A Multisensory Philosophy of Perception
February 12, 2020 Casey O’callaghan 68 citations
Human perception and perceptual consciousness are richly multisensory, not confined to individual senses. The coordinated use of multiple senses enhances and extends perceptual capacities and experience in three ways: crossmodal perceptual illusions reveal hidden interactions that make the senses more coherent and reliable; joint use of multiple senses discloses novel features and qualities, enabling new forms of perceptual consciousness; and through crossmodal dependence, plasticity, and perceptual learning, each sense is reshaped by others over time. No sense, including vision, can be understood in isolation. This challenges the prevailing sense-by-sense approach and supports a revisionist multisensory framework for understanding sense perception.