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Abstract: In this paper argue that, while Molyneux's Question itself has had immense importance across several domains for more than three centuries, it is not a question that, by itself, will settle any outstanding theoretical or methodological challenges. In other words, I will argue that we should have no expectation that there will be any theoretically interesting answers to MQ, and that the question itself no longer serves to motivate any interesting empirical findings in the area.  This is not to say that the question cannot be an important intellectual tool for thinking and engaging with the underlying issues; the claim defended here is only that no particular experiment will settle it or provide any independent evidence that could be used to settle a foundational dispute. 

Abstract: Many sensory states motivate. Examples include thirst, pain, hunger, thermoregulation, itch, and the feelings associated with the need for defecation, urination, and breath. In this paper I offer an account of how such states compel intentional action. I focus on thirst as it is relatively simple in physiological and behavioral terms, it carries little theoretical baggage, and the motivational story for thirst seems likely to generalize. I argue that thirst motivates using a variety of flexible strategies, and that no single explanatory mechanism fully captures its motivational force. The resulting view, the Aggregation Model of sensory motivation, offers the most plausible account of how sensory states motivate. The hope is that a focus on thirst will more clearly reveal the inadequacies of typical unitary accounts of sensory motivation, including the imperative and evaluative accounts recently offered to explain the motivating force of pain.

Abstract: I argue on the basis of extensive empirical evidence that perception and emotion are more deeply entangled than we might have thought. This evidence strongly suggests that we should expand our conception of perception to include emotional elements, and our conception of emotion to include perceptual ones. This expansion poses a challenge to our current taxonomic practices. In the face of this challenge, I advocate principled pluralism about psychological kinds. This view holds that, depending on our explanatory purposes, psychological processes can be legitimately classified in more than one way.

Abstract: Some perceptual experiences seem to have an emotional element that makes both an affective and motivational difference in the content and character of the experience. I offer a novel account of these experiences that is inspired by related work on pain that I call the ‘Affective-Motivational Account.’ Like typical sensory pain, perceptual experience should be understood as a complex state generated by both a sensory-discriminative component and a functionally distinct affective-motivational component. It is this latter system that provides such experiences with their emotional character. Such a view is strongly supported by the available empirical evidence and has the potential to address several longstanding philosophical puzzles about the relation between perception and emotion.

Abstract: 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.

Abstract: Recently, a number of writers have presented an argument to the effect that leading causal theories make available accounts of affect’s motivational role, but at the cost of failing to understand affect’s rationalizing role. Moreover, these writers have gone on to argue that these considerations support the adoption of an alternative (“evaluationist”) conception of pleasure and pain that, in their view, successfully explains both the motivational and rationalizing roles of affective experience. We believe that this argument from rationalization is ineffective in choosing between evaluationist and causal theories of affective experience, and that the impression to the contrary rests on a serious misunderstanding of the dialectic between the two views. We’ll describe general forms of causal and evaluationist theories, set out the argument that has been deployed by evaluationists against causal theorists, and then show how that argument rests on crucial and highly controversial presuppositions.

Abstract: Representationalism is the view that the phenomenal character of experiences is identical to their representational content of a certain sort. This view requires a strong transparency condition on phenomenally conscious experiences. We argue that affective qualities such as experienced pleasantness or unpleasantness are counter-examples to the transparency thesis and thus to the sort of representationalism that implies it.

Abstract: In this paper, I argue that with touch, as with vision and audition, we can and often do perceive objects and properties even when we are not in direct or even apparent bodily contact with them. Unlike those senses, however, touch experiences require a special kind of mutually interactive connection between our sensory surfaces and the objects of our experience. I call this constraint the Connection Principle. This view has implications for the proper understanding of touch, and perceptual reference generally. In particular, spelling out the implications of this principle yields a rich and compelling picture of the spatial character of touch.

