A Multisensory Philosophy of Perception
FAIN: FA-252032-17
Casey O'Callaghan
Washington University (St. Louis, MO 63130-4862)
A book-length argument for a theory of multisensory perception of human consciousness.
Seeing What You
Hear: A Multisensory Philosophy of Perception argues that human perceptual consciousness
is richly multisensory. This project’s thesis is that the coordinated use of
multiple senses enhances and extends human perceptual capacities in three
critical ways: (1) Crossmodal perceptual illusions reveal hidden multisensory
interactions that typically make each sense more reliable as a source of
evidence about the environment; (2) The joint use of multiple senses discloses
more of the world, including novel features and qualities; (3) Through
perceptual learning, each sense is reshaped by the influence of others. 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 methodology that illuminates the nature, scope, and character of
perceptual consciousness.