Perception and Its Modalities

2010

Philosophers and cognitive scientists of perception by custom have investigated individual sense modalities in relative isolation from each other. However, perceiving is, in a number of respects, multimodal. The traditional sense modalities should not be treated as explanatorily independent. Attention to the multimodal aspects of perception challenges common assumptions about the content and phenomenology of perception, and about the individuation and psychological nature of sense modalities. Multimodal perception thus presents a valuable opportunity for a case study in mature interdisciplinary cognitive science. This chapter aims to raise these issues against the background of unimodal approaches in the study of perception. It presents some of the central empirical findings concerning multimodality, and it explains the philosophical implications of these findings. Foremost, it aims to encourage and open avenues for future research.

NISTADS-CSIR In-House Project Technical Paper, 2011

Perceptual and recursion-based faculties have long been recognized to be vital constituents of human (and, in general, animal) cognition. However, certain faculties such as the visual and the linguistic faculty have come to receive far more academic and experimental attention, in recent decades, than other recognized categories of faculties. This paper seeks to highlight the imbalance in these studies and bring into sharper focus the need for further in-depth philosophical treatments of faculties such as especially hearing, touch, and proprioception, besides other faculties such as the olfactory and gustatory ones. It also seeks to bring to bear the debate on the role of qualia in perception and overall in cognition in its thesis of the significance of these other modular faculties for genuine insights into cognition as a (now) technologically expanded domain.

Corela, 2006

We have (…) a perceptual field, a surface in contact with the world, a permanent rootedness in it (…) The world ceaselessly assails and beleaguers subjectivity as waves wash round a wreck on the shore. All knowledge takes its place within the horizons opened up by perception. Merleau-Ponty 1962: 207

UTas, 2010

Three widespread assumptions about the human senses are challenged. These are that we have five senses, that they function independently, and, for the purposes of theorising perception, that vision can serve as a typical sense. These assumptions underlie most philosophical treatments of the senses in epistemology and the philosophy of perception, but they are mistaken. Contemporary attempts to count senses generally use some combination of four criteria based on sensations, organs, stimulus and behaviour. I examine these criteria and show them to be separately insufficient and jointly incoherent. In particular, the pluralism of physical theory and difficulties with dividing primary from secondary qualities complicate counting according to stimulus, while the other criteria advise large but indefinite counts. I consider recent proposals defending the traditional count of five based on language use, proprioceptive awareness, and pragmatic utility, and reject them all. The traditional count is best explained on the basis of differences in sensory experience, coupled with easily identified organs, together with a mistaken tendency to separate the perceiver from the world. Rather than attempting a more critically informed count, I argue that attempts to count the senses are currently based on false presuppositions regarding the individuation of the senses. I show that the traditional sense modalities are complex and do not function separately. This is achieved by considering the sense of balance, whereby the perceiver participates in dynamical relations. Balance is implicit in all perceiving. Assumptions that cause difficulties in counting the senses are traced to a preoccupation with vision, which is usually treated as a single sense only instrumentally controlled by the perceiver. I point out that understanding seeing has historically been a misguided effort to explain what is seen on the basis of two-dimensional retinal images and a separation of perception from action. By noting the dependence of seeing on looking, I argue that seeing has been misrepresented in philosophical accounts of perception. What follows is that some of the important problems of epistemology have arisen from attempts to base theories of perception on a false picture of seeing. The philosophical views of Thomas Reid are used throughout to evaluate the modern debates and place them in a wider historical context.

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.

If we want to learn something about the reality we meet, we should know something about the way we capture it or how the meeting with reality is constructed. This work, however, doesn’t just look at a neuroanatomical, cognitive–psychological description of receptors and mechanisms of sensory reception, but also offers deeper thoughts about the conditions and mainly about the consequences of higher cognitive processes tied to perception. The text thus walks a line between general and cognitive psychology and philosophical epistemology while trying to map not only the origins of percepts, what influences them, but mainly where and how our perception convictions originate and the total concept of reality we live in. The obvious intention of this exploration is not only to present a package of basic facts and theories, but also to encourage the reader to think about and to problematize the perception processes and consequences.

Oxford University Press eBooks, 2021

A representationalist theory of sense experience can seem plausible at first sight, but at bottom it involves eccentric metaphysical commitments. In this paper I shall first expose these commitments. I shall then argue that, of all current theories of sense experience, a non-relationist qualia view faces the fewest difficulties."

2021

This is the editors' Introduction to a special issue of the journal, Multisensory Research. European philosophers of the modern period found multisensory perception to be impossible because they thought that perceptual ideas are defined by how they are experienced. Under this conception, the individual modalities are determinables of ideas—just as colour is a determinable that embraces red and blue, so also the visual is a determinable that embraces colour and (visually experienced) shape. Since no idea is experienced as, for example, both visual and auditory, there can be no such thing as audiovisual perception. This conception of modality is not directly contested, but a variety of perceptual phenomena are listed that could raise interesting questions if treated as multimodal in origin

Synthese, 2020

Is the flavor of mint reducible to the minty smell, the taste, and the menthol-like coolness on the roof of one’s mouth, or does it include something over and above these – something not properly associated with any one of the contributing senses? More generally, are there features of perceptual experiences – so-called novel features – that are not associated with any of our senses taken singly? This question has received a lot of attention of late. Yet surprisingly little attention has been paid to the question of what it means to say that a feature is associated with a sensory modality in the first place. Indeed, there is only one fully developed proposal in the literature, due to Casey O’Callaghan. I argue that this proposal is too permissive to inform the debate over novel features. I go on to argue that all attempts to formulate a better proposal along these lines fail. The corollary of my arguments is that the question of the existence of novel features is poorly formed. Furthermore, the problem generalizes, with the result that we should not rely on our pre-theoretical notions of the senses as the basis of theorizing about the features (contents and phenomenal character) of perceptual experiences.