Thus aesthetic judgments might be seen to be based on the senses, emotions, intellectual opinions, will, desires, culture, preferences, values, subconscious behavior, conscious decision, training, instinct, sociological institutions, or some complex combination of these, depending on exactly which theory one employs. Modern aestheticians often asserted that will and desire were almost dormant in aesthetic experience yet preference and choice have seemed important aesthetics to some 20th century thinkers. It is what a thing means or symbolizes for us that is often what we are judging. Likewise aesthetic judgments seem to often be at least partly intellectual and interpretative. We can be attracted, repulsed, and turned on, and experience the frission of our conflicting judgments of taste all at once. Aesthetic judgments can clearly often be very fine-grained and internally contradictory. Perhaps we judge it to be repulsive partly because it signifies for us over-consumption of gasoline and offends our political or moral values. Perhaps we judge a Lamborghini to be beautiful partly because it is desirable as a status symbol. Thus, judgments of aesthetic value can become linked to judgments of economic, political, or moral value. Evaluations of beauty may well be linked to desirability, perhaps even to sexual desirability. Victorians in Britain often saw African sculpture as ugly, but just a few decades later, Edwardian audiences saw the same sculptures as being beautiful. Likewise, aesthetic judgments may be culturally conditioned to some extent. These subconscious reactions may even be partly constitutive of what makes our judgment a judgment that the landscape is sublime. Seeing a sublime view of a landscape may make us stop and softly say "wow" while our heart skips a beat and then races faster and our eyes widen. Aesthetic judgments may be linked to emotions or, like emotions, partially embodied in our physical reactions. Yet disgust can often be a learned or cultural issue too as Darwin pointed out, seeing a stripe of soup in a man's beard is disgusting even though soup is not itself disgusting. In disgust it seems clear that sensory detection is linked in instinctual ways to facial expressions, and even behaviors like the gag reflex. Judgments of aesthetic value seem to often involve many other kinds of issues as well.
What factors go into an aesthetic judgment? Judgments of beauty are sensory, emotional, and intellectual all at once for Kant. For Immanuel Kant "enjoyment" is the result when pleasure arises from sensation, but judging something to be "beautiful" has a third requirement: sensation must give rise to pleasure by engaging our capacities of reflective contemplation. For David Hume delicacy of taste is not merely "the ability to detect all the ingredients in a composition" but also our sensibility "to pains as well as pleasures, which escape the rest of mankind." Thus, the sensory discrimination is linked to capacity to pleasure.
But on most accounts, aesthetic judgments go beyond the merely sensory. If my palate is unrefined, I may miss much of the subtlety of a fine beer and not be in a position to judge these features of it. Judgments of aesthetic value clearly rely on our ability to discriminate at a sensory level.