Perception and Multimodality

1 Unimodal approaches to the study of perception Sometimes you turn to look at the source of a clunk. Sometimes you see a pan on the stove and grasp its hot handle. Sometimes you smell the pepper you taste, or find a stinky dead mouse under the sink. In each case, you perceive using more than one sense. You hear the sound and see its source. You feel and see the handle. You smell and taste the pepper. You see and smell the mouse. And yet, most work on perception by philosophers and cognitive scientists has focused on vision. Empirical psychologists catalog visual illusions and deficits because they want to discover perceptual principles and mechanisms. Philosophers analyze visual experience to explain what we perceive and how we perceive it. This focus makes sense since vision is central to how most humans experience, understand, and navigate their surroundings. Focusing exclusively on vision is risky. Nothing guarantees that what holds of seeing holds generally of perceiving. What is essential to seeing might not be essential to perceiving, and certain requirements on perceiving might lack salience in the visual case. Impressive diversity among the varieties of perceiving also might go underappreciated. Attention to the contrasts among smelling a scallion's odor, hearing the sounds of a colleague's footsteps, and