Touch is the first sense to develop in the womb, yet often it is overlooked. The Senses of Touch examines the role of touching and feeling as part of the fabric of everyday, embodied experience. -/- How can we think about touch? Problems of touch and tactility run as a continuous thread in philosophy, psychology, medical writing and representations in art, from Ancient Greece to the present day. Picking through some of these threads, the book ‘feels’ its way towards (...) writing and thinking about touch as both sensory and affective experience. -/- Taking a broadly phenomenological framework that traces the tactility from Aristotle through the Enlightenment to the present day, it examines the role of touch across a range of experiences including aesthetics, digital design, visual impairment and touch therapies. The Senses of Touch thereby demonstrates the varieties of sensory experience, and explores the diverse range of our ‘senses’ of touch. (shrink)

A rich and multi-stranded sociology of sporting embodiment has begun to emerge in recent years. Calls have been made to analyze more deeply not only the sensory dimensions of lived sporting bodies but also the values prevailing within particular physical–cultural worlds. This article contributes to a small, developing research corpus by employing theoretical perspectives drawn from phenomenological sociology to explore cross-country runners' sensory encounters with the elemental, contoured by the values of the running lifeworlds they inhabit. Autoethnographic and autophenomenographic data (...) were collected via three research projects. Senses of touch still remain under-researched within the sporting sensorium, and here we focus on the “elemental haptics” of earth and air on our cross-country training runs. We also explore the rich, complex somatic experiences afforded by various of these elemental combinations. For runners, as for many sports participants, the haptic emerges as a key aspect of our sensuous running lifeworld. (shrink)

In recent years, calls have been made to address the relative dearth of qualitative sociological investigation into the sensory dimensions of embodiment, including within physical cultures. This article contributes to a small, innovative and developing literature utilizing sociological phenomenology to examine sensuous embodiment. Drawing upon data from three research projects, here we explore some of the ‘sensuousities’ of ‘intense embodiment’ experiences as a distance-running-woman and a boxing-woman, respectively. Our analysis addresses the relatively unexplored haptic senses, particularly the ‘touch’ of (...) heat. Heat has been argued to constitute a specific sensory mode, a trans-boundary sense. Our findings suggest that ‘lived’ heat, in our own physical-cultural experiences, has highly proprioceptive elements and is experienced as both a form of touch and as a distinct perceptual mode, dependent upon context. Our analysis coheres around two key themes that emerged as salient: (1) warming up, and (2) thermoregulation, which in lived experience were encountered as strongly interwoven. (shrink)

This article focuses on the apparently paradoxical remarks of Novalis on landscape, which followed the famous “Romantikertreffen” of August 1798: that decisive meeting of the “early German romantics” on the occasion of a communal visit to the painting and sculpture galleries in Dresden. We analyze how Novalis surpasses the phenomenological conception of landscape painting proposed by August Wilhelm Schlegel by resorting to the "incorrect" categories of sculpture and haptic sense to talk about the feeling for nature that governs (...) landscape painting. This is the aesthetics of Herder – his reflections in the treatise “Sculpture” (1778) on the actual concrete and tangible force of the beautiful and the central importance it accords to the experience of one’s own body (a highly modern conception) – which is diverted here in a typical Novalisian gesture that we will show is consistent with his philosophy. The reception of Herder has contributed to the development in Novalis of a Pygmalionic aesthetics of contact with things that casts a different light on early romanticism: it is not only the exclusive exercise of a critical reflexivity that assumes distance, but also of a sensibility that seeks a tactile meeting point as it were between what is separated. (shrink)

Our thesis is that proprioception is not a sixth sense distinct from the sense of touch, but a part of that tactile (or haptic) sense. The tactile sense is defined as the sense whose direct intentional objects are macroscopic mechanical properties. We first argue (against D. Armstrong, 1962; B. O'Shaughnessy 1989, 1995, 1998 and M. Martin, 1992, 1993,1995) that the two following claims are incompatible : (i) proprioception is a sense distinct from touch; (...) (ii) touch is a bipolar modality, that intrinsically has both a subjective-bodily pole and objective pole. We then argue that the bipolarity of touch should be preferred over the introduction of a sui generis sense of the body. We try to revive Aristotle suggestion according to which the body is the tactile medium (like the air for sight). Since this medium is constantly changing its shape, we need some specific channel of information about its state : proprioception, functionally defined, is that part of touch which informs us about the state of this changing tactile medium. Though muscular and articular receptors are usually dedicated to inform us about the mechanical properties of the tactile media, and the skin receptors about the mechanical properties of the tactile objects, this is not essentially so. In weighting or wielding experiments we access the weight of external objects even when skin sensitivity is absent; in prosthetic touch, the skin receptors play the role usually assigned to muscle and articular receptors, namely to inform us about the mechanical state of the tactile medium. So proprioception, anatomically defined, can play both the role of informing us about the tactile medium, or about the tactile objects. That other sensory modalities also rely on proprioceptive information should be understood in terms of cross-modal dependencies: of sight, hearing, smell, taste...on touch. (shrink)

