A Multisensory Philosophy of Perception

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.

Study at a glance

Abstract

This book argues that human perception and perceptual consciousness are richly multisensory. Its thesis is that the coordinated use of multiple senses enhances and extends human perceptual capacities and experience in three critical ways. First, crossmodal perceptual illusions reveal hidden multisensory interactions that typically make the senses more coherent and reliable sources of evidence about the environment. Second, the joint use of multiple senses discloses more of the world, including novel features and qualities, making possible novel forms of perceptual consciousness. Third, through crossmodal dependence, plasticity, and perceptual learning, each sense is reshaped by the influence of others, at a time and over time. The implication is that no sense—not even vision itself—can be understood entirely in isolation from the others. This undermines the prevailing approach to perception, which proceeds sense by sense, and sets the stage for a revisionist multisensory approach that illuminates the nature, scope, and character of sense perception.