The chapters in this section will clearly illustrate the multidisciplinary approach of this volume, interweaving issues from different domains – chemistry, anthropology, psychology, and linguistics – to examine the complex relationships between language for odors and knowledge of odors.

In Chapter 4, from a psycholinguistic point of view, Danièle Dubois and Catherine Rouby's analysis of verbal answers in laboratory identification tasks for odors shows that scoring is not solely a technical issue, but also raises numerous theoretical questions about cognitive representations and the naming of odors. They first demonstrate that the “veridical label” is the name of the odorant source rather than the name of an olfactory property. Therefore, because subjects lack adequate labels for the olfactory properties of objects, they have to resort to the use of a large diversity of linguistic devices to account for their olfactory perceptions, and those must be interpreted by researchers as cues to subjects' knowledge of odors.

In Chapter 5, David Howes examines a large body of data borrowed from the history of Western culture and from distant cultures. Referring to Classen's “archeology of sense words” for intellect in the English language, he shows that the sense of smell has been differently valued and interpreted in various cultures and that, for example, intelligence was more “tactile” before the Enlightenment than it is now.