Perception and Its Modalities

This volume is about the many ways we perceive. In nineteen new essays, philosophers and cognitive scientists explore the nature of the individual senses, how and what they tell us about the world, and how they interrelate. They consider how the senses extract perceptual content from receptoral information and what kinds of objects we perceive and whether multiple senses ever perceive a single event. Questions pertaining to how many senses we have, what makes one sense distinct from another, and whether and why distinguishing senses may be useful feature prominently. Contributors examine the extent to which the senses act in concert, rather than as discrete modalities, and whether this influence is epistemically pernicious, neutral, or beneficial. Many of the essays engage with the idea that it is unduly restrictive to think of perception as a collation of contents provided by individual sense modalities. Rather, contributors contend that to understand perception properly we need to build into our accounts the idea that the senses work together. In doing so, they aim to develop better paradigms for understanding the senses and thereby to move toward a better understanding of perception.

Table of Contents:
About the Editors ; About the Contributors ; New Models of Perception ; 1. Perceiving as Predicting ; Andy Clark ; 2. Active Perception and the Representation of Space ; Mohan Matthen ; 3. Distinguishing Top-Down From Bottom-Up Effects ; Nicholas Shea ; Multimodal Perception ; 4. Is Consciousness Multisensory? ; Charles Spence and Tim Bayne ; 5. Not all perceptual experience is modality specific ; Casey O'Callaghan ; 6. Is audio-visual perception 'amodal' or 'crossmodal'? ; Matthew Nudds ; The Non-Visual Senses ; 7. What Counts as Touch? ; Matthew Fulkerson ; 8. Sound stimulants: defending the stable disposition view ; John Kulvicki ; 9. Olfactory Objects ; Clare Batty ; 10. Confusing Tastes with Flavours ; Charles Spence, Malika Auvray, and Barry Smith ; Sensing Ourselves ; 11. Inner Sense ; Vincent Picciuto and Peter Carruthers ; New Issues Concerning Vision ; 12. The Diversity of Human Visual Experience ; Howard C. Hughes, Robert Fendrich and Sarah E. Streeter ; 13. A crossmodal perspective on sensory substitution ; Ophelia Deroy and Malika Auvray ; 14. The dominance of the visual ; Dustin Stokes and Stephen Biggs ; 15. More Color Science for Philosophers ; C. L. Hardin ; Relating the Modalities ; 16. Morphing Senses ; Erik Myin, Ed Cooke, and Karim Zahidi ; 17. A Methodological Molyneux Question: Sensory Substitution, Plasticity and the ; Unification of Perceptual Theory ; Mazviita Chirimuuta and Mark Paterson ; 18. The Space of Sensory Modalities ; Fiona Macpherson ; 19. Distinguishing the Commonsense Senses ; Roberto Casati, Jerome Dokic, and Francois Le Corre ; Index