Perception and Its Modalities

Edited by Dustin Stokes, Mohan Matthen, and Stephen Biggs

Offers new theories about how the senses interact, how they acquire information about the world, and what the point of distinguishing the senses may be
Discusses both the familiar five sense modalities and other candidate sense modalities
Represents competing views.
Explores the idea that is unduly restrictive to think of perception as a collation of contents provided by individual sense modalities

Perception and Its Modalities

Edited by Dustin Stokes, Mohan Matthen, and Stephen Biggs

Description

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.

Perception and Its Modalities

Edited by Dustin Stokes, Mohan Matthen, and Stephen Biggs

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, Jérôme Dokic, and François Le Corre

Index

Perception and Its Modalities

Edited by Dustin Stokes, Mohan Matthen, and Stephen Biggs

Author Information

Dustin Stokes, Mohan Matthen, and Stephen Biggs are philosophers of mind who work on a range of related issues, including sense modalities and their interaction, perception and cognition, problems of consciousness, and methods of reasoning. They collaborate on these and other philosophical topics, and also work closely with empirical researchers in the cognitive sciences.

Contributors:

Malika Auvray
Clare Batty
Tim Bayne
Stephen Biggs
Peter Carruthers
Roberto Casati
Mazviita Chirimuuta
François Le Corre
Andy Clark
Ed Cooke
Ophelia Deroy
Jerome Dokic
Robert Fendrich
Matthew Fulkerson
C.L Hardin
Howard C. Hughes
John Kulvicki
Fiona Macpherson
Mohan Matthen
Erik Myin
Matthew Nudds
Casey O'Callaghan
Mark Paterson
Vincent Picciuto
Nicholas Shea
Barry C. Smith
Charles Spence
Dustin Stokes
Sarah Streeter
Karim Zahidi

Perception and Its Modalities

Edited by Dustin Stokes, Mohan Matthen, and Stephen Biggs

Reviews and Awards

'It is partly the diversity of this anthology that will make it a very useful read for someone looking for a topic on which to write a PhD thesis in the philosophy of perception. But it will also be useful for such a reader because Perception and its Modalities makes clear how much work there is left to do in this area of philosophy..." --Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews Online