Objects are central to perception and our interactions with the world. We perceive the world as parsed into discrete entities that instantiate particular properties, and these items capture our attention and shape how we interact with the environment. Recently there has been some debate about whether the sense of smell allows us to perceive odours as discrete objects, with some suggesting that olfaction is aspatial and doesn’t allow for object-individuation. This paper offers two empirically tractable criteria for assessing whether particular (...) objects are exhibited in perceptual experience— susceptibility to figure-ground segregation and perceptual constancies—and argues that these criteria are fulfilled by olfactory perception, and thus there are olfactory objects. I argue that there are, in fact, two different ways that olfaction allows for figure-ground segregation. First, I look at various Gestalt grouping principles, which are thought to govern when features are perceived as grouped into structured wholes, segregated from everything around them. I argue that these principles apply to olfactory experience, providing evidence of non-spatial figure-ground segregation. Second, I defend the contentious idea that a spatial variety of figure-ground segregation can also occur in olfaction. To see this, however, we need to look to empirical evidence showing that tactile stimulation and bodily movements play a crucial role in olfactory phenomenology. Finally, I draw on empirical evidence and olfactory phenomenology to argue that there are perceptual constancies in olfactory experience, allowing us to perceive odours as coherent objects that survive shifts in our perspectives on the world. (shrink)

Nowadays, philosophers and scientists tend to agree that, even though human and artificial intelligence work quite differently, they can still illuminate aspects of each other, and knowledge in one domain can inspire progress in the other. For instance, the notion of “artificial” or “synthetic” phenomenology has been gaining some traction in recent AI research. In this paper, we ask the question: what (if anything) is the use of thinking about phenomenology in the context of AI, and in particular machine learning? (...) We will isolate one sense of “phenomenology”, namely the sense in which it is commonly understood within analytic philosophy of perception. Then, we will give examples of projects within sensory substitution and restoration science that rely heavily on machine learning and to which, according to us, phenomenology in the sense specified makes a relevant contribution. Finally, we will shed some light on what this contribution looks like and why it is important. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that, in order to account for the apparently substantive nature of definitional disputes, a commitment to what we call ‘Socratic essentialism’ is needed. We defend Socratic essentialism against a prominent neo-Carnapian challenge according to which apparently substantive definitional disputes always in some way trace back to disagreements over how expressions belonging to a particular language or concepts belonging to a certain conceptual scheme are properly used. Socratic essentialism, we argue, is not threatened by the possibility (...) that some apparently substantive definitional disputes may turn out to be verbal or conceptual, since this pluralist strategy, in our view, requires a commitment to more, rather than fewer, essences. What is more, a deflationary, metaphysically ‘light-weight’ construal of the essence-ascriptions in question leads to a peculiar conception of the pursuit of metaphysicians as behaving like deceptive (or self-deceived) grammarians pretending to be scientists. Moreover, this deflationary attitude, we argue, spreads beyond metaphysics and philosophy more broadly to apparently substantive definitional disputes in the sciences as well as other in other disciplines, such as art criticism. (shrink)

Visual perception is widely taken to present properties such as redness, roundness, and so on. This in turn might be thought to give rise to accuracy conditions for experience, and so content, regardless of which metaphysical view of perception one endorses. An influential version of this argument—Susanna Siegel’s ’Argument from Appearing’—aims to establish the existence of content as common ground between representational and relational views of perception. This goes against proponents of ‘austere’ relationalism who deny that content plays a substantive (...) role in philosophical explanations of conscious perceptual experience. Though Siegel’s argument purports to be neutral with respect to the metaphysics of perception, it relies upon an equivocation between the presentation of property-types and property-instances. Consequently, the argument begs the question against the austere relational view, and so fails to establish the desired conclusion. So while relationalists can and should allow that experiences have accuracy conditions, it does not follow from this that they have contents of any philosophically interesting or significant kind. (shrink)

Here is a crucial question in the contemporary philosophy of perception: how can we be aware of action properties? According to the perceptual view, we consciously see them: they are present in our visual phenomenology. However, this view faces some problems. First, I review these problems. Then, I propose an alternative view, according to which we are aware of action properties because we imagine them through a special form of imagery, which I call visuomotor imagery. My account is to be (...) preferred as it offers an explanation of our awareness of action properties without generating all the problems that the perceptual view faces. (shrink)

The first part of this survey article presented a cartography of some of the more extensively studied forms of multisensory processing. In this second part, I turn to examining some of the different possible ways in which the structure of conscious perceptual experience might also be characterized as multisensory. In addition, I discuss the significance of research on multisensory processing and multisensory consciousness for philosophical debates concerning the modularity of perception, cognitive penetration, and the individuation of the senses.

