Worldly Tastes

Worldly Indeterminacy: a Rough Guide

There is a widespread suspicion that indeterminacy and vagueness can only be features of claims or representations, and hence that it makes no more sense to ask whether the world is indeterminate than it does to ask whether the world rhymes or whether it’s written in English. On this view, it is not a genuine possibility that the world itself — as opposed to our representations of it — may be u...

The worldly constituents of perceptual presence

In a thought-provoking article, Seth (2014) has elaborated a combined sensorimotor and predictive coding approach to perception. His proposal links perceptual presence with the counterfactual richness of predictive models in the brain, an appealing move, which is not without problems. Here I briefly state my main conceptual concern with the idea. I believe Seth can take this worry into account ...

A Worldly Look at Language Acquisition Dan

How many tastes are there?

How many basic tastes are there? Most people list four: sweet, sour, salty and bitter. Those with a background in the chemosensory sciences usually add a fifth, umami. But why stop there? There is growing evidence that there are more—perhaps many more. The idea that there are four basic tastes goes back at least as far as ancient Greece, so if there are more than four basic tastes why haven't t...

Brand-Specic Tastes for Quality

This paper develops a model of nonlinear pricing with competition. The novel element is that each consumer’s willingness to pay for quality is private information and is allowed to di¤er across brands. The consumer’s preferences are represented by a multidimensional type containing the marginal value of quality for di¤erent products. Buyers with high willingness to pay for quality also display ...