Taste as Epistemology

In the AI Story

Lesser's practice demonstrates what taste looks like in operation. Each week, she reads manuscripts that range from excellent to incompetent. The vast majority fall in the middle: competent but not exceptional, meeting surface standards without possessing the harder-to-name quality that would justify publication in The Threepenny Review. Lesser's capacity to identify the exceptional among the competent is taste—a sensitivity built through decades of reading that registers qualities no checklist can specify. She cannot fully articulate the criteria she applies, but the judgments are consistent and demonstrably reliable: the pieces she accepts are, by wide consensus, better than the pieces she rejects.

The AI evaluation systems emerging in 2024–2025 can assess writing along multiple dimensions—grammatical correctness, structural coherence, stylistic consistency, readability scores—and the assessments are often more consistent than human judgment. But the consistency is the consistency of property-evaluation, not quality-assessment. The AI can determine whether a manuscript meets technical standards. It cannot have the encounter that reveals whether the manuscript possesses the quality that makes it worth reading. The encounter requires a consciousness with a history—a biographical specificity that shapes what the consciousness can perceive and value.

Segal's argument in The Orange Pill that judgment becomes the scarce resource when execution becomes abundant is a technological restatement of Lesser's literary claim. When anyone can produce competent prose (through AI assistance), the premium shifts to the capacity to judge what is worth producing—and that capacity is taste, understood as Lesser understands it: not a set of preferences but a form of knowledge built through genuine encounters with quality. The knowledge is genuinely scarce in the economic sense, because it cannot be manufactured or delegated or replicated. Each person's taste is unique, shaped by a unique history of encounters, and the uniqueness is the source of the value.

The democratization of production that AI enables makes taste more valuable, not less. In an ecology of scarcity, taste is a luxury—nice to have, but production bottlenecks perform crude selection even without refined judgment. In an ecology of abundance, taste becomes the filter through which quality emerges from the flood. The culture that loses the capacity for taste—that allows algorithmic curation to substitute for human judgment—does not merely lose efficiency. It loses the capacity to distinguish the genuinely good from the merely competent, and the loss is civilizational.

Origin

The concept of taste as knowledge has deep roots in aesthetic philosophy—from Hume's "Of the Standard of Taste" through Kant's Critique of Judgment to twentieth-century debates in aesthetics. Lesser does not engage this philosophical tradition directly; her claim is grounded in practice rather than theory. But the practice demonstrates what the tradition argued: that aesthetic judgment, though subjective in the sense of personal and particular, is objective in the sense of reliable, refinable, and productive of genuine knowledge about quality.

Lesser's most explicit statement of taste as epistemology appears in essays where she defends her editorial practice against the efficiency critique. Why read everything when assistants or algorithms could pre-filter? Because the pre-filtering would delegate the encounter from which judgment emerges, and judgment delegated is judgment degraded. Taste is not the application of standards the editor possesses in advance; it is the responsiveness the editor develops through encounters, and the responsiveness cannot be transferred to a proxy without loss.

Key Ideas

Knowledge through encounter. Taste is built through thousands of genuine encounters with quality—each attended to, each response integrated, producing a sensitivity that cannot be acquired through instruction.

Irreducibility to rules. The knowledge taste produces cannot be codified into criteria applicable by anyone; it is inseparable from the specific history of encounters that produced it.

Biographical specificity. Each person's taste is unique because each biography is unique—making taste genuinely scarce and economically valuable in abundance-era production.

Reliability without transferability. Taste produces consistent, defensible judgments (epistemologically legitimate) that cannot be transferred to others (individually specific).

Scarcity in abundance. When production becomes easy, taste becomes the bottleneck determining what reaches audiences—rendering cultivated judgment the most valuable cultural resource.