Seeing and hearing flavours

According to cognitive psychology, virtually every sensory system influences the way in which flavours are experienced. However, it is less clear which systems are actually constitutive of flavour perception and which have merely causal influence. The paper focuses on the status of vision and audition, which are usually not treated as constitutive in the context of flavour perception. First, it is proposed that the mechanistic explanation debate provides conceptual resources which allow the constitutivity of sensory systems to be assessed. Second, it is argued that the contemporary state of the art provides reasons for accepting the constitutive role of audition, but analogous evidence is not available in the case of vision.