Individuating the Senses of 'Smell': Orthonasal versus Retronasal Olfaction (original) (raw)
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“Taste-smell confusions” and the duality of the olfactory sense
Perception & Psychophysics, 1982
In this paper, I argue that olfaction is the only dual sensory modality, in that it senses both objects in the external world and objects in the body (mouth). I suggest that the same olfactory stimulation may be perceived and evaluated in two qualitatively different ways, depending on whether it is referred to the mouth or the external world. I begin with a discussion of disparities in the affective value of odors and tastes of the same substance. On eating a piece of Limburger cheese, a friend once commented to me: "I really love the taste, if I can only get it by my nose." The absurdity of this statement hit me head-on. Surely, the odor of the cheese is the primary cause of its repulsiveness. Yet, this same odor, which also constitutes the most distinctive aspect of its "taste," becomes pleasant when it is sensed in conjunction with ingestion. This affect reversal is no rarity. I asked 42 undergraduates whether they disliked the smell, but liked the taste, of any foods. Specific categories were suggested (strong cheese, fish, eggs, vegetables, fruits, meat), although subjects were free to indicate items outside of these classes. More than half of the subjects (22) indicated such a response to strong cheese. The 42 subjects generated 72 instances, with fish (15) and eggs (11) following strong cheese in frequency. The opposite affect reversal, liking the smell and disliking the taste, is yet more common. Black, unsweetened coffee is a common example. However, this type of reversal presents no interesting psychological problem. The taste (in the narrow sense) properties causing the dislike are never sensed in the external object. While the odor is shared by an object-at-a-distance and an object-in-the-mouth, the taste appears only with the latter. So, black coffee is disliked in the mouth because a bitter taste is added to a pleasant odor. It is well known that affective responses are context dependent. The same foul odor can be pleasant Some of the research described in this paper was supported by National Science Foundation Grant BNS 76 80108. I thank Fritzsche-D&O for providing flavor extracts that were components of some of the exotic fruit juice stimuli; Susan Fahrbach, Christopher Earl, Elise Hochfeld, and Michael Mark for participation in the design and data collection in the study on identification of the tastes associated with learned smells; and
A Representational Account of Olfactory Experience
Much of the philosophical work on perception has focused on vision, with very little discussion of the chemical senses—olfaction and gustation. In this paper, I consider the challenge that olfactory experience presents to upholding a representational view of the sense modalities. Given the phenomenology of olfactory experience, it is difficult to see how a representational view of it might go. Olfaction, then, presents an important challenge for representational theories to overcome. In this paper, I take on this challenge and argue for a representational account of olfactory experience that honors its phenomenology.
This paper considers what olfactory experience can tell us about the controversy over qualia and, in particular, the debate that focuses on the alleged transparency of experience. Although some philosophers claim that transparency holds for all of the sense modalities, any detailed discussion of it focuses on vision. But transparency seems unintuitive for olfactory experience. This paper argues that olfactory experience is indeed transparent and that explanations of what transparency is have been obscured by a reliance on the visual model. In this way, the paper clarifies and advances the debate about transparency.
Biological Theory, 2014
Philosophical discussion about the reality of sensory perceptions has been hijacked by two tendencies. First, talk about perception has been largely centered on vision. Second, the realism question is traditionally approached by attaching objects or material structures to matching contents of sensory perceptions. These tendencies have resulted in an argumentative impasse between realists and anti-realists, discussing the reliability of means by which the supposed causal information transfer from object to perceiver takes place. Concerning the nature of sensory experiences and their capacity to provide access to reality, this article challenges the standard categories through which most arguments in this debate have been framed to date. Drawing on the underexplored case of olfaction, I first show how the details of the perception process determine the modalities of sensory experiences. I specifically examine the role of measurement and analyze its influence on the characterization of perceptions in olfaction. My aim is to argue for an understanding of perception through a process view, rather than one pertaining to objects and properties of objects.
