The First Sense: A Philosophical Study of Human Touch

Notes

Notes Chapter 1 1. Wilson (1998) continues, “The problem of understanding what the hand is becomes infinitely more complicated, and the inquiry far more difficult to contain, if we try to account for differences in the way people use their hands, or if we try to understand how individuals acquire skill in the use of their hands. When we connect the hands to real life, in other words, we confront the open-ended and overlapping worlds of sensorimotor and cognitive function and the endless combinations of speed, strength, and dexterity seen in individual human skill and performance ” (p. 9). 2. Thankfully, recent work in the philosophy of perception has increasingly tackled these difficult questions. See especially O’Callaghan (2007, 2008) and the edited volume Macpherson (2011). 3. The skin on these areas is known as glabrous skin and is distinct from the hairy skin that covers most of the rest of our bodies. One focus of recent research (discussed in chapter 7) concerns the existence of a specialized channel in hairy but not glabrous skin that seems to code for pleasant sensations. The mucosal skin of the tongue and inside of the mouth also contains a dense population of thermal and mechanoreceptors. 4. Objective, as I use it in what follows, always means object directed, not that the experience is independent of the observer. Similarly, subjective means that the experience concerns the present state of the subject rather than a kind of uncertainty or relativism. 5. Compare Ratcliffe (2008). 6. The intensive/geometrical distinction comes from Lederman and Klatzky (1997), also discussed in Jones and Lederman (2006) among other places. 7. For an excellent introduction to the issues, see the essays in Macpherson (2011). 8. See, for example, Grice (2002), Nudds (2003), and Noë (2004). 190 Notes to Chapter 2 Chapter 2 1. This approach will be described in (mildly) conceptualist terms and with the assumption of a weak version of representationalism (minimally and roughly, the idea that perceptual experiences have informational or intentional contents and can be assessed for accuracy. While the representationalism is (probably) nonnegotiable, the view is compatible with nonconceptualism about perception. One could easily hold that some (or even most) perceptual contents are nonconceptual, so long as it is allowed that, at some level of perceptual experience, features are assigned to objects. If one denies that perceptual experiences have any such structure, as Travis (2004) seems to suggest, then much of what I say here will not make much sense. There are many good sources for the conceptualist/nonconceptualist debate. The interested reader can start with the essays in Gunther (2003). It’s possible that some accommodation can be made for other views besides weak representationalism. One could, for instance, give an adverbial account of seeing a table in terms of seeing it brownly, squarely, woodenly, and so on, where some binding-like connection exists between these various ways and the overall experience. 2. The assignment of features in touch does differ from those in vision and audition, however, for they arise largely from our exploratory interactions with tangible objects. (In this, touch is perhaps most similar to smell, which also involves a kind of exploratory binding grounded in active sniffing—see Wilson & Stevenson, 2006.) 3. For some recent empirical work on multisensory experience see Calvert and Thesen (2004), Driver and Spence (2000), Spence and Driver (2004), and Ghazanfar and Schroeder (2006). O’Callaghan (2008) is an informative recent philosophical work on the subject. 4. These issues are fundamental worries in recent debates about how best to account for perceptual awareness in our best philosophical theories. Byrne (2009), for instance, has recently argued that the notion of an experience is merely a philosophical invention, one that has had harmful consequences for our best perceptual theories. Others have argued that perceptual experience cannot be thought of in terms of “states,” which imply a kind of static, snapshot view that is incompatible with actual lived experience (see, e.g., Noë, 2004, among others). I won’t address these issues directly in this work, but they are always lurking in the background whenever experiences are the target of explanation. My goal is to stay neutral on some of these more fundamental issues while knowingly moving from talk of systems to talk of experiences. 5. This is similar to the “subjective unity” discussed by Bayne and Chalmers (2003). 6. Compare O’Callaghan (2008). Some multisensory interactions, notably those involving speech perception, occur even without precise spatial...