Stuff and Nonsense

Abstract

What are the objects of olfactory experience? Proposals range from ordinary objects like lumps of cheese to abstract molecular clouds, but perhaps the most unusual suggestion is that we smell “stuffs”. Despite our everyday informal use of the term, Mizrahi deploys it with some precision in her account of olfactory perception. At a first approximation, something is a stuff if dividing it in two does not result in the existence of a new, distinct stuff. For example, a cake remains cake-stuff even if portioned into two smaller pieces. In olfaction, “smell stuffs” such as rose (or cake) exist both in the air and in the ordinary objects from which they emanate. According to Mizrahi, this stuff-based ontology fulfils what I characterise as the Alignment Principle (AP). According to AP, a theory of olfactory perception should reconcile (1) the world of molecules, (2) the metaphysics of odours, and (3) our phenomenological experience. In this paper, I begin by explaining Mizrahi’s dissatisfaction with existing Ordinary Object Direct Realist views, which don’t seem to fulfil AP; mainly because there are many cases of olfaction without any obvious nearby object. Most historical responses to this have hence focussed on odours (effectively, airborne molecules) as the true objects of olfactory experience, but Mizrahi wants to retain the possibility of ordinary objects as genuine intentional objects, thus honouring AP. The stuff view initially seems like an attractive way for Mizrahi to have her cake and eat it, retaining the best aspects of the odour and ordinary object views. But as I argue, just as extracting the glucose molecules from a cake into a bowl does not yield cake-stuff in both places, so too is it hard to conceive of odours as the same stuff as their object given their wildly different compositions and properties. In the end, I conclude that the Alignment Principle is worth abiding by but that the stuff view does not do so: even particularly charitable definitions of stuffhood either (i) encounter mereological problems within (2) or (ii) lead to an unsatisfactory explanation of olfactory experience within (3).