The Nature of the Senses

My thesis provides an account of the nature of the senses. Many philosophers have
supposed that the fact that we have different senses makes the integration of the
senses problematic. In this thesis I argue that introspection reveals our perceptual
experience to be amodal or unitary (that is, we cannot distinguish distinct
experiences associated with each of our senses) and hence that the real problem is
not how the senses are integrated with one another, but how and why we
distinguish five senses in the first place. What we need is an account of what our
judgements are about when we judge that we are, say, seeing something or some
property.
I argue that such an account cannot take any of the forms commonly
supposed. Philosophers often assume that an account must appeal to differences
between kinds of experience, but I argue that such differences are not sufficient to
explain the way that we distinguish five senses. Nor can we explain the distinction
by appealing to the different kinds of mechanism involved in perceiving, since
recent cognitive psychological models of the mechanisms of perception show them
to be functionally diverse in a way that undermines any correspondence between
them and the five senses, and our common-sense grasp of the different mechanisms
involved in perception presupposes a prior understanding of the distinction
between different senses.
I provide and account of the distinction that we make between the five
senses, according to which the senses are not substantially distinct. Although our
judgements about the senses are true, they are not judgements about kinds of thing;
rather, we distinguish different ways of perceiving in terms of different,
conventionally determined, kinds of perceptual interaction we can have with our
environment.Philosophy of Mind