Touching Voids: On the Varieties of Absence Perception

Review of Philosophy and Psychology 8 (2):355-366 (2017)
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Abstract

Seeing one’s laptop to be missing, hearing silence and smelling fresh air; these are all examples of perceptual experiences of absences. In this paper I discuss an example of absence perception in the tactual sense modality, that of tactually perceiving a tooth to be absent in one’s mouth, following its extraction. Various features of the example challenge two recently-developed theories of absence perception: Farennikova’s memory-perception mismatch theory and Martin and Dockic’s meta-cognitive theory. I speculate that the mechanism underlying the experience is a body schema that has failed to update itself.

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Dan Cavedon-Taylor
Open University (UK)

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