I'll add one more point before calling it a night: if objects are assembled out of our sense impressions by our internal model-making machinery, we might expect this fact to be disguised better. That is, we shouldn't have to learn to associate the scent of just cut grass with the look of just cut grass --- our model should have already taken steps to convince us that this scent and this look go together perfectly naturally. We shouldn't be surprised that they go together, and have to learn that this is normal. The model should be a better liar than that.

I think it's an excellent question, the best question I've seen on here in a very long time. I think it might be a really fruitful way of looking at how we think about our senses, so heading in a very different direction from yours I think.

Yeah, I'm calling it a night too.

I certainly agree with what you say. It seems our model should be a better liar, and we shouldn't be confused or surprised by sounds or smells.

I'm glad you like the question. It's nice to find someone who thinks of this too.

Talk to you soon.

Yes, I think you raised an important point, the arbitrary aspect. What would be rational to expect of something to smell like? We begin (almost) already in it, we grow up to an age in which we just assume meat smells this way and no some other way, and that flowers smell like this.

But as to what they should smell like, based on how they appear, is a good question which I don't have an answer for. — Manuel

Innate knowledge? The horseness of a neigh - a neigh is part of the (Platonic) form of horses. Someone who hears a neigh a for the first time might immediately recognize it as horse's vocalization. :chin:

As I tried to point out, the chemical and physical structure of objects determine their properties. Does this answer your question or does it not? if it does then there are reasons why objects appear to us as they do - the way they look, smell, taste, sound and feel are functions of their, how shall I put it?, essence. In a sense then an object's qualities, all of them, are fundamental to them and that messes up Hume's (?) [@Srap Tasmaner] primary vs secondary qualities distinction.

Working my way through my confusion. I mean, sure, objects don't need to many properties by necessity. If you are blind and deaf and lack a sense of tactile sensations, there aren't many properties to uncover.

Properties being, properties for us: induced by objects so that we feel that way we do when we encounter them.

But to expect a property-less object is perhaps going too far. — Manuel

A property-less object? How does one distinguish that from nothing? Is this too off-topic?

Hm, the comparison of sight to the other senses is not homologous. You say that what you see resembles what is seen (how could it not?). OK, a little odd, but fine. But then you say that the smell of grass does not resemble grass. But what does that even mean? It seems to mean: the smell of grass does not resemble the sight of grass. But why the privileging of sight? After all, it doesn't seem like the reverse operation is admissable - why not say, 'the sight of grass does not resemble the smell of grass?'.

In other words, what you call 'resemblance' already takes sight as its privileged sense. But why? Why is 'the wall which produces the sensation' understood on the modality of sight - a conflation of a sensory modality with the sheer existence of the wall as such.

The very language of resemblance is odd too: the idea is that you have two terms, X and Y, where one can or cannot resemble the other. But in the case of sight, the issue of resemblance apparently does not apply, insofar as there is simply one term: 'that which is seen'. But for some reason - and the confusion here seems linguistic rather than substantial - two terms are admitted (arbitrarily?) for the other senses, except, having conflated sight with existence, every other sensory modality is judged to fail to 'live up to' the 'resemblance' understood as 'what it looks like'. But what kind of problem is this? Seems to me like asking why a fish can't climb a tree, despite the fact that for some inexplicable reason the fish seems to do very well in water. But the problem here is not with the fish, but the question itself. But perhaps I'm missing something. If so, what?

Yet another consideration: from a phenomenological standpoint, this separation of sensory modalities is artificial from the get-go. The idea that things don't smell like they look, or feel like they sound is simply not true to experience, outside of some very narrow and artificial boundaries. To quote Alphonso Lingis:

"A thing is not a whole assembled by the central nervous system out of separate sensory data, nor is it a conceptual term posited by the mind and used to interpret the data being recorded on the separate senses. The sense organ focused on a pattern is a segment of the whole interconnected mass of the sensory nervous system. What we pick up with the eyes is already sensed by the whole sensitive substance of our body. When we see the yellow, it already looks homogeneous or pulpy, hard or soft, dense or vaporous, it already registers on our taste and smell; anything that looks like brown sugar will not taste like a lemon. To see it better and to see it as a thing is to position oneself before it and converge one's sensory surfaces upon it. It is the postural schema that comprehends things. To recognize a lemon is not to conceive the idea of a lemon on the occasion of certain sensory impressions; it is to know how to approach such a thing, how to handle it, so that its distinctive way of filling and bulging out space, its distinctive way of concentrating color and density and sourness there becomes clear and distinct" (Lingis, Sensation).

