The Senses: Classic and Contemporary Philosophical Perspectives

425 Pages·2011·3.011 MB·English

by  Fiona Macpherson

The Senses: Classical
and Contemporary
Philosophical
Perspectives
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PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
Series Editor
David J. Chalmers, Australian National University
What Are We?
A Study in Personal Ontology
Eric T. Olson
Thinking without Words
José Luis Bermúdez
The Conscious Brain
Jesse Prinz
Simulating Minds
The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Mindreading
Alvin I. Goldman
Supersizing the Mind
Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension
Andy Clark
Perception, Hallucination, and Illusion
William Fish
Phenomenal Concepts and Phenomenal Knowledge
New Essays on Consciousness and Physicalism
Torin Alter and Sven Walter
Phenomenal Intentionality
George Graham, John Tienson, and Terry Horgan
The Character of Consciousness
David J. Chalmers
The Senses
Fiona Macpherson
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The Senses: Classical
and Contemporary
Philosophical
Perspectives
EDITED BY
Fiona Macpherson
1
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1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The senses : classic and contemporary philosophical perspectives /
edited by Fiona Macpherson.
p. cm. — (Philosophy of mind)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-538596-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-19-538597-7 (hard cover : alk. paper)
1. Senses and sensation. I. Macpherson, Fiona.
BD214.S46 2010
128’.3—dc22
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
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For my mother, Margaret, who imparted her love, support and
common sense, but also her sense of wonder.
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This page intentionally left blank
Preface and Acknowledgements
The nature of the nonvisual senses and the relationship between the senses
has been unjustifi ably neglected in philosophy. Philosophers of perception
heretofore focused almost exclusively on providing an account of visual
perception. One can understand why. Sight is very important to humans.
People often single it out as being the sense that they would least like to
lose. Arguably, one would be more hampered by losing one’s vision than
by losing any of the other senses. (However, somewhat surprisingly, recent
evidence has shown that the loss of the sense of smell can be rather dev-
astating long-term as it can lead to severe depression.) In addition, more
is known about the physiology of the visual system—the nature of the
sensory organ (the eye) and the nature of the visual processing that takes
place in the brain—in comparison with the other senses. Furthermore,
there are many interesting and well-documented ways that vision can
break down, from which we can learn a lot. (One example is blindsight,
in which subjects claim to be blind but who guess well above chance in
forced-choice paradigms about what is in front of them. Other examples
come in the form of the various visual agnosias, in which subjects fail to
recognize objects or some features of objects by sight while retaining other
visual discriminatory capacities.) Philosophers of perception often simply
assume that theories of visual perception can be easily or unproblemati-
cally extended to cover perception in the other sensory modalities.
Investigating this assumption involves investigating the nature of the
nonvisual senses—their relation and interaction. When one does so, one
fi nds that the other senses differ from vision and from each other in many
respects. When one examines these differences, an obvious question
arises: What makes a sense a sense of vision rather than a sense or hearing
or touch and so on? Answering this question will involve identifying, com-
paring and contrasting the senses and determining the nature of each.
This is the topic of this volume: What makes the senses different from
each other, and on principles should we use to determine the number
and types of senses? There is a small literature on this topic within the
philosophical canon. However, I predict that, as more physiological and
psychological evidence about the nonvisual senses accumulates and as phi-
losophers begin to directly address the question of the nature of percep-
tion in the nonvisual sensory modalities (as, for example, Matthew Nudds
vii
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viii Preface and Acknowledgements
and Casey O’Callaghan have begun doing for audition), this question will
become an important locus of study in the philosophy of perception.
This volume presents key works that have been written on the topic
of the individuation of the senses in the last fi fty years (with the excep-
tion of the piece Aristotle wrote more than two thousand years ago).
In addition, it showcases a series of new essays on that topic and which
also examine the similarities and differences between the senses and
the interactions between them. I hope that this volume will serve as a
starting point for those wishing to investigate this topic and that it will
inspire and promote further work in this area.
Most of the new contributions to this volume began their life as
papers presented to an interdisciplinary conference on “Individuating the
Senses” in December 2004 at the University of Glasgow, which I orga-
nized with Matthew Nudds (of the University of Edinburgh). I would
like to thank the British Academy, the Mind Association, the Scots
Philosophical Club, the Analysis Trust, and the Faculty of Arts and the
Department of Philosophy at the University of Glasgow for supporting
the conference. I would also like to thank the speakers: Austen Clark,
Naomi Eilan, Richard Gray, John Harrison, John Heil, Robert Hopkins,
M. G. F. Martin, A. D. Smith, and Charles Spence.
The conference was held under the auspices of the Centre for the Study
of Perceptual Experience (CSPE), which is based in the Department of
Philosophy at the University of Glasgow. The primary aim of the CSPE
is to conduct and facilitate analytical, philosophical research into the
nature of perceptual experience. A secondary aim is to facilitate com-
munication and collaboration between researchers in philosophy and
other disciplines whose research remit includes perceptual experience.
At the time of writing, in its fi ve-year history, the CSPE has organized
many international conferences, including: “The Individuation of the
Senses”; “Disjunctivism: Perception, Action, Knowledge”; “Graduate
Interdisciplinary Conference on Perception”; “The Admissible Contents
of Experience”; “Hallucination on Crete”; and “Varieties of Experience
Graduate Conference”. This is in addition to numerous smaller work-
shops and events. Further information about these events and the CSPE
is available on the internet: http://www.gla.ac.uk/philosophy/cspe/.
I would like to thank all of the contributors to this volume for their
contributions and for their patience. I am, of course, also very grateful to
them for producing excellent, thought-provoking essays.
Finally, I would like to thank Jon Bird, Michael Brady, Stuart Crutchfi eld,
John Heil, Brian Keeley, Richard King, Matthew Nudds, Susanna Siegel,
Barry Smith, and two anonymous referees from Oxford University Press for
their comments and advice in preparing the volume and the introduction.
And, of course, I owe much to Peter Ohlin and his staff at Oxford University
Press for publishing the book and helping me to bring it to press.
FM
Glasgow, May 2010
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Contents
Notes on Contributors, xi
INTRODUCTION
1 Individuating the Senses, 3
Fiona Macpherson
SECTION I: CLASSIC WORKS
2 Excerpt from On the Soul (De Anima), 47
Aristotle
3 Aristotle on Demarcating the Five Senses, 64
Richard Sorabji
4 Some Remarks About the Senses, 83
H. P. Grice
5 Distinguishing the Senses, 101
J. W. Roxbee Cox
6 The Senses of Martians, 120
C. A. J. Coady
7 The Senses, excerpt from Perception and Cognition, 136
John Heil
8 Characterising the Senses, 156
Mark Leon
9 Categorising the Senses, 184
Norton Nelkin
10 Sight and Touch, 201
M. G. F. Martin
11 Making Sense of the Senses: Individuating
Modalities in Humans and Other Animals, 220
Brian L. Keeley
ix
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