After an earlier attempt at armchair social science, I'll try another.

It's not hard to imagine overhearing the following conversation:

A: I especially liked the part where he realized she no longer loved him.
B: Really? I almost gagged at that.
A: Huh. Well, you know, there's no accounting for taste.
B: Suppose so. Hey, you hungry?

The conversation here was cut off with the cliche "there's no accounting for taste." Lots of people, I take it, think that this is perfectly fine and self-explanatory. I disagree on both counts: I think ending a conversation with this cliche is bad and needs some explaining. I'll start by saying why it's bad, which will set the stage for an attempt to explain it. (Most of what I say below, if true, should generalize to other cliches.)

The first reason that the cliche is bad (and this is a minor badness) is the same reason that "it rains too much in Pojoaque" is bad: it's false, and obviously so. There's plenty of accounting for taste, and we do it all the time. Sometimes it's as simple as "it made my ears actually hurt," and sometimes it takes a little history ("I once bought a huge jar of maraschino cherries and ate half of it and felt sick"). Other times it takes some real psychological digging to get at it, as in when part of our taste ties to half-forgotten childhood insecurities. At worst, there will be some biochemical/neurological account. One can take that as an inductive argument for "there's always accounting for taste", and (if one's so inclined) through in some form of the principle of sufficient reason.

The second reason that the cliche is bad (and this is a more major badness) is that finding and discussing the explanations for our tastes is a really valuable activity. It's the sort of thing that lets you get to know someone else on a deeper level than if you had just stopped with what the tastes are. Some of the moments when I really felt like I was getting to know my friends were when one or another of them told me why she didn't like movies with talking animals, or why he prefered typing his papers in gmail, or why he liked Whitehouse concerts. Often, this results in us finding a more fundamental sentiment that we share, despite the initial surface-level disagreement. But when you say "there's no accounting for taste", you're robbing yourself and those around you of such opportunities.

If that was half-convincing, then there's a real question as to why such a cliche gets thrown around the way it does. I don't know why, but that doesn't normally stop me, so here goes. When people who know each other find that their tastes clash, a subtle sense of distance emerges. One thinks, "I thought we were together on this, but now I feel a little isolated." That's not a good feeling to have with friends and others you're close to, so it's natural to take the quickest route possible towards making it clear the two of you are on the same wavelength.

That's where the one advantage of the cliche comes in. Unless we question them, the cliches in our mind have a certain 'resonance'. Unlike other thoughts that jump around in our minds and come out of our mouths, a cliche feels solid. It's the same sort of feeling as the basic principles we explain things to ourselves have - e.g. for me, I admit with a little guilt, "we need to distinguish metaphysics from epistemology" has that vibe. So when we need to get back on the same wavelength in a disagreement, a cliche is a solid point that (unlike a lot of philosophical principles) one can be pretty sure that everyone gets the same vibe from. That's why it can make people feel their relationship is solid again, at least for a moment.

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