Or in yet other words: all sensing is synesthetic from the get-go, and the parcelling out of senses into discrete modalities is an artificial, analytic operation undertaken after the fact, on the basis of a rationalist confusion.

Innate knowledge? The horseness of a neigh - a neigh is part of the (Platonic) form of horses. Someone who hears a neigh a for the first time might immediately recognize it as horse's vocalization. :chin: — TheMadFool

Knowledge can be a problematic word when applied to animals. Innate dispositions might be better. The have a nature such that when an object induces in the animals the relevant sensory organ, they recognize the object as food or predator or mate, etc.

As I tried to point out, the chemical and physical structure of objects determine their properties. Does this answer your question or does it not? if it does then there are reasons why objects appear to us as they do - the way they look, smell, taste, sound and feel are functions of their, how shall I put it?, essence. — TheMadFool

Yeah. So far as we know it's the chemical properties that cause us to smell objects the way we do. At least we have to include chemicals as an important part of the explanation.

I think @Srap Tasmaner was on to an important point, which is the similarity of our reports based on different senses. We often see that sight and touch seem to agree with each other, as when we crumple up a piece of paper and aim for the garbage bin.

But sometimes the reports don't match, a piece of Tupperware may look normal to us and we would expect we could lift up with no problem. Until we touch it and feel an intense burn.

A property-less object? How does one distinguish that from nothing? Is this too off-topic? — TheMadFool

Depends on how you think of objects. Something lacking all sensible properties could be called nothing.

It seems to mean: the smell of grass does not resemble the sight of grass. But why the privileging of sight? After all, it doesn't seem like the reverse operation is admissable - why not say, 'the sight of grass does not resemble the smell of grass?'. — StreetlightX

Yeah, you are right. I'm aware of privileging sight. You could ask the reverse question you are positing. And the answer might be that depending on what you've smelled before, maybe a certain perfume or rolling in mud or whatever, is similar to grass, so when you turn around and see it you are surprised that the smell produced by grass is due to that object, as opposed to mud.

is judged to fail to 'live up to' the 'resemblance' understood as 'what it looks like'. But what kind of problem is this? — StreetlightX

I think the problem is that of arbitrariness. We could imagine we describe to a blind person how a tree looks like: it's taller than me, hard like a table is bright green at the top, etc. I would assume such a person would form some kind of association with "tall", "bright" and so on. So when the time comes that they recover sight, they could say I expected it to be this tall, but not this colour.

Clearly they couldn't compare colour to anything else prior to sight, but they had idea of resemblance of height. So the shock is partial.

Or in yet other words: all sensing is synesthetic from the get-go, and the parcelling out of senses into discrete modalities is an artificial, analytic operation undertaken after the fact, on the basis of a rationalist confusion. — StreetlightX

Sure I agree that objects are synthetic from the get go, in this sense "the given" is already created by us.

But the distinction between primary and secondary qualities was made by Locke and the idea of "bundles" was Hume's, so it was also an empiricist account. Again, I could be asking a confused question, as you point out, it could be that it's like asking why "fish can't climb a tree".

Or it may be a very particular puzzle of mine that may dissolve in a bit of time.

Knowledge can be a problematic word when applied to animals. Innate dispositions might be better. The have a nature such that when an object induces in the animals the relevant sensory organ, they recognize the object as food or predator or mate, etc. — Manuel

Animals know i.e. they possess knowledge (of edible food for example) but probably in ways different from humans. Now that you mention it, the definition of knowledge might need revision to accommodate this fact.

