CONCEPT
Taste as Epistemology
Lesser's claim that taste—the cultivated capacity for aesthetic judgment built through thousands of personal encounters—is genuine knowledge, irreducible to rules and irreplaceable by algorithmic assessment.
Taste, in Wendy Lesser's framework, is not a preference or an opinion but a form of knowledge: the cultivated sensitivity to quality that develops through sustained engagement with art, literature, music, or any domain where genuine aesthetic judgment is required. Taste cannot be defined in advance by a set of criteria, because quality reveals itself differently in each work. It cannot be taught through rules, because the rules that produce competence are not the rules that produce excellence. Taste is built through accumulation—thousands of encounters with works of varying quality, each encounter attended to honestly, each response integrated into a developing sensitivity that becomes more refined with practice. The editor with forty years of reading knows something about literary quality that the editor with four years does not know, and the knowledge is not propositional (a list of rules) but experiential (a calibrated responsiveness to qualities too subtle for rules to capture). This knowledge is epistemologically legitimate: it produces reliable judgments, it can be tested against outcomes, it improves with practice.