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Smell's puzzling discrepancy: Gifted discrimination, yet pitiful identification
Author(s) -
Young Benjamin D.
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
mind and language
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.905
H-Index - 68
eISSN - 1468-0017
pISSN - 0268-1064
DOI - 10.1111/mila.12233
Subject(s) - identification (biology) , cognitive science , psychology , olfactory system , olfaction , representation (politics) , olfactory perception , cognitive psychology , neuroscience , computer science , biology , ecology , politics , political science , law
Humans are gifted at detecting and discriminating odors, yet we have difficulty identifying odors by name. This paper offers a new explanation for the puzzling discrepancy between our olfactory capacities for discrimination and identification by weaving together recent neuroscientific findings regarding the cortical connectivity of the olfactory system, the olfactory system's proprietary semantic integration center, and recent philosophical research on the olfactory system's compositional format of representation. The paper develops a comprehensive explanation that we cannot readily deploy conceptual resources in naming odorants, because of an incompatibility of formats employed by our conceptual semantic resources and the olfactory system.