Yeah. So far as we know it's the chemical properties that cause us to smell objects the way we do. At least we have to include chemicals as an important part of the explanation.

I think Srap Tasmaner was on to an important point, which is the similarity of our reports based on different senses. We often see that sight and touch seem to agree with each other, as when we crumple up a piece of paper and aim for the garbage bin.

But sometimes the reports don't match, a piece of Tupperware may look normal to us and we would expect we could lift up with no problem. Until we touch it and feel an intense burn. — Manuel

In what sense do you mean "...reports don't match"? It implies you had an expectation, a preconception if you will of how a certain object/phenomenon should look/smell/taste/sound/feel like. Are you Alice (in wonderland)?

Depends on how you think of objects. Something lacking all sensible properties could be called nothing. — Manuel

Definitional issue, eh?

Now that you mention it, the definition of knowledge might need revision to accommodate this fact. — TheMadFool

I think so in the case of animals. For knowledge to be knowledge proper and not just a very broad word implying ordered information or something, it should be explicit knowledge, as in I know that so and so. Raymond Tallis speaks of this quite well.

It implies you had an expectation, a preconception if you will of how a certain object/phenomenon should look/smell/taste/sound/feel like. — TheMadFool

It's a problem. Again, suppose your senses come back and you see and hear a tree in your garden or park. You might expect that the object is closer that it is, given that much of our information is visual, perhaps more important than tactile sensation.

But when you reach out to try to touch the tree, it doesn't match what you perceive, as sight and sound suggest the object is, say 5 feet away, when it is actually 8 feet.

Something like that.

The thing is, our senses often don't match this way. You can't match music to many things, maybe math. The sensation of warmth isn't really matched by sight.

So it's curious that they sometimes they do happen to match, as when we accustom ourselves to distances coordinating our vision and tactile sensations.

:ok:

In what sense do you mean "...reports don't match"? It implies you had an expectation, a preconception if you will of how a certain object/phenomenon should look/smell/taste/sound/feel like. Are you Alice (in wonderland)? — TheMadFool

No, he’s a perceiving organism. Most of what perceive doesn’t come directly fro the world but from our expectations. See Noe and O’Reagan’s work on visual
perception.

:ok:

Here's my first stab at it --- don't know if it's any good.

What we want, think we want, is for the scent of just cut grass to be to smell what the look of just cut grass is to our vision.

Suppose we maintain a sort of catalog of scents we have smelled. What matters here is not quite the individual and possibly unique quality of each one, but how we can arrange them. You could imagine a sort of graph or map that would keep similar scents near each other shading off around the periphery into other groups that are more similar to each other than to these, and so on. The point here would be that we would have the opportunity to catalog new unfamiliar scents by their relations to ones we already know, and we could describe scents we have smelled to others who haven't relying on systematic similarities and differences.

I'm not concerned with whether the underlying psychology here is accurate; what I want is a sort of model of how we think about familiar and unfamiliar sense impressions, how we talk about them with other people, how we might link such behaviors to our actual sensory experiences. Something like what I've described seems good enough for a start.

And now we can flesh out what it would mean for the scent of just cut grass to be to smell what the look of just cut grass is to vision: the idea is that they would occupy similar positions in our respective sensory catalogs, near the same sorts of things and distant from the same sorts of things, showing the same pattern of similarities and differences, and describable using the same comparisons.

But there are at least two reasons this doesn't work at all.

First, the various sensible qualities of objects just fail to match up for us this way. Things that appear to have similar texture -- baby powder and cocoa powder -- have almost nothing else in common in their other qualities. The scent of cocoa leaves might be close to a combination of the scent of powdered cocoa and other sorts of leaves, but it looks like one and unlike the other. Failure everywhere. The way things group together, the whole pattern of relations, the map, is different for each sense.

The second reason is that the maps don't even have the same population: there are an enormous number of things we have only partial experience of. I can walk through the grocery store and see everywhere foods that I have not tasted but that I now know the look of. The population of the visual catalog explodes here with no additions to the taste catalog at all, not just at the moment anyway. Of course there's no reason to imagine we catalog absolutely everything we see in this way, but the point remains that we have to expect there are objects we took enough interest in to note their look or feel or scent, whatever, but for a large number of these we won't have a complete set of sensory impressions and thus cannot conceivably rely on the same set of similarities and differences to catalog them.

