Entry #21: A Philosophical Lexicon for Perfumistas

a priori, a posteriori

The expression a priori is used by native French speakers in everyday discourse to mean something like "ahead of time" or "in advance", but among English speakers it is much less common and sounds very sophisticated and recherché. In fact, the only people I know who use the expression are philosophers.

In philosophy, a priori is contrasted to a posteriori and there's a lot of controversy specifically about a priori knowledge, which would be knowledge "before or without" experience. I know, it sounds impossible. How could you have knowledge of anything unless your neurons were firing? But isn't that an experience? Really the terms are meant to separate the sort of knowledge which is dependent upon the contingent way which the world happens to be, and knowledge which is independent of such historical fortuities.

One example would be the truths of mathematics or logic. Presumably they would still be true even if all of chemistry was completely different so that the most common atoms in our bodies were not carbon and hydrogen but WOEIFWI and XKCNQ. Anywhere in the universe, presumably, 1 + 1 = 2.

Do we have any a priori knowledge of perfume? Evidently not. It's all a posteriori, though we might base predictions on past experience. When people grumble about a reformulation which they assume is going to be bad, they are not grumbling on the basis of a sensory experience of the new version, but because they have been disappointed in the past, with other cases of reformulation, and they expect that this reformulation, too, will be bad.

What is the basis of that belief? It's not entirely irrational, because it commences from a recognition of certain trends in the perfume industry--which is based on experience. So a conjecture about a perfume yet to be experienced is based upon empirical information. I don't want to say that it's knowledge, because that's another whole huge controversy. This information strikes me as true: new fragrances, on the whole, are becoming more abstract and simpler than they were in the twentieth century.

Entry #10: A Philosophical Lexicon for Perfumistas

Emotivism

Empirical testing cannot adjudicate disputes when it comes to values. Let's take a case involving morality. You cannot argue a sociopath into believing that what he does is wrong, and you cannot show him anything in the world which proves that he should not do what he does. He feels no compunction whatsoever and will be deterred from acting however he wishes only by the law, specifically, the threat of punishment. He will carefully conceal his activities so as not to get caught, but the reason why he wants not to get caught is emphatically not because he cares what other people think. No, he simply wishes to retain his liberty to continue to do whatever he wants to do while "passing" as a normal person, as though he were moved by moral sentiment, within civil society.

One solution to the problem of disputes in matters of value more generally—both moral and aesthetic—is simply to deny that claims about value are anything more than the expression of the speaker's emotions. This is the gist of the theory of value known as emotivism, which offers a straightforward and simple way of understanding what people are doing when they argue about values or morality or aesthetics—or anything insusceptible of empirical testing.

Yes, we can observe a painting, and we can smell the scent of a perfume. But can we perceive that either of these are great works of art? No, the emotivist will insist. That sort of talk is a bunch of balderdash. Disputes in morality and in aesthetics are really much more about the disputants' reception of the objects than about the objects ostensibly under discussion. The speaker's attitude can be positive or negative. In this view, ranting about a perfume is akin to throwing a temper tantrum, no more and no less than a way of venting emotions. 

This perspective can make some sense of the otherwise difficult to comprehend tirades by people who seem to harbor a visceral hatred of the house of Creed. I've seen similar behavior toward Bond no 9 as well, and the question becomes: why should anyone care so much about these houses? No one is forcing them to buy, and if anyone finds the price incommensurate with the value of the perfume, then they are perfectly free to walk right on by. 

Instead, people often become highly emotional in denouncing especially Creed, blinded to the likelihood, given the large number of fakes circulating about, that the "swill" which they have sniffed wasn't Creed at all. The emotivist will reply that such strong emotional reactions betray the speaker's own peculiar issues. Maybe they'd be happier with a higher salary? Or less debt?

My distinct impression is that many perfumistas accept something like emotivism when it comes to perfume appreciation in venues such as the fragrance community websites. The tried and true adage one perfumista's treasure is another perfumista's trash leaps to mind once again. The entire enterprise of swapping relies on the fact that people disagree about the value of perfumes. Are some of them right and others wrong? The emotivist will say "No." There is no "truth" of the matter, in the way in which there is truth in matters of science.

Either the earth is flat, or it is not. It's not a matter of anyone's personal feelings about the question. Either a perfume has or has not been reformulated. If so, then it contains different ingredients or different proportions than it did at the time of its launch. That sort of question about a perfume can be answered through a procedure. Take a sample of the earlier perfume and a sample from a bottle produced later and have them analyzed using gas chromatography. You will find that either the graphs match, or they do not. If they do not match, then the perfume's composition has changed, regardless of the fact that it has kept the same name.

Yes, there are matters of fact when it comes to perfume: all of the facts which are amenable to scientific testing, according to the emotivist. What the emotivist denies is that someone's proclamation that a perfume is "one of the top ten of all time" means anything more than that the speaker loves the perfume.

We have seen this again and again in the perfume world, all over the place. In perfume reviews people may wax poetic about the ostensible object of their review, but in the end they tell us much more about themselves than they do about the perfume.

