Senses as Capacities (original) (raw)

Multisensory processing and perceptual consciousness: Part II

Philosophy Compass, 2017

The first part of this survey article offered a cartography of some of the more extensively studied forms of multisensory processing. In this second part, I turn to examining some of the different possible ways in which the structure of conscious perceptual experience might also be characterized as multisensory. In addition, I discuss the significance of research on multisensory processing and multi-sensory consciousness for philosophical debates concerning the modularity of perception, cognitive penetration, and the individua-tion of the senses.

Perceptual capacities, discrimination, and the senses

Synthese, 2021

In this paper, I defend a new theory of the nature and individuation of perceptual capacities. I argue that we need a theory of perceptual capacities to explain modal facts about what sorts of perceptual phenomenal states one can be in. I defend my view by arguing for three adequacy constraints on a theory of perceptual capacities: perceptual capacities must be individuated at least partly in terms of their place in a hierarchy of capacities, where these capacities include the senses themselves; an adequate account of perceptual capacities must be sensitive to empirical considerations; and an adequate account should accommodate the nature of the capacity to perceive. I arrive at these constraints by considering how Schellenberg's view fails, before defending and developing my alternative in line with the constraints. I defend a view on which there are few, coarse-grained perceptual capacities which can fulfil complex explanatory roles because they are evaluatively gradable on many axes. Finally, on my view, perceptual capacities bear a particularly close relation to the sensory modalities themselves.

The Sensory Content of Perceptual Experience

Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 2015

According to a traditional view, perceptual experiences are composites of distinct (but related) sensory and cognitive components. This dual-component theory has many benefits; in particular, it purports to offer a way forward in the debate over what kinds of properties perceptual experiences represent. On this kind of view, the issue reduces to the questions of what the sensory and cognitive components respectively represent. Here, I focus on the former topic. I propose a theory of the contents of the sensory aspects of perceptual experience that provides clear criteria for identifying what kinds of properties they represent.

Perception and Its Modalities

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.

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.

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.

Consciousness is more than meets the eye: a call for a multisensory study of subjective experience

Over the last 30 years, our understanding of the neurocognitive bases of consciousness has improved, mostly through studies employing vision. While studying consciousness in the visual modality presents clear advantages, we believe that a comprehensive scientific account of subjective experience must not neglect other exteroceptive and interoceptive signals as well as the role of multisensory interactions for perceptual and self-consciousness. Here, we briefly review four distinct lines of work which converge in documenting how multisensory signals are processed across several levels and contents of consciousness. Namely, how multisensory interactions occur when consciousness is prevented because of perceptual manipulations (i.e. subliminal stimuli) or because of low vigilance states (i.e. sleep, anesthesia), how interactions between exteroceptive and interoceptive signals give rise to bodily self-consciousness, and how multisensory signals are combined to form metacognitive judgments. By describing the interactions between multisensory signals at the perceptual, cognitive, and metacognitive levels, we illustrate how stepping out the visual comfort zone may help in deriving refined accounts of consciousness, and may allow cancelling out idiosyncrasies of each sense to delineate supramodal mechanisms involved during consciousness.