Abstract
Most philosophers consider olfactory experiences to be very poor in comparison to other sense modalities. And because olfactory experiences seem to lack the spatial content necessary to object perception, philosophers tend to maintain that smell is purely sensational or abstract. I argue in this paper that the apparent poverty and spatial indeterminateness of odor experiences does not reflect the “subjective” or “abstract” nature of smell, but only that smell is not directed to particular things. According to the view defended in this paper, odors are properties of stuffs. This view, motivated by several arguments grounded in the phenomenology of olfactory experience, explains in particular why odors appear to be located both in the air around our nose and in the objects from which they emanate. It also explains the power of smell in the task of discriminating chemical compounds.
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Notes
Unfortunately, the term “odor” has been used to refer to a particular theory that identifies the object of olfaction as gaseous emanations, clouds of molecules, or vaporous entities. As the rest of the paper should make clear, the use of "odor" here does not represent an endorsement of this particular theory.
The idea that visual perception involves a direct acquaintance with material objects doesn't exclude the seeing of other kinds of entities. As stressed by O'Callaghan: "This doesn’t rule out that you’re ever visually aware of other material things, such as parts of material objects, or events in which material objects participate, or that you’re ever visually aware of qualities or properties of material objects, or relations among them. But being visually aware of each of those sorts of things standardly also involves being visually aware of material objects" (O'Callaghan 2011, p. 145).
See Casati and Dokic (2005).
chap. II, section II.
Aristotle, On the Soul, translated by J.A. Smith, II.9.
Porter (1999).
Several studies show that humans and mice can smell genetic variations in a potential mate, suggesting that olfactory detection of body odor operates as a mechanism of avoiding inbreeding.
Turin and Sanchez (2008, p. 228).
Gilbert (2008, p. 4).
Matthen (2005, p. 284).
Lycan (2000, p. 281).
To be more accurate, I should stress that Lycan (1996, chap. 7) argues that smells represent "clouds of molecules diffusing in the air" and also ordinary objects in an indirect level of representation. But his approach differs from the one advocated here in the sense that Lycan's notion of content is teleological. However, he insists that at the phenomenological level smell is just a quale which does not itself present anything else than "a modification of consciousness, a qualitative condition or event in us" (Lycan 2000, p. 281).
Batty (2011, p. 172).
Dretske holds that a subject S sees an object D if and only if D is "visually differentiated from its immediate environment by S" (1969, p. 20), except for the "limiting cases" in which the object seen "has no environment" (1969, p. 26). In those cases, the differentiation clause "becomes inoperative when nothing appears to S that is not part of D" (1969, p. 27).
As Richardson rightly points out, in resisting the idea that odors are external to the body, philosophers have often supposed that smell is nonexteroceptive.
Because stuffs have neither shape nor size, the chemist can store stuffs by keeping samples and pulverize stuffs before conducting experiments.
Soentgen (2008, p. 80).
Something is said to be homeomerous if it remains invariant across any arbitrary partition. If X is iron, a portion of X is iron. However, most stuffs are only "relatively homeomerous" because there is for most stuffs a limitation to their homeomerosity.
See above, p. 2.
Richardson (2013, pp. 403–404).
See n. 15.
The fact that olfactory experiences are caused by portions of stuffs doesn't mean that olfactory experiences represent portions of stuffs rather than stuffs. As stressed above, unlike stuffs, portions of stuff are localized in regions of space. You can for instance move the portion of water filling your glass by moving the glass, but water per se cannot be moved. The fact that portions of stuffs are causally responsible for our perceptions of stuffs raises many interesting questions, but it should not force us to conclude that we don't perceive stuffs directly. In fact, I think that a closer look at olfaction shows exactly the opposite. Portions of stuffs, like clouds of odoriferous molecules, are only indirectly perceived in olfaction. What is directly perceived are the olfactory properties of their stuff discriminated by our sense of smell.
Odors can be considered as a particular case of traces. Like odors, traces are often small quantities of stuff detached from their original location. At a crime scene, for example, all kinds of stuff residues can be used as trace evidence: soil, sand, paint, fibers, hairs, blood, saliva, etc. The fact that odors are traces is also manifested in the way olfactory exploration is performed. Smelling relies on repetitive sniffs that deliver odor molecules from the environment to olfactory receptors. Tracking an odor therefore presupposes sampling of the environment in order to find chemical traces left by odor sources.
According to Gilbert (2008), and contrarily to what is often claimed, there is no serious scientific estimation of the number of odors.
For a short history of the chemical discoveries that made modern perfumery possible, see Turin and Sanchez (2008, pp. 33–40).
Cf. Porter (2000).
Lycan (2000, p. 277).
As suggested to me by Kevin Mulligan, distinguishing between spatial location and spatial extension could be useful for understanding the spatiality of smells. The fact that smells have no extension could account for the fact that they are located in space but lack spatial parts.
O'Callaghan (2007, p. 14).
In addition to individual things, like trees or teapots, visual perception can also be directed to events or processes, like car accidents or footraces. It seems that this diversity is also available in olfaction. As emphasized above, we can smell some transformations from one stuff to another. The odor of smoke, for example, corresponds to the perception of a process (combustion) rather than to the perception of a persisting stuff.
One notable exception is Soentgen, who has explored the notion of stuff in phenomenology (Soentgen 2008) and written several detailed monographs about particular stuffs, like coffee, wood, cacao, aluminum, etc.
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Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Stuart Firestein, Kevin Mulligan, Emma Tieffenbach, Victoria Tschumi, and to two anonymous referees of this journal for their comments and suggestions.
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Mizrahi, V. Sniff, smell, and stuff. Philos Stud 171, 233–250 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-013-0265-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-013-0265-9