Abstract: Haptic touch is an inherently active and exploratory form of perception, involving both coordinated movements and an array of distinct sensory receptors in the skin. For this reason, some have claimed that haptic touch is not a single sense, but rather a multisensory collection of distinct sensory systems. Though this claim is often made, it relies on what I regard as a confused conception of multisensory interaction. In its place, I develop a nuanced hierarchy of multisensory involvement. According to this hierarchy, touch turns out to be a single modality in that its various receptors assign their features to the same tangible objects. When we grasp an object a range of distinct properties—shape, warmth, heft, texture, etc.—are all felt to belong to the object, just as different visual properties are associated with a visual object. Paradigm multisensory experiences, on the other hand, involve associations between distinct perceptual experiences, as when the way something looks affects the way something sounds. Thus despite its functional and physiological diversity, haptic touch can be regarded as a single sense.

Chapters and Entries

Abstract: Faces are among the most studied and well-understood visual objects. They seem to be perceived, tracked, and recognized in vision through dedicated unisensory mechanisms. Some of these areas and mechanisms have been extensively studied, especially the Fusiform Face Area (FFA). For this reason, faces might seem like paradigm instances of a specialized unimodal sensory individual, a perceptual object of significance to a single modality. In this chapter, I want to explore the many ways in which faces resist this reading. I argue that faces are best understood as multisensory objects of awareness. After briefly discussing the importance of face perception in vision, I explore parallel work that has occurred in the haptic awareness of faces. As in vision, there seem to be dedicated haptic processing areas involved in the awareness of faces through touch. And, more importantly, we see extensive evidence of coordinated interactions between haptic and visual awareness of faces. After that, I examine the extensive evidence for face perception in hearing and smell. I focus especially on the extensive audio-visual interactions we see in our awareness of faces and vocalized speech. The McGurk Effect, for instance, involves the coordinated processing of both visual face stimuli (in particular, the specialized lip movements involved in speech production) and the auditory sounds (presumed to be) made by those lip movements. In these cases, voices seem to be best understood not in isolation, but as the sound made by or coming from the face of a particular individual. Combined, these lines of evidence converge on the idea that faces, despite whatever dedicated processes they may involve within each modality, are best understood as essentially multisensory individuals. I conclude with some reflections on the implications of this perspective both on our understanding of the perception of faces and on perceptual interactions more generally.

Abstract: Is Pain a Natural Kind? Yes. 

Abstract: Our experience of self seems to be of a single, coherent entity. This experience seems to conflict with the empirical literature, which suggests a different story: that the self is actually composed of many distinct and often conflicting elements. How do we get from the one story—a story of fragmentation, conflict, and dissociation—to the felt experience of ourselves as unified, coherent beings? This is a difficult problem that has vexed much recent work on the self. In this chapter, I want to highlight the pervasive nature of such integration problems at all levels of sensory, emotional, and cognitive processing, and argue that self-awareness can be best understood as arising from the very same principles that operate in these other domains. My central focus will be on the integration processes that function to generate peripersonal space. This focus is ideal, because peripersonal space itself seems to be one of the integrated bundles subserving our sense of bodily self-awareness, which in turn plays an essential role in our overall sense of self. By examining the processes of integration that generate peripersonal space, we will better understand the processes by which the self (itself) is constructed.

Abstract: This chapter surveys some of the fundamental question that are raised by multisensory interactions. In particular, we will focus on a series of interrelated questions raised by the evidence of pervasive and substantive interactions between sensory systems at all levels of processing. These issues include the nature of the senses and sensory individuation (offering an account of what makes a sense a sense, and what separates it from the other modalities). It also includes the question how to understand and type sensory interactions, and the issue of what multisensory perception represents and how it feels.

Abstract: If suffering confers practical reason, and thereby comes to be integrated in critical ways with practical rationality in creatures like us, there seem nonetheless to be significant limits to that integration. In particular, when suffering becomes (practical) reason-conferring for a subject (when it enters into what Sellars (1956) famously calls the “space of reasons”), it nonetheless continues to behave in ways that distinguish it from other objects of rationality, and make it appear more like (yet nonetheless still distinct from) a kind of non-rational, outside influence. In this sense, suffering seems to play a dual (partly rational, partly not rational) role in the mental lives of creatures like us. Interestingly, and as we shall argue below, this duality seems peculiar to our sorts of mental lives: it likely does not occur in the mental lives of psychologically less or more rationally sophisticated creatures. 