Is this at all close, you think?

I'll try to take another swing at why we might think things should match up better. I'm not sure I really get that yet, and it's the most interesting part.

What we want, think we want, is for the scent of just cut grass to be to smell what the look of just cut grass is to our vision. — Srap Tasmaner

That's a good direction to go in. We'd want objects to be coherent, as we take them to be in manifest reality.

The point here would be that we would have the opportunity to catalog new unfamiliar scents by their relations to ones we already know, and we could describe scents we have smelled to others who haven't relying on systematic similarities and differences. — Srap Tasmaner

Then when we bump into a new-ish smell, we would not be surprised by it, because we have a catalogue of similarly smelling things. We might except to predict such smell from sight or touch.

I'm not concerned with whether the underlying psychology here is accurate; what I want is a sort of model of how we think about familiar and unfamiliar sense impressions, how we talk about them with other people, how we might link such behaviors to our actual sensory experiences. Something like what I've described seems good enough for a start. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes. This is a thought experiment which can provide a heuristic of sorts to get people into sharpening the ideas they may have of particular sensations. If this can inform a science in any way, good. If not, well we've attempted to highlight sense impressions more clearly.

And now we can flesh out what it would mean for the scent of just cut grass to be to smell what the look of just cut grass is to vision: the idea is that they would occupy similar positions in our respective sensory catalogs, near the same sorts of things and distant from the same sorts of things, showing the same pattern of similarities and differences, and describable using the same comparisons — Srap Tasmaner

Correct. That would be our "folk psychological" picture.

Is this at all close, you think? — Srap Tasmaner

I like your intuition and the way you caught on to the gist of my problem.

What you point out is true, it would be impossible to catalogue every sensation. Yet these very different senses appear to give us a coherent whole. It's very strange, but taken as a given.

And there's the whole problem of your "red" being my "green", but with smells and sounds. I don't know if when you smell cut grass or when you hear a drum you get the same sensations I do.

I suspect that we do share similar sensory qualities, but each person accentuates one property over another one.

It's also interesting to see what senses are relevant for our scientific theories. I think Russell was correct when he points out that vision is our most acute sensation. Then we go to tactile sensations. Then probably sounds. Our sense of smell is quite poor compared to many other mammals.

Yet while sight gives us good evidence for scientific phenomenon, we paradoxically don't have a science for qualitative colours. Which is strange considering how acquainted we are with colours in our day to day life.

This is meant to be open ended, and your approach looks useful to me. So quite good in my eyes.

Still thinking about this...

We can talk about the scent that a flower "gives off" as a sort of separate thing; we do, of course, say that we smell flowers, but we can think of the scent as something the flower, as it were, causes, as something it sort of does, but we don't think this way about how the flower looks. When we see the flower, we see it, not something it causes (its "appearance") or something it does.

Same for the sound of a horse's hoof striking cobblestones. When you hear that, you hear something the horse, or the horse's hooves, cause. But when you see the horse, you don't think of that as something the horse is just the cause of, but as just the horse itself.

Thinking about how we might catch onto any of sight or smell or sound first, and then have to match up other aspects to that, I was thinking that whatever privileging of sight was in your very first post here was accidental, in a sense. But now I think there's something to it. We do seem to think of seeing things as more directly grasping them as what they are than hearing them or smelling them, which feel like they're one step away from the actual thing.

But the same could maybe be said for touch and taste -- that those are more the actual thing. That would be very odd for taste since it's so closely bound up with smell. And it could be that the feel of a surface or the resistance we feel when hefting an object, maybe these are a bit too narrow an experience of the object and so, in a way, generic, realizable in many different objects.

I just don't have clear ideas about all of the senses, and might want to take back a lot of this, but I think it does turn out that we don't naturally distinguish how a thing looks from the thing, as we are inclined to do with at least some of the other senses.