Block (Trends Cogn Sci 7:285–286, 2003) and Prinz (PSYCHE 12:1–19, 2006) have defended the idea that SSD perception remains in the substituting modality (auditory or tactile). Hurley and Noë (Biol Philos 18:131–168, 2003) instead argued that after substantial training with the device, the perceptual experience that the SSD user enjoys undergoes a change, switching from tactile/auditory to visual. This debate has unfolded in something like a stalemate where, I will argue, it has become difficult to determine whether the perception acquired (...) through the coupling with an SSD remains in the substituting or the substituted modality. Within this puzzling deadlock two new approaches have been recently suggested. Ward and Meijer (Conscious Cogn 19:492–500, 2010) describe SSD perception as visual-like but characterize it as a kind of artificially induced synaesthesia. Auvray et al. (Perception 36:416–430, 2007) and Auvray and Myin (Cogn Sci 33:1036–1058, 2009) suggest that SSDs let their users experience a new kind of perception. Deroy and Auvray (forthcoming) refine this position, and argue that this new kind of perception depends on pre-existing senses without entirely aligning with any of them. So, they have talked about perceptual experience in SSDs as going "beyond vision". In a similar vein, MacPherson (Oxford University Press, New York, 2011a) claims that “if the subjects (SSD users) have experiences with both vision-like and touch-like representational characteristics then perhaps they have a sense that ordinary humans do not” (MacPherson in Oxford University Press, New York, 2011a, p. 139). (shrink)

I argue for sensory pluralism. This is the view that there are many forms of sensory interaction and unity, and no single category that classifies them all. In other words, sensory interactions do not form a single natural kind. This view suggests that how we classify sensory systems (and the experiences they generate) partly depends on our explanatory purposes. I begin with a detailed discussion of the issue as it arises for our understanding of thermal perception, followed by a general (...) account and defense of sensory pluralism. (shrink)

Is speech special? This paper evaluates the evidence that speech perception is distinctive when compared with non-linguistic auditory perception. It addresses the phenomenology, contents, objects, and mechanisms involved in the perception of spoken language. According to the account it proposes, the capacity to perceive speech in a manner that enables understanding is an acquired perceptual skill. It involves learning to hear language-specific types of ethologically significant sounds. According to this account, the contents of perceptual experience when listening to familiar speech (...) are of a variety that is distinctive to hearing spoken utterances. However, perceiving speech involves neither novel perceptual objects nor a unique perceptual modality. Much of what makes speech special stems from our interest in it. (shrink)

It’s often claimed in the philosophical and scientific literature on temporal representation that there is no such thing as a genuine sensory system for time. In this paper, I argue for the opposite—many animals, including all mammals, possess a genuine sensory system for time based in the circadian system. In arguing for this conclusion, I develop a semantics and meta-semantics for explaining how the endogenous rhythms of the circadian system provide organisms with a direct information link to the temporal structure (...) of their environment. In doing so, I highlight the role of sensory systems in an information processing architecture. (shrink)

This paper presents an account of the senses and what differentiates them that is compatible with richly multisensory perception and consciousness. According to this proposal, senses are ways of perceiving. Each sense is a subfaculty that comprises a collection of perceptual capacities. What each sense shares and what differentiates one sense from another is the manner in which those capacities are exercised. Each way of perceiving involves a distinct type of information gathering, individuated by the information it functions to extract (...) and the medium from which it does so. This approach distinguishes the project of characterizing and differentiating senses from that of attributing experiences to sensory modalities. Perceptual experiences are episodes in which perceptual capacities are exer- cised. Conscious perceptual episodes may be ascribed to distinct sensory modalities, according to the manners in which perceptual capacities are deployed on an occasion. According to this account, senses are not exclusive. First, their capacities may overlap. Second, perceptual episodes, including conscious experiences, may belong to multiple senses. Indeed, some episodes require the joint use of several senses. In this account, subjects have only limited first-person knowledge of the senses they employ. (shrink)

