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  1. Representationalism and Olfactory Valence.Błażej Skrzypulec - forthcoming - Review of Philosophy and Psychology:1-20.
    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 (...)
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  2. Smellscapes and diachronic olfaction.Błażej Skrzypulec - 2024 - Synthese 68 (204):1-22.
    According to a common view, olfactory experiences lack well-developed spatial content. Nevertheless, there is also an important opposition to such a restricted perspective on olfactory spatiality, which claims that a view ascribing only rudimentary spatial content to olfaction arises from a narrow focus on short and passive olfactory experiences. In particular, it is claimed that due to the active and diachronic aspects of olfaction, olfactory experiences represent ‘smellscapes,’ i.e., spatially organized arrangements of odor plumes. This paper considers the thesis that (...)
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  3. Stinking Philosophy!: Smell Perception, Cognition, and Consciousness.Benjamin D. Young - 2024 - Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
    The nature of olfaction; its importance for understanding perennial issues of philosophy of mind, perception, and consciousness; and its implications for cognitive neuroscience. -/- What are smells? Despite the best efforts of philosophy and the chemosciences, the question remains vexing—but no more perplexing than the historical lapse of the past few centuries to seriously consider a sense that has a key place in philosophy of mind and perception. Stinking Philosophy! is Benjamin Young's answer to this critical lapse. Drawing together more (...)
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  4. An Empirical Solution to the Puzzle of Macbeth’s Dagger.Justin D'Ambrosio - 2022 - Erkenntnis 87 (3):1377-1414.
    In this paper I present an empirical solution to the puzzle of Macbeth's dagger. The puzzle of Macbeth's dagger is the question of whether, in having his fatal vision of a dagger, Macbeth sees a dagger. I answer this question by addressing a more general one: the question of whether perceptual verbs are intensional transitive verbs (ITVs). I present seven experiments, each of which tests a collection of perceptual verbs for one of the three features characteristic of ITVs. One of (...)
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  5. How we talk about smells.Giulia Martina - 2022 - Mind and Language 38 (4):1041-1058.
    Smells are often said to be ineffable, and linguistic research shows that languages like English lack a dedicated olfactory lexicon. Starting from this evidence, I propose an account of how we talk about smells in English. Our reports about the way things smell are comparative: When we say that something smells burnt or like roses, we characterise the thing's smell by noting its similarity to the characteristic smells of certain odorous things (burnt things, roses). The account explains both the strengths (...)
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  6. Seeing and Hearing Flavours.Błażej Skrzypulec - 2022 - In Benjamin D. Young & Andreas Keller (eds.), Theoretical Perspectives on Smell. Routledge.
    According to cognitive psychology, virtually every sensory system influences the way in which flavours are experienced. However, it is less clear which systems are actually constitutive of flavour perception and which have merely causal influence. The paper focuses on the status of vision and audition, which are usually not treated as constitutive in the context of flavour perception. First, it is proposed that the mechanistic explanation debate provides conceptual resources which allow the constitutivity of sensory systems to be assessed. Second, (...)
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  7. Tracking representationalism and olfaction.Błażej Skrzypulec - 2022 - Mind and Language 38 (2):446-463.
    While philosophers of perception develop representational theories of olfactory experiences, there are doubts regarding whether features of olfactory perception can be accommodated within the representationalist framework. In particular, it is argued that the function of olfaction is not to represent stimuli but rather to evaluate it. The paper claims that the major representational accounts of olfaction have problems in accommodating the evaluative aspects of olfactory phenomenology. However, an alternative position, named “olfactory evaluativism,” is proposed which is free of these problems (...)
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  8. Objective smells and partial perspectives.Giulia Martina - 2021 - Rivista di Estetica 3 (78):27-46.
    The thesis that smells are objective and independent of perceivers may seem to be in tension with the phenomenon of perceptual variation. In this paper, I argue that there are principled reasons to think that perceptual variation is not a threat to objectivism about smells and is indeed integral to our perceptual relation to the objective world. I first distinguish various kinds of perceptual variation, and argue that the most challenging cases for the objectivist are those where an odourant smells (...)
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  9. Contextual variation and objectivity in olfactory perception.Giulia Martina - 2021 - Synthese 199 (5-6):12045-12071.