The sense of touch provides us knowledge of two kinds of events. Tactile sensation (T) makes us aware of events on or just below the skin; haptic perception (H) gives us knowledge of things outside the body with which we are in contact. This paper argues that T and H are distinct experiences, and not (as some have argued) different aspects of the same touch-experience. In other words, T ≠ H. Moreover, H does not supervene on T. Secondly: (...) In T, we are aware of immanent, phenomenal qualities; in H, we come to know of transcendent qualities in things that exist independently of ourselves. Finally: T is non-spatial; it is indexed by parts of the body, but not by position in space. H, by contrast, is spatial. This brings to mind Kant’s contention that things are presented as existing objectively when they are represented spatially. (shrink)

The 'traditional philosophical prestige' of seeing and touching, as analyzed by Emmanuel Levinas, comes to dominate the qualities of the other three senses. An investigation of the roles of these prestigious senses, along with the resultant privileged sense-organs of the hand and the eye, within phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and gender- or queer-theory suggests that the part of the prestige of touch will have been related to its function in the phenomenality of feeling. Yet the sense of taste seems to (...) be as applicable, if not more so, to the phenomenal experience of selfhood based on feeling as theorized by Edmund Husserl and Jean-Luc Marion. The tongue, rather than the hand, is reconsidered as a sense-organ of touch in order to salvage the all but lost tang of the tangible. As such, the tongue and taste not only illuminate the shortcomings of binary gender theories based on either inner feeling or outer surface anatomy (or, either interior orifices or exterior appendages), but further discover a remarkable phenomenology of the body to be found in the writings of Hélène Cixous and Monique Wittig that moves beyond certain masculine tendencies lurking about the hand and observation (as described by Freud and Butler). The phenomenal experience of the other that yields either empathy (for Husserl), love/eros (for Marion), or hearing and heeding 'Thou shall not kill' (for Levinas) has much to learn from the orality of women's writing. The third body, as written by Cixous, can experience the self as selftaste (as considered by Derrida) and experiences the other as the taste of the other. It is, thereby, opened to a love or a justice (or an erotic justice) beyond the proclamation of Levinas that 'ethics is an optics' as well as any ethics as a mere haptics to be found in Husserl or Marion, where feeling seems always determined by the hand. (shrink)

Introduction -- Historical essays -- The humanist brain : Alberti, Vitruvius, and Leonardo -- The enlightened brain : Perrault, Laugier, and Le Roy -- The sensational brain : Burke, Price, and Knight -- The transcendental brain : Kant and Schopenhauer -- The animate brain : Schinkel, Bötticher, and Semper -- The empathetic brain : Vischer, Wölfflin, and Göller -- The gestalt brain : the dynamics of the sensory field -- The neurological brain : Hayek, Hebb, and Neutra -- The phenomenal (...) brain : Merleau-Ponty, Rasmussen, and Pallasmaa -- Neuroscience and architecture -- Anatomy : architecture of the brain -- Ambiguity : architecture of vision -- Metaphor : architecture of embodiment -- Hapticity : architecture of the senses -- Epilogue: The architect's brain. (shrink)

Higher animals need to identify and track material objects because they depend on interactions with them for nutrition, reproduction, and social interaction. This paper investigates the perception of material objects. It argues, first, that material objects are tagged, in all five external senses, as bearers of the features detected by them. This happens through a perceptual process, here entitled Generalized Completion, which creates the appearance of objects that have properties that transcend the activation of sensory receptors. The paper shows, secondly, (...) that material objects are privileged subjects for perceived motion and interaction. That is, they are perceived as subjects for these properties while their parts seem to be subjects only derivatively. Material objects are the only perceptual subjects that are both multisensory and privileged. (shrink)

At a distance of more ten years from publication (2000 French/2005 English translation), with this essay I will re-read, comment and discuss, in different way and in form of anthological sketch, the Derridean volume ‘On Touching-Jean Luc Nancy’, focusing in particular on its ‘tangents and its metonymies’, its manifold entanglements with the metaphysics of touch and bodily connections. Making use of the geometrical figure of the tangent, Derrida affirms that "[if] philosophy has touched the limit [my emphasis-J. D. ]. of (...) the ontology of subjectivity, this is because philosophy has been led to this limit”. To touch is to touch a limit, a limit without depth or surface. How have we regarded touching in the past? The body? My thesis is that if Derridean reflection remains mostly anchored to Jean-Luc Nancy’s Corpus, it is inspired nevertheless by a different deconstructive gesture/s similar to different geometric tangents (the deconstructive practice is similar to the tracing of many tangents). Discussing in particular Nancy’s Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, Derrida’essay ‘Deconstruction of Christianity’ and devoting an entire section of the book to the sense of touch in the Gospels, Derrida gives us numerous and special considerations on deconstruction and the deconstruction of touch in Christianity, admitting as well the enormity of this task. A reflection on the Kas Saghafi, “Safe, Intact”: Derrida, Nancy, and the “Deconstruction of Christianity” will follow in an exemplary way. Following a discussion of touch and the body in both animal and human spheres, in the closing section of the essay, I will comment on the Patrick Llored’s essay A Philosophy of Touching Between the Human and the Animal: The Animal Ethics of Jacques Derrida, recently published in A Companion to Derrida (2014). This study addresses highly topical questions such as: ‘What does it teach us about touch, but also about the body and the life of the animal? To what extent is it capable of renewing our knowledge [connaissance] of non-human life and of generating an animal ethics reconceived from top to bottom? If touching is coextensive with the living body, that implies not only that we place the haptical question at the centre of reflection on the animal, but also that we take into account the consequence that is most disruptive for us today (A Companion, p. 512). And conclude along with Patrick Llored that the question of touch promises to transform everything we have understood until now about animality. (shrink)

