Intentionalism and the ‘other’ senses
phil 93507
Jeff Speaks
September 7, 2009
The literature about intentionalism, like the literature on perception more generally, has
focused on visual experience. But the claims intentionalists make are about all perceptual
experiences (and all states with a phenomenal character, in the case of global intentional-
ists). One therefore wants to know whether intentionalist claims are plausible in the case
of other sense modalities, and whether they can be given the same kind of motivation.
1 Smell
It may seem initially less plausible that smell is representational than that vision is; the
phenomenology of smell might seem more like the phenomenology of pain or other bodily
sensations than of vision. In particular, it is not obvious that our sense of smell represents
particulars as instantiating smell-relevant properties.
Batty says out that this is in large part because the human sense of smell does not locate
smells. You might smell cigarette smoke, but you do not smell it as located at a particular
point in your environment. (We do have the ability to locate smells, but this seems to
come from changes in smell intensity as we move about a space.) But this is compatible
with olfaction being representational; it may just be that the contents of olfactory ex-
periences are less ‘complete’ than of visual experiences. For example, perhaps olfactory
experiences simply represent certain properties as instantiated, rather than particular
objects as instantiating those properties.
Moreover, there is a clear sense in which we can give the same kind of transparency-
based argument for smell as for vision. Imagine any noticeable change in your olfactory
experience; there will be a corresponding change in the way that the world around you is
represented as being, and hence a corresponding change in content.
Another interesting argument (also from Batty) for the representational character of smell:
animals with very developed senses of smell clearly seem to represent their environment
with their olfactory experiences. But it would be odd if lack of acuity evacuated olfactory
experiences of any content, rather than just impoverishing the contents of the relevant
experiences.
