Making Sense of Scents: The Science of Smell | Ann-Sophie Barwich

While we have a better understanding of the olfactory pathway today, many of the central questions remain unresolved. How do you classify smells and how do you make their perception comparable? (And how do you control the volatile stimulus, its concentration, and its administration in psychophysical studies?) What are the perceptual dimensions of smell? Are there such things as primary odours? How does the brain represent smells? From this perspective, the discovery of how the sense of smell works presents us with an intriguing, yet untold, history of creativity in scientific reasoning.

Philosophy of Psychology and Cognitive Science | Daniel Weiskopf

Psychology emerged within the last two centuries from a long tradition of philosophical speculation about the mind, and it has to a large degree remained entangled with that tradition. Psychological theorizing overlaps with philosophical discourse at many points, and has also produced a host of concepts, methods, and models that shed new light on some of philosophy’s old problems. This combination has made it one of the most fertile sources of material for philosophers of science. The emergence of cognitive science as an organizing conception for the interfield study of the mind is a testament to the reciprocal influence of philosophy on scientific theorizing. As increasing attention has been paid in recent years to the analysis of the practices of particular sciences, the philosophy of psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science have flourished.