Abstract
In formulating a theory of perception that does justice to the embodied and enactive nature of perceptual experience, proprioception can play a valuable role. Since proprioception is necessarily embodied, and since proprioceptive experience is particularly integrated with one’s bodily actions, it seems clear that proprioception, in addition to, e.g., vision or audition, can provide us with valuable insights into the role of an agent’s corporal skills and capacities in constituting or structuring perceptual experience. However, if we are going to have the opportunity to argue from analogy with proprioception to vision, audition, touch, taste, or smell, then it is necessary to eschew any doubts about the legitimacy of proprioception’s inclusion into the category of perceptual modalities. To this end, in this article, I (1) respond to two arguments that Shaun Gallagher (2003) presents in “Bodily self-awareness and objectperception” against proprioception’s ability to meet the criteria of object perception, (2) present a diagnosis of Gallagher’s position by locating a misunderstanding in the distinction between proprioceptive information and proprioceptive awareness, and (3) show that treating proprioception as a perceptual modality allows us to account for the interaction of proprioception with the other sensory modalities, to apply the lessons we learn from proprioception to the other sensory modalities, and to account for proprioceptive learning. Finally, (4) I examine Sydney Shoemaker’s (1994) identification constraint and suggest that a full-fledged notion of object-hood is unnecessary to ground a theory of perception.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Page numbers correspond to: http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~gallaghr/theoria03.html.
Though Gallagher’s arguments are situated in the phenomenological tradition and bear many connections to concepts such as, the body “as subject,” the transparency and recessiveness of the body in action and experience, “readiness to hand,” and prereflective self-consciousness, I do not aim to take issue with any of these related but distinct concepts. In this paper, my aim is limited to arguing, pace Gallagher, that proprioception, in its most typical form, does not fail to meet the criteria of object perception. There may be important implications for other related notions that stem from this claim, but it is beyond the scope of this paper to address those issues. See Merleau-Ponty (1945); Heidegger (1986); Sartre (1936, 1943); Welton (1999); Legrand (2006); Legrand et al. (2009); Zahavi (2003); and Gallagher and Zahavi (2008) for detailed discussion of the above concepts.
Here, I am referring to Bermudez’s proposal that the body is a peripheral object in propriocetive experience.
This way of describing normal cases of proprioception was developed by Brian O’Shaughnessy (1995), who follows a long phenomenological tradition of philosophers like Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau Ponty in describing the notion of the body “as subject.”
The distinction between the ventral and dorsal streams in visual perception complicates interpretations of blindsight. Still, this complication is not a threat for my purposes since, whether the ventral or dorsal stream is responsible for the detection and discrimination of objects in blindsight or not, it follows that some mechanism or other is in fact detecting and discriminating a stimulus. For the sake of this argument, that is all that I need to show. See Goodale and Milner (1992) for a detailed discussion of the ventral/dorsal stream.
There may, of course, be various differences in one’s capacity to differentiate or understand perceptual arrays that are not consciously perceived, but the difference in detail or cognitive sophistication is not a difference in object-perception.
Of course, there may be important differences between conscious states, nonconscious states, and minimally conscious states. However, these differences cannot be detected on the basis of phenomenology alone. That is, I do not rule out the possibility that, on independent grounds, we may conclude that the nature of these variously conscious states is indeed different. However, in the absence of independent evidence, the lack of consciousness alone is a poor reason to posit substantial differences between the natures of such states.
I have not attempted to argue for the positive claim that proprioception is organized egocentrically, but I take it that the above considerations would allow for such an account. Specifically, if implicit bodily reference is composed of various modalities, then proprioception, as a form of object perception, could be organized according to an egocentric framework, which is constituted by a multimodal implicit bodily reference.
I am indebted to Daniel Friedrich for this point.
Perhaps Gallagher’s notion of the body schema is a better candidate for the implicit reference to bodily position than proprioception. See Gallagher (2005, pp. 24–25).
“Phenomenology runs into certain natural limitations when it comes up against non-phenomenal processes” (Gallagher 2005, p. 40).
I refer here to the famous “what it is like” of conscious experience. See Nagel (1974).
Cases of phantom limbs would also support this claim. See Ramachandran, and Rogers-Ramachandran (1996).
Susan Hurley (1998) coined this phrase in describing classical theories of cognitive science.
Notice that even though McDowell holds that all perceptual content is conceptual, he does not deny that it is possible to discriminate features of a perceptual array without being able to reidentify them in a separate context. Rather, he is committed to the view that this sort of non-reidentifiable feature discrimination is conceptual.
Of course, there is a long and complicated debate about whether perception is conceptual or not. However, that debate often relies on redefining concepts away from identifiable and reidentifiable particulars. Since Shoemaker’s account explicitly states that objects are identifiable and reidentifiable, this debate need not concern us here. That is, Shoemaker clearly has in mind something more robust than demonstrable concepts (see McDowell (1994)) when he talks of the objects of perception.
References
Armstrong, D. (1968). A materialist theory of mind. London: Routledge.
Bargh, J. A., & Pietromonaco, P. (1982). Automatic informationprocessing and social perception: The influence of trait information presented outside of conscious awareness on impression formation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 43, 437–449.
Bermudez, J. (1998). The paradox of self-consciousness. Cambridge: MIT.