Perceptual experience strikes us as a presentation of the here and now. I argue that it also involves experience of the past. This claim is often made based on cases, like seeing stars, involving significant signal-transmission lag, or based on how working memory allows us to experience extended events. I argue that the past is injected into perceptual experience via a third way: long-term memory traces in sensory circuits. Memory, like the receptor-based senses, is an integrated and constituent modality through (...) which we experience the environment. Because of this modality, we experience the sensed properties of stimuli partly as they are now, but also partly as we encountered them in the past. (shrink)

Is the flavor of mint reducible to the minty smell, the taste, and the menthol-like coolness on the roof of one’s mouth, or does it include something over and above these—something not properly associated with any one of the contributing senses? More generally, are there features of perceptual experiences—so-called novel features—that are not associated with any of our senses taken singly? This question has received a lot of attention of late. Yet surprisingly little attention has been paid to the question (...) of what it means to say that a feature is associated with a sensory modality in the first place. Indeed, there is only one fully developed proposal in the literature, due to Casey O’Callaghan. I argue that this proposal is too permissive to inform the debate over novel features. I go on to argue that all attempts to formulate a better proposal along these lines fail. The corollary of my arguments is that the question of the existence of novel features is poorly formed. Furthermore, the problem generalizes, with the result that we should not rely on our pre-theoretical notions of the senses as the basis of theorizing about the features of perceptual experiences. (shrink)

The Phenomenal Concept Strategy offers the physicalist perhaps the most promising means of explaining why the connection between mental facts and physical facts appears to be contingent even though it is not. In this article, we show that the large body of evidence suggesting that our concepts are often embodied and grounded in sensorimotor systems speaks against standard forms of the PCS. We argue, nevertheless, that it is possible to formulate a novel version of the PCS that is thoroughly in (...) keeping with embodied cognition, focuses on features of physical concepts, and succeeds in explaining the appearance of contingency. (shrink)

Two proposals have recently, and independently, been made about a space of possible sensory modalities. In this paper I examine these different proposals, and offer one of my own. I suggest that there are several spaces associated with distinct kinds of sensory modality.

The scientific investigation of pain faces many challenges. I argue that one of the central challenges posed by pain – its inherent complexity and supposed idiosyncrasy – is best understood as an instance of a more general issue in the mind sciences: the problem of psychological integration. This label is not yet an explanation or account of the underlying challenge, but rather a more precise, empirically tractable formulation of the worry as it arises in multiple domains. In this paper I (...) first lay out a more substantive account of psychological integration, focusing on both the informational and regulative aspects of psychological coordination and control, and then apply this conception to the peripheral and central elements of sensory pain processing. (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)

In 2021, 193 Member States at UNESCO’s General Conference adopted the Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence as the first important step towards a future global standard-setting instrument on the subject. The text reflects an emerging consensus among the international community about the growing ethical concerns with artificial intelligence (AI). Among these concerns are also serious risks and dangers attributed to the manipulative effects of AI, which can be further exacerbated by the creative combination of AI with other innovative (...) technologies or applications, such as brain–computer interfaces (BCIs), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), robotics, and big data. The risks for individuals and society as a whole caused by manipulation through AI are already well known and have recently also been addressed by the European Union having released a proposal for an Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA). Among multiple risks related to AI, the AIA singles out the specific dangers related to AI systems that deploy “subliminal techniques beyond a person’s consciousness to materially distort a person’s behaviour in a manner that causes or is likely to cause that person or another person physical or psychological harm”. The present article thus aims to highlight the known and potential dangers related to AI systems manipulating human thoughts and behaviour through subliminal and supraliminal means and methods. To this end, it advocates the joint study of law and the senses captured by the concept of legal synaesthesia to correspond to the need for an interdisciplinary debate covering the complexity of the links between AI, related technologies, human perception based on the senses and the mind, as well as the role and instruments of law in the future organization of societies in this world. (shrink)

