Humans are poorer at identifying smells and communicating about them, compared to other sensory domains. They also cannot easily organize odor sensations in a general conceptual space, where geometric distance could represent how similar or different all odors are. These two generalities are more or less accepted by psychologists, and they are often seen as connected: If there is no conceptual space for odors, then olfactory identification should indeed be poor. We propose here an important revision to this conclusion: We believe that the claim that there is no odor space is true only if by odor space, one means a conceptual space representing all possible odor sensations, in the paradigmatic sense used for instance for color. However, in a less paradigmatic sense, local conceptual spaces representing a given subset of odors do exist. Thus the absence of a global odor space does not warrant the conclusion that there is no olfactory conceptual map at all. Here we show how a localist account provides a new interpretation of experts and cross‐cultural categorization studies: Rather than being exceptions to the poor olfactory identification and communication usually seen elsewhere, experts and cross‐cultural categorization are here taken to corroborate the existence of local conceptual spaces.

中文翻译：

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气味分类：地方主义方法

与其他感官领域相比，人类在识别气味和交流方面的能力较差。他们也无法在一般概念空间中轻松组织气味感觉，其中几何距离可以表示所有气味的相似或不同程度。这两个普遍性或多或少被心理学家接受，并且它们通常被视为相互关联：如果没有气味的概念空间，那么嗅觉识别确实应该很差。我们在此提出对这一结论的重要修正：我们相信，只有当气味空间表示一个代表所有事物的概念空间时，没有气味空间的断言才是正确的。可能的气味感觉，例如用于颜色的典型意义。然而，在较不典型的意义上，代表给定气味子集的局部概念空间确实存在。因此，缺乏全球气味空间并不能保证根本没有嗅觉概念图的结论。在这里，我们展示了一个地方主义者的描述如何为专家和跨文化分类研究提供新的解释：专家和跨文化分类不是通常在其他地方看到的糟糕的嗅觉识别和交流的例外，而是用来证实当地的存在。概念空间。