https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0186-3812
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ABSTRACT
Molyneux’s Question (MQ) concerns whether a newly sighted man would recognize/distinguish a sphere and a cube by vision, assuming that he could previously do this by touch. We argue that MQ splits into questions about (a) shared representations of space in different perceptual systems, and about (b) shared ways of constructing higher-dimensional spatiotemporal features from information about lower-dimensional ones, most of the technical difficulty centring on (b). So understood, MQ resists any monolithic answer: everything depends on the constraints faced by particular perceptual systems in extracting features of higher dimensionality from those of lower dimentionality.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
ORCID
Mohan Matthen http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0186-3812
Notes
1 Degenaar and Lokhorst [Citation2017] survey philosophical approaches to the question.
2 James et al. [Citation2007] provide strong reasons for thinking that such tactual exploration is a perceptual process.
3 For a discussion of the difference between shape and space in this context, see Schwenkler [Citation2012a].
4 See Matthen [Citation2015] for a development of this idea and a critique of Evans’s use of ‘behavioural space’.
5 Evans assumes that if ‘the tactual concept is the same as the visual concept’ then the answer to MQ is ‘yes’ [Citation1985: 381]. But this misses the fact that deploying a concept to classify patterns of sensory stimulation might need to be learned—how do we know that this configuration of visual ideas instantiates the tactual concept?
6 Lewis contrasts the colour mosaic view with one in which visual perception is of ‘ostensible constituents of the external world’. This is not the contrast on which we focus. We do not assume that colour mosaics are arrays of ‘sense data’ and we are not primarily concerned with how external objects are constructed from these. Our interest is in how point-data yield higher-dimensional data, and not in the separate question of whether the former are constituents of conscious states.
7 To be clear, we have no definite opinion about whether Evans himself would have endorsed a constructivist or a mosaicist view. (His paper is a late draft that he could not revise before he died.) However, his critical remarks (following his reading of Pierre Villey: see below) about the blind man’s integration of tactile information strongly suggest a constructivist view.
8 Cohen [Citationin press] emphasizes problems of such intermodal differences in representational scope, and their implications for the operation of sensory substitution devices. These questions must be taken case by case, and empirically.
9 The question has been investigated by Patrick Haggard and his co-workers. See, for example, Haggard and Giovagnoli [Citation2011]. It is worth noting that Haggard distinguishes the questions of tactile localization from those of tactile pattern recognition. The former set of questions has been investigated since the dawn of psychophysics, the latter only very recently.
10 This interpretation is controversial: cf. Robertson et. al [Citation1997], Kim and Robertson [Citation2001], and Robertson [Citation2004].
11 Is the newly sighted man aware right away of coherent two-dimensional displays of colour similar to those available to those sighted since birth? This is what Locke thought, but the assumption is dubious, and infects some treatments of the problem up until the present (see Schwenkler [Citation2012b]).
12 For a candidate Lockean understanding of this immediate recognition, see Bennett [Citation1965]. In the opposite direction, note that the sense of touch is unlike vision, in that its input is not a flat Euclidean two-dimensional array, but rather is an array of contact points on the skin together with (possibly incomplete) proprioceptive information about the three-dimensional disposition of these contact points. This brings to the fore the Reidian warning (see below) about possible differences between the kinds of information that are available to the two modalities. How does translation from one to the other work, and how does this affect inter-modal transfer? The answers to these questions, which bridge the two- and three-dimensional MQs, are not a priori or obvious.
13 Similar negative results were reported much earlier—e.g. in the celebrated ‘Cheselden case’ of a congenitally blind Molyneux subject restored to vision by the removal of cataracts [Cheselden Citation1728]. For more on the history of Molyneux cases, see von Senden [Citation1932].
14 Of course, these results do not, all by themselves, confirm Locke’s treatment of the matter. As we have noted, there is also the possibility that the newly sighted find it difficult to form a coherent two-dimensional visual expanse, and that there are difficulties in transitioning between the ways that three-dimensionality is presented in the two modalities.
15 Namely, he holds that touch and vision use different geometries: according to him, touch does, while vision does not, represent space and shape as Euclidean [Reid Citation1997: chs. 6, 7].
16 However, Diderot is wrong to treat a difference in the spatiotemporal range of vision and touch as marking, by itself, a genuine structural difference between the two. After all, there are ways of controlling for the former sort of difference—e.g. in this case, either by restricting visual range (by the use of blinders) or increasing tactile range (presenting the entire straight or curved shape all at once on the subject’s back).
17 See Matthen [Citation2014, Citation2015] for discussion of how sensory exploration affects the ontology and epistemology of perception.
18 John O’Keefe and Steven Nadel [Citation1978] argue that the representation of space used in memories of spatial layout derives not from information received through the senses, but from innate structures in the hippocampal formation. This might be taken to suggest that the perceptual representation of space is not modal at all, or that it is amodal/‘premodal’ [Matthen Citation2015] and that these zero-d MQs would get a ‘yes’ answer for reasons that have nothing to do with intermodal transfer.
19 Evans alludes to temporal MQ, although, according to his wife and posthumous editor, Antonia Phillips, he was apparently of two minds about how to approach it [Citation1985: 372].
20 For example, Louise Richardson [Citation2014] takes it as a datum that temporal MQs are unlike spatial MQs in meriting obvious positive answers, and she attempts to explain why this should be so. What we say below suggests that the alleged datum is false.
21 See Ian Phillips [Citation2008, Citation2011, Citation2014].
22 More precisely, the claim should be that the timing of the sensory experiences matches the times that information about the flash and the bang are received. We see a distant flash of lightning before we hear the thunder that accompanies it, because the sound arrives after the flash.
23 Barry Dainton [Citation2014] ascribes something like this view to Locke, Berkeley, and (more tentatively) to Hume, as well as to Kant and Brentano. It is also endorsed by Richardson [Citation2014].
24 Views in the vicinity of our Reflection Principle have been endorsed by Evans [Citation1985: 373n18], Mellor [Citation1985: 144], Phillips (see note 21 above), and Dainton [Citation2000, Citation2014]. Detractors include Daniel Dennett [Citation1991], Dennett and Marcel Kinsbourne [Citation1992], Rick Grush [Citation2008], Geoffrey Lee [Citation2014], and Matthen [Citation2014, Citation2015].
25 Cf. Scheier, Nijhawan, and Shimojo [Citation1999], Morein-Zamir, Soto-Faraco, and Kingstone [Citation2003], and Spence and Squire [Citation2003].
26 Of course, there is much more to say about these and many related results, the psychological processes of temporal integration that underpin them, and their significance for the philosophy of perception and the philosophy of time. For further examples and wide-ranging discussion, see Lee [Citation2014] and Craig Callender [Citation2017: ch. 9].
27 See Pick, Warren, and Hay [Citation1969], Bertelson [Citation1999], and Vroomen and de Gelder [Citation2000, Citation2004].
28 We are grateful to Craig Callender, John Campbell, James Van Cleve, Becko Copenhaver, Lu-Vada Dunford, Matthew Fulkerson, Brian Glenney, Janet Levin, Heather Logue, Alisa Mandrigin, Mike Martin, Farid Masrour, Nico Orlandi, Louise Richardson, John Schwenkler, Ayoob Shahmoradi, Aidan Wakefield-Mulroney, the Philosophy of Perception Reading Group at UC San Diego, and audiences at Cambridge, Kyoto, Toronto, UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, and York for helpful discussion of these matters that has substantially enriched the paper. Two anonymous referees for this Journal made extremely helpful critical remarks.