We face reality presented with the data of conscious experience and nothing else. The project of early modern philosophy was to build a complete theory of the world from this starting point, with no cheating. Crucial to this starting point is the data of conscious sensory experience – sense data. Attempts to avoid this project often argue that the very idea of sense data is confused. But the sense-data way of talking, the sense-data language, can be (...) freed from every blemish using ideas from contemporary metaontology. We can adopt a sense-data framework that vindicates the traditional claims of sense-data theories and leads to plausible theories of perception and color. We can, we should, and in a sense, we must. Yet when we do, we face the traditional problem of external world skepticism, head-on. The real challenge of skepticism is forced upon us; it cannot honestly be avoided using externalist tricks, burden of proof shifting, or other razzle dazzle. But the challenge can be met: we are rational to posit the external world as the best explanation of the many synchronic and diachronic patterns over our sense-data. This paper argues for all of these points and ends with a plea for analytic empiricism – a traditional sense-data version of empiricism that uses all of the tools of analytic philosophy while avoiding the more questionable doctrines of the Vienna Circle (phenomenalism, verificationism). Analytic empiricism is our last best hope for completing the great philosophical project of early modern philosophy. (shrink)

Some people of colour feel shame in response to racist incidents. This phenomenon seems puzzling since, plausibly, they have nothing to feel shame about. This puzzle arises because we assume that targets of racism feel shame about their race. However, I propose that when an individual is racialised as non-White in a racist incident, shame is sometimes prompted, not by a negative self-assessment of her race, but by her inability to choose when her stigmatised race is made salient. I argue (...) that this can make sense of some shame responses to racism. My account also helps to highlight some of the emotional and cognitive costs of racism that have their root in shame as well as a new form of hermeneutical injustice and distinctive communicative harms, contributing to a fuller picture of what is objectionable about racism. (shrink)

This chapter identifies two contrasting methodological reductions utilized in philosophical scepticism: withdrawal/doubt [R–]; immersion/attention [R+]. Moving toward a feminist ethics grounded in phenomenological scepticism, Aumiller explores how reduction relates to experiences of personal and global uncertainty such as a pandemic. Reduction involves our entire embodied being, challenging how we are fundamentally in touch with the world. How we respond to being disrupted makes all the difference.

Much work on the sense of agency has focused either on abnormal cases, such as delusions of control, or on simple action tasks in the laboratory. Few studies address the nature of the sense of agency in complex natural settings, or the effect of skill on the sense of agency. Working from 2 case studies of mountain bike riding, we argue that the sense of agency in high-skill individuals incorporates awareness of multiple causal influences on action (...) outcomes. This allows fine-grained differentiation of the contributions of self and external factors to action outcomes. We further argue that the sense of agency incorporates prospective awareness of actions that are possible in a situation and awareness of the limits of control. These forms of sense of agency enable highly flexible, context-sensitive strategic control, and are likely to contribute to high interindividual variability in responses to complex tasks. (shrink)

In this paper, I revisit Frege's theory of sense and reference in the constructive setting of the meaning explanations of type theory, extending and sharpening a program–value analysis of sense and reference proposed by Martin-Löf building on previous work of Dummett. I propose a computational identity criterion for senses and argue that it validates what I see as the most plausible interpretation of Frege's equipollence principle for both sentences and singular terms. Before doing so, I examine Frege's implementation (...) of his theory of sense and reference in the logical framework of Grundgesetze, his doctrine of truth values, and views on sameness of sense as equipollence of assertions. (shrink)

All living things have sensory capacities. Plants, in particular, have sensory receptors, transduce the activations of these receptors, and process these outputs in order to manage actions that demand sensory integration. However, there is a kind of sensory function that plants cannot perform. They cannot sense something as other than themselves. Animals, by contrast, perceive. They experience two kinds of "othering impressions"—impressions of entities as located outside and available for interaction, and hence as distinct from the perceiving subject. First, (...) they represent external entities in a "body scheme" that enables sensorimotor interaction with these entities. Second, higher animals such as mammals and birds and possibly fish, represent these entities as located relative to a "cognitive map." These othering impressions are very important because they are the foundation for the human conceptions of the self and other. (shrink)

Frege famously claimed that variations in the sense of a proper name can sometimes be ‘tolerated’. In this paper, we offer a novel explanation of this puzzling claim. Frege, we argue, follows Trendelenburg in holding that we think in language—sometimes individually and sometimes together. Variations in sense can be tolerated in just those cases where we are using language to coordinate our actions but are not engaged in thinking together about an issue.

