Theory #3: Archibald Alison

From "Associationism and Taste Theory in Archibald Alison's Essays" by Steven A. Jauss:

Some earlier taste theorists had appealed to associationist psychology, but they did so primarily to help explain away the obvious diversity of responses to almost any object of taste: private emotional associations with an object, they suggested, often corrupt the process by which individuals arrive at judgements of beauty, thereby giving rise to the apparent diversity of tastes [. . . .] Alison, however, dramatically expands the role of that psychology in taste theory by arguing that genuine aesthetic experience (the "emotion of taste") just is the experience of a special sort of "train" of emotional associations with an object.