The nonclassical mereology of olfactory experiences
Synthese, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-018-02072-x, 2019
While there is a growing philosophical interest in analysing olfactory experiences, the mereological structure of odours considered in respect of how they are perceptually experienced has not yet been extensively investigated. The paper argues that odours are perceptually experienced as having a mereological structure, but this structure is significantly different from the spatial mereological structure of visually experienced objects. Most importantly, in the case of the olfactory part-structure, the classical weak supplementation principle is not satisfied. This thesis is justified by referring to empirical results in olfactory science concerning the human ability to identify components in complex olfactory stimuli. Further, it is shown how differences between olfactory and visual mereologies may arise from the way in which these modalities represent space.
Current Biology, 2004
Of all the senses, smell is the least understood. Despite centuries of investigation, science can still offer no satisfying theory for why a particular substance smells the way it does. Nor do we understand in any detail how we are able to distinguish the smell of a peach from that of an apricot, or how a particular smell can trigger longforgotten memories of a distant time or place. Human olfactory psychophysics, the study of how humans perceive odors, is possible because humans have acquired language. Human subjects can report directly if something smells, characterize the smell, or decide if two smells are distinguishable. Answers to these simple questions have the potential to provide insight into important questions: What (if any) is the relationship between the chemical structure of an odor and its perceived smell? What types of olfactory stimuli can be discriminated, and how is this accomplished in the nose and the brain? How does experience modulate our perception of odorants? There are of course many things that cannot be done in humans, for instance genetic manipulation and electrophysiology, but these types of approaches are successfully used in animal models.
Representationalism and Olfactory Valence
Review of Philosophy and Psychology, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13164-023-00707-8, 2023
One of the crucial characteristics of the olfactory modality is that olfactory experiences commonly present odours as pleasant or unpleasant. Indeed, because of the importance of the hedonic aspects of olfactory experience, it has been proposed that the role of olfaction is not to represent the properties of stimuli, but rather to generate a valence-related response. However, despite a growing interest among philosophers in the study of the chemical senses, no dominant theory of sensory pleasure has emerged in the case of human olfaction. The aim of this paper is to develop an argument based on the way in which olfactory valence is neurally encoded; one that demonstrates an advantage of the indicative representational approach to olfactory valence over approaches that characterise valence in terms of desires or commands. The argument shows that it is plausible to understand olfactory valence, at least in part, in terms of indicative representations.
Smell 'sensations' are among the most mysterious of conscious experiences, and have been cited in defense of the thesis that the character of perceptual experience is independent of the physical events that seem to give rise to it. Here we review the scientific literature on olfaction, and we argue that olfaction has a distinctive profile in relation to the other modalities, on four counts: in the physical nature of the stimulus, in the sensorimotor interactions that characterize its use, in the structure of its intramodal distinctions and in the functional role that it plays in people's behaviour. We present two thought experiments in which we detail what would be involved in transforming sounds into smells, and also smells into colours. Through these thought-experiments, we argue that the experiential character of smell derives precisely from the structural features of olfaction, and that an embodied account of olfactory phenomenology is called for.
The Nature of Sensory Experience: the case of taste and tasting
Phenomenology and Mind Online Journal 2013, pp. 292-313 ISSN 2280-7853 (print), ISSN 2239-4028, 2013
Recently, psychologists and neuroscientists have provided a great deal of evidence showing that perceptual experiences are mostly multimodal. As perceivers, we don’t usually recognize them as such. We think of the experiences we are having as either visual, or auditory or tactile, not realising that they often arise from the fusion of different sensory inputs. The experience of tasting something is one such case. What we call ‘taste’ is the result of the multisensory integration of touch taste and smell. These unified flavour experiences provide a challenge when trying to reconcile the underlying processing story with the conscious experience of subjects, but they also challenge assumptions about our access to our own experiences and whether how we conceive of those experiences plays any in role in accounting for their ultimate nature.