Abstract

In a series of investigations in everyday life situations in different cultures and languages, in expert professional practices as well as in experimental conditions, we developed a situated cognitive approach of olfactory experience departing from the canonical cognitive model of perception grounded on visual perception and computer sciences. Instead of considering olfaction as a primitive, speechless sense, when relying on information processing of odorants, the situated approach allows unifying the different types of knowledges elaborated from sensory experiences within a semiotic approach of cognition as meaning constitution. An analysis of the linguistic resources available in different languages to speakers when communicating their sensory experience illustrates the specificity of olfactory experience as embodied, multisensory, and critically invested with symbolic, social and emotional values. Therefore, olfaction can be seen as a heuristic for developing a generic model of sensuous cognition. Methodologically, instead of evaluating sensory experience at the yardstick of natural sciences descriptions, we suggest to start the investigations of olfactory experience from an anthropological perspective by identifying the linguistic resources from any language and their use by speakers in a diversity of discourses elicited from different situations accounting for their olfactory categories as acts of meaning.