Entry #14: A Philosophical Lexicon for Perfumistas

Solipsism, Solipsist, Solipsistic

Have you ever awoken from an incredibly complex dream filled with characters some of whom you have never met in reality? Perhaps the phone rang, and suddenly the narrative came to an end before you were forced to contend with a seemingly insurmountable challenge. You may have been relieved to discover that it was only a dream.

Now imagine if you did not wake up, but the dream continued on and on, all produced by your own mind, but unbeknownst to you. Your world would be that of a solipsist. You'd be all alone! In some ways, solipsism represents the farthest reach of skepticism: doubt about the existence of other minds such as your own or, if you like: subjects of consciousness.

I've never heard anyone but philosophers use the term solipsism, most likely because it's a fairly crazy idea. Can you conceive of being the only real mind in existence? It's difficult to do, but philosophers love to discuss the so-called "problem of other minds," which puts the burden of proof squarely on the conscious subject who believes in the existence of other minds, not vice versa. 

How do you know that I, sherapop, really exist? How do you know that I am not a figment of your imagination? Perhaps you are an evil genius creating in some corner of your mind the entire salon de parfum—texts and comments alike! You might object that since you did not know the word solipsism until today, you could not have produced the text in which it appeared. However, the same thing happens in your dream, as its plot unfolds, you have no idea what is going to happen next, despite the fact that the dream is clearly created by your very own brain! Is it not?

It might not seem that solipsism has much bearing on perfume or perfumery, but I used the word here at the salon a while back in diagnosing the problem which I found with the idea of appropriating the jargon of visual art theory for talking about perfume. Since art theorists don't seem to know much about perfume, and perfumistas don't usually know all that much about art theory and history, how can they have a conversation using that language? If someone decides to theorize about perfume in this way, then it seems that he will end up talking to himself. No one can participate in a meaningful dialogue, because no one else will have any idea what he is talking about. It would be like being all alone. Hence, my use of the term solipsism. 

Another possible application of this term might be in cases where people simply emote short and strong praise or denunciation of a perfume in their review. We were discussing this problem in the comments a couple of days ago: how does emitting solely the words "I hate it" communicate any meaningful information or knowledge to anyone but the speaker himself? It gives no context or reasons or explanation or even a clue as to why the reviewer hates the perfume. Perhaps the perfume contains patchouli, which the reviewer happens to hate. Or perhaps the perfume does not contain patchouli, which the reviewer happens to love and feels should be there. 

It seems to me that simply emoting love or hatred is a somewhat solipsistic form of reviewing, since it does not reach out to readers to communicate the basis of the love or the hatred. I don't really believe that "solipsistic reviewers" are solipsists, but they might be like small children who believe that the world is exhausted by the limits of what they know and can see. Of course, there is no need to communicate with other people, if they do not even exist, but then why do such reviewers bother to write at all? Perhaps it is a way of expressing their emotions, no more and no less.  

Is this Creed a Fake? An essay in applied epistemology

A while back, I purchased a couple of Creed perfumes from an online discount emporium. I knew that they had a liberal return policy, so in the event that I received fakes, I'd be able to return them for a full refund. I had bought Creeds from discounters in the past with extraordinarily good luck. I base this claim on the fact that I tested nearly the entire set of Creed perfumes about three years ago using house-prepared vials provided by an officially authorized Creed dealer. I wrote reviews at that time, and so when my experience matched my reviews, and the perfumes also proved to have excellent longevity and smell natural, I was confident that they were authentic. Needless to say, I was delighted in those cases to have saved a wad of cash by taking a chance on acquiring those bottles from unauthorized dealers.

 Note the peridot green color!

This more recent time, however, I may not have been so lucky. I spoke with a woman at Creed headquarters at length regarding the purchase, as I had also in the past about various issues regarding their distribution and the problem of fakes. Creed is extremely helpful and understanding about this problem and they go out of their way to take the time to talk to consumers of their perfumes—whether or not they are customers of the boutique itself. 

