ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the reasons for claiming that olfactory perception is spatially unstructured and our experience of smells has an abstract structure. The denial of identifying the object of olfactory perception and experience with ordinary objects yields many problems in ascertaining the distal nature of olfactory perception. The abstract view, argued for by C. E. Batty, is that olfactory experiences present with an undifferentiated experience of features of an environment. A. Keller’s construal of the olfactory many properties problem centers upon issues concerning the perceptual space rendered by the olfactory system. Following the overview of the many problems inherent to distal olfactory perception, the chapter introduces molecular structure theory (MST) as an alternative perspective that allows for figure-ground segregation and perceiving multiple olfactory objects within an array. MST theoretically evolves by generating an account of the intentional object as smellscapes where these are by analogy to landscapes large-scale distal arrays.