    According to Smell Objectivism, the smells we perceive in olfactory experience are objective and independent of perceivers, their experiences, and their perceptual systems. Variations in how things smell to different perceivers or in different contexts raise a challenge to this view. In this paper, I offer an objectivist account of non-illusory contextual variation: cases where the same thing smells different in different contexts of perception and there is no good reason to appeal to misperception. My central example is that of (...)
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  10. Common Structure of Vision and Olfaction.Błażej Skrzypulec - 2021 - Philosophia 49 (4):1703-1724.
    According to a common opinion, human olfactory experiences are significantly different from human visual experiences. For instance, olfaction seems to have only rudimentary abilities to represent space; it is not clear whether olfactory experiences have any mereological structure; and while vision presents the world in terms of objects, it is a matter of debate whether there are olfactory object-representations. This paper argues that despite these differences visual and olfactory experiences share a hierarchical subject/property structure. Within this structure, olfactorily experienced odours (...)
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  11. Individuating the Senses of ‘Smell’: Orthonasal versus Retronasal Olfaction.Keith A. Wilson - 2021 - Synthese 199:4217-4242.
    The dual role of olfaction in both smelling and tasting, i.e. flavour perception, makes it an important test case for philosophical theories of sensory individuation. Indeed, the psychologist Paul Rozin claimed that olfaction is a “dual sense”, leading some scientists and philosophers to propose that we have not one, but two senses of smell: orthonasal and retronasal olfaction. In this paper I consider how best to understand Rozin’s claim, and upon what grounds one might judge there to be one or (...)
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  12. Olfactory Amodal Completion.Benjamin D. Young & Bence Nanay - 2021 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 103 (2):372-388.
    Amodal completion is the representation of those parts of the perceived object that we get no sensory stimulation from. While amodal completion is rife and plays an essential role in all sense modalities, philosophical discussions of this phenomenon have almost entirely been limited to vision. The aim of this paper is to examine in what sense we can talk about amodal completion in olfaction. We distinguish three different senses of amodal completion – spatial, temporal and feature-based completion – and argue (...)
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  13. Multisensory Consciousness and Synesthesia.Berit Brogaard & Elijah Chudnoff - 2020 - In Berit Brogaard & Elijah Chudnoff (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Consciousness. Routledge. pp. 322-336.
    This chapter distinguishes between two kinds of ordinary multisensory experience that go beyond mere co-consciousness of features (e.g., the experience that results from concurrently hearing a sound in the hallway and seeing the cup on the table). In one case, a sensory experience in one modality creates a perceptual demonstrative to whose referent qualities are attributed in another sensory modality. For example, when you hear someone speak, auditory experience attributes audible qualities to a seen event, a person’s speaking motions. The (...)
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  14. How Reliably Misrepresenting Olfactory Experiences Justify True Beliefs.Angela Mendelovici - 2020 - In Dimitria Gatzia & Berit Brogaard (eds.), The Epistemology of Non-visual Perception. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press. pp. 99-117.
    This chapter argues that olfactory experiences represent either everyday objects or ad hoc olfactory objects as having primitive olfactory properties, which happen to be uninstantiated. On this picture, olfactory experiences reliably misrepresent: they falsely represent everyday objects or ad hoc objects as having properties they do not have, and they misrepresent in the same way on multiple occasions. One might worry that this view is incompatible with the plausible claim that olfactory experiences at least sometimes justify true beliefs about the (...)
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  15. Perceiving Smellscapes.Benjamin D. Young - 2020 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 101 (2):203-223.
    We perceive smells as perduring complex entities within a distal array that might be conceived of as smellscapes. However, the philosophical orthodoxy of Odor Theories has been to deny that smells are perceived as having a distal location. Recent challenges have been mounted to Odor Theories’ veracity in handling the timescale of olfactory perception, how it individuates odors as a distal entities, and their claim that olfactory perception is not spatial. The paper does not aim to dispute these criticisms. Rather, (...)
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  16. Odors: from chemical structures to gaseous plumes.Benjamin D. Young, James A. Escalon & Dennis Mathew - 2020 - Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 111:19-29.
    We are immersed within an odorous sea of chemical currents that we parse into individual odors with complex structures. Odors have been posited as determined by the structural relation between the molecules that compose the chemical compounds and their interactions with the receptor site. But, naturally occurring smells are parsed from gaseous odor plumes. To give a comprehensive account of the nature of odors the chemosciences must account for these large distributed entities as well. We offer a focused review of (...)
