ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we turn our attention to the " other" senses-somatosensation, gustation, and olfaction. All three of these topics suffer from a handicap, which has long inhibited the conceptualization and formalization of their respective theories of quality-namely, there is no single dimension of the stimulus that can be varied to systematically scan the range of microqualities assumed to be included within each of these macromodalities. For that matter, it is not clear whether there is, indeed, as much of an analogy between taste and vision, for example, as there is between sweetness and vision. It is entirely possible that the " other" senses are, in fact, conglomerates of a number of sensitivities, which are individually more like vision and audition than the collective terms (like taste) themselves. Previous attempts to cluster all of the tastes into a single sense may be merely an expression of the general similarities in locus and function rather than any more fundamental link among them. Be that as it may, there is a substantial difference in the way these three senses are dealt with in comparison to vision and audition. The questions asked are framed in a much more discrete form-stimuli are members of certain classes, which do not vary in microquality and, thus, do not vary continuously into one another. Such questions as qualitative difference thresholds are not routinely examined, nor is it exactly clear what the result would mean if they were. Rather, questions of specificity
and nonspecificity of the receptors to the discrete classes of stimuli are more often encountered in our discussion.