The research question of the present paper is what relation exists between biology and cultural semiosis and I examine as a token of this question the relation between the physiological senses of proprioception and the cultural concepts corresponding to them. While the origins of semiosis are biological, the origin of proprioceptive concepts is debated. Against the biological view that the proprioceptive senses define directly the concepts corresponding to them, there is an opposite view supporting that these concepts are culture-specific. The (...) concept of “classification system” is counter-proposed as the structural framework for the study of proprioceptive concepts. The paper discusses the senses and concepts of proprioception on the basis of a large corpus of anthropological and archaeological material concerning the semiotic systems of precapitalist societies and with the help of a set of metalinguistic spatial concepts. These metalinguistic concepts are up vs. down, front vs. rear, and right vs. left. The senses corresponding to them lead to the senses and concepts of spatial orientation and presuppose a point of reference, closely related to the sense of equilibrium. My conclusion is that the cultural concepts corresponding to these senses are not directly extrapolated from the senses themselves, but are culture-specific and each time integrated within a different cultural and social environment. (shrink)

Riassunto: In questo lavoro intendo discutere alcune questioni metodologiche relative al dibattito sull’individuazione delle modalità sensoriali. In primo luogo, cercherò di distinguere tra un problema metafisico, che riguarda la natura dei sensi, e un problema di classificazione, che riguarda la loro tassonomia. I criteri comunemente impiegati per individuare i sensi dovrebbero essere in grado di affrontare entrambi i problemi. In secondo luogo, delineerò cinque zone grigie, ossia cinque gruppi di casi problematici, che gli autori interessati nel difendere un criterio dovrebbero (...) essere in grado di affrontare. Il fine di questo lavoro non è quello di discutere i criteri e le aree grigie per se, bensì quello di chiarire alcune premesse metodologiche sullo sfondo del dibattito che qui si sta considerando. Parole chiave: Individuazione dei sensi; Filosofia della percezione; Metafisica dei sensi; Classificazione dei sensi; Zone grigie Methodological Considerations on the Individuation of the Senses: In this paper, I discuss some methodological issues relevant to the debate on the individuation of the sensory modalities. First, I make a distinction between a metaphysical question related to the nature of the senses, and a classificatory question related to their taxonomization. The criteria commonly used to individuate the senses should be able to address both questions. Second, I articulate five grey areas, namely, five groups of problematic cases that authors interested in defending a specific criterion should be able to tackle. The aim of this paper is not to discuss these criteria and grey areas per se, but to clarify some methodological premises that frame the debate under consideration. Keywords: Individuation of the Senses; Philosophy of Perception; Metaphysics of the Senses; Classification of the Senses; Grey Areas. (shrink)

This paper explores the use of perhaps the most ubiquitous phrase in time perception literature, i.e., ‘there is no sense organ for time’. I argue here that its usage often highlights several misguided notions about how we perceive time and thus creates a problem in studying it. In this commentary three such underlying notions are discussed which are often drawn as conclusions from the lack of a sensory system to perceive time. These are that time is generated or created separately (...) by the brain, that time perception is different from other kinds of perception and that the study of time is hampered by the lack of a dedicated sense organ. These notions are discussed and argued against. It is claimed that a sense organ for time is not possible, nor does this exclude time from our percepts in general. Moreover, rather than creating a problem, a lack of a sense organ for time offers an opportunity to theorize about our experiences across perceptual modalities and cognitive mechanisms. I conclude by suggesting an end to using this phrase and instead seeing mental time as existing across our experiences. (shrink)

Fugue and chaos are used in their contemporary meaning. Elements of the fugue, albeit a ‎small number of universals, will be demonstrated in the area of visual and verbal colors. ‎Chaos dominates the internet, fashion, and everyday life. The visual and verbal colors are ‎differentiated and their communicative potential is indicated alongside the diachronic changes. The prototypes of colors are the interface between visual and verbal colors.‎.