Abstract: Sensory interactions are highly varied, and occur at all levels of sensory processing. In addition, there are important elements of interaction that occur between perceptual and other systems, in particular systems responsible for emotional processing and motor control. To simplify and focus the discussion, I will focus on the unique epistemic features of human haptic touch. The idea is that, even when we look at the individual sensory modalities, we see evidence of competitive, interactive exchanges that bear epistemic consequences. My goal is to investigate some of the details of human haptic perception and see how they influence the epistemic quality of our perceptual beliefs. These insights will then be used as a model for the more general claim that, based on our best current understanding of the sense of touch and perception generally, we should be adopting a more nuanced understanding of how perceptual interactions influence the epistemic quality of our perceptual beliefs.

Abstract: Some sensory experiences are pleasant, some unpleasant. This is a truism. But understanding what makes these experiences pleasant and unpleasant is not an easy job. Various difficulties and puzzles arise as soon as we start theorizing. There are various philosophical theories on offer that seem to give different accounts for the positive or negative affective valences of sensory experiences. In this paper, we will look at the current state of art in the philosophy of mind, present the main contenders, critically compare and contrast them. In particular, we want to examine how they handle the reason-giving power of affective states. We will look into two representationalist proposals and a functionalist proposal, and argue that, contrary to their own advertisements, the representationalist proposals don’t have good accounts of why and how sensory affect can motivate, rationalize, and justify subsequent behavior and intentional mental activity. We will show that our own functionalist proposal does a much better job in this regard, and that when the representationalist proposals are modified to do a better job, they fare better not because of their representationalist credentials but due to their functionalist ones.

Abstract: This chapter offers a critical philosophical examination of recent work on pleasant (or affective) touch. After developing a distinction between two notions of perceptual affect, I argue that “emotional” and “affiliative” touch are best understood as causing affective reactions, and that affective touch is best understood as perceptually presenting us with affective qualities. In other words, affective touch, unlike other forms of hedonic touch, has a presentational character. On neither model does touch involve anything like a pleasantness detector, nor does it involve a direct relation to or representation of affective qualities understood as objective sensible features of external objects. I suggest an alternative, largely dispositional account of affective touch experiences. Taken together, these reflections aim to provide a detailed framework for better understanding the richness and diversity of affective touch experience.

Abstract: Touch is one of our central forms of perceptual awareness. Thought to be the first sense to develop, touch occurs across the whole body using a variety of receptors in the skin. It often combines these signals with rich information made available by stretch receptors in the muscles and tendons as we actively move and explore the world. Because of these unique features, touch raises many interesting philosophical issues. Its complex yet fundamental nature makes it a central topic of discussion in debates about the multisensory nature of perception, the relation between perception and action, and the connection between touch and bodily awareness.

Abstract: Comment on Kevin Connolly’s “Making Sense of Multiple Senses.” Our experience of the world involves a number of senses, including (but perhaps not limited to) sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. These senses are not isolated from one another. They work together, providing a robust and coherent awareness of our environment. Consider entering a good restaurant: one sees the décor and the other patrons, smells the pleasing odors wafting from the kitchen, hears the pleasant music and sound of conversation, feels the comfort of the seating, and, finally, savors the taste of the food. It seems obvious that, in some sense at least, our perceptual awareness of the restaurant is multisensory. Saying exactly what it is for perceptual awareness to be multisensory is more challenging than it appears, however.

Abstract: Why do we separate pains, itches, tingles, throbs, hunger pangs, and the like from those qualities usually associated with touch, like pressure, texture, vibration, shape, and thermal properties? This chapter makes the case that touch, like vision, involves the grouping of sensory features into coherent object representations, and that these groupings can provide an independent motivation for counting certain features (and the systems that code for them) as part of touch.  

Reviews