Emotivism may of course be false. It is a theory, after all—and a nonempirical one at that! Maybe there are value-laden facts about perfume. But if so, why do people not agree about what those facts are? Some people love Thierry Mugler Angel and Christian Dior Poison. Others find them abhorrent. What principles can be applied to adjudicate such disputes? To counter the emotivist's skeptical denial that value judgments are a matter of objective fact, one must come up with some way of resolving the disputes about value which arise among equally informed, equally intelligent people equipped with equally sensitive noses. 

People who wish to claim that their personal judgments about perfumes are authoritative, somehow more reliable or accurate than those of others, need to produce some basis for this claim. What is it about them that makes them uniquely qualified to judge the quality of perfumes? Or are such people merely projecting their tastes in perfume upon the world? That is the question, my fragrant friends.

Entry #5: A Philosophical Lexicon for Perfumistas

Empirical, Empiricism, and Empiricist

The contrast class for metaphysical is empirical or empirically observable. An empirical phenomenon need not be directly perceivable using our sense organs, but it has to be inferrable by appeal to empirical data. Think of the scent of cigar lingering in a hall. That gives you some empirically perceivable evidence for believing that someone was recently smoking a cigar in that very space. A woman wafting of the scent of Lancôme Trésor gives good reason for believing that she applied that perfume earlier that day.

Empiricism is one approach to knowledge, often contrasted with rationalism (to be defined...). Empiricists are people who believe that empirical methods, including observation—whether direct or indirect—yield truth. They tend to be scientifically or naturalistically minded and may reject questions such as "Does God exist?" as incapable of being answered. But not all empiricists simplemindedly espouse atheism. They may instead sincerely maintain that there is no compelling evidence for the existence or the nonexistence of God. It's up for grabs. The jury's still out. That kind of thing.

Could there be empirical evidence for the existence of Plato's Forms? The Form of the Perfect Perfume is an idea or a concept, some would say, but Plato seems to have had in mind something more significant, something metaphysically real.The Form of the Perfect Perfume would be what a real, empirically perceptible perfume would be like, if it were not mired in the lowly world of becoming. Earthly perfumes can only aspire to the realm of the Forms, including the Form of Beauty.

Somehow I cannot imagine that such examples are helping anyone who wishes to come to an understanding of what metaphysics is. Let us begin again. Is reality exhausted by the things which we human beings happen to be able to perceive? Or is there more to reality than what can be reasonably inferred to exist from the deliverances of our idiosyncratic sense organs? Does a perfume never sniffed thereby cease to exist? Sounds a bit crazy, doesn't it?

Nonetheless, at this point in history, our culture is quite scientifically focused. For the most part, science is thought to tell us the truth about the world. Anything which cannot be confirmed or refuted by empirical testing, through setting up a hypothesis and determining what its implications would be, falls outside of the realm of science. In this sense, religions are metaphysical, although contemporary professional metaphysicians think of their vocation as quite a bit more important and rigorous than either religion or new-age "metaphysics". But even atheistic metaphysicians have their own little "gods", their objects of faith, their fanciful theories.

Among other things, metaphysicians are interested in categories. Here we can return to the case of perfume and ask whether any of the orthodox perfume categories actually "carve reality at its joints", as philosophers love to say. Or is it rather that we adopt these categories for organizational purposes? 

Floral perfumes are those which feature primarily floral notes. Classical chypres contain some combination of characteristic notes, often including oakmoss and/or patchouli. Floral aldehydes obviously contain a perceptible dose of aldehydes, along with floral notes. Floral green perfumes often feature galbanum.

In the twenty-first century we seem to have a whole new set of categories, and this may suggest to critical minds that these really are all just conventions. Do shampoo-conditioner fragrances exist? Well, there are plenty of perfumes out there which smell just like the scent of shampoos and conditioners, so why not? Do "don't worry, be happy, never dislike, only like," SSRI fragrances exist? They have a bright and shiny demeanor, and it's easy to identify them once one has been familiarized with the "reality" of this new fragrance category.

What about office-ready, inoffensive, fruity-floral frags? There seem to be lots of perfumes out there which fit that description, so why not give them their own acronym: ORIFFF? What about Oud perfumes? Is there such a thing as a real and existent category of oud perfumes, or are there only a bunch of independently produced oud perfumes, which are similar to one another in that they all (claim to...) feature oud? I think that you can see where all of this is leading.

Do the categories of things named by us really exist? Or are they simply useful organizational schemes for talking about things? A skeptical take on all of this is that we make up categories to suit our purposes. There is a decision being made about how to talk about what we wish to distinguish as separate objects in the world. Scientific testing will not help in these cases.

People who have limited experience with perfume may find that Chanel no 5 and Britney Spears Circus Fantasy smell very much alike. And it's probably true that they do smell more like one another than either smells like water. We call them both perfumes, even though that is a crude label which does not distinguish any of the more finely delineated categories described above. 

To be honest, I feel the same way about the "Perfume is art" thesis. A very few perfumes may attain the status of art, given the conditions of their production and the intentions of their creator, but most of them? That would be a conceptual confusion of the highest order. Perfumery is first a business. What happens beyond that depends on the individual perfumer. Sweeping claims about all perfumers being olfactory artists make very little sense at all when one reflects upon what most of them do and, above all, why.

One response to this sort of discussion, particularly frequent from nonphilosophers, is: Who cares? That may sound unsophisticated, but it could also be the heartfelt expression of a school of philosophy known as pragmatism. More on that to follow...