PERCEPTION UNDER CONSTRUCTION

PROVISIONAL SCHEDULE

Thursdays

7:30 am Pacific Coast time, 10:30am Eastern Coast time, and 4:30pm Central European time 

September 24              

            Mohan Matthen, The Individuation of the Senses  

Perception is best regarded as a single modular system spread out over much of the cortex, with the exception of some parts of the (especially human) forebrain, and devoted to the creation, in real time, of a single cognitive map of the subject’s surroundings. However, philosophers, starting from Aristotle and right down to mid-century icons of analytic philosophy such as H. P. (Paul) Grice, contentiously treat the external sense-modalities as entirely separate and self-contained systems, with multisensory cognitive maps assembled from their unimodal components.  They are operating, no doubt, under the influence of phenomenal appearance—Grice explicitly so—which does indeed present the modalities separately. However, this evidence is highly contentious, since phenomenal appearance is an effect of some delimited stage of sensory processing and cannot properly be used as direct evidence of global facts concerning sensory processing as a whole. In this entry, I probe these ways of separating the senses. One diagnostic tool that I will use prominently is Molyneux’s Question, which has long been thought to give strong but defeasible evidence of separate senses. I shall show that in fact there are many Molyneux Questions and that these don’t all go in the same direction when closely examined. In the end, I will argue, evidence for the separation of the senses remains inconclusive. At best, it establishes only that they are separate in some phase of processing. But we know antecedently that they are separate at least to some limited degree because they correspond to distinct input-transducers. The open question, then, is what significance this evidence has and whether separation at this level implies a significant distinction. My aim is to show that the distinction, though real, has limited significance for the proper understanding of perception.

            Casey O’Callaghan, Multi-modal perception

Human perception occurs in several sensory modalities. In this respect, sense perception is multi-modal. Nevertheless, theorizing about perception and perceptual consciousness in science and in philosophy prior to recent decades has been predominantly unisensory. Unisensory approaches treat each sense in isolation or in abstraction from each other. Such approaches investigate capacities, processes, and mechanisms associated with one sense, ignoring or controlling for contributions from others. Unisensory approaches rely on two implicit assumptions: Independence: each sense is explanatorily independent from the others. Completeness Assembling accounts of individual senses yields an explanatorily exhaustive account of perception and perceptual consciousness. However, recent psychophysics and neuroscience demonstrate that senses interact extensively. Perceptual processes associated with one sense can impact and reshape those associated with another. Some novel perceptual capacities rely on the coordinated use of multiple senses. Each can reshape perceptual consciousness at a time and over time. This challenges the explanatory independence and the explanatory completeness of individual senses. Sense perception thus cannot fully be understood by treating the senses wholly in isolation or in abstraction from each other. On the positive side, the coordinated use of several senses enhances the coherence and the reliability of sense perception, extends its reach, and makes possible novel varieties of perceptual consciousness. This chapter presents the case that, in human beings, perceptual processes and functions, perceptual capacities, and two facets of perceptual consciousness -- awareness and experience (or phenomenality) are richly or deeply multi-sensory. However, this need not challenge the distinctness of our senses. Human perception and perceptual consciousness can occur in distinct, if overlapping, sensory modalities. The key is that our senses are not mutually exclusive perceptual modalities.

October 8                     

            Christopher Peacocke, Identifiers: Their Scope, Nature and Significance 

Identifiers are modes of presentation of subjective states with this striking feature: when in the content of a mental event, the event conveys to its owner what it is like to be in the state that they present. Identifiers of mental states occur in imagination, in autobiographical memory, in the perception of expressive action, and in the perception of music when a mental state is heard in the music. Identifiers are not demonstratives. It is crucial to distinguish the event that contains the identifier – the delivering state – from what it delivers, which is a content containing the identifier. Identifiers form a category of phenomenal concepts distinct from those widely acknowledged in the philosophical literature. Identifiers are crucial both for knowledge and reflection on our detailed conscious lives, and for our interpersonal relations. Various failures of good relations to a grasp of identifiers can contribute to the explanation of a variety of pathologies, including the amusias, alexithymia, and aphantasia.   

            Jonathan Mitchell, Peripersonal Space and Peripersonal Experience     

We traditionally think of there as being a sharp division between external space and our bodies. External space is ‘out there’, separated from our body, with the skin serving as the boundary between ourselves and the external world. The notion of peripersonal space overturns this traditional picture. A significant body of evidence from cognitive neuroscience suggests that our perceptual systems process external objects in the space in close proximity to our bodies (up to 30-50cm) in a distinctive way, and critically as different from far space. Philosophers of cognitive science and perception have increasingly taken an interest in peripersonal space, principally with a view to detailing the computational principles characteristic of peripersonal processing, and specifying kinds of representational contents that figure in non-conscious peripersonal perception. However, a vexed question concerns whether we enjoy some form of awareness of peripersonal space as special, as a distinctive form of peripersonal spatial awareness. In this chapter, I provide an overview of various options for characterising peripersonal spatial awareness, including in terms of visual appearance properties, felt mandates, and an increased ‘sense of perceptual presence’. I suggest that we do best, in the end, to think of such awareness in relation to tactile expectations and tactile possibilities. I close with some thoughts on further avenues for philosophical research on peripersonal experience.  

