Perceiving Representations

• Wilson, Keith A. (2022). The Temporal Structure of Olfactory Experience. In Young, Benjamin & Keller, Andreas (Ed.), Theoretical Perspectives on Smell. Routledge. ISSN 9781032075884.
• Wilson, Keith A. (2022). Does Property-Perception Entail the Content View? Erkenntnis: An International Journal of Scientific Philosophy. ISSN 0165-0106. doi: 10.1007/s10670-022-00559-1. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Visual perception is widely taken to present properties such as redness, roundness, and so on. This in turn might be thought to give rise to accuracy conditions for experience, and so content, regardless of which metaphysical view of perception one endorses. An influential version of this argument—Susanna Siegel’s ‘Argument from Appearing’—aims to establish the existence of content as common ground between representational and relational views of perception. This goes against proponents of ‘austere’ relationalism who deny that content plays a substantive role in philosophical explanations of conscious perceptual experience. Though Siegel’s argument purports to be neutral with respect to the metaphysics of perception, it relies upon an equivocation between the presentation of property-types and property-instances. Consequently, the argument begs the question against the austere relational view, and so fails to establish the desired conclusion. So while relationalists can and should allow that experiences have accuracy conditions, it does not follow from this that they have contents of any philosophically interesting or significant kind.

• Wilson, Keith A. (2022). The Auditory Field: The Spatial Character of Auditory Experience. Ergo - An Open Access Journal of Philosophy. ISSN 2330-4014. In press. Show summary

  It is generally accepted that there is a visual field, but the analogous notion of an auditory field is rejected by many philosophers on the grounds that the metaphysics or phenomenology of audition lack the necessary spatial structure. In this paper, I argue that many of the common objections to the existence of an auditory field are misguided and that, contrary to a tradition of philosophical scepticism about the spatiality of auditory experience, it is as richly spatial as visual experience — and in some ways even more so. By carefully considering the spatiality and boundedness of audition, along with how sounds or their sources are experienced as occurring within the surrounding acoustic environment, we can gain a better understanding of (i) our auditory experience of space and (ii) the conditions for the existence of spatial sensory fields in general in a way that does not privilege vision over the other senses. http://keithwilson.net/research/the-auditory-field

• Wilson, Keith A. (2022). Windows on Time: Unlocking the Temporal Microstructure of Experience. Review of Philosophy and Psychology. ISSN 1878-5158. doi: 10.1007/s13164-022-00632-2. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Each of our sensory modalities—vision, touch, taste, etc.—works on a slightly different timescale, with differing temporal resolutions and processing lag. This raises the question of how, or indeed whether, these sensory streams are co-ordinated or ‘bound’ into a coherent multisensory experience of the perceptual ‘now’. In this paper I evaluate one account of how temporal binding is achieved: the temporal windows hypothesis, concluding that, in its simplest form, this hypothesis is inadequate to capture a variety of multisensory phenomena. Rather, the evidence suggests the existence of a more complex temporal structure in which multiple overlapping windows support distinct functional mechanisms. To aid in the precise formulation of such views, I propose a taxonomy of temporal window types and their characteristics that in turn suggests promising avenues for future empirical and philosophical research. I conclude by examining some philosophical implications of multi-window models for the metaphysics of perception and perceptual experience more generally.

• Wilson, Keith A. (2021). Individuating the Senses of ‘Smell’: Orthonasal versus Retronasal Olfaction. Synthese. ISSN 0039-7857. 199, p. 4217–4242. doi: 10.1007/s11229-020-02976-7. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  The dual role of olfaction in both smelling and tasting, i.e. flavour perception, makes it an important test case for philosophical theories of sensory individuation. Indeed, the psychologist Paul Rozin claimed that olfaction is a “dual sense”, leading some scientists and philosophers to propose that we have not one, but two senses of smell: orthonasal and retronasal olfaction. In this paper I consider how best to understand Rozin’s claim, and upon what grounds one might judge there to be one or two distinct olfactory modalities. I conclude that while Rozin may be right that humans have dual occurrences of an olfactory ‘sense’, the concept of a sense-modality, and hence the ‘sense’ of smell, is ambiguous between two different notions: a physiological sensory channel and an experiential modality, along the lines suggested by J. J. Gibson. Furthermore, recognising that these are complementary rather than competing conceptions of a sense-modality enables the formulation of a powerful ‘dual-concept’ framework for posing and addressing questions concerning the complex architecture of human multisensory experience.

• Aasen, Solveig (2020). Crossmodal Aesthetics: How Dance and Music Can Match. The Philosophical Quarterly. ISSN 0031-8094. doi: 10.1093/pq/pqaa049. Full text in Research Archive
• Aasen, Solveig (2020). Depicting Movement. Australasian Journal of Philosophy. ISSN 0004-8402. doi: 10.1080/00048402.2019.1706590. Full text in Research Archive

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• Wilson, Keith A. (2021). How Many Senses? Multisensory Perception Beyond the Five Senses. Sabah Ülkesi. ISSN 2195-6456. 66(January 2021), p. 76–79. Show summary

  https://philpapers.org/rec/WILMP-8 (English) https://www.sabahulkesi.com/2021/01/19/cok-duyumlu-algi/ (Turkish)

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