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Molyneux’s question famously asks about whether a newly sighted subject might immediately recognize, by sight alone, shapes that were already familiar to her from a tactile point of view. This paper addresses three crucial points concerning this puzzle. First, the presence of two different questions: the classic one concerning visual recognition and another one concerning vision-for-action. Second, the explicit distinction, reported in the literature, between ocular and cortical blindness. Third, the importance of making reference to our best neuroscientific account on (...) |
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In 1688 the Irish scientist and politician William Molyneux sent a letter to the philosopher John Locke. In it, he asked him a question: could someone who was born blind, and able to distinguish a globe and a cube by touch, be able to immediately distinguish and name these shapes by sight if given the ability to see? -/- The philosophical puzzle offered in Molyneux’s letter fascinated not only Locke, but major thinkers such as Leibniz, Berkeley, Diderot, Reid, and numerous (...) |
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Molyneux’s question is, very roughly, that of whether a blind person's prior acquaintance with shape properties by touch alone would suffice for visually identifying those properties, if her sight were restored. The question is at least in part an empirical one, and various scientific attempts have been made to answer it not only for sight and haptic touch but also for various other sensory modalities. This paper is not aimed at answering Molyneux’s original or related questions. Rather, our aim here (...) |
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A recent study published in Nature Neuroscience purports to have answered a question posed to Locke in 1688 by his friend William Molyneux, namely, whether ‘a man born blind and made to see’ would be able to identify, immediately and by vision alone, objects previously known only by touch. The answer, according to the researchers – and as predicted by Molyneux, as well as Locke, Berkeley, and others – is ‘likely negative. The newly sighted subjects did not exhibit an immediate (...) |
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Our experience seems to be populated by mind-independent objects. These very same objects are also experienced as offering the possibility of motor interactability. Thus, one may be tempted, prima facie, to consider these two experiences as always related. In this paper, I propose that this idea is not tenable, by invoking evidence from vision science and ophthalmology about a special case of blindness, stereoblindness. Stereoblind subjects cannot rely on stereopsis. Stereopsis is the visual mechanisms responsible for the experience of motor (...) |
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