Towards a New Understanding of the Senses: Does Sensory Pluralism offer a satisfactory solution to the problem of individuating the senses? (original) (raw)
Related papers
2014
Philosophers have traditionally relied on a modality-specific conception of sensory experience: all such experience is visual or auditory or tactual, etc., they have said. No sensory experience is of more than one of these kinds, they assume-there is no such thing as audiovisual experience, for example, except insofar as visual experience can take place in the same perceiving subject at the same time as auditory experience. Recent work in cognitive science and philosophy has begun to show that this assumption of exclusive modalities has severe limitations. In the proposed volume, a number of distinguished philosophers and cognitive scientists show why it is not useful to think of the sense-modalities as distinct and discrete in their operations. Many of them argue, moreover, that once this exclusivity is abandoned, there is no reason to think of the modalities as limited to some small number-five, as the tradition would have it. The volume works toward a new understanding of sense-modality.
Non sense-specific perception and the distinction between the senses
2014
How should interaction between the senses affect thought about them? I try to capture some ways in which non sense-specific perception might be thought to make it impossible or pointless or explanatorily idle to distinguish between the senses. This task is complicated by there being more than one view of the nature of the senses, and more than one kind of non sense-specific perception. I argue, in particular, that provided we are willing to forgo certain assumptions about, for instance, the relationship between modes or kinds of experience, and about how one should count perceptual experiences at a time, at least one way of thinking about the senses survives the occurrence of various kinds of non sense-specific perception relatively unscathed.
Common Sense about Qualities and Senses
Philosophical Studies, 2008
There has been some recent optimism that addressing the question of how we distinguish sensory modalities will help us consider whether there are limits on a scientific understanding of perceptual states. For example, Ned Block has suggested that the way we distinguish sensory modalities indicates that perceptual states have qualia which at least resist scientific characterization. At another extreme, Brian Keeley argues that our common-sense way of distinguishing the senses in terms of qualitative properties is misguided, and offers a scientific eliminativism about common-sense modalities which avoids appeal to qualitative properties altogether. I'll argue contrary to Keeley that qualitative properties are necessary for distinguishing senses, and contrary to Block that our common-sense distinction doesn't indicate that perceptual states have qualia. A non-qualitative characterization of perceptual states isn't needed to avoid the potential limit of scientific understanding imposed by qualia.
A Proprioceptive Account of the Sense Modalities
Representationalist theories of sensory experience are often thought to be vulnerable to the existence of apparently non-representational differences between experiences in different sensory modalities. Seeing and hearing seem to differ in their qualia, quite apart from what they represent. The origin of this idea is perhaps Grice's argument, in "Some Remarks on the Senses," that the senses are distinguished by "introspectible character." In this chapter I take the Representationalist side by putting forward an account of sense modalities which is consistent with that view and yet pays due regard to the intuition behind Grice's argument. Employing J.J. Gibson's distinction between exploratory and performatory behaviour, I point to a proprioceptive element in perceptual experience, and identify this as crucial in any account of what makes a particular way of perceiving a sense modality.
Multisensory Research, 2021
This paper presents an account of the senses and what differentiates them that is compatible with richly multisensory perception and consciousness. According to this proposal, senses are ways of perceiving. Each sense is a subfaculty that comprises a collection of perceptual capacities. What each sense shares and what differentiates one sense from another is the manner in which those capacities are exercised. Each way of perceiving involves a distinct type of information gathering, individuated by the information it functions to extract and the medium from which it does so. This approach distinguishes the project of characterizing and differentiating senses from that of attributing experiences to sensory modalities. Perceptual experiences are episodes in which perceptual capacities are exercised. Conscious perceptual episodes may be ascribed to distinct sensory modalities, according to the manners in which perceptual capacities are deployed on an occasion. According to this account, senses are not exclusive. First, their capacities may overlap. Second, perceptual episodes, including conscious experiences, may belong to multiple senses. Indeed, some episodes require the joint use of several senses. In this account, subjects have only limited first-person knowledge of the senses they employ.
Perception and Its Modalities, 2014
This volume is about the many ways we perceive. Contributors explore the nature of the individual senses, how and what they tell us about the world, and how they interrelate. They often represent competing views: for instance, some argue that perception uses the senses in concert, while others are content, at least for present purposes, to leave unchallenged the traditional assumption that we perceive through discrete senses. And the methods deployed sometimes differ from one essay to the next: some draw upon the sciences and engineering, while others rely upon conceptual analysis.
The article presents a sensory language of thought (a set of cognitive units and relations) used to provide non-verbal definitions for various concepts. The definitions proposed below have a uniform structure both for artifacts (ARMCHAIR, CUP), and natural concepts (LAKE), including living ones (TREE, APPLE).
The Individuation of the Senses
Mohan Matthen (ed.) Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Perception, 2015
How many senses do humans possess? To answer this question, we have to say (a) what a sense is, and (b) how one sense differs from another. In response to (a) it is argued that the senses are information gathering faculties that feed into an integrated learning system in which the output of one can be associated with output of any other. Hearing and seeing satisfy this criterion, the immune system does not, though it is an information gathering faculty. In response to (a), two criteria are proposed. The first is the scientific criterion, which goes by separate data-processing channels in the brain. This criterion does not meet ordinary usage, and a perceptual criterion is proposed by which modalities are defined by perceptual activities, such as looking, focussing the eyes, scanning, etc.
Why does it matter to individuate the senses: A Brentanian approach
European Journal of Philosophy, 2021
How do we individuate the senses, what exactly do we do when we do so, and why does it matter? In the following paper, I propose a general answer to these related questions based on Franz Brentano's views on the senses. After a short survey of various answers offered in the recent literature on the senses, I distinguish between two major ways of answering this question, causally and descriptively, arguing that only answers giving priority to description and to the classification involved in it are on the right track for a general answer to the related questions. In the second part of the paper, I argue that Brentano's descriptive psychology is an attractive candidate for such an answer. His descriptive psychology provides a plausible account of the classification involved in description, in particular regarding the classification of sensory qualities. I close the paper by briefly explaining how Brentano spells out the priority of descriptive answers over causal ones.