Much of the philosophical work on perception has focused on vision, with very little discussion of the chemical senses—olfaction and gustation. In this paper, I consider the challenge that olfactory experience presents to upholding a representational view of the sense modalities. Given the phenomenology of olfactory experience, it is difficult to see what a representational view of it would be like. Olfaction, then, presents an important challenge for representational theories to overcome. In this paper, I take on this challenge and (...) argue for a representational account of olfactory experience that honors its phenomenology. (shrink)

Seattle rain smelled different from New Orleans rain…. New Orleans rain smelled of sulfur and hibiscus, trumpet metal, thunder, and sweat. Seattle rain, the widespread rain of the Great Northwest, smelled of green ice and sumi ink, of geology and silence and minnow breath.— Tom Robbins, Jitterbug PerfumeMuch of the philosophical literature on perception has focused on vision. This is not surprising, given that vision holds for us a certain prestige. Our visual experience is incredibly rich, offering up a mosaic (...) of apparent three-dimensional objects. For this reason, it is commonplace to suppose that visual experience is world-directed, with the view taking its most popular form in the representational, or content, view. World-directed views contrast with what we might call subjectivist views — views according to which experiences are raw feels or mere sensations. (shrink)

This paper proposes some guidelines for the undeveloped discussion of auditory epistemology. Auditory epistemology is an approach concerned with the perceptual basis for knowledge and belief, specifically around audition. The article pursues two goals. Firstly, it claims that addressing auditory perception from the viewpoint of epistemology is more fruitful than the discussion on phenomenology which has thus far dominated the debates in the literature on sound. Secondly, it elaborates a concrete proposal pertaining to the cooperation of sense-modalities. In so doing, (...) a model for “Perceptual Coherence” is suggested. The first section of the paper critically reviews the problem of perception as it is usually understood in traditional epistemology. An ensuing section outlines the model of perceptual coherence. (shrink)

In the recent literature on the nature of sound, there is an emerging consensus rejection of what might be thought of as the scientifically informed commonsense position: that sounds, whatever else they may be, must be entities that mediate between the source of the sound and the subject hearing it. This paper offers an argument for such "medial" theories of sound. This argument is intended to shift attention from the two considerations that have dominated the debate thus far: the relevant (...) scientific facts about audition and the spatial phenomenology of auditory experience. (shrink)

This paper identifies three claims that feature prominently in recent discussions concerning the experience of silence: that experiences of silence are the most “negative” of perceptions, that we do not hear silences because those silences cause our experiences of silence, and that to hear silence is to hear a temporal region devoid of sound. The principal proponents of this approach are Phillips and Soteriou, and here I present a series of objections to common elements of their attempts to place these (...) three claims within an account of experience of silence. The final section of the paper returns to the first of the three claims and argues that, in fact, there is no good reason to accept it as initially formulated. However, when properly formulated, the claim ceases to offer support for Phillips’s and Soteriou’s approach to experience of silence. (shrink)