Which brings us right back to your original version of the puzzle, that there's a potential for being surprised by perhaps any sensible aspect of an object except its appearance.

If true, that's very curious indeed.

causes, as something it sort of does, but we don't think this way about how the flower looks. When we see the flower, we see it, not something it causes (its "appearance") or something it does. — Srap Tasmaner

That's exactly what I caught my attention. What other possible way could a flower look like except the way it looks like? There are different flowers of course, which look differently from each other, but I don't question that this flower could look other than how it does. But I can perfectly image a flower smelling completely different, like ocean water or wood.

But now I think there's something to it. We do seem to think of seeing things as more directly grasping them as what they are than hearing them or smelling them, which feel like they're one step away from the actual thing. — Srap Tasmaner

That's what Reid seems to point out. He was saying all these curious things about all other senses, but when it came to colour he was saying something like the colour just is what it looks like in the object. Which is strange, but true, at least in ordinary experience, putting science aside.

And it could be that the feel of a surface or the resistance we feel when hefting an object, maybe these are a bit too narrow an experience of the object and so, in a way, generic, realizable in many different objects. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes. This are a bit more problematic than smelling or hearing. I suppose I can say that if I look at an apple, I could not know before hand that it could taste as it does. For all I know it could taste like meat. I think touch is probably the hardest one, outside of sight. Perhaps wooden tables might not be so surprising. But then I think of water as in the beach or a river. Could it be thicker than what it looks like, as in swimming in glue? I'm not sure.

Which brings us right back to your original version of the puzzle, that there's a potential for being surprised by perhaps any sensible aspect of an object except its appearance.

If true, that's very curious indeed. — Srap Tasmaner

I'm glad one other person caught my surprise. Permit me to link you to what Reid book I was looking at, you might find it further fuels your imagination:

https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/reid1764.pdf

I stopped at page 66, when he gets to math, as I prefer to look into more modern views on this subject, like Russell. But the rest is quite good, look at the table of contents and you'll be directed to whatever sense you want to look at in more detail.

Just by searching the word "resemble", there's plenty of good stuff you might like.

Reid points out that if you are walking down a street and hear the sound of a horse pulling a wagon and then you turn around and look at it, the sound produced does not resemble the objects producing it.

Likewise, the pain in my finger looks not at all like the tip of a sword which caused it. — Manuel

Methinks Reid's observation delves into what things really are. Reid seems to have made an assumption - sight reveals the true nature of things, reality. Thus his question about some perceptions, sound in this case, not matching the visual input and not any other thing.

Is this justified?

Why can't sound be the standard of measure here? We could then ask why what a horse straining on a heavily-loaded wagon looks like fails to resemble the sound they make? A bat (which can think), whose primary sensory system is hearing, might ask just such a question.

So, which sensory modality is primary - vision, auditory, gustatory, tactile, olfactory? There must be a reason why we have all these senses together for none alone gives you a complete picture of (earthly) reality. This then makes Reid's question meaningless: it's like asking why the tail of a horse doesn't resemble a horse? The tail, which may differ from the head, neck, hooves, etc. of a horse is part of what a horse is.

I guess what I'm getting at is there doesn't seem to be any good reason why the sound of a horse wagon should resemble a horse wagon.

I'll have to read him again, since it's been a while since I read what I linked. He believes that many of these aspects sounds, tastes and the like, are something the mind produces which are inexplicable.

Locke said that colours are secondary qualities, not essential to the object itself but instead an effect we feel when confronted with the object. Reid seems to saying that Locke is wrong in this respect, that colours are in the objects. As are other sensations too, but that we have no idea how objects cause these effects in us.

Well, think of it this way. We've advanced so much in physics because of the way light works. It's been vision - sight - that's allowed us to progress in physics. If we were blind creatures, we would not have modern physics. Math, yes. So sight does give us a unique avenue into the nature of the world, somehow. The other senses much less so.

there doesn't seem to be any good reason why the sound of a horse wagon should resemble a horse wagon. — TheMadFool

I agree with this. But again, I may be either misleading myself or misreading Reid's point.

