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Abstract
Several theorists argue that one does not experience something as being at or coming from a distance or direction in olfaction. In contrast to this, I suggest that there can be a variety of spatial aspects of both synchronic and diachronic olfactory experiences, including spatial distance and direction. I emphasise, however, that these are not aspects of every olfactory experience. Thus, I suggest renouncing the widespread assumption there is a uniform account of the nature, including the spatial nature, of what is experienced in olfactory experience.
Acknowledgements
For helpful discussion of the material for this paper, I would like to thank the audiences at the Perceiving at a Distance Conference at the University of Antwerp in June 2016, the iCog3 Conference at University College London in February 2016, and the CSMN Annual Retreat at the University of Oslo in January 2016. I am also grateful for the comments from two anonymous reviewers for this journal.
Notes
1. By contrast, there are several spatial aspects of animals’ olfactory experiences, as documented by a large scientific literature (see e.g. Gagliardo Citation2013 for an overview of research on olfactory navigation in birds).
2. See Phillips (Citation2008) for a discussion of why it may be difficult to account for synchronic experience of entities that are extended in time.
3. An alternative way to distinguish between diachronic and synchronic experience would be to define diachronic experiences as those lasting more than, say, 30 m/s. I avoid this way of making the distinction because I think the time at or during which an experience lasts is inessential to its nature. I sympathize with Soteriou’s (Citation2007) view that a subject may have several perceptual experiences at a given time or period of time, and that asking for the experience had at a given time is misguided.
4. A similar argument can be gleaned from Lycan, who seeks to support the claim that synchronic olfactory experience is aspatial by appealing to the fact that a blindfolded subject will be unable to tell where a smell is located (Citation2000, 278–279 and 287, n. 13). By contrast to Lycan, Batty does not claim that olfaction is aspatial, but only that a smell’s location cannot be differentiated from other locations in allocentric space.
5. Batty (Citation2010d) and Young (Citation2016) appeal to the implausibility of a non-veridical olfactory experience in this argument. Richardson argues slightly differently. She claims that, while sources make no difference to the olfactory experience, odours do. So, she concludes, it is more reasonable to think that odours are the objects of olfaction. (See Richardson Citation2013, 404)
6. It is unclear to me why this fact should make us conclude that sources are not perceived in olfaction. For it would seem, by analogous reasoning, that material objects are not perceived in vision, since only some of the electromagnetic radiation that the object reflects is responsible for making the object visually appear as it does.
7. For simplicity I speak of ‘faint smells’ rather than ‘low concentrations of an odour’. I do not mean to commit to any particular view of the objects of olfactory experience by speaking thus.
8. This effect is for instance exploited repeatedly in Mascagni’s opera Cavalleria Rusticana.
9. See Wilson and Stevenson (Citation2007, 71–74) for a brief review of research on concentration effects.
10. As Cleland et al. (Citation2012) show, naïve mice first experience different concentrations of an odour as if they were different smells. They learn to recognise the odour after repeated exposure. How they manage this, is difficult to account for. Wilson and Stevenson (Citation2007, 73–74) provide an explanation that appeals to the pattern of glomerular activity.
11. That past olfactory experience constitutes knowledge on the basis of which one forms beliefs about one’s current olfactory experiences is also assumed in Lycan (Citation2014, 68). Batty (Citation2014, 241–242) makes a similar assumption.
12. Wilson and Stevenson do not discuss the spatial nature of olfaction much. Without further justification, they write that ‘[o]bject formation in the olfactory system presumably does not involve an external spatial component’ (Citation2007, 23).
13. The influence of training on identification and even hedonistic evaluation of olfactory experience is also emphasised by Barwich (Citation2017), who regards it as a reason for challenging the division between sensation and cognition, as well as acknowledging aesthetic olfactory experiences.
14. Batty (Citation2014) seems more sympathetic to Wilson and Stevenson’s view, arguing that their insights are compatible with her view that we perceive properties rather than objects in olfaction. However, she brackets the issue in question here, i.e. whether drawing on past experience makes one believe something about one’s olfactory experience rather than experience it.
15. Another kind of olfactory constancy occurs when a smell is recognised as the same despite the fact that some components of the chemical mixture are missing or change over time. See Carvalho (Citation2014) for discussion.
16. Richardson (Citation2013, 408–409) also seems to think one ‘finds out’ about rather than experiences direction in diachronic olfactory experiences. In a later paper, however, Batty seems to acknowledge a spatial aspect of diachronic olfactory experiences: ‘We track odors and, as a result, are able to experience them as extended through space’ (Batty Citation2014, 240, my emphasis).
17. In addition, Batty thinks one draws on ‘input from the other sensory modalities’ (Citation2010a, 523). I bracket this part of her objection here.
18. A different kind of mash-up results when the movements of the two eyes are not coordinated; then subjects experience double vision (Maxwell and Schor Citation2006).
19. A similar distinction is made by Scruton (Citation1997), who argues that we in music listen to ‘pure’ sound events in abstraction from what produces them.
20. One contributor who would not accept the uniformity assumption is Barwich (Citation2014). She argues that it is misleading to treat olfactory objects as static units independent of the particular instance of perception, because this fails to capture the variability and the dynamics of the processes involved in perception. For this reason, she resists an analysis of olfaction in terms of the object experienced. I am sympathetic to Barwich’s project, especially her call for a variation of measurement techniques that can mirror the important fact that olfactory experience varies with context, person, concentration of the odour, as well as other factors. However, I do not think this prevents us from asking, in a particular case, what the object of experience is. I only think it means we should expect no uniform answer.