The people at Creed know very well that many of us who wish to own Creed perfumes would also love to be able to save $100 or even $200 a bottle, if possible. But is it possible in a world rife with Creed fakes? that is the question, my fragrant friends. Of course, many consumers believe that genuine Creeds can be had for significantly less than MSRP, as evidenced by the amazing fact that, despite countless "Creed fake" threads at Dnotes, all of which relay basically the same story over and over again, people continue to acquire Creed bottles from e-bay. 

As a matter of fact, even the Creed staff avers that it is possible to obtain genuine Creed perfumes from unauthorized dealers. The problem, they are swift to warn, is that there is no guarantee, as there is when one purchases from an officially authorized Creed dealer. One way for real Creed perfumes to show up at discounters is when an authorized dealer closes up shop for one reason or another (usually going out of business), and they sell off their entire stock in one big lot. 

The structure of the cap and spray mechanism appear to be genuine

The problem, of course, is that discounters obtain bottles by any and all other means as well, and this means that it's always a gamble. Discounters, too, hope to peddle only genuine wares, but because there is not a direct and documentable path from the provider back to the producer of the perfumes, there is no way to prevent fakes being slipped into the system now and then. For most perfumes, this is not a problem, since no one would bother to invest the time and energy needed to produce a plausible fake because it would not be profitable enough. Only for expensive perfumes such as Creed does this make the enterprise worth the criminal's effort and guile. 

The lot numbers engraved on the bottle and printed on the box match

The good news is that, unlike ebay peddlers, discounters tend not to be fly-by-night ventures but reputable businesses working hard to build and maintain a loyal clientele. This is why when customers are dissatisfied, the store permits them to return the merchandise, and the store even pays the postage for the return, provided that there is a legitimate reason for the disgruntled consumers' concern.

I believe that I may have received a fake bottle of Tabarome, which for that reason I returned (once a good friend of mine had taken these photos for me). What is the evidence? skeptical minds are already asking. What are the key signs of a fake Creed? Having looked into this matter a few times before, I am familiar with the tell-tale signs of egregious fakes, and many of them are missing in this case. Here is what is as it should be:

1. There are no misspellings of the text on either the box or the folio. 

2. The cardboard of the box has the raised impressions with the Creed logo. 

3. The lot number etched in the bottom edge of the glass matches the lot number on the label affixed to the bottom of the box. 

4. The inner sprayer is made of white plastic and is a separate piece from the outer sprayer. 

5. The cap has a separate inner plastic insert, and the crown insignia is on a separate piece from the rest of the outer cap.

6. The white calling card included in the box appears to be genuine, as it is empirically indistinguishable from the ones included with bottles which I am confident contain authentic Creed perfume.

Folio and Calling Card included in the box

So far, so good. Unfortunately, there are a few outstanding problems. If this bottle is a fake, it is not an egregious one, but is it a fake after all?

Let us list the evidence, and then consider the various explanations for the evidence. Are there other ways to explain what I identified as disparities? I found problems with each of these:


1. The scent 

2. The color of the liquid

3. The box top

4. The folio

5. The front of the box

6. The marbled quality of the plastic inner layer of the cap.

The Scent

The moment I sprayed on the liquid from this bottle, the first word which came out of my mouth was: aromachemicals. The scent smacked decidedly of the current craze among both designer and niche perfumers for the use of some combination of iso-E-super and ambroxan and what-not, and I do not like it at all. Would I want to wear this perfume? In a word: No.

Why in the world did she buy it? inquiring minds are now pondering. The answer is found in the review which I penned at Fragrantica on May 7, 2010:

I am beginning to wonder whether I might have been a chain smoker in a past life, as I find myself delighted by every fragrance in which tobacco plays a central role, and especially in savory presentations. Part of my excitement may be due to the relative dearth of the tobacco note in women's perfume, and especially outside gourmand territory. 

Creed TABAROME is a delectable tobacco composition with no sweetness, no ashiness, and no dirtiness. This is not the smell of cigarettes, cigars, or pipes. TABAROME is clean, wet, green, freshly harvested piles of tobacco leaves, beautifully framed by a few gentle aromatics. Fresh tea leaves are present as well, along with sandalwood, vetiver and musk, serving to anchor the composition and impart good longevity and medium sillage. 

