in Enrique Villanueva (ed.), Perception (Philosophical Issues vol. 7) (Atascadero: Ridgeview 1996), 301-318, with replies by Brian Loar and Kirk Ludwig.

How ought we differentiate the senses? What, say, distinguishes vision from audition? The question comes in two versions. First, there is the traditional problem of individuating the senses in humans. Second, there is also an important question about what sensory modalities we ought to attribute to non-human animals, a version of the question that has been virtually ignored by philosophers. Modality ought to be construed as an “avenue into” an organism for information external to the central nervous system. Six proposed (...) criteria found in the philosophical literature concerning the senses are reviewed. Initially, four criteria—physics, neurobiology, behavior, and evolutionary or developmental dedication—are shown to be individually necessary and jointly sufficient. Next, two criteria—Aristotle's proper objects of sensation criterion and Grice's sensation or qualia criterion—are considered and rejected. One overarching goal here is to show that there is interesting contemporary work left to be done on this ancient philosophical question. (shrink)

First published in 1995, The Visual Brain in Action remains a seminal publication in the cognitive sciences. For this new edition, a very substantial and illustrated epilogue has been added to the book in which Milner and Goodale review the key developments that support or challenge the views that were put forward in the first edition.

It is argued that david lewis' account of convention in "convention" required too much self-Consciousness of parties participating in a convention. In particular, It need not be known that there are equally good alternatives to the convention. This point affects other features of the definition, And suggests that the account is too much guided by the "rational assembly" picture of human conventions. (edited).

The primary objects of hearing are sounds: everything we hear we hear by hearing a sound. (This claim differs from Berkeley’s that we hear only sounds and from Aristotle’s that we only hear sounds.) Colored regions are primary objects of sight, and pressure resistant regions are primary objects of perception by touch. By definition, the primary objects of perception are physical. The properties of the primary objects of perception are exactly the properties sense-datum theories attribute to sense-data. Indirect Realism holds (...) that awareness of sense-data (or something similar) mediates our perception of primary objects. Direct Realism denies this. The question when the perception of a primary object, such as parts of the surfaces of a hat and coat, is thereby the perception of a non-primary object, such as a person, is independent of the disagreement between Direct and Indirect Realism. (shrink)

There is a terminological matter that should be settled before getting down to business. Lopes himself is not confused about this, but a reader—especially one who doesn't pay much attention to footnotes —might easily be.

Although the mechanics of how the eye works are well understood, debate still exists as to how the complex machinery of the brain interprets neural impulses...

Representational theories of mind cannot individuate the sense modalities in a principled manner. According to representationalism, the phenomenal character of experiences is determined by their contents. The usual objection is that inverted qualia are possible, so the phenomenal character of experiences may vary independently of their contents. But the objection is inconclusive. It raises difficult questions about the metaphysics of secondary qualities and it is difficult to see whether or not inverted qualia are possible. This paper proposes an alternative test (...) of representationalism. Do experiences in different sense modalities have the same phenomenal character when they share content? Psychological work on the perception of shape through vision and spatial hearing is discussed. This work shows that visual and auditory experiences differ in phenomenal character even in so far as they represent similar properties. This objection to representationalism does not invite questions about secondary qualities or depend on establishing metaphysical possibilities. (shrink)