But what it got me into thinking (for some reason) is that sight is rather special for insight. Which is strange.

What is it about light that gives it an edge over other media (for information)? Didn't the written word follow, temporally, the spoken word? Mayhaps time is flowing backwards. :grin:

Space in and of itself is very important to agents... agents need to manipulate their environment, and space is essentially where the environment is. Many (all?) of our senses are "affixed" into our sense of space somehow; those that don't "locate" still "feel" local (e.g., smell)... we have a sense of our position in space, and it is "on" this position where our sense of touch/texture normally resides (though we can extend this... with ye ol using an pencil to feel something beyond our fingers trick, we can project tactile sensations off of our skin... fun experiment).

It would seem to me that the resemblance feature of sight being discussed here is a unique feature about how sight allocates things into space. Sight feels almost magical in this sense... with sight, our sensory experiences extend far beyond our bodies. Sight is not quite unique in this regard... we can hear things and allocate that into space, so hearing "reaches out" far beyond our bodies just as sight does. But for humans in particular, sight is unique in its precision of allocation of sensed objects into space... we can ascertain an object's shapes, motions and behaviors real time as we sense them. I gather this is the particular sense in which a particular flower should "look like" what it is... we can feel the flower's shape, using our proprioception and tactile senses to allocate the flower into space, and when we look at the flower its shape should be allocated into space the same way we pieced together that it should be using these other senses.

So is it just sight's ability to affix objects remotely and precisely in space that is what's being discussed here? Analogous to how a flower should look like what it is, shouldn't it also "echo-locate" like what it is to entities that use high precision echo-location?

Yep.

As to your question, no idea. Somehow we are creatures for which sight not only saved us from predators, it also allowed us to see certain aspects of physics.

As to your question, no idea. Somehow we are creatures for which sight not only saved us from predators, it also allowed us to see certain aspects of physics. — Manuel

:ok:

Very good post. :up:

Yeah, there's something about sight in combination with our sense of direction and other factors, that permits us to create a model, some of which may map to the external world.

So is it just sight's ability to affix objects remotely and precisely in space that is what's being discussed here? Analogous to how a flower should look like what it is, shouldn't it also "echo-locate" like what it is to entities that use high precision echo-location? — InPitzotl

That's one very important aspect. If we had different sensory modalities, such as echo-location, sophisticated enough to a certain point, it may well be the sense that gives us most depth of understanding.

It seems that the concept of "resemblance" follows sight most closely. Which is why the other senses can be more puzzling, whereas, at least in my case, I don't ask why does the flower look the way it does.

Do you have Swiss consciousness? Somehow your name sounds Swiss. Like meusli. — Thunderballs

There's this curious phenomenon which is brought up by several philosophers, though I like Thomas Reid's formulation of the problem. What's the problem? — Manuel

Do you happen to know where Reid offers his formulation?

The issue is that of resemblances. Reid points out that if you are walking down a street and hear the sound of a horse pulling a wagon and then you turn around and look at it, the sound produced does not resemble the objects producing it. — Manuel

I'm inclined to take issue with Reid's assessment as you relate it here, in part because the account of perception seems biased by disproportionate respect for visual perception.

The "look" of an object is not identical to that object. Why should we speak as if the look of an object resembles the object any more than the sound of an object resembles the object?

We must be careful in identifying the "perceptual object" in each case. Surely the thing I hear is not best characterized primarily in terms of color and extension. It's not a static visual picture of a horse and wagon; nor is it merely a horse and wagon. It's a whole physical system with many moving parts that we may characterize only roughly and generically as, say: a shod horse pulling at a given velocity through a given period of time a wooden wagon of given dimensions and weight carrying a given load on granite cobblestones surrounded by air….

The visual system is not capable of perceiving all the gross and subtle motions of that object which transmit vibration through the surrounding air, nor capable of perceiving those transmitted vibrations as they move through air. In this regard the auditory system is much finer, and grasps the object in its own way when the ear receives the vibrations produced by the motion of that whole state of affairs.

