Abstract: Keeley has recently argued that the philosophical issue of how to analyse the concept of a sense can usefully be addressed by considering how scientists, and more specifically neuroethologists, classify the senses. After briefly outlining his proposal, which is based on the application of an ordered set of individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for modality differentiation, I argue, by way of two complementary counterexamples, that it fails to account fully for the way the senses are in fact individuated in neuroethology and other relevant sciences. I suggest substantial modifications to Keeley’s account which would both solve the problem cases and make better sense of the actual classifications made by scientists. I conclude by noting some limits to the way of classifying the senses that I suggest. I conclude by suggesting that the problem I identify in Keeley’s account has arisen from a confusion that sometimes arises in the philosophical literature between how we individuate the senses and what constitutes a sense

Abstract: In this paper I am going to argue that two commonly held views about perceptual experience are incompatible and that one must be given up. The first is the view that the five senses are to be distinguished by appeal to the kind of experiences involved in perception; the second is the view – called Representationalism – that the subjective character of perceptual experience is solely determined by what the experience represents. We could take their incompatibility as a reason for rejecting Representationalism; but I will suggest that it’s open to the Representationalist to claim that the experiences of a single sense need have no common character

Abstract: The distinction we make between five different senses is a universal one.¹ Rather than speaking of generically perceiving something, we talk of perceiving in one of five determinate ways: we see, hear, touch, smell, and taste things. In distinguishing determinate ways of perceiving things what are we distinguishing between? What, in other words, is a sense modality?² An answer to this question must tell us what constitutes a sense modality and so needs to do more than simply describe differences in virtue of which we can distinguish the perceptions of different senses. There are many such differences – the different perceptions involve different sense organs, sensitivity to different kinds of stimuli, the perception of different properties, and they involve different kinds of experiences – but which, if any, of these differences are the differences that really matter?

1.

To say what is constitutive of a sense modality we need to say what all instances of perceiving something with a particular sense have in common in virtue of which they are instances of perceiving with that sense.³ Many philosophers suppose that there is an obvious answer to this question. In order to perceive something one must have an experience of it.⁴ Seeing something requires having a _visual_ experience of it, hearing

Abstract: Standard accounts of the senses attempt to answer the question how and why we count five senses (the counting question); none of the standard accounts is satisfactory. Any adequate account of the senses must explain the significance of the senses, that is, why distinguishing different senses matters. I provide such an explanation, and then use it as the basis for providing an account of the senses and answering the counting question

Abstract: This is not the question that his essay is normally taken to be asking, namely, how are the senses to be distinguished from one another? The difference between these questions is subtle but consider, for example, the issue of the difference between the colours as against the issue of when to count some property as a novel colour. The difference between the colours will more or less fall out of your favourite account of what colours are; but it more difficult to think of how to approach the question of whether some property counts as a new colour. We might begin be dividing the question into two parts: firstly, is the property in question a colour at all?, and if it is a colour, is it a novel colour? The answers may not be distinct, but the questions clearly are

Abstract: Given that, as Grice sees it, neither the Content nor the Qualia views seem viable on their own, it is worth addressing the possibility that the combination of them might do the job. So, on the combined view, for two sense experiences to correctly be said to belong to different modalities they must _both_ differ introspectibly _and_ represent different groups of properties. But, according to Grice,

…this does not seem to be a satisfactory way out; for if it
were, then it would be logically possible to detect smells
by means of the type of [introspectible] experience
characteristically involved in seeing, yet only to do this
would not be to _see_ smells, since a further condition
would be unfulfilled. But surely we object on logical
grounds no less to the idea that we might detect smells
through visual experiences than to the idea that we might
see the smell of things: indeed the ideas seem to be the
same. (p. 145)

Though this objection is phrased as an objection specifically to the _combination_ of the Content and Qualia views, to my mind it really is simply a re-phrasing of the objection to the Qualia view. That is to say, this objection is an objection to the idea that it is possible to pull apart the introspectible quality of an experience from the content of that experience. If this idea really is an integral part of the Qualia View, then combining the Qualia View with the Content View will not be of any help; the combined view will simply inherit this apparently untenable idea

Abstract: Representationalist theories of experience are often thought vulnerable to the existence of apparently non-representational differences between experiences in different sensory modalities. This goes back at least to Grice’s argument, in “Some Remarks on the Senses,” that the senses are distinguished by “introspectible character.” Employing J.J. Gibson’s useful distinction between _exploratory_ and _performatory_ behaviour, I argue that the senses can be distinguished consistently with representationalism by recognising a proprioceptive element to perceptual experience. When we perceive we are aware of using a sense organ, and differences in this respect account adequately for the felt difference between the sense modalities

