scholarly journals Are the Senses Silent?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith A. Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Category Mistake ◽  
Important Challenge ◽  
The Senses

Many philosophers and scientists take perceptual experience, whatever else it involves, to be representational. In ‘The Silence of the Senses’, Charles Travis argues that this view involves a kind of category mistake, and consequently, that perceptual experience is not a representational or intentional phenomenon. The details of Travis’s argument, however, have been widely misinterpreted by his representationalist opponents, many of whom dismiss it out of hand. This chapter offers an interpretation of Travis’s argument from looks that it is argued presents a genuine and important challenge to orthodox representational views of experience. Whilst this challenge may not (pace Travis) be insurmountable, it places a substantial burden upon the representationalist to explain not only how experiences come to have the contents that they do (the individuation question), but how those contents come to feature in our conscious mental lives (the availability question).

Reply to Keith A. Wilson

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Representational Content ◽  
The Senses

In my essay, ‘The Silence of the Senses’ (2004, revised 2013) I argued that perceptual experience has no representational content, or at least none if you exclude the content of a perceiver’s, or experiencer’s responses to his experience, e.g., in a case of perceiving, recognizing...

Perceptual knowledge

2019 ◽  
pp. 279-308
Author(s):  
Georges Dicker
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Perceptual Knowledge ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Carry Over ◽  
Sensitive Knowledge ◽  
Rule Out

This chapter critically analyzes Locke’s views on “sensitive knowledge.” Its main theses are: (1) Locke sometimes confuses the legitimate question (Q1), “When we perceive a body, how can we know that we aren’t hallucinating instead?” with the faulty “veil-of-perception” question, (Q2) “How do we know bodies exist, since we can’t perceive them?” (2) When Locke does mention (Q1), he sometimes just dismisses it, because he holds that simple ideas of sensation are by definition produced by bodies. (3) At other times, Locke humors the skeptic, and offers a defense of the senses, in the form of an inference to the best explanation. (4) It’s doubtful that he could successfully rule out other possible explanations of our perceptual experience, like Descartes’s deceiver scenario and its contemporary variants. (5) There are reasons for this weakness, and they carry over to any attempt to defeat skepticism by an inference to the best explanation.

Perception, Especially Perception through Language

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Garrett Millikan
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Perceptual Processing ◽  
Perceptual Illusions ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Psychological Processing ◽  
Cognitive Understanding

Perceptual processing is translation of patterns in the data of sense into cognitive understanding without uniceptual inference. Understanding language differs from ordinary perceptual processing in that the signs it translates are detached rather than attached. This similarity is obscured because ordinary uses of the verbs of perception do not track a kind of psychological processing. Their use is mostly factive, which encourages overlooking the fallibility of perception. One result is the mistaken view that perceptual illusions are an anomaly and that perception is cognitively impenetrable. The assumption that each of the senses has its own proprietary level of perception and the assumption that differences in the result of perceptual processing are always accompanied by differences in perceptual experience are questioned. Finally, a number of intuitive objections to the idea that understanding language is a form of perceptual processing are discussed.

Ayurvedic perspective of Cosmetology

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dr.Sumedh Wasnik ◽  
Tanuja Naik ◽  
Anita Ghodke ◽  
Vaibhav Sulakhe
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Life Science ◽  
Toxic Materials ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Four Levels ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Concept Of Beauty ◽  
Physically Attractive

Cosmetology deals with various aspect of beauty. Beauty is the quality of being physically attractive, the qualities in a person or a thing that give pleasure to the senses or the mind. It is the quality or aggregate of qualities in a person or thing that gives pleasure to the senses or pleasurably exalts the mind or spirit. Beauty is the quality present in a thing or person that gives intense pleasure or deep satisfaction to the mind, whether arising from sensory manifestations (as shape, colour, sound, etc.), a meaningful design or pattern, or something else. It pleases the aesthetic senses, especially the sight. Beauty of person gives perceptual experience of pleasure or satisfaction. According to Ayurveda, the concept of beauty includes physical, mental, social and spiritual elements. Ayurveda is the science of health care and healing, works on four levels body, Breath, mind and spirit. When these are in perfect harmony, a person radiates with inner and outer beauty. In fact, the concept of beauty and cosmetics is as old as mankind and civilization. Ama (toxic materials) inside our body make a person ugly and diseased and Sodhana i.e. Panchakarma (purification) is the best therapeutic intervention to eliminate body toxins. Being Ayurveda as a life science and tradition of India, soon India will be the global cosmetic industry’s capital because of advantages of Ayurveda and Ayurvedic medicines.

scholarly journals Perception verbs and the conceptualization of the senses: The case of Avatime

Linguistics ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-38
Author(s):  
Saskia van Putten
Keyword(s):  
Visual Perception ◽  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Sensory Perception ◽  
Perception Verbs ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Detailed Picture ◽  
Shed Light

AbstractLanguages differ in their number of basic verbs that describe perceptual experience. Some languages have only two such verbs: one for visual perception and another for non-visual perception. How do speakers of these languages conceptualize sensory perception? To shed light on this question, this paper investigates the perception verbs mɔ̀ ‘see’ and nu ‘hear/feel/taste/smell’ in Avatime (Kwa, Niger-Congo). These verbs are studied together with the constructions in which they occur, using both translated data and spontaneous discourse. Both perception meanings and meanings outside the domain of perception are taken into account. The detailed picture that emerges shows some previously undocumented patterns of perception encoding and enriches our understanding of the conceptualization of the senses more generally.

