Much of the philosophical work on perception has focused on vision. Recently, however, philosophers have begun to correct this ‘tunnel vision’ by considering other modalities. Nevertheless, relatively little has been written about the chemical senses—olfaction and gustation. The focus of this paper is olfaction. In this paper, I consider the question: does human olfactory experience represents objects as thus and so? If we take visual experience as the paradigm of how experience can achieve object representation, we might think that the (...) answer to this question is no. I argue that olfactory experience does indeed represent objects—just not in a way that is easily read from the dominant visual case. (shrink)

We can learn much about perceptual experience by thinking about how it can mislead us. In this paper, I explore whether, and how, olfactory experience can mislead. I argue that, in the case of olfactory experience, the traditional distinction between illusion and hallucination does not apply. Integral to the traditional distinction is a notion of ‘object-failure’—the failure of an experience to present objects accurately. I argue that there are no such presented objects in olfactory experience. As a result, olfactory experience (...) can only mislead by means of a kind of property hallucination. The implications of my arguments are twofold. First, we see that accounts of representational content cannot always be based on the visual model. And, secondly, we see that we must recast the notion of nonveridicality, allowing for a notion of non-veridical experience that is disengaged from any particular object. (shrink)

Much of the philosophical work on perception has focused on vision, with very little discussion of the chemical senses—olfaction and gustation. In this paper, I consider the challenge that olfactory experience presents to upholding a representational view of the sense modalities. Given the phenomenology of olfactory experience, it is difficult to see what a representational view of it would be like. Olfaction, then, presents an important challenge for representational theories to overcome. In this paper, I take on this challenge and (...) argue for a representational account of olfactory experience that honors its phenomenology. (shrink)

Neuroimaging and psychophysiological techniques have proved to be useful in comprehending the extent to which the visual modality is pervasive in mental imagery, and in comprehending the specificity of images generated through other sensory modalities. Although further research is needed to understand the nature of mental images, data attained by means of these techniques suggest that mental imagery requires at least two distinct processing components.

The essays, written by both chemists and philosophers, adopt distinctive philosophical perspectives on chemistry and collectively offer both a conceptualization ...

What if a blind person could 'see' with her ears? Thanks to Sensory Substitution Devices (SSDs), blind people now have access to out-of-reach objects, a privilege reserved so far for the sighted. In this paper, we show that the philosophical debates have fundamentally been mislead to think that SSDs should be fitted among the existing senses or that they constitute a new sense. Contrary to the existing assumption that they get integrated at the sensory level, we present a new thesis (...) according to which they are not sensory, and get vertically integrated on the top of existing sensory abilities, from which they should be theoretically distinguished. (shrink)

Haptic touch is an inherently active and exploratory form of perception, involving both coordinated movements and an array of distinct sensory receptors in the skin. For this reason, some have claimed that haptic touch is not a single sense, but rather a multisensory collection of distinct sensory systems. Though this claim is often made, it relies on what I regard as a confused conception of multisensory interaction. In its place, I develop a nuanced hierarchy of multisensory involvement. According to this (...) hierarchy, touch turns out to be a single modality in that its various receptors assign their features to the same tangible objects. When we grasp an object a range of distinct properties?shape, warmth, heft, texture, etc.?are all felt to belong to the object, just as different visual properties are associated with a visual object. Paradigm multisensory experiences, on the other hand, involve associations between distinct perceptual experiences, as when the way something looks affects the way something sounds. Thus despite its functional and physiological diversity, haptic touch can be regarded as a single sense. (shrink)

In the opening section of this paper we spell out an account of our na ve view of bodily sensations that is of historical and philosophical significance. This account of our shared view of bodily sensations captures common ground between Descartes, who endorses an error theory regarding our everyday thinking about bodily sensations, and Berkeley, who is more sympathetic with common sense. In the second part of the paper we develop an alternative to this account and discuss what is at (...) stake in deciding between these two ways of understanding our everyday view. In the third and final part of the paper we offer an argument in favour of our alternative. (shrink)

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)

Congenitally blind people can make and understand ‘tactile pictures’ – representations form of raised ridges on flat surfaces. If made visible, these representations can serve as pictures for the sighted. Does it follow that we should take at face value the idea that they are pictures made for touch? I explore this question, and the related issue of the aesthetics of ‘tactile pictures’ by considering the role in both depiction and pictorial aesthetics of experience, and by asking how far the (...) experience of those engaging with representations through touch can approximate to that of those engaging with them through sight. (shrink)