According to the powerful qualities view, properties are both powerful and qualitative. Indeed, on this view the powerfulness of a property is identical to its qualitativity. Proponents claim that this view provides an attractive alternative to both the view that properties are pure powers and the view that they are pure qualities. It remains unclear, however, whether the claimed identity between powerfulness and qualitativity can be made coherent in a way that allows the powerful qualities view to constitute this sort (...) of alternative. I argue here that this can be done, given a particular conception of both the qualitativity and powerfulness of properties. On this conception, a property is qualitative just in the sense that its essence is fixed independently of any distinct properties, and it is powerful just if its essence grounds its dispositional role. (shrink)

In the case of ventriloquism, seeing the movement of the ventriloquist dummy’s mouth changes your experience of the auditory location of the vocals. Some have argued that cases like ventriloquism provide evidence for the view that at least some of the content of perception is fundamentally multimodal. In the ventriloquism case, this would mean your experience has constitutively audio-visual content (not just a conjunction of an audio content and visual content). In this paper, I argue that cases like ventriloquism do (...) not in fact warrant that conclusion. I then try to make sense of crossmodal cases without appealing to fundamentally multimodal content. (shrink)

I present a sense of the term “ideal theory” based on Joseph Raz’s response to the situation of a lifeguard faced with three drowning on one side and two on the other and unable to save all. From what is of value, such a theory builds up a conception of an ideal political state or an aspect of it which we have reason to realize, but ignoring whether it is possible for us to realize this.

Can there be a theory-free experience? And what would be the object of such an experience. Drawing on ideas set out by Husserl in the “Crisis” and in the second book of his “Ideas”, the paper presents answers to these questions in such a way as to provide a systematic survey of the content and ontology of common sense. In the second part of the paper Husserl’s ideas on the relationship between the common-sense world (what he called the (...) ‘life-world’) and the world of physical theory are subjected to a critical evaluation. The relation of Husserl’s ideas to current work in folk psychology and naive physics and to the direct realism of J. J. Gibson are also treated. (shrink)

This article is interdisciplinary in its claims. Evolving around the ecological concept of affordance, it brings together pragmatics and ecological psychology. Starting from the theoretical writings of Peirce, Dewey and James, the biosemiotic claims of von Uexküll, Gibson’s ecological approach to perception and some empirical evidence from recent neurobiological research, it elaborates on the concepts of experiential and enactive cognition as applied to music. In order to provide an operational description of this approach, it introduces some conceptual tools from the (...) domain of cybernetics with a major focus on the concept of circularity, which links perception to action in a continuous process of sense-making and interaction with the environment. As such, it is closely related to some pragmatic, biosemiotic and ecosemiotic claims which can be subsumed under the general notion of functional significance. An attempt is made to apply this conceptual framework to the process of musical sense-making which involves the realisation of systemic cognition in the context of epistemic interactions that are grounded in our biology and possibilities for adaptive control. Central in this approach is the concept of coping with the environment, or, in musical terms, to perceive the sounding music in terms of what it affords for the consummation of musical behaviour. (shrink)

We show that, contrary to conventional wisdom, Frege’s distinction between sense and reference does not reconcile a classical logic of identity with apparent counterexamples to it involving proper names embedded under propositional attitude verbs.

The paper shows how ideas that explain the sense of an expression as a method or algorithm for finding its reference, preshadowed in Frege’s dictum that sense is the way in which a referent is given, can be formalized on the basis of the ideas in Thomason (1980). To this end, the function that sends propositions to truth values or sets of possible worlds in Thomason (1980) must be replaced by a relation and the meaning postulates governing the (...) behaviour of this relation must be given in the form of a logic program. The resulting system does not only throw light on the properties of sense and their relation to computation, but also shows circular behaviour if some ingredients of the Liar Paradox are added. The connection is natural, as algorithms can be inherently circular and the Liar is explained as expressing one of those. Many ideas in the present paper are closely related to those in Moschovakis (1994), but receive a considerably lighter formalization. (shrink)

