{"id":2162,"date":"2009-10-22T11:15:20","date_gmt":"2009-10-22T17:15:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/?p=2162"},"modified":"2009-10-22T11:15:20","modified_gmt":"2009-10-22T17:15:20","slug":"tasting-rating-and-our-imperfect-brain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/tasting-rating-and-our-imperfect-brain\/","title":{"rendered":"Tasting, rating and our imperfect brain"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>&#8220;Our brain has been designed to believe itself, wired so that our prejudices feel like facts, our opinions indistinguishable from the actual sensation.&#8221;<\/em><\/p>\n<p>This link goes to a discussion about <a href=\"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/cortex\/2009\/10\/robert_parker.php\">wine and numbers<\/a> and might remind you about previous discussions about the value of blind tastings. Nonetheless if you cross out wine and pencil in beer I think it still makes sense:<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;we can&#8217;t quantify a <del datetime=\"2009-10-22T17:08:38+00:00\">wine<\/del> <strong>beer<\/strong> by trying to listen to our tongue. This is because what we experience is not what we sense. Rather, experience is what happens when our senses are interpreted by our subjective brain, which brings to the moment its entire library of personal memories and idiosyncratic desires. As the philosopher Donald Davidson argued, it is ultimately impossible to distinguish between a subjective contribution to knowledge that comes from our selves (what he calls our &#8216;scheme&#8217;) and an objective contribution that comes from the outside world (&#8216;the content&#8217;). Instead, in Davidson&#8217;s influential epistemology, the &#8216;organizing system and something waiting to be organized&#8217; are hopelessly interdependent. Without our subjectivity we could never decipher our sensations, and without our sensations we would have nothing to be subjective about. Before you can taste the <del datetime=\"2009-10-22T17:08:38+00:00\">wine<\/del> <strong>beer<\/strong> you have to judge it.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><!--adsense--><\/p>\n<p><code>&nbsp;<\/code><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;Our brain has been designed to believe itself, wired so that our prejudices feel like facts, our opinions indistinguishable from the actual sensation.&#8221; This link goes to a discussion about wine and numbers and might remind you about previous discussions about the value of blind tastings. Nonetheless if you cross out wine and pencil in &#8230; <a title=\"Tasting, rating and our imperfect brain\" class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/tasting-rating-and-our-imperfect-brain\/\" aria-label=\"More on Tasting, rating and our imperfect brain\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[292],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-musing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4wTn-yS","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2162","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2162"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2162\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2165,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2162\/revisions\/2165"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}