I do not believe that TABAROME is suited only for men, nor that this is an "old school", "landed gentry" frag. I find this sumptuous in the way in which so many patchouli perfumes are--the clean ones, not the dark, dirty ones.  

Perhaps tobacco land owners should abandon their doomed projects to create new smokers and instead divert their energies, resources and time to the perfume industry. I honestly believe that now that patchouli has achieved market saturation, tobacco could be the new patchouli...

Highly recommended. On my wish list, too!

So there you have it. Why I bought—or tried to buy—a bottle of Tabarome. My experience of the liquid in the bottle in question unfortunately bore no relation to the experience relayed in the above review. 

Now, there are several possible explanations for the disparity. Perhaps in my first encounter with Creed Tabarome I was succumbing to the power of suggestion. Perhaps I imagined the scent of tobacco in my original testing of a house-sourced vial. But why, then, would I not similarly conjure up the scent of tobacco in this instance as well? I suppose that it is possible that I was already skeptical, having purchased the bottle from a discounter. 

What if this creation has been reformulated? Perhaps I smelled another scent because the name Tabarome is now being attached to a different perfume. Or perhaps the disparity can be explained by the natural variations in natural ingredients, often cited in explaining inconsistencies especially in different batches of perfumes built from natural materials. 

The problem with that explanation is that the substance in this bottle of Tabarome did not smell natural to me at all. I smelled none of the wonderful notes of what I believed earlier to have been Tabarome. I smelled aromachemicals. Is it possible that in the interim I developed a hypersensitivity to aromachemicals having encountered them in some many perfumes of late? Perhaps I did not smell the ginger and the tobacco and the other notes in this batch of Tabarome because my nose was distracted by the aromachemicals which perhaps were being used now in place of some of the former materials.

Could the disparity be explained by a change in taste? I do not believe so, because I detected none of the notes present in the earlier testing. Before, I was able easily to identify the tobacco note. It's not that I detected tobacco in this batch and did not like it. No, I did not detect it at all!

The Color

Am I imagining this, or is this the only bottle of Tabarome pictured on the entire World Wide Web which is peridot green? I've googled and googled, and looked at everyone's images, and the liquid in only this bottle is a wacky hue of green! What can this mean? Could this radical difference in color be explained by a particularly verdant crop of tobacco? Needless to say, I'm skeptical, given that I smelled no tobacco but only aromachemicals here.

The Box top

Every single box of Creed which I own and have ever seen uses all caps for the text on the box top. This one uses lower case. Was this due to a deviant designer who happened to be working at the time of the production of the box housing this particular bottle of "Tabarome"? Are there other boxes around with lower-case text, and I simply have never encountered them? If I owned more Creed perfumes, would I encounter this variant again? Can anyone out there speak to this question? Have you a box with lower-case writing on the top? If so, are you sure that yours is authentic Creed? How is it that you know?

Only one of these boxes (in the lower left-hand quadrant)
uses lower case for the list of historical figures who wore Creed perfume.
The other boxes all use all caps 

The Folio

The informational folio included with all of my other Creed perfumes has four pages, in multiple languages. This one? A single page in English, with no text on the backside and no other languages. 

Page 1 of two different folios: the one on the left is only in English;
the one on the right offers the text in English, French, Italian, and German 
on the subsequent pages (missing from the dubious Tabarome folio)

Page 2 of the dubious Tabarome folio; Page 2-3 of an authentic Creed folio

There is no text on the backside (page 2) of the dubious Tabarome folio;
there is text on the backside (page 4) of the authentic Creed folio

I do not believe that the severely abridged folio alone proves that the Tabarome is fake. But it requires some imagination to explain why the text is only the first page of the four-page authentic folio. Could it be a printer error? Books are sometimes printed with pages in the wrong order or missing pages, or even with the pages of a completely different book interpolated. Could something bizarre like that have happened here? Is it plausible that a fake-Creed producer would make this sort of mistake, when it seems one of the easiest parts of the production to mimic?

The Front of the Box

The issues which I found on the front of the box are subtle, but perhaps important. First, the word père appears to be split in two, as though the person setting the text did not know French and so thought that there were two words: pè and re.

père  or pè and re ???