The theory presented here is a near neighbour of Humphrey's theory of sensations as actions. O'Regan & Noë have opened up remarkable new possibilities. But they have missed a trick by not making more of the distinction between sensation and perception; and some of their particular proposals for how we use our eyes to represent visual properties are not only implausible but would, if true, isolate vision from other sensory modalities and do little to explain the phenomenology of conscious experience (...) in general. (shrink)

Listening and Voice is an updated and expanded edition of Don Ihde's groundbreaking 1976 classic in the study of sound.

In recent years, the rich tradition of various philosophical theories of perception has been increasingly studied by scholars of the history of philosophy of ...

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)

In recent philosophy of mind, a series of challenging ideas have appeared about the relation between the body and the sense of touch. In certain respects, these ideas have a striking affinity with Husserl’s theory of the constitution of the body. Nevertheless, these two approaches lead to very different understandings of the role of the body in perception. Either the body is characterized as a perceptual “organ,” or the body is said to function as a “template.” Despite its focus on (...) the sense of touch, the latter conception, I will argue, nevertheless orients its understanding of tactual perception toward visual objects. This produces a distorted conception of touch. In this paper, I will formulate an alternative account, which is more faithful to what it is like to feel. (shrink)

This paper defends two theses about sensory objects. The more general thesis is that directly sensed objects are those delivered by sub-personal processes. It is shown how this thesis runs counter to perceptual atomism, the view that wholes are always sensed indirectly, through their parts. The more specific thesis is that while the direct objects of audition are all composed of sounds, these direct objects are not all sounds—here, a composite auditory object is a temporal sequence of sounds (whereas a (...) composite visual object is a spatial composite). Many composite objects are directly heard in the sense just mentioned. There is a great variety of such composite auditory objects—melodies, harmonies, sequences of phonemes, individual voices, meaning-carrying sounds, and so on. This diversity of auditory objects has an important application to aesthetics. Perceivers do not naturally or easily attend simultaneously to auditory objects that overlap in time. Yet, aesthetic appreciation depends on such an allocation of attention to overlapping objects. (shrink)

According to Paul Snowdon, one directly perceives an object x iff one is in a position to make a true demonstrative judgement of the form “That is x”. Whenever one perceives an object x indirectly (or dependently , as Snowdon puts it) it is the case that there exists an item y (which is not identical to x) such that one can count as demonstrating x only if one acknowledges that y bears a certain relation to x. In this paper (...) I argue that what we hear directly are sounds, and that material objects (such as violins and goldfinches) are only indirectly heard. However, there are cases of auditory object perception that should count as direct : Some blind persons’ ears are so sensitive to the way sound waves are modified by things in their surroundings that they can detect objects such as other persons, fences or trees. Interestingly, objects localized in this way make themselves felt via a kind of pressure in the perceiver’s face (that is why the phenomenon is commonly called “facial vision”), the perception is phenomenally quite different from hearing. Since, to some degree, most people are able to conclude from the way it sounds that, say, they stand at the foot of a concrete wall (when there is enough traffic noise around), we can imagine situations where two persons perceive the same wall, one indirectly (demonstratively apprehending sounds) and the other directly (demonstratively apprehending nothing but the wall). These cases invite us to discuss the role phenomenology plays in determining whether an object is perceived directly or indirectly. (shrink)

Clare Batty has recently argued that the content of human olfactory experience is 'a very weak kind of abstract, or existentially quantified content', and so that 'there is no way things smell'. Her arguments are based on two claims. Firstly, that there is no intuitive distinction between olfactory hallucination and olfactory illusion. Secondly, that olfaction 'does not present smell at particular locations', and 'seems disengaged from any particular object'. The present article shows both of these claims to be false. It (...) shows that naïve subjects find it quite natural to draw a distinction between olfactory hallucination and olfactory illusion. And it argues that the phenomenology of normal olfactory experience is of particular objects as having smells. Two confusions are responsible for Batty thinking otherwise: (1) Batty's examples are cases of extreme pungency, and she mistakes a peculiarity of intense perceptions for a property of olfaction more generally; (2) Batty focuses on very short time slices and so confuses limitations on the information carried by a single sniff for a limitation on the logical form of all olfactory content. (shrink)

The views are original, and there is substantive engagement among contributors. This collection will stimulate future research in this area.

