding and R, or reverse banding. Each type of stained band is characterised by variations in gene density, time of replication, base composition, density of repeat sequences, and chromatin packaging. It is increasingly apparent that R and G bands, which are complementary to each other, (...) represent separate compartments of the euchromatic human genome, with R bands containing the vast majority of genes. R bands are also more GC‐rich, contain a higher density of Alu repeats, and replicate earlier in S phase, than G bands. These properties may be interdependent and may have coevolved. (shrink)

The mammalian chromosome is longitudinally heterogeneous in structure and function and this is the basis for the specific banding patterns produced by various chromosome staining techniques. The two most frequently used techniques are G, or Giemsa banding and R, or reverse banding. Each type of stained band is characterised by variations in gene density, time of replication, base composition, density of repeat sequences, and chromatin packaging. It is increasingly apparent that R and G bands, which are complementary to each other, (...) represent separate compartments of the euchromatic human genome, with R bands containing the vast majority of genes. R bands are also more GC‐rich, contain a higher density of Alu repeats, and replicate earlier in S phase, than G bands. These properties may be interdependent and may have coevolved. (shrink)

Where the isocortex comes from is an important question, but even more important is understanding what it leads to – that is, what advantage is afforded by its peculiar organization in layers of distinct neuronal types. A computational hypothesis accounts for granulation and for the differentiation between supra- and infragranular pyramidal layers, as quantitatively advantageous to support fine topography in sensory maps.

Noetherian type and Noetherian π-type are two cardinal functions which were introduced by Peregudov in 1997, capturing some properties studied earlier by the Russian School. Their behavior has been shown to be akin to that of the cellularity, that is the supremum of the sizes of pairwise disjoint non-empty open sets in a topological space. Building on that analogy, we study the Noetherian π-type of κ-Suslin Lines, and we are able to determine it for every κ up to the first (...) singular cardinal. We then prove a consequence of Changʼs Conjecture for ℵω regarding the Noetherian type of countably supported box products which generalizes a result of Lajos Soukup. We finish with a connection between PCF theory and the Noetherian type of certain Pixley–Roy hyperspaces. (shrink)

Taste-aversion learning has been a popular paradigm for examining associative processes because it often produces outcomes that are different from those observed in other classical conditioning paradigms. One such outcome is taste-mediated odor potentiation in which aversion conditioning with a weak odor and a strong taste results in increased or synergistic conditioning to the odor. Because this strengthened odor aversion was not anticipated by formal models of learning, investigation of taste-mediated odor potentiation was a hot topic in the 1980s. The (...) present manuscript reviews the history of potentiation research with particular focus given to the stimuli that produce potentiation, the conditions that produce potentiation, the possible mechanism of this phenomenon, and possible reasons for the decline of research in this area. Although the number of published reports of potentiation has decreased since the 1980s, recent physiological and behavioral assessments have advanced the field considerably, and the opportunities for future research are bountiful. Recent physiological experiments, for example, have identified the basolateral nucleus of the amygdala as the key brain region to produce taste-mediated odor potentiation (e.g., Hatfield andGallagher, 1995). Also, recent behavioral experiments have extended the generality of synergistic conditioning effects. Studies have shown that odor can potentiate responding to taste (Slotnick, Westbrook and Darling, 1997) and that augmented responding can be produced in the A+/AX+blocking design (e.g., Batsell and Batson, 1999). With the current understanding of where synergistic conditioning may occur in the brain and the new tools to explore synergistic conditioning, we propose various directions for future research to determine whether taste-aversion learning and synergistic conditioning require unique explanations. (shrink)

Taste-aversion learning has been a popular paradigm for examining associative processes because it often produces outcomes that are different from those observed in other classical conditioning paradigms. One such outcome is taste-mediated odor potentiation in which aversion conditioning with a weak odor and a strong taste results in increased or synergistic conditioning to the odor. Because this strengthened odor aversion was not anticipated by formal models of learning, investigation of taste-mediated odor potentiation was a hot topic in the 1980s. The (...) present manuscript reviews the history of potentiation research with particular focus given to the stimuli that produce potentiation, the conditions that produce potentiation, the possible mechanism of this phenomenon, and possible reasons for the decline of research in this area. Although the number of published reports of potentiation has decreased since the 1980s, recent physiological and behavioral assessments have advanced the field considerably, and the opportunities for future research are bountiful. Recent physiological experiments, for example, have identified the basolateral nucleus of the amygdala as the key brain region to produce taste-mediated odor potentiation (e.g., Hatfield andGallagher, 1995). Also, recent behavioral experiments have extended the generality of synergistic conditioning effects. Studies have shown that odor can potentiate responding to taste (Slotnick, Westbrook and Darling, 1997) and that augmented responding can be produced in the A+/AX+blocking design (e.g., Batsell and Batson, 1999). With the current understanding of where synergistic conditioning may occur in the brain and the new tools to explore synergistic conditioning, we propose various directions for future research to determine whether taste-aversion learning and synergistic conditioning require unique explanations. (shrink)