Taste is falsification.
A few weeks ago while on a project, a designer asked me: so what do you want? My answer was quite simple, I told him: I don't know what I want, but I know what I don't want. Reflecting on that interaction, it's very clear to me that taste is falsfication.
Taste is resonance after n falsifications. If you think of taste acquisition as a search problem, then failed experiments do not lead you to an inherently positive item. Rather, they guide you towards an optimal level of resonance. This is why you can do better than your local maxima; such that what's right simply becomes an alloy of all that's wrong. And, you don't just stumble on it; you construct it by using agency to uncover the constraints.
N could be 0, but the ability to judge, without experimentation, means you're dealing with a formal problem, or as I call them: regular problems. Their constraints are known. Their invariants can be neatly formalized. And therefore their solution(s), easily verified.
Architecture is my favorite form of regularization. It functions by providing regularities that yield higher-order guarantees (behavioral, structural, etc). Architectural drafting and study, on the other hand, is a falsification process. Personally, I'm more fascinated by the work people throw away. Their notes, scribbles and doodles. I think a lot about all the unreleased music hiding on magnetic strips, which will never see the light of day.
And so naturally, you only formalize after tasting. The will can only formalize what the soul has tasted.
Intrinsically, experimentation requires a cut, it requires collection, it requires observation, it requires labour, it requires energy. It requires material manipulation, directly or not. This then means, that craft and taste are 2 sides of a coin, except an artificial distance can be created between them, whose cause is fundamentally, economic.
A craftsman has the capacity to falsify, yet he can't always falsify at the frequency and scale of his patron. The patron needs the constructive capacity of his craftsman to exercise his taste. Some categorize this as creator preference and curator preference. The schism doesn't matter, as long as we can agree on the primacy of the interaction with the physical world.
Now, I want you to recontextualize my interaction with the designer.
This essay is not purely pro-creation. You see, verification is routine, it's work, it's logical, it's repetitive and it's regular. Verification is boring, rational, secure, and mechanical. However, it's exactly these properties that yield guarantees which facilitate a higher-order explosion.
Human judgment is not always propositional, and so you couldn't, in any meaningful way, formally verify an output before judgment. I believe this is the fundamental problem with formal verification systems? A well-written spec is not a well-codified intent. Intent knows when it senses, unless of course, it's seen it before. Which means a question we should forever ask ourselves, is that: whose intent matters?
Your feeling of resonance is not because you've discovered an objective, true, form. What you have discovered, is rather a series of truths and falsehoods that regularize rather neatly.
When it comes to taste, false is true.
This essay is about taste, but its motivations span beyond taste. It's a synthesis of my thoughts on (the future of) software engineering, a rejection of the difference between a priori and a posteriori knowledge, my disagreements with the artificial schism between experience and reason, and a world where contradictions do not necessarily explode the superstructure.
I picked the quote from "Culture of growth", Joel Mokyr (pages 284-285). I find the backstory a bit hilarious because it's a rebuttal to someone arguing for a unification of the truth. Structurally, however, it encodes the Puritan affinity for experimental philosophy. You can only do so much with inactive contemplation; at some point, you have to poke the world.