Lessons in smelling : essays on olfactory perception

This three-paper dissertation focuses on olfactory perception, with each paper exploring an ongoing debate in the perceptual literature through the olfactory 'lens'. Philosophers of perception have typically assumed what I call the Unification Thesis: the thesis that certain philosophical issues about perception should be settled in the same way for each of the sensory modalities. I argue that olfaction presents special challenges to the Unification Thesis. Meeting these challenges rewards us with new insight into three topics: 1) the nature, and extent, of representational content, 2) qualia and the alleged transparency of experience and 3) the nature of the secondary qualities. In the first chapter, I consider the challenge that olfactory experience presents to upholding a representational view of the sense modalities. It is commonplace to suppose that visual experience is representational. But, given the phenomenology of olfactory experience, it is difficult to see how a representational view of it might go. I take on the challenge and argue for a representational account of olfactory experience that honors its phenomenology. In the second chapter, I consider what olfactory experience can tell us about the controversy over qualia and, in particular, the argument against them that focuses on the alleged transparency of experience. Although most transparency theorists claim that transparency holds for all of the sense modalities, transparency seems unintuitive for olfactory experience. I argue that olfactory experience is indeed transparent and that explanations of what transparency is supposed to be have been obscured by a reliance on the visual model.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2007

Author dc:creator

• Batty, Clare (Clare E.)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Alex Byrne.

• Linguistics and Philosophy.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/41703

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/41703