October 22                   

            Fall break

November 5                 

           Gabriel Siegel, Vestibular Sens

The vestibular sense processes information from inner ear mechanisms to detect changes in head orientation, the direction of gravitational pull and bodily acceleration. This sense is one of the most phylogenetically primitive and pervasive senses across the animal kingdom. Organisms must use vestibular sensitivity to gravity to maintain postural stability and successfully move across their environment. This chapter provides a philosophical introduction to the vestibular sense. First, I provide a brief overview of the vestibular sensory transduction mechanisms and describe some of the computational problems the vestibular system solves. Second, I consider some of the vestibular sense’s sensibles. In other words, I provide a tentative answer to the following question: what are some of the worldly and/or bodily components to which the vestibular sense is sensitive? In this chapter, my focus will be on orientational relations between the head and gravity. Considering sensory awareness of these relations, I speculate about whether the vestibular sense is properly construed as an interoceptive or exteroceptive sense modality. I provide motivations for both perspectives. Third, I discuss whether the vestibular sense is properly construed as perceptual or whether it should be understood as a non-perceptual sensory system, again providing considerations for both positions. Fourth, I discuss whether the vestibular sense contributes to phenomenal consciousness, again entertaining opinions on both sides of this debate. Fifth, I discuss why attention to the vestibular sense is a fruitful line of philosophical inquiry into the nature of perceptual awareness and consciousness more broadly. Among other topics, I discuss the connection between vestibular awareness and self-consciousness in both philosophy and cognitive neuroscience. To conclude, I briefly outline future directions for philosophical research on the vestibular sense.

Matt Fulkerson, Interoception

Our whole cubic capacity is sensibly alive; and each morsel of it contributes its pulsations of feeling, dim or sharp, pleasant, painful, or dubious, to that sense of personality that every one of us unfailingly carries with him. 

—William James 

Many of our sensory capacities are exteroceptive, focused on providing awareness of objects and events in the external world. Such senses include vision, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. These forms of experience have been the focus of a great deal of philosophical and psychological work, and for good reason. Such perceptual experiences serve as our connection to the external world, securing empirical knowledge and allowing us to act effectively in pursuit of our goals. In addition to these classical senses, however, our body contains numerous additional interoceptive sensory systems that serve a more internal, bodily-directed function. Thirst, hunger, sleep drive, fatigue, tiredness, pain, thermoregulation, the felt need for air and evacuation, vertigo, nausea, itch, proprioception, vestibular awareness, and visceral awareness all involve specialized sensory networks that provide awareness of the present state of the body. This entry will provide a basic history of thinking about interoception, from William James and Charles Sherrington (who coined the term), through to more contemporary accounts of interoception by AD Craig and Sarah Garfinkel. We will consider whether interoceptive awareness forms a natural kind and explore several accounts of its functional role (we will consider, for instance, whether all interoceptive awareness is homeostatic or intrinsically motivating). The key takeaway will be that interoception plays a foundational role in our lived experience and should be included in any plausible account of perception and sensory processes. 

November 19               

            Angelica Kaufmann, Animal Perception and Temporal Representation

This chapter discusses what animal senses reveal about the structure of perception. Research on nonhuman animals often treats sensory capacities as mechanisms for registering current stimuli: an odour trail, a call, a moving body, an approaching conspecific, or a disappearing food source. Yet many animal behaviours suggest that sensing is not exhausted by present-directed registration. Animals use sensory information across delays, changing spatial layouts, recurrent opportunities, and coordinated social contexts.

The chapter examines how one dimension of perception, namely temporality, enters animal perception in foraging, navigation, communication, predator–prey interaction, and social coordination. Animal senses provide a privileged test case for the boundary between temporal sensitivity and temporal representation. A system may be sensitive to temporal regularities without representing temporal relations as such. Conversely, some patterns of animal action suggest that temporally structured information is used in combination with spatial, causal, and social information.

I argue that these distinctions help determine when temporality remains a feature of sensory tracking and when it becomes part of perception and cognition. The resulting view treats animal perception neither as passive stimulus registration nor as already high-order judgement, but as a temporally organised interface between sensing, action, and the animal’s ecological world.

            Sabrina Coninx & Laurenz Casser, Is Pain Perception?

Where does pain fit in our ‘anatomy of the mind’? Historically, conceptions of pain have shifted considerably: from views that classified pain as a type of emotion to those that understood it as an aspect of touch to those that identified pain as a sense in its own right. Since the 1960s, philosophers have viewed pain primarily as a form of perception, analogous to vision, hearing, and touch. However, even perceptualism about pain remains controversial, at least in part because there is lingering disagreement over what counts as ‘pain’ and what counts as ‘perception’. In this chapter, we reconsider whether pain is truly a perceptual phenomenon by offering a taxonomy of prominent marks of perception by which this view can be assessed, including: processing speed, automaticity, input sensitivity, informational encapsulation, patterns of interaction with other perceptual systems, news-gathering function, adaptation effects, and constancy mechanisms. As we will suggest, the classification of pain as a perceptual phenomenon is problematic irrespective of which criterion or group of criteria the perceptualist chooses to privilege.

December 3                 

            Alberto Voltolini, The role of Imagination for Perception

December 17               

            Błażej Skrzypulec, Touch          

            Giulia Martina, Smell     

Winter Break

January 14                   

            Jacob Beck, Do Convolutional Neural Networks Undermine Marr’s Framework for Explaining Vision?

            Carlota Serrahima, Tactile field

January 28                   

            Nick Young, Audition

Guilano Torrengo, The present in perception: content or attitude? 

February 11                 

            Assaf Weksler & Gabriel Rabin, Iconic perception          

            Jonna Vance, Feature Binding and Hedonic Valence in Perception        

February 25                 

            Joulia Smortchkova, Are feelings of déjà vu and jamais vu part of perceptual experience?

            Kevin Lande, Perspective as Representational Form

March 11                     

            Gerardo Viera, Extended present: the role of memory for perception      

            Jack Shardlow, Extended present: the role of anticipation for perception

March 25                     

            Arina Pismenny & Benjamin Young, Smell and the emotions      

            John Morrison, Perceptual confidence   

April 8              

            Dan Burnston, Analog perception

Madeleine Ransom, Perceptual learning