It may seem clear enough what it means to call one sound similar or dissimilar to another sound; and to call one look similar or dissimilar to another look. It seems prima facie less clear what it might mean to call a sound and a look similar or dissimilar to each other; or to call a sound (or a look) similar or dissimilar to the object that sounds (or looks) thus. In each case we must specify a principle of comparison: similar or dissimilar in what respect?

It seems fair enough to say that a sound and a look may resemble each other in virtue of their correspondence to the same perceptual object and in virtue of their correspondence to the same sort of perceptual object.

Ordinarily, a horse looks and sounds horse-like. In this regard, the look and the sound of the horse are alike. Moreover, the look and the sound of a horse may be called "horse-like" in that they appear to us when we happen to be in the appropriate physical and perceptual relation to horses: This sound is like other sounds I have heard in a similar connection to horses. This look is like other looks I have seen in a similar connection to horses.

It's easy enough to specify respects in which the sound of an auditory object resembles the object itself. For instance, the force and temporal intervals at which hooves strike cobblestones are reflected in the auditory presentation, though the same features of the object may seem a blur to vision. I presume the science of acoustics can specify in fine grain many more features according to which the objective character of the sound resembles the various parts-in-motion of the physical system that produces the sound.

This is perhaps even clearer in cases of olfaction and tactition.

We can further imagine many other instances: the smell of wet grass does not resemble grass. — Manuel

What could be more "grass-like" than the gas we call the grass's odor -- which presumably contains molecules just like some of the molecules of which the grass itself consists, only lately transmitted from that grass to the air around it?

the sensation of a surface of a wall does not resemble the wall which produces the sensation — Manuel

The wall feels smooth and hard and yay high; the wall is smooth and hard and yay high. Here too, empirical science may unpack the correlations of such objective features of tactile perception with physical characteristics of the object perceived, with a finer grain than is available to us in our ordinary perceptual reports.

To say a resemblance is not immediately apparent is not to suggest that there is no such resemblance. To say a resemblance is roughly grasped is not to suggest it is not grasped.

We can do this for almost all of our senses, with the apparent exception of sight. It makes no sense to say (for example) that the red sensation I get from this apple does not resemble red. — Manuel

I'm not sure what exception you have in mind. To pursue the analogy you've set up, the relevant perceptual object here is not the color red, but the apple itself. To rehearse the formula I introduced above, I see no reason to suppose the redness of the apple we see is any more "like" the apple itself, than the sweetness of the apple we taste is "like" the apple itself.

Likewise, the pain in my finger looks not at all like the tip of a sword which caused it. — Manuel

Surely the "look" of the finger and the "look" of the sword are not the most relevant principles of comparison here.

That aside, I suggest that feelings of pain are more like feelings of hunger than they are like exteroceptive modes of perception, and arguably deserve distinct treatment in the present inquiry. I might briefly expand on this point if you like.

I think such thought experiments show what the rationalists have argued for, namely, that objects induce in us the capacity to be affected in a certain manner. If we are deaf, no problem of resemblance can arise for hearing: such persons just lack the innate capacity to hear. — Manuel

What rationalist argument do you have in mind?

It seems to me the capacities you point to here are not induced in us by the things we perceive, but are natural to animals like us.

Do you happen to know where Reid offers his formulation? — Cabbage Farmer

Here's the link for the entire book, for free:

https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/reid1764.pdf

One passage:

"Anatomy tells us that the wisdom of nature has assigned the mucus membrane, and the olfactory nerves that are run to the hairy parts of this membrane, to the sense of smell; so that a body can’t be smelled when it doesn’t emit any effluvia, or it does but they don’t enter the nose, or they do enter but the mucus membrane or olfactory nerves have become unfit to do their work. Despite all this ·knowledge that we have·, it is obvious that neither the organ of smell, nor the medium, nor any motions we can conceive to be caused in the mucus membrane or in the nerve or animal spirits, have the faintest resemblance to the sensation of smelling."

