The given sentence is missing in the paragraph below. Decide where it best fits among the options 1, 2, 3, or 4 indicated in the paragraph.

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) ____.

The paragraph explains why Denneny focuses on “taste” instead of “judgment” and how this choice helps bring attention to an important but often ignored part of aesthetic and philosophical history. It first shows Denneny pointing out a forgotten historical change, then explains that in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, “taste” grew from a physical sense to a main idea in aesthetics and ethics. Finally, it discusses how tracing this history helps recover overlooked thinkers and ideas. The missing sentence fits best at blank (3) because, by this point in the paragraph, it has already been described how ‘taste’ expanded. The sentence adds to the discussion by explaining why taste is important: even though it was often seen as the same as judgment, it kept its link to pleasure, the body, and personal experience, which later theories often ignored. This directly builds on the previous point about taste’s central role in aesthetics and ethics.

Putting the sentence at blank (1) would be too early, since the paragraph has not yet talked about how the concept of ‘taste’ changed over time. Placing it at blank (2) would break up the flow from Denneny’s motivation to the bigger historical story. If it went at blank (4), it would feel awkward because the paragraph there moves on to Denneny’s method and the recovery of overlooked thinkers, not the difference between taste and judgment. So, blank (3) is the most coherent and logical position.