This book arises from an acknowledgment: the lack, as far as we know, of a book dedicated to the cognition of chemical senses.

Although recent discoveries in the field of molecular biology raise the hope of a future understanding of the transduction and peripheral coding of odors and tastes, it seems to us that they imply a risk: to make us forget that in the other extreme of knowledge, that of maximal complexity, the evolution of cognitive sciences allows an epistemologically fruitful reformulation of information-processing problems.

Unlike the other senses, olfaction and taste do not have a learned discourse dealing with elementary aspects, that is, sensory processing, as well as the most abstract aspects, that is, symbolic processing. The purpose of cognitive science is to orient these processings into a continuity, and particularly to try to find out to what extent higher-order processes interact with the sensory level in order to produce sufficiently reliable representations of the world. We are still quite unaware of the nature of gustatory and olfactory representations, as compared with what we know about vision and audition, for example.

Faced with this relative ignorance, our prejudice was the following: If odors and tastes are ill-identified cognitive objects, then none of the available potential resources should be neglected: Expert and naive people, as well as “savage” and “civilized” ones, conscious knowledge and emotions, biology and social sciences – all of those can contribute first to an assessment of our knowledge, and then to confrontation of its inadequacies.