How We Know Our Senses

I propose a new criterion by which, I hold, subjects recognize and distinguish their sensory modalities. I argue that, rather than appealing to one of the standard criteria (sense organ, proximal stimulus, phenomenal character, or representational content (Grice 1962, Macpherson 2011a)) or to O’Dea’s (2011) proprioceptive content, we need to introduce the criterion of location in the functional architecture of the subject’s personal-level mind in order to make sense of an ordinary subject’s ability to tell immediately which sensory modalities are employed in her occurrent perceptual experience. More specifically, a subject’s personal-level mind is functionally organized into different faculties, and, seeing as it is her mind, she has a natural cognitive access to this structure; in the specific case of perceptual experience, perceptual input from the world is present to the subject as organized into the different sensory modalities, vision, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. I motivate and explicate my new criterion for distinguishing the senses, in particular its psychological aspects. Moreover, I show how it can handle problems raised by empirical findings, such as additional human senses (e.g. the vomeronasal sense) and cross-modal experiences (e.g. the experience of a speaker’s voice emanating from his mouth) Posted at the Zurich Open Repository and Archive, University of Zurich ZORA URL: https://doi.org/10.5167/uzh-141464 Originally published at: Schmidt, Eva (2012). How we know our senses. In: Was dürfen wir glauben? Was sollen wir tun?, Konstanz, 17 September 2012 20 September 2012, 256-263. How We Know Our Senses