The views are original, and there is substantive engagement among contributors. This collection will stimulate future research in this area.

Some sounds have pitch, some do not. A tuba’s notes are lower pitched than a flute’s, but the fuzz from an untuned radio has no discernible pitch. Pitch is an attribute in virtue of which sounds that possess it can be ordered from “low” to “high”. Given how audition works, physics has taught us that frequency determines what pitch a sound auditorily appears to have.

Recent work on non-visual modalities aims to translate, extend, revise, or unify claims about perception beyond vision. This paper presents central lessons drawn from attention to hearing, sounds, and multimodality. It focuses on auditory awareness and its objects, and it advances more general lessons for perceptual theorizing that emerge from thinking about sounds and audition. The paper argues that sounds and audition no better support the privacy of perception’s objects than does vision; that perceptual objects are more diverse than an (...) exclusively visual perspective suggests; and that multimodality is rampant. In doing so, it presents an account according to which audition affords awareness as of not just sounds, but also environmental happenings beyond sounds. (shrink)

Provides the theoretical and psychological framework to the philosophy of sounds and audition. I address auditory scene analysis, spatial hearing, the audible qualities, and cross-modal interactions.

Vision has been the primary focus of naturalistic philosophical research concerning perception and perceptual experience. Guided by visual experience and vision science, many philosophers have focused upon theoretical issues dealing with the perception of objects. Recently, however, hearing researchers have discussed auditory objects. I present the case for object perception in vision, and argue that an analog of object perception occurs in auditory perception. I propose a notion of an auditory object that is stronger than just that of an intentional (...) object of audition, but that does not identify auditory objects with the ordinary material objects we see. (shrink)

... ISBN0199215928 ... -/- Abstract: Vision dominates philosophical thinking about perception, and theorizing about experience in cognitive science traditionally has focused on a visual model. This book presents a systematic treatment of sounds and auditory experience. It demonstrates how thinking about audition and appreciating the relationships among multiple sense modalities enriches our understanding of perception. It articulates the central questions that comprise the philosophy of sound, and proposes a novel theory of sounds and their perception. Against the widely accepted philosophical (...) view that sounds are among the secondary or sensible qualities, and against the scientific view that sounds are waves that propagate through a medium such as air or water, the book argues that sounds are events in which objects or interacting bodies disturb a surrounding medium. This does not imply that sounds propagate through a medium, such as air or water. Rather, sounds are events that take place in one's environment at or near their sources. This account captures the way in which sounds essentially are creatures of time and situates sounds in the world. Sounds are not ethereal, mysterious entities. It also provides a powerful account of echoes, interference, reverberation, Doppler effects, and perceptual constancies that surpasses the explanatory richness of alternative theories. Investigating sounds and audition demonstrates that considering other sense modalities teaches what we could not otherwise learn from thinking exclusively about the visual. This book concludes by arguing that a surprising class of cross-modal perceptual illusions demonstrates that the perceptual modalities cannot be completely understood in isolation, and that a visuocentric model for theorizing about perception — according to which perceptual modalities are discrete modes of experience and autonomous domains of philosophical and scientific inquiry — ought to be abandoned. -/- . (shrink)

A Martian reading contemporary work on perception might be forgiven for thinking that humans had only one sense: vision. Witness the title of one popular recent collection: Vision and mind: selected readings in the philosophy of perception. Our obsession with sight is stifling. It leads to distorted vision-based models of the other senses, and it means that the distinctive puzzles raised by non-visual modalities are routinely neglected. With this pioneering and long-overdue collection of essays on auditory perception, Nudds and O’Callaghan (...) aim to start correcting this state of affairs. They deserve much praise, not least for their own substantial contributions and splendid introduction. (shrink)

The eclipse riddle -- Seeing surfaces -- The disappearing act -- Spinning shadows -- Berkeley's shadow -- Para-reflections -- Para-refractions : shadowgrams and the black drop -- Goethe's colored shadows -- Filtows -- Holes in the light -- Black and blue -- Seeing in black and white -- We see in the dark -- Hearing silence.

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. (shrink)