The second issue is the missing e next to 120ml. This is present on all of my other boxes. However, there is a possible problem. This Tabarome was the only 120ml bottle box ever in my possession. Could it be that the 120ml bottle box does not have that symbol for a reason? I am skeptical, especially because my 250ml bottle of Jasmin Impératrice Eugénie (which is undeniably authentic) does display that symbol next to the volume. 

a suspiciously missing e

Again, the possibilities proliferate. Could this, too, have been a printer's error on a specific lot of boxes? The raised insignia looks perfectly in order. The cardboard is clearly the same. Even the silver ink matches. Could these variations be the work of an incompetent typesetter, perhaps?

The Inner Cap

The inner cap is a separate piece from the outer cap, which seems genuine because the crown insignia is also separate. However, there is a problem:  the inner cap exhibits a marbled quality absent from every other Creed cap I've seen. 

Is this marbled quality common in Creed caps?
Have I just happened on homogeneous plastic in my experience with genuine Creeds in the past? 

This, too, could be some sort of fluke. Or perhaps I simply have not looked at a wide enough range of Creed caps. Or perhaps, again, there are significant differences in the case of 120ml bottles. But wait: aren't the caps the very same size???? Needless to say, I am confused.

Is this a fake? Who knows? Does it even matter? I only knew in this case what I needed to know: that I did not like this perfume and would not use 120 mls of it in even 120 years.

Implications

Perhaps all of the deviations can be explained somehow. Perhaps the dubious Tabarome was a real Creed perfume. But it is also quite possible that the perfume in the bottle was not  genuine Creed perfume. I've read many, many dismissive reviews of Tabarome. Does this mean that the perfume itself is bad? Or that fakes such as mine are rife? I suspect that the latter is the best explanation of the poor (sometimes scathing) reviews, given that there is a handful of glowing reviews brim with praise. My suspicion is that the bottle I returned is now in the hands of some other perfumista who purchased it in the hope of receiving a genuine Creed for a fraction of MSRP. It is even possible that a decanter acquired this or another bottle like it, and by divvying it up into tiny (grossly overpriced) samples, has sown falsehood and deception far and wide.

Now I'd like to open up the floor. Come forth Creed fans and foes! Share your Creed fake stories. If you are a Creed detractor, ask yourself whether you can trace the source of your juice back to the Creed boutique or headquarters. If not, I need to know whether you believe that there is some reason why you, too, might not have been testing a bogus dupe when you took Creed to task for producing a "boring, synthetic, derivative, and overpriced excuse for a niche perfume." 

It's time to come clean, my friends. Please share your epistemological trials and tribulations. Or explain why you should be free from the above sorts of concerns.

Entry #7: A Philosophical Lexicon for Perfumistas

Truth

In some ways, the concept of truth seems too obvious to bother discussing. In other ways, it seems too elusive to pin down, which can lead to the same conclusion: why bother?

Philosophers have spent a lot of time trying to understand what it means for a statement to be true. In logic, it's pretty straightforward. There are truth conditions on each type of logical statement. Let us consider one example, the conditional or hypothetical statement:

(1) If this perfume is a genuine Chanel perfume, 

then it was produced by the house of Chanel.

(2) If this perfume was produced by the house of Chanel, 

then it is a genuine Chanel perfume.

Which of these statements are true? These are conditional statements, readily recognizable by the if-then structure. If the first part (the antecedent or "if clause") of a conditional statement is true, then the second part (the consequent or "then clause") must be true in order for the statement as a whole to be true.

If the antecedent of a conditional statement is false, then the consequent could be either true or false, and the statement as a whole would still be true. In other words, the falsehood of the antecedent automatically guarantees the truth of the conditional statement. 

The two statements together express both a necessary and a sufficient condition: we can know that any genuine Chanel perfume was produced by the house of Chanel (not a knock-off operation), and any perfume produced by the house of Chanel is a genuine Chanel perfume. Because both of these statements are true, their conjunction is as well:

(1) & (2)

The truth conditions on a conjunction (joined by and or the ampersand) are simple. Both of the conjuncts must be true in order for the statement as a whole to be true. 

If all of this seems quite boring and trivial to you, that is probably because working out truth conditions on such logical statements is a far cry from talking about truths in reality. 