Temporal ontology is the philosophical debate on the existence of the past and the future. It features a three-way confrontation between supporters of presentism (the present exists, the past and the future do not), pastism (the past and the present exist, the future does not), and eternalism (the past, the present, and the future all exist). Most philosophers engaged in this debate believe that presentism is much more in agreement with common sense than the rival views; moreover, most of (...) them believe that being in agreement with common sense is epistemically valuable for a philosophical view. We studied experimentally non-experts’ ideas pertaining to the domain of temporal ontology, i.e., as we called it, common-sense temporal ontology, focusing on the Italian population. We found that a non-overwhelming majority of participants (~64%) favoured presentism, while two significant minorities favoured pastism (~19%) and eternalism (~17%). We think that our findings provide some support, albeit weaker than expected, for the view that presentism is more in agreement with common sense than the rival positions. (shrink)

Large changes in a scene often become difficult to notice if made during an eye movement, image flicker, movie cut, or other such disturbance. It is argued here that this _change blindness_ can serve as a useful tool to explore various aspects of vision. This argument centers around the proposal that focused attention is needed for the explicit perception of change. Given this, the study of change perception can provide a useful way to determine the nature of visual attention, and (...) to cast new light on the way that it is?and is not?involved in visual perception. To illustrate the power of this approach, this paper surveys its use in exploring three different aspects of vision. The first concerns the general nature of _seeing_. To explain why change blindness can be easily induced in experiments but apparently not in everyday life, it is proposed that perception involves a _virtual representation_, where object representations do not accumulate, but are formed as needed. An architecture containing both attentional and nonattentional streams is proposed as a way to implement this scheme. The second aspect concerns the ability of observers to detect change even when they have no visual experience of it. This _sensing_ is found to take on at least two forms: detection without visual experience (but still with conscious awareness), and detection without any awareness at all. It is proposed that these are both due to the operation of a nonattentional visual stream. The final aspect considered is the nature of visual attention itself?the mechanisms involved when _scrutinizing_ items. Experiments using controlled stimuli show the existence of various limits on visual search for change. It is shown that these limits provide a powerful means to map out the attentional mechanisms involved. (shrink)

According to the reading offered here, Descartes' use of the meditative mode of writing was not a mere rhetorical device to win an audience accustomed to the spiritual retreat. His choice of the literary form of the spiritual exercise was consonant with, if not determined by, his theory of the mind and of the basis of human knowledge. Since Descartes' conception of knowledge implied the priority of the intellect over the senses, and indeed the priority of an intellect operating independently (...) of the senses, and since, in Descartes' view, the untutored individual was likely to be nearly wholly immersed in the senses, a procedure was needed for freeing the intellect from sensory domination so that the truth might be seen. Hence, the cognitive exercises of the Meditations, modeled not on the sense- and imagination-based exercises of Ignatius of Loyola, but on the Augustinian procedure of turning away from the senses and imagination to perceive the unpicturable with the fleshless eye of the mind. In accordance with this reading, the function of Descartes' skeptical arguments is not to introduce skepticism so that it can be defeated but to aid the meditator in withdrawing the mind from the senses in order to attend to truths of the pure intellect. These truths then offer the basis for a new natural philosophy, including a new theory of the senses. (shrink)

This paper explores Kant's concept of the highest good and the postulate of the existence of God arising from it. Kant has two concepts of the highest good standing in tension with one another, an immanent and a transcendent one. I provide a systematic exposition of the constituents of both variants and show how Kant’s arguments are prone to confusion through a conflation of both concepts. I argue that once these confusions are sorted out Kant’s claim regarding the need to (...) postulate God’s existence from a moral point of view makes much more sense. (shrink)

The theory of knowledge in early twentieth-century Anglo American philosophy was oriented toward phenomenally described cognition. There was a healthy respect for the mind-body problem, which meant that phenomena in both the mental and physical domains were taken seriously. Bertrand Russell's developing position on sense-data and momentary particulars drew upon, and ultimately became like, the neutral monism of Ernst Mach and William James. Due to a more recent behaviorist and physicalist inspired "fear of the mental", this development has been (...) down-played in historical work on early analytic philosophy. Such neglect assumes that the "linguistic turn" is a proper and permanent effect of twentieth-century philosophy, an assumption that distorts early analytic historiography, and begs a substantive philosophical question about thought and cognition. (shrink)

We are frequently confronted with moral situations that are unsettling, confusing, disorienting. We try to come to grips with them. When we do so, we engage in a distinctive type of moral inquiry: hermeneutical inquiry. Its aim is to make sense of our situation. What is it to make sense of one's situation? Hermeneutical inquiry is part of our everyday moral experience. Understanding its nature and its place in moral epistemology is important. Yet, I argue, that existing accounts (...) of moral inquiry do not give us the resources to do so. This paper develops a positive account of hermeneutical inquiry. I argue that when we engage in hermeneutical inquiry, we search for an apt perspective on our situation. (shrink)

