Abstract
From the outside, our senses are spatially integrated in our body in manifestly different ways. This paper starts from the suggestion that the philosophical formulation of the problem of spatial perception, as it flows from the modern opposition of mind and world, is partly responsible for the fact that philosophers have often explicitly disregarded the spatial nature of the senses themselves. An indirect consequence is that much philosophical work focuses on how the senses can – or cannot – perceive the same spatial features of objects in the same way, while disregarding the massive differences in performance among the senses. This paper explores the ways in which the spatial integration of our senses determines what each of our senses excels in, and hence what they contribute to our spatial relation to a physical environment. By juxtaposing descriptive analyses of a variety of selected cases, the paper gives priority to how various aspects of the world appear to us in order to obtain insight into the meaning of spatiality for different senses.
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Notes
The success of TVSS inspired phrases like ‘seeing with the skin’. But the appeal of this phrase makes us forget that the camera is doing its share by capturing a certain external stimulus on a field of juxtaposed photo-sensitive cells. Similarly, the external structure of touch-receptors embedded in depth throughout the integumentary mass cannot be ignored when describing touch, on penalty of altering the nature of touch.
Helmholtz gives the example in discussing the defects of the retina and eyes as optical instruments, and explains that we do not even notice the irregularities and disturbances since the eyes are incessantly moving (von Helmholtz 1868: 248–58).
Besides their contribution to the preservation of the bodily self, the ear and eye also have self-protective mechanisms to prevent overstimulation.
The nature in which auditory stimuli propagate through space would make it close to useless.
Husserl, who would not consider the external nature of the senses as he insists on tackling the problem of spatial perception strictly starting from what can be found within conscious experience (which includes the experienced as such), regards this difference between audition and vision (or touch) as a matter of an intrinsic relation between visual (and tactual) sense-impressions and extension, which is lacking in sonic impressions. Husserl here relies on the suggestion that we cannot imagine, say, a specific shade of red without also imagining a specific expanse. Still, the senses capable of perceiving surfaces are also the senses with a surface of receptors.
Recently, Deroy and Auvray (2012) combined the point that shape is not the object of audition with the indirect processing of object shape starting from sonic stimuli obtained through a visual-to-auditory substitution device to argue that such devices constitute a form of ‘reading’ rather than true perceiving. However, this verdict is then extended to all sensory substitution including Bach-y-Rita’s initial device in which a self-generated flow of optical patterns is transferred to a cutaneous receptor field. But what then should prevent us from saying, like Berkeley, that eyesight is reading rather than perceiving the world?
One is tempted to hold that the circularity of the rim is felt because the circle is a simple, well-known figure that stands in an obvious relation to curvature. Indeed, as an anonymous referee pointed out, perceptual expectations here sustain the experience of the overall shape; anticipation, according to Husserl, is an essential moment in the intentionality of all external perception. However, expectations explain our sense of having a tactual take on whole shapes, but do not improve it; it does not help one to distinguish a figure from a slightly dissimilar one.
It is not a matter of the artificial separation, and subsequent realignment, of two different ways of perceiving positions in one’s surroundings. If it had been, Molyneux’s scenario would amount to a situation in which a deaf birdwatcher takes his blind girlfriend to the park, so that she can tell him where she hears the bird that he hopes to see. In this situation, the blind girlfriend can specify in egocentric terms where the deaf boy should direct his gaze, or indeed stretch her arm in the right direction or simply turn her face toward the singing bird.
If the silhouette is relevant for the task, one can even rely on this for distinguishing three-dimensional objects (e.g. one can find the roundest orange in a pile).
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Mattens, F. Spatial phenomena in material places. Reflections on sensory substitution, shape perception, and the external nature of the senses. Phenom Cogn Sci 18, 833–854 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-018-9579-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-018-9579-6