MindPapers: 3.4a. Distinguishing the Senses

Bermudez, Jose Luis (1999). Categorizing qualitative states: Some problems. Anthropology and Philosophy 3 (2). (Google | Edit)

Coady, C. A. J. (1974). The senses of Martians. Philosophical Review 83 (1):107-125. (Cited by 4 | Google | More links | Edit)

Cooper, D. E. (1970). Materialism and perception. Philosophical Quarterly 20 (October):334-346. (Google | More links | Edit)

Cox, J. W. Roxbee (1970). Distinguishing the senses. Mind 79 (October):530-550. (Cited by 1 | Google | More links | Edit)

Feenstra, Louw & Borgstein, Johannes (2003). The senses in perspective. Ludus Vitalis 11 (20):135-157. (Google | Edit)

Gray, Richard (2005). On the concept of a sense. Synthese 147 (3):461-475. (Google | More links | Edit)

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

Grice, H. P. (1962). Some remarks about the senses. In R. J. Butler (ed.), Analytical Philosophy, First Series. Oxford University Press. (Cited by 31 | Google | Edit)

Keeley, Brian L. (2002). Making sense of the senses: Individuating modalities in humans and other animals. Journal Of Philosophy 99 (1):5-28. (Cited by 15 | Google | More links | Edit)

Leon, Mark . (1988). Characterising the senses. Mind and Language 3:243-70. (Cited by 7 | Google | Edit)

Nelkin, Norton (1990). Categorizing the senses. Mind and Language 5 (2):149-165. (Google | Edit)

Nudds, Matthew (online). Is seeing just like feeling? Kinds of experiences and the five senses. (Google | Edit)

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

Nudds, Matthew (2000). Modes of perceiving and imagining. Acta Analytica 15 (24):139-150. (Google | More links | Edit)

Nudds, Matthew (online). The senses as psychological kinds. (Google | More links | Edit)

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

Nudds, Matthew (2004). The significance of the senses. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 104 (1):31-51. (Cited by 9 | Google | More links | Edit)

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

O'Dea, John (online). Grice's Some Remarks on the Senses. (Google | Edit)

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

O'Dea, John (online). The Martian case. (Google | Edit)

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

O'Dea, John (ms). The senses and the structure of experience. (Google | More links | Edit)

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

Ross, P. (2001). Qualia and the senses. Philosophical Quarterly 51 (205):495-511. (Cited by 3 | Google | More links | Edit)

Ross, Peter W. (forthcoming). Common sense about qualities and senses. Philosophical Studies. (Google | More links | Edit)

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

Scott, Michael (2007). Distinguishing the senses. Philosophical Explorations 10 (3):257 – 262. (Google | More links | Edit)

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

3.4b	Vision [27]

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