It’s All About the Layers: Lycan on Olfactory Representation

Up until the early 2000s, philosophical discussions of olfaction were rare. However, the recent effort to explore, and assess, the dominant visual model of theorizing about perception has produced a substantial and growing body of philosophical work on olfactory perception. When I began writing my dissertation on olfaction in 2004, there were very few substantial philosophical discussions of smell to turn to. There was Thomas Reid’s chapter “On Smelling” in his Inquiry into the Human Mind (2000 [1764]). There was Moreland Perkins’ chapter on smell in his Sensing the World (1983). And there was William Lycan’s work in Consciousness and Experience (1996) and the “The Slighting of Smell” (2000). Thank goodness for all of these, but, as I went on to write primarily on the representation of objects in olfactory experience, Lycan’s work on olfaction was particularly influential in the development of my views. In the years since, the philosophy of olfaction has grown considerably largely because of Lycan’s initial work on olfaction. But despite my own focus on olfactory content, and the other work that has followed in recent years, Lycan’s Layering Thesis has unfortunately received very little uptake in the ensuing debates. The focus has been, rather, on observations Lycan makes in “The Slighting of Smell.” In this chapter I aim to rectify this imbalance, and showcase the thesis’ explanatory power, by setting it against the background of an underexplored area of the philosophy of olfaction—one driven by observations of interspecies similarities and differences in olfactory capability.