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  17. The nonclassical mereology of olfactory experiences.Błażej Skrzypulec - 2019 - Synthese 198 (1):867-886.
    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 (...)
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  18. The structure of audio–visual consciousness.Błażej Skrzypulec - 2019 - Synthese 198 (3):2101-2127.
    It is commonly believed that human perceptual experiences can be, and usually are, multimodal. What is more, a stronger thesis is often proposed that some perceptual multimodal characters cannot be described simply as a conjunction of unimodal phenomenal elements. If it is the case, then a question arises: what is the additional mode of combination that is required to adequately describe the phenomenal structure of multimodal experiences? The paper investigates what types of audio–visual experiences have phenomenal character that cannot be (...)
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  19. Smell's puzzling discrepancy: Gifted discrimination, yet pitiful identification.Benjamin D. Young - 2019 - Mind and Language 35 (1):90-114.
    Mind &Language, Volume 35, Issue 1, Page 90-114, February 2020.
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  20. The Many Problems of Distal Olfactory Perception.Benjamin D. Young - 2019 - In Tony Cheng, Ophelia Deroy & Charles Spence (eds.), Spatial Senses: Philosophy of Perception in an Age of Science. New York: Routledge.
    The chapter unfolds in the following sections. The first section exam- ines the reasons for claiming that olfactory perception is spatially unstruc- tured and our experience of smells has an abstract structure. The second section elucidates the further arguments that olfaction cannot generate figure-ground segregation. The third section assesses the conclusion that olfactory perception and experience cannot solve the MPP. Following the overview of the many problems inherent to distal olfactory percep- tion, MST will be introduced as an alternative perspective (...)
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  21. Smelling Molecular Structure.Benjamin D. Young - 2019 - In Dena Shottenkirk, Manuel Curado & Steven S. Gouveia (eds.), Perception, Cognition and Aesthetics. New York: Routledge. pp. 64-84.
    There is consensus within the chemosciences that olfactory perception is of the molecular structure of chemical compounds, yet within philosophical theories of smell there is little agreement about the nature of smell. The paper critically assesses the current state of debate regarding smells within philosophy in the hopes of setting it upon firm scientific footing. The theories to be covered are: Naïve Realism, Hedonic Theories, Process Theory, Odor Theories, and non-Objectivist Theories. The aforementioned theories will be evaluated based on their (...)
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  22. Odors, Objects and Olfaction.Dan Cavedon-Taylor - 2018 - American Philosophical Quarterly 55 (1):81-94.
    Olfaction represents odors, if it represents anything at all. Does olfaction also represent ordinary objects like cheese, fish and coffee-beans? Many think so. This paper argues that it does not. Instead, we should affirm an austere account of the intentional objects of olfaction: olfactory experience is about odors, not objects. Visuocentric thinking about olfaction has tempted some philosophers to say otherwise.
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  23. Up the nose of the beholder? Aesthetic perception in olfaction as a decision-making process.Ann-Sophie Barwich - 2017 - New Ideas in Psychology 47:157-165.
    Is the sense of smell a source of aesthetic perception? Traditional philosophical aesthetics has centered on vision and audition but eliminated smell for its subjective and inherently affective character. This article dismantles the myth that olfaction is an unsophisticated sense. It makes a case for olfactory aesthetics by integrating recent insights in neuroscience with traditional expertise about flavor and fragrance assessment in perfumery and wine tasting. My analysis concerns the importance of observational refinement in aesthetic experience. I argue that the (...)
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  24. Enactivism's Last Breaths.Benjamin D. Young - 2017 - In M. Curado & S. Gouveia (eds.), Contemporary Perspective in the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge Scholars Press.
    Olfactory perception provides a promising test case for enactivism, since smelling involves actively sampling our surrounding environment by sniffing. Smelling deploys implicit skillful knowledge of how our movement and the airflow around us yield olfactory experiences. The hybrid nature of olfactory experience makes it an ideal test case for enactivism with its esteem for touch and theoretical roots in vision. Olfaction is like vision in facilitating the perception of distal objects, yet it requires us to breath in and physically contact (...)
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  25. Disgusting Smells and Imperativism.Manolo Martínez - 2015 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 22 (5-6):191-200.
    I sketch and defend an imperativist treatment of the phenomenology associated with disgusting smells. This treatment, I argue, allows us to make better sense than other intentionalist alter-natives both of the neuroanatomy of olfaction, and of a natural pre-theoretical stance regarding the sense of smell.