Abstract: 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

Abstract: Seeing, hearing and touching are phenomenally different, even if we are detecting the same spatial properties with each sense. This presents a prima facie problem for intentionalism, the theory that phenomenal character supervenes on representational content. The paper reviews some attempts to resolve this problem, and then looks in detail at Peter Carruthers' recent proposal that the senses can be individuated by the way in which they represent spatial properties and incorporate time. This proposal is shown to be ineffective in distinguishing auditory from either visual or tactual perception, and substantial classes of visual and tactual perceptions are found that the posited spatial and temporal features fail to individuate

Abstract: The goal of this paper is to challenge the rather insouciant attitude that many investigators seem to adopt when they go about describing the items and events in their "visual fields". There are at least three distinct categories of interpretation of what these reports might mean, and only under one of those categories do those reports have anything resembling an observational character. The others demand substantive revisions in one's beliefs about what one sees. The ur-concept of a "visual field" is that of the "sum of things seen", but one can interpret the latter in very different ways. The first is the "field of view", or the sum of physical things seen. The second is an array of visual impressions, whose spatial relations are distinct from those of physical phenomena in front of the eyes. The third is an intentional object: the world as it is represented visually. These three categories are described, and various locutions of vision science--such as "optic array", "retinocentric space", "visual geometry", "virtual object" and others--are analyzed and variously located within them. Finally, a recent argument purporting to necessitate the existence of a version two visual field is examined and shown wanting

Abstract: Pictorial representation is one species of visual representation--but not the only one, I argue. There are three additional varieties or species of visual representation--namely 'structural', 'aspect' and 'integrative' representation--which together comprise a category of 'delineative' rather than depictive visual representation. I arrive at this result via consideration of previously neglected orientational factors that serve to distinguish the two categories. I conclude by arguing that pictures (unlike 'delineations') are not physical objects, and that their multiplicity and modal narrowness motivates a view of them as instead being (one kind of) 'delineatively' represented content or subject matter, as represented by those objects that are (commonly but wrongly, in my view) assumed to be pictures

Abstract: One’s visual experience will change. One change is that the penny looks to be presented obliquely, where it once looked to be presented head-on. This is a change in the ostensible three-dimensional spatial properties of the penny: certain parts of the penny look to have become more distant from one; other parts look to have become closer to one

Abstract: Department of Philosophy Brown University Providence, RI 02915

Abstract: The specialization of visual function within biological function is reason for introducing “homology thinking” into explanations of the visual system. It is argued that such specialization arises when organisms evolve by differentiation from their predecessors. Thus, it is essentially historical, and visual function should be regarded as a lineage property. The colour vision of birds and mammals do not function the same way as one another, on this account, because each is an adaptation to special needs of the visual functions of predecessors—very different kinds of predecessors in each case. Thus, history underlies function. We also see how homology thinking figures in the hierarchical classification of visual systems, and how it supports the explanation of visual function by functional role analysis

Abstract: Abstract The paper uses the tools of mereotopology (the theory of parts, wholes and boundaries) to work out the implications of certain analogies between the 'ecological psychology' of J. J Gibson and the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. It presents an ontological theory of spatial boundaries and of spatially extended entities. By reference to examples from the geographical sphere it is shown that both boundaries and extended entities fall into two broad categories: those which exist independently of our cognitive acts (for example, the planet Earth, its exterior surface); and those which exist only in virtue of such acts (for example: the equator, the North Sea). The visual field, too, can be conceived as an example of an extended entity that is dependent in the sense at issue. The paper suggests extending this analogy by postulating entities which would stand to true judgments as the visual field stands to acts of visual perception. The judgment field is defined more precisely as that complex extended entity which comprehends all entities which are relevant to the truth of a given (true) judgment. The work of cognitive linguists such as Talmy and Langacker, when properly interpreted, can be shown to yield a detailed account of the structures of the judgment fields corresponding to sentences of different sorts. A new sort of correspondence-theoretic definition of truth for sentences of natural language can then be formulated on this basis

Abstract: in Sounds and Perception: New Philosophical Essays, ed. by Matthew Nudds and Casey O’Callaghan (Oxford University Press, forthcoming in 2008)

Abstract: Olfactoric imagery is abundantly employed in the Bramhall-Hobbes controversy. I survey some examples and then turn to the possible significance of this. I argue that by forcing Hobbes into the figurative exchange Bramhall scores points in terms of moving the controversy into ground that is not covered by the limited view of rationality that Hobbes is committed to according to his rhetoric (at least as Bramhall perceives it). Bramhall clearly wants to move from cool argument to a more affluent rhetorical appeal. I argue that choosing such a richer epistemology coheres with Bramhall’s deeper anxieties regarding the moral method used in the Leviathan. This essay thus deviates from other form-content analysis of Hobbes, in attempting to examine his rhetoric in practice, under the pr