According to a widespread view, one of the most important roles of education is the nurturing of common sense. In this article I turn to Gilles Deleuze’s concept of sense to develop a contrary view of education—one that views education as a radical challenge to common sense. The discussion will centre on the relation of sense and common sense to thinking. Although adherents of common sense refer to it as the basis of all thought (...) and appeal to critical thinking as instrumental in eliminating its occasional errors, I shall argue, following Deleuze, that common sense education in fact thwarts thinking, while only education which revolves around making sense may provoke thinking that goes beyond the self-evident. I demonstrate how making sense can become an educational encounter that breaks hierarchies and generates thinking independently of the thinker’s knowledge and place in the sociopolitical order. The present article attempts, therefore, to put some sense into Deleuzian education for thinking, and thereby shed new light on its radical-political, counter-commonsensical power. (shrink)

Philosophers debate whether all, some or none of the represcntational content of our sensory experience is conccptual, but the technical term "concept" has different uses. It is commonly linked more or less closely with the notions of judgdment and reasoning, but that leaves open the possibility that these terms share a systematic ambiguity or indeterminacy. Donald Davidson, however, holds an unequivocal and consistent, if paradoxical view that there are strictly speaking no psychological states with representational or intentional content except the (...) propositional attitudes of language users, since thc source or fundamental bearer of intentionality is the employed sentence. Accordingly he claims that what has content in ordinary sense experience is not sensation, but propositional belief caused, but not justified, by sensation. John McDowell, sharing some ofDavidson's premises,holds a less paradoxical, but (l will argue) equivocal and incoherent view that post-infantile human sensory expcrience must have content in so far as it is what grounds perceptual belief but that this content is itself conceptual or propositional, dependent on language and culture. Reasons are givcn in the present article for rejecting both views, and their common premises. It is argued that perceptual or sensory states have intentional content which is no more conceptual or propositional than the world is. Recognition that perceptual content and conceptual content are, in a certain unsurprising way incommensurable allows for a more realistic understanding of the relationship between Language and the world as we experience it. (shrink)

I discuss the role of translatability in philosophical justification. I begin by discussing and defending Thomas Reid’s account of the role that facts about comparative linguistics can play in philosophical justification. Reid believes that common sense offers a reliable but defeasible form of justification. We cannot know by introspection, however, which of our judgments belong to common sense. Judgments of common sense are universal, and so he argues that the strongest evidence that a judgment is a part (...) of common sense is that it is to be found in all languages. For Reid, then, evidence that a certain distinction is to be found in all languages is evidence that the distinction is part of common sense rather than being a common local prejudice. From such a perspective, empirical work in comparative linguistics can play a defeasible justificatory role in philosophical arguments. I contrast Reid’s position with the more radical position of defenders of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach, such as Anna Wierzbicka, who argues that only judgments that are translatable into all natural languages are justifiable. I show how such a position is rooted in an implausible view, although one common among cognitive scientists and linguistics, about the nature of concepts, which does not allow for novel concepts. (shrink)

The problem that I am primarily concerned with in this paper is the nature of moral capacity as it relates to virtue in Hume’s ethical system.1 In particular, I am concerned with the relationship between virtue and moral sense. Hume’s remarks about this matter are both brief and scattered. I will argue, nevertheless, that when we piece together his various claims and observations on this subject we discover some important insights that add to the overall coherence and credibility of (...) his system. The most important of these is the suggestion that our ability to acquire and sustain the virtues depends in large measure on our capacity for moral sense. Throughout this paper I will explore this theme and show how it relates to other key components in Hume’s scheme. (shrink)

The doctrine of the spiritual senses has played a significant role in the history of Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox spirituality. What has been largely unremarked is that the doctrine also played a significant role in classical Protestant thought, and that analogous concepts can be found in Indian theism. In spite of the doctrine’s significance, however, the only analytic philosopher to consider it has been Nelson Pike. I will argue that his treatment is inadequate, show how the development of the (...) doctrine in Puritan thought and spirituality fills a serious lacuna in Pike’s treatment, and conclude with some suggestions as to where the discussion should go next. (shrink)

Fregeanism and Relationism are competing families of solutions to Frege’s Puzzle, and by extension, competing theories of propositional representation. My aim is to clarify what is at stake between them by characterizing and evaluating a Relationist argument. Relationists claim that it is cognitively possible for distinct token propositional attitudes to be, in a sense, qualitatively indistinguishable: to differ in no intrinsic representational features. The idea of an ‘intrinsic representational feature’ is not, however, made especially clear in the argument. I (...) clarify it here and, having done so, offer reason to doubt the argument. This will put us in a position to draw some lessons about the relation between object-directed and representation-internal aspects of cognitive significance. (shrink)

It has often been assumed that when we use vision to become aware of an object or event in our surroundings, this must be accompanied by a corresponding visual experience (i.e., seeing). The studies reported here show that this assumption is incorrect. When observers view a sequence of displays alternating between an image of a scene and the same image changed in some way, they often feel (or sense) the change even though they have no visual experience of it. (...) The subjective difference between sensing and seeing is mirrored in several behavioral differences, suggesting that these are two distinct modes of conscious visual perception. (shrink)

