Sorting the Senses Stephen

This volume is about the many ways we perceive. Contributors explore the nature of the individual senses, how and what they tell us about the world, and how they interrelate. They often represent competing views: for instance, some argue that perception uses the senses in concert, while others are content, at least for present purposes, to leave unchallenged the traditional assumption that we perceive through discrete senses. And the methods deployed sometimes differ from one essay to the next: some draw upon the sciences and engineering, while others rely upon conceptual analysis. Despite these differences, all the contributors agree that traditional theorizing about the senses is hampered by a neglect of the senses other than vision (based on the facile assumption that what goes for vision goes just as well for the other senses), and by the misconception that vision itself is a passive receptacle for an image thrown by a lens. In addition, many of the contributors believe that it is unduly restrictive to think of perception as a collation of content provided by individual modalities; they think that to understand perception properly, we need to build into our accounts the idea that the senses work together. The ambition of the volume is to begin to develop better paradigms for understanding the senses, and thereby to move toward a better understanding of perception. The push for change begins with recognizing the shortcomings of tradition. We introduce the volume, accordingly, by sketching some of those shortcomings, and situating each contribution among the sketches. While we intend for the discussion to be informative in its own right, our sketches are offered to set the stage for the more detailed discussions that are offered by the essays that comprise the volume.