Reid on olfaction and secondary qualities.
Frontiers in Psychology January 1, 2013 Jake Quilty-Dunn 36 citations
Thomas Reid's theory of perception holds that conscious perception consists of a non-intentional sensation accompanied by a noninferential perceptual belief. For olfactory perception and odors as secondary qualities, this creates a tension: Reid seems to require that we infer odors from sensations, which would preclude direct, noninferential perceptual awareness of odors. The paper argues that Reid's doctrine of "acquired perception"—where learned conceptual representations become incorporated into perceptual states via perceptual learning—resolves this tension. Acquired perception allows genuine olfactory perceptual acquaintance with odors, even though the semantic properties of the representations depend on causal relations to sensations. Reid's account of olfaction remains a coherent option for contemporary philosophy of perception.