We can often achieve together what we could not have achieved on our own. Many times these outcomes and actions will be morally valuable; sometimes they may be of substantial moral value. However, when can we be under an obligation to perform some morally valuable action together with others, or to jointly produce a morally significant outcome? Can there be collective moral obligations, and if so, under what circumstances do we acquire them? These are questions to which philosophers are increasingly (...) turning their attention. It is fair to say that traditional ethical theories cannot give a satisfying answer to the questions, focusing as they do on the actions and attitudes of discreet individual agents. It should also be noted that the debate surrounding collective moral obligations is ongoing and by no means settled. This chapter discusses and compares the different attempts to date to answer the above questions. It proposes a set of meta-criteria—or desiderata— for arbitrating between the various proposals. (shrink)

My argument is that Chalmers' zombie fiction and his rigid-designator-argument going back on Kripke comes down to a petitio principii. Rather, at the core it appears to be more related to the essential 'privacy' of the phenomenal internal perspective. In return for Chalmers I argue that the 'principle self-preservation' of living organisms necessarily implies subjectivity and the emergence of sense. The comparison with a robot proves instructive. The mode of 'mere physical' being is transcended if, in the form of (...) phenomenal perception, sense appears on the stage of higher animals – a transition explained here as an emergence phenomenon based on the systemic co-operation of perception, valuation and action ('perc-val-act system'). Some fundamental considerations are added: Those consequences implied by the principle self-preservation reveal the natural-biological origin of the organism – primarily seeming a more insignificant circumstance – as a momentous fundamental difference (end-in-itself-character, subjectivity, constitution of sense) compared to technical artefacts (robot). And the emergentist approach indicates the – maybe paradoxical – possibility of a dualism of physical and psychical phenomena in an overall physical system, that is not dualistic at the same time. (shrink)

The paper addresses the phenomenology of inference. It proposes that the conscious character of conscious inferences is partly constituted by a sense of meaning; specifically, a sense of what Grice called ‘natural meaning’. In consciously drawing the (outright, categorical) conclusion that Q from a presumed fact that P, one senses the presumed fact that P as meaning that Q, where ‘meaning that’ expresses natural meaning. This sense of natural meaning is phenomenologically analogous, I suggest, to our (...) class='Hi'>sense of what is said in fluently comprehending everyday utterances in our first language. The proposal that conscious inference involves a sense of natural meaning is compared with views according to which conscious inference involves taking the premises (i) to be good reasons for the conclusion (as defended by Thomson and Grice), (ii) to support it (as argued by Audi and, recently, Boghossian), or (iii) to imply it (as lately contended by Broome). I argue our proposal can explain certain phenomena handled by alternatives (i) and (ii), but that some further phenomena is handled by our account but not these alternatives. In relation to alternative (iii), I argue that, in so far as implicational and natural-meaning relations come apart, the latter are a better fit for what we sense or take to be so in conscious inference. (shrink)

Many researchers consider cancer to have molecular causes, namely mutated genes that result in abnormal cell proliferation (e.g. Weinberg 1998). For others, the causes of cancer are to be found not at the molecular level but at the tissue level where carcinogenesis consists of disrupted tissue organization with downward causation effects on cells and cellular components (e.g. Sonnenschein and Soto 2008). In this contribution, I ponder how to make sense of such downward causation claims. Adopting a manipulationist account of (...) causation (Woodward 2003), I propose a formal definition of downward causation and discuss further requirements (in light of Baumgartner 2009). I then show that such an account cannot be mobilized in support of non-reductive physicalism (contrary to Raatikainen 2010). However, I also argue that such downward causation claims might point at particularly interesting dynamic properties of causal relationships that might prove salient in characterizing causal relationships (following Woodward 2010). (shrink)

The enactive approach to cognition distinctively emphasizes autonomy, adaptivity, agency, meaning, experience, and interaction. Taken together, these principles can provide the new sciences of language with a comprehensive philosophical framework: languaging as adaptive social sense-making. This is a refinement and advancement on Maturana’s idea of languaging as a manner of living. Overcoming limitations in Maturana’s initial formulation of languaging is one of three motivations for this paper. Another is to give a response to skeptics who challenge enactivism to connect (...) “lower-level” sense-making with “higher-order” sophisticated moves like those commonly ascribed to language. Our primary goal is to contribute a positive story developed from the enactive account of social cognition, participatory sense-making. This concept is put into play in two different philosophical models, which respectively chronicle the logical and ontogenetic development of languaging as a particular form of social agency. Languaging emerges from the interplay of coordination and exploration inherent in the primordial tensions of participatory sense-making between individual and interactive norms; it is a practice that transcends the self-other boundary and enables agents to regulate self and other as well as interaction couplings. Linguistic sense-makers are those who negotiate interactive and internalized ways of meta-regulating the moment-to-moment activities of living and cognizing. Sense-makers in enlanguaged environments incorporate sensitivities, roles, and powers into their unique yet intelligible linguistic bodies. We dissolve the problematic dichotomies of high/low, online/offline, and linguistic/nonlinguistic cognition, and we provide new boundary criteria for specifying languaging as a prevalent kind of human social sense-making. (shrink)

