Sound Research WIKINDX
Sound Research WIKINDX |
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Lycan, W. (2000). The slighting of smell (with a brief word on the slighting of Chemistry). In N. Bhushan & S. Rosenfeld (Eds), Of Minds and Molecules: New Philosophical Perspectives on Chemistry (pp. 273–289). New York: Oxford University Press. Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard (10/4/23, 5:39 PM) Last edited by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard (10/4/23, 5:44 PM) |
| Resource type: Book Article Language: en: English Peer reviewed DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780195128345.003.0026 ID no. (ISBN etc.): 9780195128345 BibTeX citation key: Lycan2000 Email resource to friend View all bibliographic details  |
Categories: General Keywords: Odour, Perception, Smell Creators: Bhushan, Lycan, Rosenfeld Publisher: Oxford University Press (New York) Collection: Of Minds and Molecules: New Philosophical Perspectives on Chemistry |
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| Abstract |
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"Philosophy articles on prepositional attitudes, attitude content, and related matters sometimes begin by reminding us that there are many prepositional attitudes besides belief: there are desire, intention, remembering, guessing, speculating, wondering, hoping, wishing, resenting, regretting, being embarrassed, and whatnot. Those same philosophy articles then immediately serve notice that, for simplicity, they will discuss only belief. Desire, intention, and memory very occasionally receive attention from philosophers of mind and philosophers of psychology; the other attitudes almost never. It is an interesting question why belief holds this overwhelming social preeminence over the other attitudes. Similarly, philosophy articles on perception sometimes begin by reminding us that there are other senses besides vision; but those articles then immediately serve notice that, for simplicity, they will discuss only vision. The other senses—especially the chemical senses, smell, and taste—almost never receive the slightest attention from philosophers (though noteworthy exceptions are Perkins, 1983, and Clark, 1993). Psychologists and neuroscientists have, of course, done work on smell, but there, too, not nearly as much as they have on vision and usually in pursuit of research on something else, such as memory. My question here is how the philosophy of perception would be different if smell had been taken as a paradigm rather than vision. I argue that vision is not a typical sense modality at all, but a very unusual, unrepresentative example of one. If I am right about that, then we may expect to find that the philosophy of perception has been warped and skewed by its persistent focus on vision. And—now that the Decade of Neurophilosophy is over—I contemplate ushering in the era of Rhinophilosophy (or more grandly, Osphresiophilosophy). But the claims I shall actually make here will be only rudimentary. There is a difference between the social preeminence of belief and that of vision. For it is arguable that, in fact, belief is conceptually prior to the other attitudes. The more rarified prepositional attitudes may well be denned partly in doxastic terms; for example, a correct analysis of regret or wish or even memory would very probably make mention of belief, but not vice versa."
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