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, (...) what will be shown is that Molecular Structure Theory, a refinement of Odor Theory, can be further developed to handle these challenges. The theory is further refined by focusing on distal perception that requires considering the perceptual object as mereologically complex persisting odor against a background scene conceived of as a smellscape. What will be offered is an expansion of Molecular Structure Theory to account for distal smell perception within natural environments. (shrink)

Theories of perception have traditionally dismissed the sense of smell as a notoriously variable and highly subjective sense, mainly because it does not easily fit into accounts of perception based on visual experience. So far, philosophical questions about the objects of olfactory perception have started by considering the nature of olfactory experience. However, there is no philosophically neutral or agreed conception of olfactory experience: it all depends on what one thinks odors are. We examine the existing philosophical methodology for addressing (...) our sense of smell: on the one hand appeals to phenomenology that focus on the experiential dimensions of odor perception and on the other approaches that look at odor sources and their material dimensions. We show that neither strategy provides enough information to account for the human sense of smell and argue that the inclusion of the missing dimension of biology, with its concern for the function (or functions) of olfaction, provides the means to develop a satisfactory and empirically informed philosophy of smell. (shrink)

In this paper, we outline and defend a view on which in olfactory experience we can, and often do, smell ordinary things of various kinds—for instance, cookies, coffee, and cake burnings—and the olfactory properties they have. A challenge to this view are cases of smelling in the absence of the source of a smell, such as when a fishy smell lingers after the fish is gone. Such cases, many philosophers argue, show that what we perceive in olfactory experience are odour (...) objects, and not ordinary things. On behalf of our opponent, we articulate a screening-off argument based on cases of lingering smells for the thesis that we do not smell ordinary things. We then develop an alternative account of these cases that is consistent with our view. In doing so, we call into question two claims that are typically built into the notion of an odour object. (shrink)