Paracompletion Question 1 - CAT 2025
Sentence: While taste is related to judgment, with thinkers at the time often writing, for example, about “judgments of taste” or using the two terms interchangeably, taste retains a vital link to pleasure, embodiment, and personal specificity that is too often elided in post-Kantian ideas about judgment—a link that Arendt herself was working to restore.
Paragraph: __(1)__ . Denneny focused on taste rather than judgment in order to highlight what he believed was a crucial but neglected historical change. __(2)__ . Over the course of the seventeenth century and early eighteenth century, across Western Europe, the word taste took on a new extension of meaning, no longer referring specifically to gustatory sensation and the delights of the palate but becoming, for a time, one of the central categories for aesthetic—and ethical—thinking. __(3)__ . Tracing the history of taste in Spanish, French, and British aesthetic theory, as Denneny did, also provides a means to recover the compelling and relevant writing of a set of thinkers who have been largely neglected by professional philosophy. __(4)__.
Step-by-Step Explanation
The main idea of the paragraph is to explain why Denneny chose to study “taste” instead of “judgment.” He wanted to show how the meaning of taste changed over time and why it became important in the study of art, beauty, and even ethics. The paragraph also points out that many writers who discussed these ideas were later ignored.
Blank (3) makes the most sense because the sentence before it explains how the meaning of taste changed. The missing sentence can then explain what made the idea of taste different from ordinary judgment. Taste was connected not only to making judgments, but also to feelings, physical experience, and individual preferences. This makes it a useful idea for understanding aesthetics.
The other blanks do not fit as well. Blank (1) comes before the paragraph explains the historical change, so the idea would appear too soon. Blank (2) would interrupt the explanation of how the meaning of taste developed. Blank (4) comes after the paragraph has already moved toward discussing Denneny’s method and the thinkers he studied. Therefore, blank (3) is the best choice.