Senses

2019 ◽  
pp. 154-179
Author(s):  
Casey O'Callaghan
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Information Gathering ◽  
Multisensory Perception ◽  
Activity Type ◽  
The Senses ◽  
The Way

Multisensory phenomena have been used to challenge the distinctness of our senses. Perceptual processes interact extensively and perform joint functions, while perceptual experience is constitutively and irreducibly multisensory. This chapter presents an account of the senses and what differentiates them. According to this proposal, each sense is a family of perceptual capacities unified and distinguished by the way in which those capacities are exercised. The relevant manner is an information-gathering activity type individuated by the information it functions to extract and the medium from which it does so. Perceiving involves exercising perceptual capacities in one or more sensory manners. Thus, perceptual episodes and experiences may be typed accordingly, without appealing to their phenomenology. The key to this approach is distinguishing the task of individuating senses from that of ascribing modalities to experiences. This account rejects the independence of the senses while preserving their distinctness. It illuminates richly multisensory perception and captures why it matters.

Experience

2019 ◽  
pp. 121-153
Author(s):  
Casey O'Callaghan
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Phenomenal Character ◽  
Phenomenal Consciousness ◽  
Multisensory Perception ◽  
Perceptual Consciousness ◽  
The Senses

This chapter argues that perceptual experience is richly multisensory. In particular, phenomenal consciousness is constitutively and irreducibly multisensory. The reason is that the phenomenal character of a conscious multisensory episode can include more than what is associated with each of the respective senses plus whatever accrues due to simple co-consciousness. Exercising multisensory capacities thus makes a phenomenal difference to perceptual consciousness. This difference can obtain whether or not it would enable a subject to discriminate between two otherwise equivalent experiences. It follows that the character of a perceptual episode is not exhausted by what belongs to each of the senses. Therefore, not all perceptual experience is modality specific. Coordination among the senses thus makes possible new forms of perceptual consciousness. Multisensory perception extends the varieties of experience.

New Phenomenalism as an Account of Perceptual Knowledge

1975 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 109-121
Author(s):  
Alan Hobbs
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Perceptual Knowledge ◽  
Sensory Data ◽  
Sensory Experiences ◽  
The Senses

To be an Empiricist with respect to knowledge of the natural world, is to insist that all knowledge of that world is rooted in perceptual experience. All claims which go beyond the deliverances of the senses must, in the end, be justified by, and understood in terms of, relations holding between those claims and sensory data. Crucial to the Empiricist case, therefore, is an account of how perception can be a source of knowledge. How can sensory experiences provide, for the owner of those experiences, information about objects and events which exist independently of the experiences themselves?The following essay scavenges in contemporary sources to arrive at a fresh Empiricist account of perceptual knowledge. There are sufficient parallels with earlier doctrines to call the outcome ‘New Phenomenalism’, but the label is not important. The materials for the thesis have been gathered (and probably twisted) from several current writers, most notably P.F. Strawson and Jonathan Bennett, but no one of these writers is a proponent of the expounded thesis as a whole. As with a composite photograph, no face completely fits.

Scepticism and the Senses

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry Stroud
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
Perceptual Knowledge ◽  
The World ◽  
The Senses ◽  
The Right ◽  
Sceptical Argument ◽  
Philosophical Scepticism

This chapter considers some lessons that can be learned from philosophical scepticism and some strategies to be pursued in understanding human knowledge in the right way. It examines the conception of perceptual experience and what is needed for a more accurate—and hence more trouble-free—account of what we can and do in fact perceive. It also discusses René Descartes’s sceptical argument and his notion of perceptual knowledge before concluding with an explanation of what it calls propositional perception to account for knowledge of the world. It argues that we can perceive particular objects without believing or knowing anything about them. It is only with such ‘propositional’ objects of perception that direct perceptual knowledge of the world is possible, since knowledge is knowledge of what is so.

Looks Indexing

2017 ◽  
Vol 94 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 138-152
Author(s):  
Graham Peebles
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Main Thrust ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Content Of Experience ◽  
The Way

Charles Travis influentially argued in “The Silence of the Senses” that the representational theory of perceptual experience is false. According to Travis, the way that things look cannot index the content of experience as the subject of the experience cannot read the content off from the way things look. This looks indexing is a central commitment of representationalism. The main thrust of Travis’ argument is that the way things look is fundamentally comparative, and this prevents the subject from reading a single content off from the way things look. If content were looks indexed, the subject would be able to do this. I argue that Travis’ argument rests on an illicit transition from an argument about the way objects look in themselves—i.e. an argument about the visible properties that they have—to a conclusion about the way that objects look to subjects in experience.

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