The First Sense: A Philosophical Study of Human Touch

6. Distal Touch

6 Distal Touch Flesh is not the organ but the medium of touch. —Aristotle, De Anima 6.1 Introduction In this chapter I argue that we can and do experience objects through touch, even when those objects are not in contact with the apparent limits of our bodies. And we can do so without explicit awareness of the proximal points of contact (as argued in chapter 4). I first discuss the nature of demonstrative content in perception and introduce the important distinction between teleosenses—senses like vision and audition that can represent distal objects without representing the medium connecting us to them— and contact senses that require direct contact between an object and our sensory surfaces. It might obvious that to experience an object through touch requires that we come into direct bodily contact with it. Despite the intuitive appeal of such a view, the claim is implausible. In section 6.3, I describe and reject this view, which I call the contact thesis. In section 6.4, I discuss an improved version of the contact thesis found in Martin (1992). This is the view that touch only requires apparent contact with external objects. I provide several strong arguments against this view. In section 6.5, I argue that in touch, as in 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. The connection principle holds that distal touch requires an appropriate tactual medium to connect our sensory 138 Chapter 6 surfaces to the distal object. In section 6.6, I argue that tactual media must allow the reliable transmission of tangible information and it must properly coordinate with our exploratory capacities. 6.2 Perceptual Reference To see a cup on the table is to see a particular individual—that very cup— with its various qualities, located in relation to other visual objects and properties. Perceptual experiences like these seem to possess demonstrative content; the experiences seem to be about or refer to particular individual objects. I want to briefly motivate this idea that perception involves a kind of referential character (much as language, beliefs, and thoughts do). The key point I want to emphasize is that such a view of perception does not entail anything radical about the nature of perception. Philosophers have traditionally recognized a distinction between intentional states and phenomenal states. Beliefs and thoughts are paradigm intentional states, as they are about states of affairs in the world. Perceptual experiences are paradigm phenomenal states, as our experience of the world has a particular phenomenal character. While some have recently argued for the identity of intentional and phenomenal states, nothing so radical is required for perception to admit of a referential character. For one, perceptual experiences seem completely intentional in Brentano’s [1874] sense: they, like beliefs and thoughts, are about things in the world. When we see a red apple on the table, our experience is representing a certain state of affairs. This is a very basic sense of representation that nearly all parties can agree on. (It does not, for instance, require an explicit mental representation of the state of affairs, nor does it require that the phenomenal content be exhausted by the representational contents.) We can add two streams of support to this initial characterization, one involving the close relation between perceptual experience and referential language, and another stemming from our best account of the mechanisms of perception. We’ll start with language. Gareth Evans (1982), for instance, takes perception to be a part of the information system (along with various forms of communication and memory). Perception involves seemings: meaningful events that can influence our actions and ground demonstrative thoughts. We can speak of these seemings being “of an object” in terms Distal Touch 139 of its informational content. The relation between perception and demonstrative thought is actually one of the primary motivations for treating perception as referential in character. As Susanna Siegel (2002) writes, We perceive facts about our surroundings by perceiving things; we can state facts about our surroundings by demonstratively referring to things. Perception can anchor uses of demonstratives to, say, a baby when it represents contrasts between the baby...