Abstract
According to an ordinary view, we distinguish, classify, and appreciate food and beverages according to their taste. However, scientists seem to disagree with this naive view. They maintain that we don't really perceive the lemony taste of a cake or the delicate smoky taste of a single-malt whiskey, because what we ascribe to taste is in reality mostly perceived by smell. As opposed to this scientific consensus regarding taste, I will defend a naive view of taste and deny that olfaction is involved in what we naively call taste. Like the uninformed layman, I will maintain that when I eat a strawberry, what I really perceive is its taste, not its smell or flavor.
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Notes
A classic example is the McGurk effect. In this effect, an auditory sound /ba/ paired with a visual lip movement associated with /ga/ often produces the percept /da/ (McGurk and MacDonald 1976).
I will use the expressions “sensory modality” and “ sense” interchangeably to refer to the perceptual faculties including at least the following: sight, touch, hearing, smell, and taste.
Although I defend a classical view of the way senses are distinguished, I don’t endorse the classical Aristotelian taxonomy of the senses that commits to the existence of only five senses. I believe that the proper object criterion that will be defended in section 4 allows for the existence of many other possible senses (such as thermoception and trigeminal perception).
See Erickson (2008) for a criticism of the notion of basic taste.
For related arguments against the revisionist view put forward by scientists regarding the everyday conception of taste, see Richardson (2013).
For a critical approach to the notion of basic taste, see Erickson (2008), which attacks the concept of basic taste by arguing that it relies on a poorly defined hypothesis that cannot be tested scientifically.
For a recent discussion of interoception see Ritchie and Carruthers (2013)
In fact, taste receptors similar to those found on the tongue have also been found in the human intestines. This discovery introduces new difficulties for the sense organ criterion, because experiences of taste are not located in the guts although they apparently harbor taste organs similar to those located in the mouth. According to these new findings, sense organs aren’t sufficient to individuate the senses. As I will argue, they are not necessary either.
Unlike Richardson (2013), who suggests that the exteroceptivity of smell is ensured by the act of sniffing, I do not believe that the exteroceptivity of smell is guaranteed by the act of sniffing or that sniffing is constitutive of the olfactory experience itself (for more details, see Mizrahi 2014). We certainly know that there is a causal dependency between the act of sniffing and olfactory experiences, but there is no reason to think that the act of sniffing is part of our olfactory experiences. In this regard, olfaction is similar to the other sense modalities. Visual experiences result, for example, from the opening of the eyes, but there is no reason to believe that a visual experience of a red tomato includes information about the eyes of the observer. The knowledge that a specific sense organ is causally related to a perceptual experience seems therefore not to be determined by some phenomenal features of the perceptual experience itself but rather by some generalization about the existing correlation between a kind of experience (such as visual or olfactory) and the availability of particular sense organs (for an opposite position, see O’Dea 2011).
Although I do not consider the most general questions regarding the reliability of perception as a source of knowledge and the realism of the senses, I argue that if the notion of sense is scientifically meaningful, it must explicated by reference to the phenomenology of perceptual experiences.
The notion of “proper object” or “proper sensible” is used in Aristotle’s De Anima to distinguish the five external senses. Each sense, according to Aristotle, has sole access to its own proper sensible, and there is a unique proper sensible for each sense.
The realist view of proper objects fits nicely into naive realist theories of perception, which hold that perceptual experiences are necessarily constituted by relations of conscious sensory awareness to mind-independent objects, properties, and events. For a clear presentation of the diversity of naive realist theories, see Crane and French (2005, section 3.4).
There are basically two different ways to defend a realist view of proper objects: reductionism, which reduces proper objects to physical properties (see, for example, Hilbert 1987; Byrne and Hilbert 2003; Tye 2000), and primitivism, which holds that proper objects are sui generis entities that cannot be identified with entities specified in other terms (see, for example, Campbell 1993; Yablo 1995).
Massin elaborates his answer to the POC in Massin (2014). Contrary to his earlier view, cited above, Massin analyzes the relationship between proper sensibles and common sensibles in terms of “filling” rather than dependence. In the view defended in Massin (2014), proper sensibles are not properties or events, but dependent stuffs that fill common sensibles. Massin argues that unlike dependence relations, filling relations can be perceived and therefore elucidate the phenomenal difference between feeling and seeing a shape.
Although synesthesia has been described as the mixing of the senses, I think it should be described as the triggering of one sensory modality by the stimulation of a different modality. Synesthesia characterized in this way would not constitute a case of confusion of the senses; it would, on the contrary, rely on a prior distinction of the sensory modalities.
See O’Callaghan (2007), chap. 1.
See, for instance, how Shepherd (2012, p. 18) describes as a “mirage” what happens when we taste certain foods: “And astonishingly, the sense of flavor produced is a mirage; it appears to come from the mouth, where the food is located, but the smell part, of course, arises from the smell pathway. No wonder it has taken so long to begin to realize what an amazing sense retronasal smell is.”
Philosophical views regarding the spatial content of olfactory experiences are quite diverse. Lycan suggests that smell is aspatial (2000, p. 278), Smith holds that we experience smells in our nose (2002, p. 139), Richardson maintains that odors are in the vicinity of the nose (2013, p. 417), and Matthen (2005, p. 284) and Batty (2010b, p. 112) claim that odors are indeterminately located around the perceiver.
I have argued Mizrahi (2014) that smell is directed to stuffs rather than individual objects. I believe that a detailed study of the nature of taste will reveal that taste is another case of stuff perception. It is remarkable, in effect, that food perception does not involve the perception of any particular object, but that the multimodal perception that characterizes food perception is rather linked with the destruction of the individuals entering the mouth. By chewing aliments, we not only extract information about tastes, smells, temperatures, textures, etc., but also gain information about the stuffs that exhibit those properties.
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Many thanks to Olivier Massin, Kevin Mulligan and to the anonymous referee of this journal for their comments and suggestions.
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Mizrahi, V. Just a Matter of Taste. Rev.Phil.Psych. 8, 411–431 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-016-0312-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-016-0312-5