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Sniffing and smelling

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Abstract

In this paper I argue that olfactory experience, like visual experience, is exteroceptive: it seems to one that odours, when one smells them, are external to the body, as it seems to one that objects are external to the body when one sees them. Where the sense of smell has been discussed by philosophers, it has often been supposed to be non-exteroceptive. The strangeness of this philosophical orthodoxy makes it natural to ask what would lead to its widespread acceptance. I argue that philosophers have been misled by a visuocentric model of what exteroceptivity involves. Since olfaction lacks the spatial features that make vision exteroceptive the conclusion that olfaction is nonexteroceptive can appear quite compelling, particularly in the absence of an alternative model of exteroceptivity appropriate to olfaction. I offer a model according to which odours seem to be external to the body because they seem to be brought into the nose from without by sniffing and breathing through the nostrils. I argue that some natural-seeming objections to this model rely on substantive assumptions about how the senses are distinguished from one another, and how perceptual experience is put together out of its modality-specific parts, that require defence.

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Notes

  1. See O’Callaghan (2011) for an interesting discussion of this claim.

  2. In a series of recent papers, Clare Batty has argued that representationalism is true of olfaction (see especially her 2010a, b). In her 2010c she argues that accounts of representational content cannot, if they are to be true of olfaction, be based on a visual model. Tye (2000) also suggests, though in passing, that his representationalism can be extended to both taste and smell. The features of olfactory experience I will be concerned with here are ones that can be characterised independently of any theory of perception.

  3. See Richardson (forthcoming) on the question of whether flavour perception is partly olfactory. For more general discussion of the role of science in determining what senses we have and which ones we’re using in any given instance of perceiving see Keeley (2002), Nudds (2004, 2011) and Gray (2011). See Grice (1962) and Nudds (2004), for representative discussion of the question of how the senses are distinguished from one another. I return to this issue in Sect. 6.

  4. This is consistent with odours being thought of as events of some kind, as O’Callaghan (2010), and Casati (2005) argue we should think of sounds. I put aside here the question of the relationship between odours and the clouds of odiferous molecules that are the stimuli for olfaction, which Batty discusses in her 2009. The account given here could be adapted, mutatis mutandis, to accommodate the view that odours are properties of something other than the source, perhaps of the air, or of this cloud of molecules. See Martin (2010) for the view that odours are universals.

  5. The phrase ‘mere thought contact’ is from O’Shaughnessy (2002, p. 453): this is the kind of contact he thinks we have with the sources of sounds. If one thinks that perception itself is a cognitive attitude then ‘perceiving that…’ will imply the necessity of having a cognitive attitude other than the perceptual state itself. Whether one should think that is, of course, beyond the scope of this paper.

  6. See Robinson (1994, pp. 80–84).

  7. See also Smith (2002, p. 143). This would not be an obstacle to olfactory perception of sources if one was happy to think of the relevant conceptual or cognitive resources as built into perception itself.

  8. See Herz and Von Clef (2001) for evidence that how we perceive an odour can be significantly influenced by the verbal label provided for it.

  9. Even those who deny that colours are really ‘in’ the objects we see allow that that’s where they seem to be. See, for example, Boghossian and Velleman (1989).

  10. For such views of bodily sensation see, for example, Armstrong (1962), Martin (1998) and Crane (2003).

  11. Whilst Lycan denies that olfactory experiences seem to present their subjects with any mind-independent object or quality, he argues that olfactory perception does, nevertheless, represent odours, which are extra-bodily, mind-independent phenomena (2000, p. 281).

  12. See Broad (1927, pp. 254–257; 1942, pp. 10–11). For discussion see Price (1959, p. 458).

  13. This is not to deny that there might be other sources of motivation, too. Kant thought that taste and smell made one aware (predominantly) of one’s sense organs, because ‘…the idea obtained from them is more a representation of enjoyment than of cognition of the external object’ (2006, p. 46), pleasure and displeasure being ‘determinations of the subject, and so cannot be ascribed to external objects’ (2006, p. 136).

  14. See Hopkins (1998, Chap. 7) and Batty (2010a) for discussion of differences in the spatial character of experience in different senses.

  15. See, for example, von Bekesy (1964), Kobal et al. (1989), Radil and Wysocki (1998) and Frasnelli et al. (2009).

  16. There seems to be a near-consensus that olfactory stimuli can only be lateralized ‘when the substances additionally or mainly excited the trigeminal nerve, i.e. if they elicited side effects such as pain, cooling/warming, or pressure’ (Kobal et al. 1989, p. 130). Frasnelli et al. (2009, p. 142) suggest that ‘if an odorant can be localized, it is an indication that it also stimulates the trigeminal nerve’.

  17. See also the discussion in Smith (2002). The HOT/COLD game example is from Pasnau’s (1999) discussion of hearing. He points out that Gibson (1966) seems to think of hearing in this way—and argues that he is wrong to do so.

  18. The model is Teghtsoonian’s—see Mainland and Sobel (2006) for a review of scientific literature on the role of sniffing in olfaction.

  19. As a reviewer for this journal pointed out, it would be interesting to know whether there are cases in which subjects are (temporarily) incapable of feeling air in their nostrils yet still have olfactory experience. At least on the face of it, the experience of such subjects would be a test case for the view presented here.

  20. Her interest here though is with whether olfactory experience has any mind-independent object, rather than with whether it has an extra-bodily one.

  21. For discussion of some methods of determining whether some property is represented in perception, see Siegel (2006) and Kriegel (2007).

  22. See references in footnote 3 for representative discussion.

  23. See Moore (1903).

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Acknowledgments

Versions of this paper were read in Warwick, UEA and Manchester. I am grateful for helpful comments and suggestions on those occasions. Particular thanks to Stephen Butterfill, Andy Hamilton, Alex Kelly, Paul Noordhof, Ian Phillips, Oliver Rashbrook, Elizabeth Schechter, Matt Soteriou, Roger Squires and a referee for this journal.

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Richardson, L. Sniffing and smelling. Philos Stud 162, 401–419 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9774-6

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