Le sens commun distingue le corps de l’esprit. Il considère par exemple que les désirs et les souvenirs sont des phénomènes mentaux alors que les sons et les courants d’air sont des phénomènes physiques. Au sein de l’esprit, il distingue diverses facultés mentales : il considère par exemple que l’imagination est distincte de la volonté, qui est elle-même distincte de la perception. Au sein de la faculté perceptive, il distingue cinq sens : l’odorat, le goût, la vue, le toucher et (...) l’ouïe. Cette distinction entre différentes modalités perceptives s’avère tout à fait opératoire : nous n’avons le plus souvent aucun mal à répondre à la question « comment avez- vous perçu X : l’avez-vous vu, entendu, touché, ... ? ». En outre, cette distinction semble robuste : elle résiste par exemple à la co-occurrence d’expériences de modalités distinctes. Ainsi pouvons-nous voir et entendre un planeur à la fois. Enfin, nous semblons convaincus, en ce qui concerne les humains, du caractère exhaustif de cette distinction : il nous arrive certes de parler de l’intuition comme d’un sixième sens, ou de parler du sens de l’humour ou des affaires, mais ces expressions sont entendues en un sens figuré. (shrink)

I consider the role of psychology and other sciences in telling us about our senses, via the issue of whether empirical findings show us that flavours are perceived partly with the sense of smell. I argue that scientific findings do not establish that we're wrong to think that flavours are just tasted. Non-naturalism, according to which our everyday conception of the senses does not involve empirical commitments of a kind that could be corrected by empirical findings is, I suggest, a (...) plausible view that is not easy to dismiss. (shrink)

This is a bibliography of books and articles on consciousness in philosophy, cognitive science, and neuroscience over the last 30 years. There are three main sections, devoted to monographs, edited collections of papers, and articles. The first two of these sections are each divided into three subsections containing books in each of the main areas of research. The third section is divided into 12 subsections, with 10 subject headings for philosophical articles along with two additional subsections for articles in cognitive (...) science and neuroscience. Of course the division is somewhat arbitrary, but I hope that it makes the bibliography easier to use. This bibliography has first been compiled by Thomas Metzinger and David Chalmers to appear in print in two philosophical anthologies on conscious experience . From 1995 onwards it has been continuously updated by Thomas Metzinger, and now is freely available as a PDF-, RTF-, or HTML-file. This bibliography mainly attempts to cover the Anglo-Saxon and German debates, in a non-annotated, fully formatted way that makes it easy to "cut and paste" from the original file. To a certain degree this bibliography also contains items in other languages than English and German - all submissions in other languages are welcome. Last update of current version: July 13th, 2001. (shrink)

In philosophical discussions of the secondary qualities, color has taken center stage. Smells, tastes, sounds, and feels have been treated, by and large, as mere accessories to colors. We are, as it is said, visual creatures. This, at least, has been the working assumption in the philosophy of perception and in those metaphysical discussions about the nature of the secondary qualities. The result has been a scarcity of work on the “other” secondary qualities. In this paper, I take smells and (...) place them front and center. I ask: What are smells? For many philosophers, the view that colors can be explained in purely physicalistic terms has seemed very appealing. In the case of smells, this kind of nonrelational view has seemed much less appealing. Philosophers have been drawn to versions of relationalism—the view that the nature of smells must be explained (at least in part) in terms of the effects they have on perceivers. In this paper, I consider a contemporary argument for this view. I argue that nonrelationalist views of smell have little to fear from this argument. (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)

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)

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)