According to one theory of truth, the correspondence theory,  a true statement is one which corresponds to a state of affairs. We have an intuitive grasp of what truth is, but our criterion for denying that something is true is that it contradicts something else which we know or believe to be true.

Reformulation may on its face seem to be a good example. A perfume house may deny that they reformulated a perfume, and they may be telling the truth, or they may be lying, under the assumption that they have a right to say whatever they like about their own perfumes. 

If we examine the label of our bottle of Yves Saint Laurent Champagne, which was renamed as Yvresse, and compare the ingredients listed to recent bottles of Yvresse, we may conclude that the perfume is no longer the same. (This is only an example, and I hasten to add that I am not sure that Yves Saint Laurent has ever denied having reformulated its perfumes...)

It is possible, however, that labeling conventions have changed. You may have noticed that in the past many perfume bottles listed basically three ingredients:

Alcohol, fragrance (parfum), water. 

Not so anymore! These days, the list of ingredients goes on and on and on. So just finding that the labels read differently does not necessarily mean that the perfume was prepared using a different formula.

Sometimes houses simply contradict themselves. A recent example would seem to be Guerlain's announcement that they would be bringing Mitsouko back to its former glory. If they earlier claimed that the perfume was reformulated in order to comply with IFRA restrictions, then something has to give. Either it was never necessary to reformulate the perfume in the first place, or else it is impossible to bring Mitsouko back to its former glory, given the reigning IFRA restrictions, which have become more not less strict over the last few years.

The law of non-contradiction is key here. We reject the truth of a claim by showing that it is self-contradictory or implies something which we know to be false. The law of non-contradiction is the skeptic's most faithful ally, and the only inviolable principle. The skeptic may question every other statement ever made by anyone, but the basis of his rejection of some statements and theories is that something cannot both be and not be in the same way and at the same time.

Is reformulation a kind of self-contradiction? The answer to this question appears to be: No. Although we may bemoan reformulation (a few brave souls, going against the current trend, have argued that reformulations are often improvements!), it is not necessarily a contradiction for a company such as Coty to fob off a vastly inferior version of Muguet des Bois under the very same name as the perfume formerly known as Muguet des Bois.

It may be that, in the case of perfumery, the truth conditions are slightly different than we have come to believe in the case of most objects and things. The prevailing convention regarding naming of perfumes (given rampant reformulation) is that the company which produces a perfume gets to decide what goes in it, and they can change the ingredients at their caprice—for any reason whatsoever. 

The reason why people feel that they have been cheated when they buy a bottle of reformulated perfume going by the same name (and usually sold in the same type of bottle) as a cherished perfume is because they are assuming something akin to Leibniz' law:

Two things are identical if and only if all of their properties are the same.

In perfumery, the criteria are more lax: "Shalimar is Shalimar" just means that Shalimar is still created by Guerlain. That's it. They can pour whatever they like in the bottle and call it Shalimar, and their having done so is the necessary and sufficient condition for its being Shalimar, even though it may smell nothing like the original launch of that perfume.

When we feel cheated in a case of reformulation, it is because we have not fully appreciated that the house has the final say on its own creations. It's a godlike power, in a way. The house giveth and the house taketh away, and there is absolutely nothing that we consumers can do about it—beyond voting with our wallets. That is the extent of our power  in this realm.

Entry #4: A Philosophical Lexicon for Perfumistas

Metaphysics and Metaphysicians

The term metaphysics was first used by the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle as the title of one of the volumes of his massive philosophical corpus. Metaphysics was literally the volume after Physics. What were the subjects contained within Aristotle's volume Metaphysics? All sorts of topics which involve a higher level of abstraction than physics itself or, if you like, dig more deeply into the nature of reality than even physics.

Over the many centuries since Aristotle, metaphysics has come to mean philosophical speculation of a nonempirical type, of intrinsically nonobservable phenomena. One example is causation. We don't observe causation. We observe what appears to be a cause, and what appears to be an effect. Are they joined causally, or are they merely coincidentally connected? This is a big question for philosophers interested in metaphysics. They have also speculated about such things as tropes and possible worlds. 

