What Does Taste Represent?

Abstract

What does vision represent? What does hearing represent? Smell? Touch? Competing answers to each of these questions have been defended. The present paper argues that the issue of what taste represents is categorically more complicated. In particular, it raises two very difficult dilemmas.

Keywords:

• perception
• representation
• taste
• flavour
• experience

Notes

¹ Louise Richardson [2013] argues that this familiar idea is neither plain common sense nor a deliverance of science. For some detail on the integration of smell and taste, see Prescott and Stevenson [2015].

² Some say there may be a sixth, metallic, but that is disputed and there is no clear evidence for it; see, e.g., Lawless et al. [2004].

³ Citing Trivedi [2012], Spence, Auvray, and Smith [2015: 255n] add the stomach, the intestines, and the pancreas, ‘and even in sperm’.

⁴ Richardson [2013] calls our attention to apparent evidence that ortho- and retronasal outputs lead to respectively different brain activations; see Small et al. [2005].

⁵ And I am grateful to Barry Smith for his very informative talk on this material, presented at the Conference on Olfaction, Centre for Philosophical Psychology, University of Antwerp (December, 2013), which got me thinking about taste.

⁶ And perhaps, separately, the sound of one's own chewing [Yeomans et al. 2008]; but see section 6 below.

⁷ But Perkins [1983] asks the same question of smell, and bases on it a substantive argument for his ‘indirect realist’ analysis. (He does not speak in terms of representation.)

⁸ Thanks to an anonymous referee for this suggestion.

⁹ Is the perceiving of flavour multisensory or ‘multimodal’? It seems obviously so, and some take that to be hardly worth mentioning; but Fulkerson [2014: ch. 2] points out that care is needed here. (His concern is with touch, which has also been called multisensory; he contends that it is not, or, more precisely, not by any standard that would not also classify the other major senses as multisensory.) ‘Multisensory’ could be judged by (i) double functional dissociation; (ii) same content delivered via multiple information channels; (iii) coördination between different kinds of stimuli; or (iv) lack of feature binding. Fulkerson writes off the first two of those as uselessly liberal, points out that by the third both smell and taste count as multisensory but for a trivial reason, and then argues that touch does accomplish feature binding.Interestingly, Fulkerson simply assumes throughout that the perceiving of flavour is unisensory in the general sense that concerns him. But he specifically argues that smell passes the feature-binding test, and a parallel argument would work for taste.

¹⁰ It began with Dennett [1978] and Stich [1978]. For a critical discussion, see Drayson [2012]: she argues that ‘subpersonal’ has been confused as between the explanatory and the metaphysical, and that we should instead focus on Stich's notion of the ‘subdoxastic’. Since my topic is representation, I suppose that I should take her advice. I shall stop using ‘subpersonal’, although I think that ‘person-level’ is still all right.

¹¹ Though for independent reasons, I myself am in sympathy with the verdict [1996: 22–3].

¹² There is a burgeoning recent literature rejecting the whole idea that sense modalities represent [Campbell 2002, Travis 2004, Fish 2009]. But, as I have emphasized, the present paper is contrastive: Even freely granting that vision and smell represent, the claim that taste does so is vexed. The problems for our title question go deeper.

¹³ Byrne would have to be using the term ‘phenomenal character’ fairly narrowly, excluding, e.g., conative and affective features of the experience.

¹⁴ Thanks to each of two anonymous AJP referees, whose comments greatly improved this paper.