Philosophy and Cognitive Science, CUNY Graduate Center New York, NY, USA.
Front Psychol. 2013 Dec 24;4:974. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00974. eCollection 2013.
Thomas Reid is one of the primary early expositors of the "dual-component" theory of perception, according to which conscious perception constitutively involves a non-intentional sensation accompanied by a noninferential perceptual belief. In this paper, I will explore Reid's account of olfactory perception, and of odor as a secondary quality. Reid is often taken to endorse a broadly Lockean picture of secondary qualities, according to which they are simply dispositions to cause sensations. This picture creates problems, however, for Reid's account of how we perceive secondary qualities, including odors. Given Reid's insistence that we come to be aware of odors only by inferring a causal relation to obtain between them and our olfactory sensations, it seems that he cannot allow for direct, noninferential perceptual awareness of odors. Since his general account of perception invokes noninferential perceptual beliefs to explain perceptual awareness, it seems that Reid must either reject this general account for the case of olfactory perception (and supplant it with something else), or else deny that we ever actually perceive odors. I will attempt to reconcile these ideas by appeal to Reid's doctrine of "acquired perception," which involves the incorporation of learned conceptual representations into perceptual states via perceptual learning. Reidian acquired perception enables genuine olfactory perceptual acquaintance with odors despite the dependence of the semantic properties of the relevant representations on causal relations to sensations. In exploring these issues, I hope to illuminate several features of Reid's account of perception and demonstrate its interest to contemporary theorizing about conscious perception-especially olfaction-in the process. Reid's theory of olfaction remains a live, coherent option for present-day theorists.
托马斯·里德是“双成分”知觉理论的主要早期阐释者之一，根据这一理论，有意识的知觉构成性地包含非意向性感觉和非推理知觉信念。在本文中，我将探讨里德对嗅觉感知和气味作为次要性质的解释。里德通常被认为赞同一种广泛的洛克式的次要性质图景，根据这种图景，它们只是引起感觉的倾向。然而，这种图景给里德对我们如何感知次要性质（包括气味）的解释带来了问题。鉴于里德坚持认为，我们只有通过推断它们与我们的嗅觉感觉之间存在因果关系，才能意识到气味，因此，他似乎不能允许我们直接、非推理地感知气味。由于他对知觉的一般解释是用非推理的知觉信念来解释知觉意识，因此，里德似乎必须要么拒绝这种一般解释，要么否认我们实际上感知到了气味。我将通过诉诸里德的“习得知觉”学说来调和这些观点，该学说涉及通过知觉学习将习得的概念表现纳入知觉状态。里德的习得知觉使我们能够真正地通过嗅觉来感知气味，尽管相关表现的语义属性依赖于与感觉的因果关系。在探讨这些问题的过程中，我希望阐明里德对知觉的解释的几个特点，并展示其对当代关于有意识知觉的理论化的兴趣——特别是嗅觉。里德的嗅觉理论仍然是当今理论家的一个可行、连贯的选择。
