In the past empiricist philosophy has urged one or other or both of two interconnected, and sometimes interconfused, theses. The first has been a thesis about the causal origins of certain beliefs, the second a thesis about the proper criteria for appraising these beliefs. The causal thesis is that all beliefs about the structure and contents of the natural world are the end-product of a process that originates wholly in individual experiences of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, or touching. The criterial (...) thesis is that all these beliefs are ultimately to be appraised for their truth, soundness or acceptability in terms of the data afforded by such perceptual acts. Of recent years the causal version of empiricism has been much attacked, primarily in regard to its implications about language-learning. The language in terms of which our beliefs are constructed is heavily conditioned, we are told, by certain congenital features of the human brain. But, whenever Chomsky and his followers have assailed the causal version of empiricism, they have always been careful to claim for their doctrines the warrant of empirical evidence. They have never questioned the correctness of the criterial version of empiricism. (shrink)

In the past empiricist philosophy has urged one or other or both of two interconnected, and sometimes interconfused, theses. The first has been a thesis about the causal origins of certain beliefs, the second a thesis about the proper criteria for appraising these beliefs. The causal thesis is that all beliefs about the structure and contents of the natural world are the end-product of a process that originates wholly in individual experiences of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, or touching. The criterial (...) thesis is that all these beliefs are ultimately to be appraised for their truth, soundness or acceptability in terms of the data afforded by such perceptual acts. Of recent years the causal version of empiricism has been much attacked, primarily in regard to its implications about language-learning. The language in terms of which our beliefs are constructed is heavily conditioned, we are told, by certain congenital features of the human brain. But, whenever Chomsky and his followers have assailed the causal version of empiricism, they have always been careful to claim for their doctrines the warrant of empirical evidence. They have never questioned the correctness of the criterial version of empiricism. (shrink)

The discovery of mirror neurons has been hailed as one of the most exciting developments in neuroscience in the past few decades. These neurons discharge in response to the observation of others’ actions. But how are we to understand the function of these neurons? In this paper I defend the idea that mirror neurons are best conceived as components of a sensory system that has the function to perceive action. In short, mirror neurons are part of a hitherto unrecognized “sixth (...) sense”. In this spirit, research should move toward developing a psychophysics of mirror neurons. (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.

This paper addresses the nature of touch or ?tactual perception?. I argue that touch encompasses a wide range of perceptual achievements, that treating it as a number of separate senses will not work, and that the permissive conception we are left with is so permissive that it is unclear how touch might be distinguished from the other senses. I conclude that no criteria will succeed in individuating touch. Although I do not rule out the possibility that this also applies to (...) other senses, I suggest that the heterogeneity of touch makes it both distinctive and particularly problematic. (shrink)

Some philosophers have argued that we do not hear sounds as located in the environment. Others have objected that this straightforwardly contradicts the phenomenology of auditory experience. And from this they draw metaphysical conclusions about the nature of sounds—that they are events or properties of vibrating surfaces rather than waves or sensations. I argue that there is a minimal, but recognizable, notion of audition to which this phenomenal objection does not apply. While this notion doesn’t correspond to our ordinary notion (...) of auditory experience, it does—in conjunction with our lack of an uncontroversial individuation of the senses and recent interest in distinctively multisensory features of perceptual experiences—raise the possibility of more expansive notions of audition, including some that do plausibly count as corresponding to our everyday notion of audition, that lack the spatial phenomenology cited in the objection. Until this possibility is ruled out, the phenomenal objection and metaphysical conclusions drawn from it remain inconclusive. (shrink)

For the most part, philosophical discussion of the senses has been concerned with what distinguishes them from one another, following Grice’s treatment of this issue in his ‘Remarks on the senses’. But this is one of two questions which Grice raises in this influential paper. The other, the question of what distinguishes senses from faculties that are not senses, is the question I address in this thesis. Though there are good reasons to think that the awareness we have of our (...) bodies is perceptual, we do not usually think of bodily awareness as a sense. So in particular, I try to give an account of what it is that is distinctive about the five familiar modalities that they do not share with bodily awareness. I argue that what is distinctive about vision, touch, hearing, taste and smell, is that perception in all these modalities has enabling and disabling conditions of a certain kind. These enabling and disabling conditions are manifest in the conscious character of experience in these modalities, and exploited in active perceptual attention— in looking, listening, and so on. Bodily awareness has no such enabling conditions. The five familiar senses having this distinctive feature, and bodily awareness lacking it is not a merely incidental difference between them. Nevertheless, I do not claim that having these enabling conditions is necessary and sufficient for counting some faculty as a sense, or, correlatively, for something being an instance of sense-perception. Rather, we can see why it would serve certain human interests for us to think of the faculties that involve these enabling conditions as instances of a single kind of thing, of which bodily awareness is not an instance. (shrink)