Philosophy

In this dissertation I argue that some of our visual and tactile experiences of the external world are exhausted by spatial content. For instance, some of our visual experiences of shape are not ‘colored in’, but are seen as just shapes out in the external world — what I call “spatial experience”. This provides grounds for sensory knowledge of objects in the external world which is not corrupted by sense-specific content like color and texture.
The possibility of spatial experience resolves the three-century old problem known as Molyneux’s question: whether the newly sighted recognize tactilely familiar shapes by sight alone. Given the resounding evidence from Developmental Science in support of an affirmative answer to Molyneux’s question, the question has changed from ‘whether’ to how the newly sighted recognize the shapes. I answer that the newly sighted are able to recognize the shapes because they have spatial experiences of them — the same type of experiences of shape by sight and touch.
I set my answer in the context of other plausible affirmative answers given by Leibniz, Adam Smith, Gareth Evans, Jesse Prinz, and John Campbell. I argue that these answers fail to guarantee that newly sighted subjects actually experience this sameness and thereby recognize the shapes as the same. These answers only provide possible bases for the sameness of the shape properties of visual and tactile shape perception or the basis for how different shape properties might connect up. Only recognition of shapes based on spatial experience guarantees an affirmative answer to Molyneux’s Question.

How does the mind attribute external causes to internal sensory experiences? Adam Smith addresses this question in his little known essay “Of the External Senses.” I closely examine Smith’s various formulations of this problem and then argue for an interpretation of his solution: that inborn perceptual mechanisms automatically generate external attributions of internal experiences. I conclude by speculating that these mechanisms are best understood to operate by simulating tactile environments.

Molyneux’s Question asks whether the once-blind might immediately recognize shapes familiar to the touch by sight alone. John Locke and other empiricists answered "not." Gottfried Leibniz was the first to publish an affirmative reply. However, Leibniz’s reason for his affirmative answer has yet to be discussed directly with any depth, a lacuna this paper seeks to address. The main contention of this paper is that Leibniz cannot think that sensory representations based on the sight and touch of shape sufficient for this task, as several commentators have suggested. It is argued that Leibniz’s answer is based on the ability of the once-blind to unconsciously employ “common sensibles,” representations of shape that are independent of sight and touch.

Molyneux’s Question, also known as Molyneux’s Problem, became a fulcrum for early research in the epistemology of concepts, challenging common intuitions about how our concepts originate, whether sensory features differentiate concepts, and how concepts are utilized in novel contexts. It was reprinted and discussed by a wide range of early modern philosophers, including Gottfried Leibniz, George Berkeley, and Adam Smith, and was perhaps the most important problem in the burgeoning discipline of psychology of the 18th Century. The question has since undergone various stages of development, both as a mental exercise and as an experimental paradigm, garnering a variety of both affirmative and negative replies in the next three centuries of debate and deliberation.

A sensory substitution device (SSD) is a technology that translates information for one sensory modality, like vision, into information for use by another, like touch. Though SSDs have been in existence for over four decades, effective training techniques for their use are rarely discussed. In this paper, we compare three training strategies on a particular SSD known as the vOICe. These comparisons were conducted using a minimal but active search and localization task of luminescent discs. These studies show that an interactive training paradigm, which combines the efforts of two trainees at the same time in a tag-like game, is more effective than passive training at a computer console or active training involving search and localization of luminescent discs. This finding supports philosophical views of perception that take interaction with the environment seriously. In particular, we argue that these findings are in support of certain features of the extended mind view as proposed by Andy Clark (2008). In particular, the study suggests that when environmental conditions are responsive to one’s behavioral activity, the activity itself is enhanced, as is predicted by the extended mind view.

Might the perception of real color include stimuli from any sensory system whose input was within the visible and near-visible spectrum? For instance, might color content be processed by an auditory system with color receptors? I argue that subjects wearing a color sonification device that processes color content using the auditory system hear real color much like a parrot or a human sees real color, a view called, “Radical Pluralistic Realism”. What makes it radical is that, unlike Mohan Matthen’s (2005) view, color content can be processed by a visual system that did not evolve out of processes relevant to an ecological niche.

Our paper addresses the ‘middle-blind’ status of the man from Bethsaida whom, according to Mk 8.22–26, Jesus heals in two phases. Drawing on observations from modern philosophical psychology and from ancient Greek theories of vision, we argue that the two healing touches of Jesus are distinct in kind: the first restores optical function of the eye, and the second enables cognitive synthesis of form. This reading better conforms to the narrative theme of ‘seeing but not perceiving’ than traditional interpretations, and provides the theological impetus behind what has otherwise been considered a discomfiting account of Jesus’ inefficiency.

Effective training techniques for sensory substitution devices (SSDs), devices that translate information for one sensory modality into information that can be used by another, are rarely discussed.  In this paper, we compare three training strategies on a particular SSD, known as the vOICe, in a minimal search and localization task and show that an interactive paradigm, which combines the efforts of two trainees at the same time in a tag-like game,  is more effective than passive training at a computer console or active training involving search and localization of luminescent discs.  This finding suggests support for philosophical views of perception that take interaction with the environment seriously.  In particular, we argue that these findings are in support of the embodied mind view as proposed by Andy Clark (2008).

Molyneux’s question, whether the newly sighted might immediately recognize tactilely familiar shapes by sight alone, has produced an array of answers over three centuries of debate and discussion. I propose the first pluralist response: many different answers, both yes and no, are individually sufficient as an answer to the question as a whole. I argue that this is possible if we take the question to be cluster concept of sub-problems. This response opposes traditional answers that isolate specific perceptual features as uniquely applicable to Molyneux’s question and grant viability to only one reply. Answering Molyneux’s question as a cluster concept may also serve as a methodology for resolving other philosophical problems.

According to Adam Smith, when we simulate the actions of others we also evaluate their actions, and thereby sympathize with their condition. I argue that the ‘practical’ simulations of perception discussed in Smith's 'On the External Senses' (ES) share an evaluative component: guiding the body’s interaction with objects in a way that support its health and avoid its harm. Not only does such a discussion help elucidate Smith’s early thoughts about perception in ES, but how ES pre-figures and connects with his later, more developed views of morality and social interaction. It also provides a basis for connecting Smith’s account of perception with recent research in neuroscience, as I argue in this paper’s conclusion.