How do humans manage to keep track of a gradually changing object or person as the same persisting individual despite the fact that the extraction of information about this individual must often rely on heterogeneous information sources and heterogeneous tracking methods? The article introduces the Empirical Tracking of Individuals theory to address this problem. This theory proposes an analysis of the concept of integrated tracking, which refers to the capacity to acquire, store, and update information about the identity and location (...) of individuals in our environment. It hypothesizes that certain functions of attention are a key to explaining how the cognitive flexibility of the human mind overcomes the heterogeneity of sources and methods in integrated tracking. At least two premises lend support to this hypothesis. First, heterogeneity of tracking sources is overcome by the combination of information from multiple perceptual modalities and a phenomenon of multisensory 'transparency'. Second, heterogeneity of tracking sources and methods may also be overcome by inferences that combine information across domains to acquire reasons to believe propositions about the target's location and identity. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to give a description of the objects of the sense of touch. Those objects, it is argued, are forces, rather than flesh deformation, solidity or weight. Tangible forces, basically tensions and pressures, are construed as symmetric and non-spatially reducible causal relations. Two consequences are drawn: first, the perception of heat and cold falls outside the sense of touch; second, muscular sense (together with a large part of proprioception) falls inside the sense of touch.

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)

Representationalist theories of sensory experience are often thought to be vulnerable to the existence of apparently non-representational differences between experiences in different sensory modalities. Seeing and hearing seem to differ in their qualia, quite apart from what they represent. The origin of this idea is perhaps Grice’s argument, in “Some Remarks on the Senses,” that the senses are distinguished by “introspectible character.” In this chapter I take the Representationalist side by putting forward an account of sense modalities which is consistent (...) with that view and yet pays due regard to the intuition behind Grice’s argument. Employing J.J. Gibson’s distinction between exploratory and performatory behaviour, I point to a proprioceptive element in perceptual experience, and identify this as crucial in any account of what makes a particular way of perceiving a sense modality. (shrink)

In 1986, I argued that pains are essentially not phenomenal states. Using a Wittgen-steinian son of argument, I showed that the same sort of phenomena can be had on different occasions, and on one occasion persons be in pain, while on another occasion persons not be in pain. I also showed that very different phenomena could be experienced and, yet, organisms have the same sort of pain. I supported my arguments with empirical data from both laboratory and clinical studies. There (...) is nothing about this thesis I would now retract. However, there was a further thesis that needs to be reconsidered. I argued that phenomenal states are only accompaniments of pains, that pains are essentially a combination of cognitive, affective and behavioural/motivational states. This thesis I do now zaish to retract. I now argue that phenomenal states are necessary for pains, but still not sufficient. There must also be a cognitive state which involves an evaluation of the phenomenon as something like, 'Harm to the body'. The evaluation is a kind of de re belief, regarding the phenomenon as itself representing harm to the body. Besides admitting that phenomenal states are necessary for pains, I also now claim that other relevant belief states, affective states, and behavioural/motivational states are not necessary for pain, but normal consequences of pain. This revised theory is preferable to the 1986 one because it fits better with empirical facts (including providing better explanations for anomalous cases), fits better with certain powerful common-sense intuitions, and fits better with a larger theory of consciousness I have been developing. Among other things, it turns out that being in pain is a quite peculiar conscious state and considering it as a paradigm for consciousness is a serious mistake. (shrink)

Standard accounts of the senses attempt to answer the question how and why we count five senses ; none of the standard accounts is satisfactory. Any adequate account of the senses must explain the significance of the senses, that is, why distinguishing different senses matters. I provide such an explanation, and then use it as the basis for providing an account of the senses and answering the counting question.

Suppose someone hears a loud noise and at the same time sees a yellow flash. It seems hard to deny that the person can experience loudness and yellowness together. However, since loudness is experienced by the auditory sense whereas yellowness is experienced by the visual sense it also seems hard to explain how.

When philosophers and psychologists think about consciousness, they generally focus on one or more of three features: phenomenality , intentionality , and introspectibility . Using examples from empirical psychology and neuroscience, I argue that consciousness is not a unitary state, that, instead, these three features characterize different and dissociable states, which often happen to occur together. Understanding these three features as dissociable from each other will resolve philosophical disputes and facilitate scientific investigation.