Hume's famous attempt to ground subjective aesthetic judgment in universal and relatively invariant cognitive processes (his proposed solution to the so-called "antinomy of taste") has received a bit of support recently from neuropsychologists Jamie Ward's and Julia Simner's research on syneasthesia -- the involuntary intermingling of perceptual modalities. This sort of sensory integration occurs, for example, when visual stimuation evokes a corresponding aural or olfactory sensation, just as Russian artist Wasilly Kandinsky (right), a self-proclaimed synaesthete, claimed to hear what he painted (and hoped to provide opportunities for his admirers to do the same).
Contrary to widespread belief that congenital synaesthesia affects no more than 4 percent of the population, Ward and Simner opine that we all routinely make synaesthetic connections in the brain, while only full-fledged synaesthetes are consciously aware of those connections. Ward concludes that "beauty is not in the eye of the beholder," but simply an "innate, hard-wired reponse" to objects in the world (Discover, December, 2006, p. 19).
If this is right, synaesthetic connections may double as an objective ground for subjective expressions of taste (as well as provide a solution to Hume's antinomy).
DKJ
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