To skeptics, all of this is well and fine, but an elaborate fantasy is, at the end of the day, still a fantasy. For obvious reasons, then, metaphysicians are not that keen on skeptics. When confronted with a meticulously woven metaphysical tapestry, rather than complimenting its maker, the skeptic points out all of its flaws, and reveals that even the metaphysician's most cherished theories are incapable of being demonstrated as anything more than figments of his imagination. To metaphysicians, skeptics are like an annoying kid at a party who pops everyone's balloons.

Eternal, Transcendent Masterpiece
or Highly Contingent Mass Market Success?

Where does metaphysics fit into the perfume picture? One question which has arisen lately is the status of perfumery. Is it art? Does it matter? On the one hand, this seems to be a simple conceptual question. Define the term art, and then examine perfumery and see whether it fits the definition. I've noticed a tendency on the part of the "Perfume is art" crowd to conflate art and aesthetics. 

Beauty stopped being a necessary condition to art more than a century ago, so there's definitely a conceptual confusion in the minds of those who infer from the resplendent beauty of some perfumes that they are works of art. When people begin exalting perfumes as masterpieces, or "one of the ten greatest perfumes of all time," there seems to be something more going on. When such claims are made with quasi-religious fervor, then one can only suspect that perfume has become some kind of surrogate for a higher purpose or power. Perfume seems to hold some sort of metaphysical significance for such enthusiasts, a value beyond the pleasure derived from the experience of perfume.

Eternal, Transcendent Masterpiece
or Highly Contingent Mass Market Success?

Many people appear to wish to believe that great perfumes have an eternal aspect to them, despite the obviously evanescent quality of the real liquids which go by the label perfume, and despite the fact that perfumes arise in very particular cultural contexts, and despite the dependence of our tastes in perfume on highly contingent cultural factors. Being skeptical by nature, my distinct impression is that the people who fall into the "Perfume is art" camp are making sweeping generalizations based on their own love of some perfumes. Obviously, all perfumes are not artworks, just as most texts are not literature. So right from the beginning there is a problem with the "Perfume is art" thesis. 

Surely any thoughtful person would distinguish great perfumes from vat-produced chemical soups created solely in response to marketing data amassed about the preference of current consumers. There is something of a vicious circle in all of this, because the perfumes thought to be market-worthy end up on the shelves, and then consumers buy and wear them. They may in this way become habituated to those sorts of scents, and then when they are surveyed, they will express in complete sincerity an interest in wearing more of the same. Homogenization is inevitable in such a scheme.

Returning to the question of metaphysics, one may ask whether there are transcendent perfumes, which attain a higher level. Plato would say that, if so, then they participate in the Realm of the Forms, specifically, The Form of the Perfect Perfume. Now there is a metaphysical theory, if ever there was one. But in order to understand Plato's theory of reality (his metaphysics), we'll need to think a bit more about empiricism, a term yet to be defined. Stay tuned...

Eternal, Transcendent Masterpiece
or Highly Contingent Mass Market Success?

Entry #3: A Philosophical Lexicon for Perfumistas

Skepticism and Skeptics

The word skeptic is used quite a lot in a loose way to refer to someone who harbors doubts about a particular question or subject matter. In philosophy, skeptic and skepticism refer more specifically to a type of epistemological doubt. Skeptics are people who start out as epistemologists, attempting to determine the conditions and extent of our knowledge, but they end by concluding that the answers to the following questions are rather dim: 

What do we know? Diddly.

How do we know? We don't.

Can we know? No.

Do we know anything at all? No.

What is truly fascinating about skepticism is that it knows (pardon the pun) no bounds. It is possible even to be a skeptic about skepticism! So a consistent skeptic ultimately ends up in a quandary: how does he know that he does not know?

Socrates appears to have been a skeptic, who did not espouse any positive views of his own about the world, but famously exhorted people to Know thyself. When it came to matters transcending the self, Socrates was all questions and no answers, and this really annoyed his contemporaries, who in the end sentenced him to death for his irritating habit of walking around the streets of Athens and badgering people with questions until they revealed the truth: that they had no idea what they were talking about.

