Smelling Molecular Structure

Abstract

Smells are mysterious entities.1 They seemingly arise inside our nose, providing a private phenomenological experience, yet at the same time we acknowledge that smells are external entities carried upon the wind. We talk about smells as objective entities of shared attention but are not sure of their ontological status. While the chemoreceptive sciences are still researching the mechanisms of sensory transduction in olfaction, minimally there is consensus that we perceive chemical compounds. The exact property of these compounds is still under investigation, as well as how these yield our sensory experience of what things smell like. Nonetheless few would disagree with the statement that using olfaction we perceive chemical compounds composing gaseous clouds—that is, few except philosophers. In the last decade, there has been a rapid development of philosophical theories regarding the nature of smell.2 This chapter assesses the current philosophical debate about smells. The theories to be covered are: Naïve Realism, Odor Theories, Stuff Theories, Non-Objectivist Theories, Process Theory and Molecular Structure Theory.3 The theories will be evaluated based on their explanations of (a) the olfactory quality of a smell, (b) smells as distal entities and (c) our experience of smells as intentional objects,4 which are arguably the three central issues in answering what are smells.5 The chapter concludes with a defense of Molecular Structure Theory that demonstrates its strengths in accounting for each of these three aspects of smell.