But smell and taste are different. For those senses, the hard philosophical and scientific work is trying to find words that we recognize in common and can share with each other, so that we all know what we’re talking about. The first step is to acknowledge just how limited our senses actually are. For example, it’s possible to ask how many different aromas a person is able to perceive at once—like when taking a sip of wine. In 1998, a couple of Australian researchers, Andrew Livermore and David Laing, hypothesized that even if people could identify the smells of complicated things like coffee
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