Socrates revealed this truth to his interlocutors by catching them in contradictions. It cannot be the case both that p and that not-p (where p is any proposition), but when Socrates persisted in his questioning, he invariably found that the people with whom he conversed contradicted themselves, thus demonstrating that, despite their sophisticated airs and alleged expertise and experience, reality and appearance diverged.

Are there skeptics in the world of perfume? Of course. One of the most common examples is the Creed skeptic, who denies that the house of Creed really is all that it purports to be. To the Creed skeptic, a Creed skeptic skeptic (such as Bryan Ross at From Pyrgos) retorts: how do you know that Creed is a sham? 

 
Is a skeptic about Creed skeptics a true believer? Or does he simply deny that the grounds for Creed skepticism are sound? I encourage you to read some of the many excellent pieces on these matters over at From Pyrgos.

We'll pick up tomorrow where we left off, with the skeptic's mortal enemy: the metaphysician!

Entry #2: A Philosophical Lexicon for Perfumistas

Epistemology

The word epistemology means theory of knowledge or the study of knowledge. This branch of philosophy is concerned with the most fundamental of questions: What do we know? How do we know? Can we know? Do we know anything at all?

Naturally one of the first questions to be addressed by epistemologists (the philosophers who spend their time primarily on questions of knowledge) is simply this: 

What is knowledge? 

According to one orthodox answer to this question, knowledge is justified true belief. That may sound complicated, but it's really just common sense. If I know that the perfume which I just donned after my bath is Clinique Aromatics Elixir, then presumably it is true that I just donned Clinique Aromatics Elixir, and I do in fact believe that to be the case. Furthermore, I must be justified in believing that the perfume in the bottle which I just sprayed on is indeed Clinique Aromatics Elixir. Are there any reasons for doubting any of this?

Or to turn the question on its head: What precisely are my grounds for believing that the perfume which I just donned is Aromatics Elixir? It certainly seems reasonable that the brown liquid inside this frosted glass bottle is Aromatics Elixir. I did not buy my bottle from an ebay hawk, who in an effort to maximize profit may have decanted half the liquid and refilled the vessel with anti-freeze, adjusting the color back to that of the original perfume by adding some dye. 

Of course, it's possible that some perverse factory employee of the Clinique company pulled a practical joke such that an entire batch of what was bottled as Aromatics Elixir was in fact a completely different perfume. It's also possible that an incompetent employee simply made a big fat mistake, say, by confusing the various recipes in the factory fragrance book, and combining the ingredients needed to produce Clinique Happy instead of Aromatics Elixir.

Nonetheless, I feel justified in my belief that the perfume which I donned after my bath is not Clinique Happy, because happily it does not smell like that fragrance. In fact, the perfume wafting up my décolleté smells exactly like Aromatics Elixir! 

There is still a problem, however: my alleged knowledge of what Aromatics Elixir smells like derives solely from the bottles in my collection (one was produced in the United States, the other in Switzerland). If those bottles do not contain Aromatics Elixir, though I believe that they do, I could still be wrong. They both open with a bitter and intense chamomile but eventually dry down to oakmoss-patchouli bliss.

Now, of course, the astute reader is wondering about the probability that the liquids in the two different bottles, produced in entirely different countries, could possibly both be erroneously filled with some substance other than Aromatics Elixir—and the same one, at that! To my surprise, the color of the liquids in the two bottles is not at all the same—one seems more yellow, the other much more brown—but the scent seems quite similar, especially by the drydown. 

Would it not take a conspiracy of grand proportion for both of these bottles to be filled with any perfume other than Aromatics Elixir, even though empirically speaking they are in fact quite distinct? Can we not explain the difference in color by factors such as the particular crop of patchouli used in the two distinct batches? 

I think that you can see where all of this is leading. Epistemologists really do spend time on all of the various ways in which we can be mistaken in our beliefs. If knowledge is justified true belief, then when we are mistaken in our beliefs, we lack knowledge. Perhaps it should be obvious why epistemologists have so few friends and are hated above all by people whose beliefs are grounded in faith. 

There are so many very different ways in which we might be mistaken that after thinking about these questions for a while, one may simply capitulate to skepticism. But that's tomorrow's word, so stay tuned, especially since Creed may be mentioned...