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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: 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
