Two proposals have recently, and independently, been made about a space of possible sensory modalities. In this paper I examine these different proposals, and offer one of my own. I suggest that there are several spaces associated with distinct kinds of sensory modality.

The failure to resolve satisfactorily epistemological issues surrounding the identification of different senses has led to questions being asked of the nature of the senses. This issue has been thrown into sharp focus by two starkly contrasting positions. The first is a realist position that draws on science and is based on the application of criteria. The second is an anti-realist position that adheres to commonsense conceptions and is partly motivated by the apparent failure of criterial approaches. In this paper (...) I attempt to mediate between the two views. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

One strategy for working out how to individuate the senses is to pursue that task in tandem with that of individuating the sensory imaginings. We can tackle both, at least for the spatial senses of sight and touch, if we appeal to the idea that, while both modes represent their objects perspectivally, different forms of perspective are involved in each. This cannot, however, exhaust the differences between tactual and visual. Tactual experience is tied to bodily awareness as visual is not. (...) I explore these connections in the context of the more sophisticated forms tactual experience can take. This raises questions the account in terms of differing perspectives has yet to answer. Although these include whether touch really is perspectival after all, neither the qualifications required nor the questions raised undermine the fundamental appeal of distinguishing both the senses and the sensory imaginings by appeal to the structures within which they represent their objects. (shrink)

Sensory substitution devices are a type of sensory prosthesis that (typically) convert visual stimuli transduced by a camera into tactile or auditory stimulation. They are designed to be used by people with impaired vision so that they can recover some of the functions normally subserved by vision. In this chapter we will consider what philosophers might learn about the nature of the senses from the neuroscience of sensory substitution. We will show how sensory substitution devices work by exploiting the cross-modal (...) plasticity of sensory cortex: the ability of sensory cortex to pick up some types of information about the external environment irrespective of the nature of the sensory inputs it is processing. We explore the implications of cross-modal plasticity for theories of the senses that attempt to make distinctions between the senses on the basis of neurobiology. (shrink)

Is there a space of the sensory modalities? Such a space would be one in which we can represent all the actual, and at least some of the possible, sensory modalities. The relative position of the senses in this space would indicate how similar and how different the senses were from each other. The construction of such a space might reveal unconsidered features of the actual and possible senses, help us to define what a sense is, and provide grounds that (...) we might use to decide what is one token sense rather than multiple token senses. -/- In this paper, I explore, refine, and defend the idea that we can construct such a space—an idea that I briefly proposed in earlier work (Macpherson 2011a and 2011b). In doing so, I defend the idea from an objection that Richard Gray (2012) has voiced. Gray claims that the dimensions of the space of sensory modalities must generate a non-­‐arbitrary ordering of the senses. He argues that we cannot find dimensions that do so. I disagree. I identify different ways in which a space could be arbitrary but I argue that we can define a space of the sensory modalities in a non-arbitrary manner. I give examples of what the dimensions might be. (shrink)

I argue that we should reject the sparse view that there are or could be only a small number of rather distinct senses. When one appreciates this then one can see that there is no need to choose between the standard criteria that have been proposed as ways of individuating the senses—representation, phenomenal character, proximal stimulus and sense organ—or any other criteria that one may deem important. Rather, one can use these criteria in conjunction to form a fine-grained taxonomy of (...) the senses. We can think of these criteria as defining a multidimensional space within which we can locate each of the senses that we are familiar with and which also defines the space of possible senses there could be. (shrink)

The senses, or sensory modalities, constitute the different ways we have of perceiving the world, such as seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling. But how many senses are there? How many could there be? What makes the senses different? What interaction takes place between the senses? This book is a guide to thinking about these questions. Together with an extensive introduction to the topic, the book contains the key classic papers on this subject together with nine newly commissioned essays. -/- (...) One reason that these questions are important is that we are receiving a huge influx of new information from the sciences that challenges some traditional philosophical views about the senses. This information needs to be incorporated into our view of the senses and perception. Can we do this whilst retaining our pre-existing concepts of the senses and of perception or do we need to revise our concepts? If they need to be revised, then in what way should that be done? Research in diverse areas, such as the nature of human perception, varieties of non-human animal perception, the interaction between different sensory modalities, perceptual disorders, and possible treatments for them, calls into question the platitude that there are five senses, as well as the pre-supposition that we know what we are counting when we count them as five (or more). -/- This book will serve as an inspiring introduction to the topic and as a basis from which further new research will grow. -/- This volume is the first on the philosophy of the non-visual senses. -/- It combines older, hard-to-find essays on the non-visual senses with contemporary essays by well-known philosophers in the field. -/- Macpherson's introduction to the volume traces the philosophy of the senses throughout history and points towards new directions in its future. -/- Readership: The market will be scholars in philosophy of mind, as well as students particularly in graduate seminars. (shrink)

This thesis vindicates the common-sense intuition that touch is more objective than the other senses. The reason why it is so, it is argued, is that touch is the only sense essential of the experience of physical effort, and that this experience constitutes our only acquaintance with the mind-independence of the physical world. The thesis is divided in tree parts. Part I argues that sensory modalities are individuated by they proper objects, realistically construed. Part II argues that the proper objects (...) of touch are pressures and tensions, defined as pairs of real and antagonist forces. Part III argues that experiences of pressures are an essential part of the experience of physical effort and that the experience of physical effort (which amounts to the experience of resistance to our will), constitutes our only immediate access to the mind-independence of the physical world. (shrink)