Botovnick, M., & Cohen, J. (1998). Rubber hands ‘feel’ touch that eyes see. Nature, 391(6669), 756.
Chalmers, D. (1995). Facing up to the problem of consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2, 200–219.
Cheesman, J., & Marikle, P. M. (1984). Priming with and without awareness. Perception and Psychophysics, 36(4), 387–395.
Clark, A. (2004). Feature-placing and proto-objects. Philosophical Psychology, 17(4), 443–469.
Cole, J., & Paillard, J. (1995). Living without touch and peripheral information about body position and movement: Studies with deafferented subjects. In J. Bermúdez, A. Marcel, & N. Eilan (Eds.), The body and the self (pp. 245–66). Cambridge: The MIT.
Cussins, A. (1992). Content, embodiment and objectivity: The theory of cognitive trails. Mind, 101, 651–688.
Dawson, M. D., & Schell, A. M. (1982). Electrodermal responses to attended and nonattended significant stimuli during dichotic listening. Journal of Experiemental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 8, 315–324.
Dennett, D. (1991). Consciousness explained, New York: Little, Brown.
Dennett, D. (2003). Who’s on first? Heterophenomenology explained. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 10(9–10), 19–30.
Devine, P. G. (1989). Stereotypes and prejudice: Their automatic and controlled components. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 56(1), 680–690.
Dretske, F. (1997). Naturalizing the mind. Cambridge: The MIT.
Erdelyi, C. A., & D’Agostino, P. R. (1987). Cognitive and affective componenets of automatic priming effects. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54(5), 741–747.
Gallagher, S. (2003). Bodily self-awareness and object perception. Theoria et Historia Sceintiarum: International Journal for Interdisciplinary Studies, 7(1), 53–68.
Gallagher, S. (2005). How the body shapes the mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gallagher, S., & Zahavi, D. (2008). The phenomenological mind. London: Routledge.
Goodale, M. A., & Milner, A. D. (1992). Separate visual pathways for perception and action. Trends Neuroscience, 15(1), 20–25.
Greenwald, A. (1992). Unconscious cognition reclaimed. American Psychologist, 47(6), 766–779.
Heidegger, M. (1986). Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer; English translation: J. Stambaugh. (1996) Being and time. Albany: SUNY.
Hill, C. S. (2009). Consciousness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hurley, S. (1998). Consciousness in action. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Kitayama, S. (1990). Interaction between affect and cognition in word perception. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 58, 209–217.
Legrand, D. (2006). The bodily self: The sensori-motor roots of pre-reflexive selfconsciousness. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 5(1), 89–118.
Legrand, D., Grünbaum, T., & Krueger, J. (2009). Dimensions of bodily subjectivity. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 8(3), 279–283.
McDowell, J. (1994). Mind and world. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945). Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Éditions Gallimard; English translation: C. Smith. (1962). Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Moray, N. (1959). Attention in dochotic listening: Affective cues and the influence of instructions. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 11, 56–60.
Nagel, T. (1974). What is it like to be a bat? Philosophical Review, 83(4), 435–50.
Neuberg, S. L. (1988). Behavioral implications of information presented outside of conscious awareness: The effect of subliminal presentation of trait information on behaviour in the prisoner’s dilemma game. Social Cognition, 6, 207–230.
O’Shaughnessy, B. (1995). Proprioception and the body image. In J. Bermudez, A. Marcel, & N. Eilan (Eds.), The body and the self (pp. 175–203). Cambridge: MIT.
Peacocke, C. (1989). Perceptual content. In J. Almog, J. Perry, & H. Wettstein (Eds.), Themes from Kaplan (pp. 297–329). New York: Oxford University Press.
Peacocke, C. (1992). A atudy of concepts. Cambridge: MIT.
Perdue, C. W., Dovidio, J. F., Gurtman, M. B., & Tyler, R. B. (1990). Us and them: Social categorization and the process of intergroup bias. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59, 475–586.
Quine, W. V. O. (1953). Two dogmas of empiricism. In From a logical point of view. New York: Harper & Row.
Ramachandran, V. S., & Rogers-Ramachandran, D. C. (1996). Synaesthesia in phantom limbs induced with mirrors. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 263, 377–386.
Sacks, O. (1985). The man who mistook his wife for a hat and other clinical tales. New York: Touchstone.
Sartre, J. P. (1936). La transcendance de l’ego. Paris: Vrin; English translation: F. Williams and R. Kirkpatrick. (1957). The transcendence of the ego. New York: Noonday.
Sartre, J. P. (1943). L’Etre et le néant. Paris: Tel Gallimard; English translation: H. E. Barnes. (1956). Being and nothingness. New York: Philosophical Library.
Shoemaker, S. (1994). Self-knowledge and inner-sense. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 54, 249–314.
Strawson, P. F. (1959). Individuals: An essay in descriptive metaphysics. New York: Anchor.
Treisman, A. M. (1960). Contextual cues in selective listening. Quartely Journal of Experimental Psychology, 12, 242–248.
Weiskrantz, L. (1986). Blindsight. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Welton, D. (Ed.). (1999). The essential Husserl. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Zahavi, D. (2003). Inner time-consciousness and pre-reflective self-awareness. In D. Welton (Ed.), The new Husserl: A critical reader (pp. 157–180). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Fridland, E. The case for proprioception. Phenom Cogn Sci 10, 521–540 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-011-9217-z
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-011-9217-z