ABSTRACT
MAN'S NAIVE ASSUMPTION THAT WHAT HE PERCEIVES WITH HIS senses is reality, things as they really are, is so deeply rooted in his nature that almost three thousand years of epistemological doubt, since the teachings of the Indian Vedanta and the early Greek philosophers, have not changed the fact that each one of us believes his senses. What he perceives with them "makes sense" to him, and only in exceptional states of mind or by an effort of theoretical thought does he start to doubt them. The bulk of the vast psychological literature on the senses and on sensory perception shares, in different forms and ways, the tacit assumption of the basically cognitive nature of human perception. This is curious when one considers that, experientially, the senses differ markedly in what they convey to the perceiver. Whereas in sight the experience is usually one of "seeing the object as it really is," in taste and smell the recognition of an object plays a much lesser, often a quite negligible role, and the primary experience is one in which the specific quality of the taste or smell is linked with pleasure or displeasure. Yet, the words "pleasure" or "disgust" hardly appear even in the literature on smell and taste. The attention of most experimentalists who have worked in this field is directed, if not to the physiological functioning of these senses, to phenomena of threshold, discrimination, etc. Reading their accounts one would get no idea that one of the primary experi-
82 Two Basic Perceptual Modes ences connected with smell and taste is on the order of pleasure and displeasure.1