This is an entry for the Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Perception How many senses do humans possess? Five external senses, as most cultures have it—sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste? Should proprioception, kinaesthesia, thirst, and pain be included, under the rubric bodily sense? What about the perception of time and the sense of number? Such questions reduce to two. 1. How do we distinguish a sense from other sorts of information-receiving faculties? 2. By what principle do we distinguish (...) the senses? Aristotle discussed these questions in the De Anima. H. P. Grice revived them in 1967. More recently, they have taken on fresh interest as a result of a collection of essays edited by Fiona Macpherson. This entry reviews some approaches to these questions and advances some new ideas for the reader’s consideration. (shrink)

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.

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. (shrink)

Standard accounts of the senses attempt to answer the question how and why we count ?ve senses (the counting question); none of the standard accounts is satisfactory. Any adequate account of the senses must explain the signi?cance 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.

We enjoy modes of sensory imagining corresponding to our five modes of perception - seeing, touching, hearing, smelling and tasting. An account of what constitutes these different modes of perseption needs also to explain what constitutes the corresponding modes of sensory perception. In this paper I argue that we can explain what distinguishes the different modes of sensory imagination in terms of their characteristic experiences without supposing that we must distinguish the senses in terms of the kinds of experience involved. (...) thus the fact that we enjoy different modes of sensory imagining poses no threat to someone who thinks that the five senses are to be distinguished by appeal to the kinds of mechanism or psychological capacities their exercise involves, and not by appeal to experience. (shrink)

Representationalist theories of sensory experience are often thought to be vulnerable to the existence of apparently non-representational differences between experiences in different sensory modalities. Seeing and hearing seem to differ in their qualia, quite apart from what they represent. The origin of this idea is perhaps Grice’s argument, in “Some Remarks on the Senses,” that the senses are distinguished by “introspectible character.” In this chapter I take the Representationalist side by putting forward an account of sense modalities which is consistent (...) with that view and yet pays due regard to the intuition behind Grice’s argument. Employing J.J. Gibson’s distinction between exploratory and performatory behaviour, I point to a proprioceptive element in perceptual experience, and identify this as crucial in any account of what makes a particular way of perceiving a sense modality. (shrink)

In chapter 7 of the third book of De anima Aristotle is concerned with the activity of the intellect (nous), which, here as elsewhere in the work, he explores by developing parallels with his account of sense-perception. In this chapter his principal interest appears to be the notion of judgement, and in particular intellectual judgements about the value of some item on a scale of good and bad. In this paper I shall argue, firstly that there is in fact a (...) coherent structure and focus to this chapter, which has therefore unjustly been criticized as disorganized or corrupt; and secondly that, in the light of such a coherent understanding of the chapter as a whole, we can resolve the difficulties in interpreting the central passage concerned with cross-modal perceptual judgements, and thereby also throw some further light on the related passages in the second chapter of De anima 3, which had been directly concerned with that topic. (shrink)

The second chapter of book three of the De anima marks the end of Aristotle's discussion of sense-perception. The chapter is a long one and apparently rambling in subject matter. It begins with a passage that is usually taken as a discussion of some sort of self-awareness, particularly awareness that one is perceiving, although such an interpretation raises some difficulties. This paper reconsiders the problems raised by supposing that the question discussed in the first paragraph is ‘how do we perceive (...) that we perceive?’, and suggests an alternative interpretation which would solve many of the difficulties and have the additional merit of restoring unity to the sequence of notes which go to make up the whole chapter. (shrink)

This chapter considers whether any of the inner sense mechanisms that have been postulated to detect and represent some of our own mental states should qualify as sensory modalities. We first review and reject the four standard views of the senses, and then propose a set of properties that would be possessed by a prototypical sensory system. Thereafter we consider how closely the existing models of inner sense match the prototype. Some resemble a prototypical sense to a high degree, some (...) much less so. (shrink)

In his classic paper, "Some Remarks about the Senses," H. P. Grice argues that our intuitive distinction among perceptual modalities requires that the modalities be characterized in terms of the introspectible character of experience. I first show that Grice's argument provides support for the claim that perceptual experiences have qualia, namely, mental qualitative properties of experience which are what it's like to be conscious of perceived properties such as color. I then defend intentionalism about experience, which rejects qualia, by showing (...) that we need not appeal to differences in qualia in order to distinguish the senses. Rather, I claim that we can appeal to, among other factors, differences in the physical properties of physical objects which experience represents. (shrink)

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, 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, 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 on scientific understanding imposed by qualia. (shrink)

How should we characterize the nature of perceptual experience? Some theorists claim that colour experiences, to take an example of perceptual experiences, have both intentional properties and properties called 'colour qualia', namely, mental qualitative properties which are what it is like to be conscious of colour. Since proponents of colour qualia hold that these mental properties cannot be explained in terms of causal relations, this position is in opposition to a functionalist characterization of colour experience.

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. (shrink)

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