Patients suffering from the Cotard syndrome can deny being alive, having guts, thinking or even existing. They can also complain that the world or time have ceased to exist. In this article, I argue that even though the leading neurocognitive accounts have difficulties meeting that task, we should, and we can, make sense of these bizarre delusions. To that effect, I draw on the close connection between the Cotard syndrome and a more common condition known as depersonalisation. Even though (...) they are not delusional, depersonalised patients seem to have experiences that are quite similar to those of Cotard patients. I argue that these experiences are essentially characterised by a lack of subjective character and of two other structural features of experience, which I call ‘the present character’ and ‘the actual character’. Cotard's nihilistic delusions simply consist in taking these anomalous experiences at face value. (shrink)

A Touch of Doubt traces the theme of touch in the evolution of skepticism through Platonism, German idealism, Continental philosophy and psychoanalysis. Haptic Scepticism, the field of ethics emerging from this study, explores the grasp-ability of contradiction. Contradiction is a haptic marvel. We can cup it in our palms, press it against our lips, dip our toes into its coolness, and, if we are not careful, we may even burn ourselves on its surface.

Bodily awareness seems to present the body as a topologically connected whole, composed of many parts. In consequence, the source of topological and mereological content of bodily awareness comes into question. In particular, it may be asked whether (a) such content is provided by the bodily sense, i.e., sensory mechanisms which, like proprioception, presents the body “from the inside,” or (b) it is a product of “exteroceptive” elements of bodily awareness, which represents the body “from the outside” in a (...) similar way to that of other physical objects. This paper argues that while passive touch and proprioception are unlikely to present the body as a topological and a mereological whole, such content is likely to be provided by kinesthesis. In consequence, it is plausible that holistic topological and mereological bodily content is present in virtue of certain mechanisms of bodily sense. (shrink)

Many philosophers nowadays believe Frege was right about belief, but wrong about language: The contents of beliefs need to be individuated more finely than in terms of Russellian propositions, but the contents of utterances do not. I argue that this 'hybrid view' cannot offer no reasonable account of how communication transfers knowledge from one speaker to another and that, to do so, we must insist that understanding depends upon more than just getting the references of terms right.

Many researchers consider cancer to have molecular causes, namely mutated genes that result in abnormal cell proliferation (e.g. Weinberg 1998); yet for others, the causes of cancer are to be found not at the molecular level but at the tissue level and carcinogenesis would consist in a disrupted tissue organization with downward causation effects on cells and cellular components (e.g. Sonnenschein & Soto 2008). In this contribution, I ponder how to make sense of such downward causation claims. Adopting a (...) manipulationist account of causation (Woodward 2003), I propose a formal definition of downward causation, and discuss further requirements (in light of Baumgartner 2009). I then show that such an account cannot be mobilized in support of non-reductive physicalism (contrary to Raatikainen 2010). However, I also argue that such downward causation claims might point at particularly interesting dynamic properties of causal relationships that might prove salient in characterizing causal relationships (following Woodward 2010). (shrink)

How many senses do humans possess? Five external senses, as most cultures have it—sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste? Should proprioception, kinaesthesia, thirst, and pain be included, under the rubric bodily sense? What about the perception of time and the sense of number? Such questions reduce to two. 1. How do we distinguish a sense from other sorts of information-receiving faculties? 2. By what principle do we distinguish the senses? Aristotle discussed these questions in the De Anima. (...) H. P. Grice revived them in 1967. More recently, they have taken on fresh interest as a result of a collection of essays edited by Fiona Macpherson. This entry reviews some approaches to these questions and advances some new ideas for the reader’s consideration. It proposes that the senses constitute an integrated learning system, membership in which answers question 1. It also proposes that the modalities can be distinguished from one another in two ways, by the means of information pick-up and by the kinds of activity that a perceiver undertakes to make use of them. (shrink)

This paper discusses some relations between the notion of Fregean sense and the notion of linguistic meaning. It argues that these notions come apart from one another even in the case of non-indexical expressions. In particular, synonymous non-indexical expressions may be assigned different Fregean senses with respect to certain contexts of use.

Thompson Clarke’s seminal paper “The Legacy of Skepticism” (1972) is notoriously difficult in both substance and presentation. Despite the paper’s importance to skepticism studies in the nearly half-century since its publication, no attempt has been made in the secondary literature to provide an account, based on a close reading of the text, of just what Clarke’s argument is. Furthermore, much of the existing literature betrays (or so it seems to me) fundamental misunderstandings of Clarke’s thought. In this essay, I attempt (...) to explain—concisely but comprehensively—Clarke’s overall argument in “The Legacy of Skepticism.”. (shrink)