Philosophy

Events

Superstrong Multimodality: A New Approach to Perceptual Experience- Rebecca Copenhaver and Bryce Dalbey (Lewis & Clark)

Date: October 14 2011, 3:30pm - 5:00pm Location: J.R. Howard Hall - J.R. Howard Hall 102

We present a taxonomy of approaches and position to studying perceptual experience.  Perceptual experience has been studied primarily as a unimodal phenomenon: philosophers and cognitive scientists have approached each sense modality as isolated and encapsulated and as having unique, proprietary objects.  In addition, philosophers and cognitive scientists have focused almost exclusively on vision.  Recently, some have begun to study audition, olfaction, gustation, proprioception and other neglected sense modalities.  We argue that while this shift in attention is an advance, a more radical shift in methodology is called for: superstrong multimodality.  On this approach, there are no modally-specific, distinct, proprietary, invariant contents.  Rather, overall perceptual experience is the most basic form of content, and it cannot be specified in modally-specific terms.