Maxime Daniel Barbier

Do odors have meaning? Approaching the use of odors from the perspective of formal semantics, we argue that odors can denote and can combine compositionally. The paper's first contribution is a system of olfactory signs with language-like structure: odors are the material vehicles (comparable to written traces), percepts are the principles by which those vehicles are individuated as signs (comparable to words), and the associated contents are their denotations (comparable to linguistic meanings). The paper's second contribution is to show that the resulting sign system supports the compositionality of these denotations in two senses. First, odors can combine with one another to represent complex contents, albeit in a way tightly constrained by human olfactory perception. Second, olfactory signs can combine with non-olfactory signs such as linguistic and visual, or even drawn from outside any established sign system altogether. We explore this mixed compositionality through two case studies: narrative scratch-and-sniff books and the practice of scenting places and objects.

This paper opens a new direction in the study of the meaning of odors. It investigates the cognitive ability to represent objects that stand in for sources of smells: that is, the ability of a subject to attribute to an intentional object features possessed by characteristic sources of a perceived smell. We argue that this novel capacity is sufficiently similar to one identified in auditory semantics to justify extending the existing theoretical framework of denotation by sounds and music to odors and fragrances.