This volume is about the many ways we perceive. In nineteen new essays, philosophers and cognitive scientists explore the nature of the individual senses, how and what they tell us about the world, and how they interrelate. They consider how the senses extract perceptual content from receptoral information and what kinds of objects we perceive and whether multiple senses ever perceive a single event. Questions pertaining to how many senses we have, what makes one sense distinct from another, and whether and why distinguishing senses may be useful feature prominently. Contributors examine the extent to which the senses act in concert, rather than as discrete modalities, and whether this influence is epistemically pernicious, neutral, or beneficial. Many of the essays engage with the idea that it is unduly restrictive to think of perception as a collation of contents provided by individual sense modalities. Rather, contributors contend that to understand perception properly we need to build into our accounts the idea that the senses work together. In doing so, they aim to develop better paradigms for understanding the senses and thereby to move toward a better understanding of perception.

About the Author
Dustin Stokes, Mohan Matthen, and Stephen Biggs are philosophers of mind who work on a range of related issues, including sense modalities and their interaction, perception and cognition, problems of consciousness, and methods of reasoning. They collaborate on these and other philosophical topics, and also work closely with empirical researchers in the cognitive sciences.

Reviews
'It is partly the diversity of this anthology that will make it a very useful read for someone looking for a topic on which to write a PhD thesis in the philosophy of perception. But it will also be useful for such a reader because Perception and its Modalities makes clear how much work there is left to do in this area of philosophy..." --Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews Online



Book Information
ISBN 9780199832798
Author Dustin Stokes
Format Hardback
Page Count 512
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 842g
Dimensions(mm) 163mm * 236mm * 31mm