Thanks for stopping by, and apologies for just kind of raiding your blog for material for my own. But, I thought the discussion concerning preferences versus tastes was interesting and so I thought of playing around with the concepts in a fast and loose manner. Not that anything that I ended up with really works, as the above (argh! badly-written) thoughts indicate.

To your point about preferences as arising sui generis out of the individual as not being sociological – yes, absolutely, you’re right on that, exactly so. What I was trying to get at is how the concept of preferences is in fact used unsociologically, i.e., as reflecting basic facts about individuals without need for further explanation. Of course, as a sociologist I’d never say that individuals have preferences and that’s that – but I think this kind of unreflective application of the concept gets at a way it’s often taken up. With tastes, not so easy to do – when raising the question of taste there’s automatically a hint of reference to matters of cultivation, breeding, social origin, class, distinction, discrimination, comparison, etc etc already built into the term. NOT that we can’t get that same information by investigating preferences, but as an observational mechanism the concept of preference doesn’t lend itself as readily toward drawing forth social comparisons.

But…in any event…I’m still unsure whether there are sociological insights to be gained by positing a strong distinction between tastes and preferences, because I’m unsure whether or not a strong distinction can be drawn. But hey, it’s worth a try and thanks for letting me join in on the thinking-out-loud!