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  26. Olfactory Consciousness Across Disciplines.Benjamin D. Young & Andreas Keller (eds.) - 2015 - frontiers.
    Our sense of smell pervasively influences our most common behaviors and daily experience, yet little is known about olfactory consciousness. Over the past decade and a half research in both the fields of Consciousness Studies and Olfaction has blossomed, however, olfactory consciousness has received little to no attention. The olfactory systems unique anatomy, functional organization, sensory processes, and perceptual experiences offers a fecund area for exploring all aspects of consciousness, as well as a external perspective for re-examining the assumptions of (...)
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  27. A Sense So Rare: Measuring Olfactory Experiences and Making a Case for a Process Perspective on Sensory Perception.Ann-Sophie Barwich - 2014 - Biological Theory 9 (3):258-268.
    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 (...)
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  28. Olfactory consciousness across disciplines.Andreas Keller & Benjamin D. Young - 2014 - Frontiers in Psychology 5.
    Although vision is the de facto model system of consciousness research, studying olfactory consciousness has its own advantages, as this collection of articles emphatically demonstrates. One advantage of olfaction is its computational and phenomenological simplicity, which facilitates the identification of basic principles. Other researchers study olfactory consciousness not because of its simplicity, but because of its unique features. Together, olfaction's simplicity and its distinctiveness make it an ideal system for testing theories of consciousness. In this research topic, the results of (...)
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  29. Aristotle on Odour and Smell.Mark A. Johnstone - 2012 - Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 43:143-83.
    The sense of smell occupies a peculiar intermediate position within Aristotle's theory of sense perception: odours, like colours and sounds, are perceived at a distance through an external medium of air or water; yet in their nature they are intimately related to flavours, the proper objects of taste, which for Aristotle is a form of touch. In this paper, I examine Aristotle's claims about odour and smell, especially in De Anima II.9 and De Sensu 5, to see what light they (...)
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  30. Stinking Consciousness!Benjamin D. Young - 2012 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 19 (3-4):223-243.
    Contemporary neuroscientific theories of consciousness are typically based on the study of vision and have neglected olfaction. Several of these (e.g. Global Workspace Theories, the Information Integration theory, and the various theories offered by Crick and Koch) claim that a thalamic relay is necessary for consciousness. Studies on olfaction and the olfactory system's anatomical structure show this claim to be incorrect, thus showing these theories to be either false or inadequate as general and comprehensive accounts of consciousness. Attempts to rescue (...)
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  31. Smelling lessons.Clare Batty - 2011 - Philosophical Studies 153 (1):161-174.
    Much of the philosophical work on perception has focused on vision. Recently, however, philosophers have begun to correct this ‘tunnel vision’ by considering other modalities. Nevertheless, relatively little has been written about the chemical senses—olfaction and gustation. The focus of this paper is olfaction. In this paper, I consider the question: does human olfactory experience represents objects as thus and so? If we take visual experience as the paradigm of how experience can achieve object representation, we might think that the (...)
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  32. Is Trilled Smell Possible? How the Structure of Olfaction Determines the Phenomenology of Smell.Ed Cooke & Erik Myin - 2011 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 18 (11-12):59-95.
    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 (...)
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  33. What the Nose Doesn't Know: Non-Veridicality and Olfactory Experience.Clare Batty - 2010 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 17 (3-4):10-17.
    We can learn much about perceptual experience by thinking about how it can mislead us. In this paper, I explore whether, and how, olfactory experience can mislead. I argue that, in the case of olfactory experience, the traditional distinction between illusion and hallucination does not apply. Integral to the traditional distinction is a notion of ‘object-failure’—the failure of an experience to present objects accurately. I argue that there are no such presented objects in olfactory experience. As a result, olfactory experience (...)
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  34. The Contents of Olfactory Experience.Christopher Mole - 2010 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 17 (11-12):173-79.
    Clare Batty has recently argued that the content of human olfactory experience is 'a very weak kind of abstract, or existentially quantified content', and so that 'there is no way things smell'. Her arguments are based on two claims. Firstly, that there is no intuitive distinction between olfactory hallucination and olfactory illusion. Secondly, that olfaction 'does not present smell at particular locations', and 'seems disengaged from any particular object'. The present article shows both of these claims to be false. It (...)
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