"

I'm inclined to take issue with Reid's assessment as you relate it here, in part because the account of perception seems biased by disproportionate respect for visual perception. — Cabbage Farmer

Reid on Colour:

"So we have all the reason that the nature of the thing admits, to think that the vulgar apply the name ‘colour’ to the quality of bodies that causes in us what the philosophers call the ‘idea of colour’. That there is such a quality in bodies is agreed to by all philosophers who think there is any such thing as body. Philosophers have thought fit to leave nameless the quality of bodies that the vulgar call ‘colour’, and to •give the name ‘colour’ to an idea or appearance that the vulgar leave nameless because they never think about it or reflect on it. So it seems that when philosophers say that colour is not in bodies, but in the mind, and the vulgar say that colour is not in the mind, but is a quality of bodies, there is no difference between them about things but only about the meaning of a word."

What could be more "grass-like" than the gas we call the grass's odor -- which presumably contains molecules just like some of the molecules of which the grass itself consists, only lately transmitted from that grass to the air around it? — Cabbage Farmer

Perhaps a spray of some kind, which smells like grass, but lacks other smells that may interfere with it in real life, air pollution, dog manure, surrounding plants, etc.

Ordinarily, a horse looks and sounds horse-like. In this regard, the look and the sound of the horse are alike. Moreover, the look and the sound of a horse may be called "horse-like" in that they appear to us when we happen to be in the appropriate physical and perceptual relation to horses: This sound is like other sounds I have heard in a similar connection to horses. — Cabbage Farmer

When you look at a horse, I don't ask myself, how else could this creature look like? When the horse starts racing, it would not be evident to me that his hooves would sound the way they do. In this respect, you can recreate the sound of hooves with your tongue.

But, point taken in so far as I'm privileging vision. It seems to bother me somehow.

To say a resemblance is not immediately apparent is not to suggest that there is no such resemblance. To say a resemblance is roughly grasped is not to suggest it is not grasped. — Cabbage Farmer

You are correct. We construct the resemblance and then we say that sounded like a horse or that looks solid like a wall.

That aside, I suggest that feelings of pain are more like feelings of hunger than they are like exteroceptive modes of perception, and arguably deserve distinct treatment in the present inquiry. I might briefly expand on this point if you like. — Cabbage Farmer

Go ahead, sounds interesting.

What rationalist argument do you have in mind? — Cabbage Farmer

Let me quote Leibniz:

"What is innate is what might be called the implicit knowledge of them, as the veins of the marble outline a shape which is in the marble before they are uncovered by the sculptor"

And a few from Cudworth:

" The essence of nothing is reached unto by the senses looking outward, but by the mind's looking inward upon itself. That which wholly looks abroad outward upon its object is not one with that which it percieves, but it is at a distance from it, and therefore cannot know or comprehend it. But knowledge and intellection doth not merely look out upon a thing at a distance, but make an inward reflection upon the thing it knows... the intellect doth read inward characters written within itself."

"For knowledge is not a knock or thrust from without, but it consisteth in the awakening and exiting of the inward active powers of the mind."

It seems to me the capacities you point to here are not induced in us by the things we perceive, but are natural to animals like us. — Cabbage Farmer

You are right. I should have made it much more clear. It's not so much that Reid argued what I am saying, it's that I took what he was saying in this direction. His ideas caused me to take his arguments in this direction.

The objects incite in us an innate capacity to react to them the way do, because we are the creatures we are. We never see triangles in the world, we construct them out of imperfect figures. We don't see entire environments, but parts of it, we fill out the rest. We listen to sounds in a pattern which we call music, but which nonetheless are "just" sounds. And so on.

Apologies for the length of the reply, but I felt I had to respond in kind.

Great post by the way.

@InPitzotl pointed out the intimate connection between space and vision. Something else worth considering is the relation between other sensible qualities and time. No sound without time, without movement. Gazing at an object we can imagine we are seeing the object as it simply is, not in its doing something. Persisting doesn't seem like something an object *does*.

I thought I replied, but will look again.

What you say about say about time is true. Which is why it's often helpful to think of things as "events" as Whitehead and Russell do. That way we get around the persistence problem.

But nothing is coming to mind at the moment to add to what you are pointing out, other than agreeing.



This is true. We discovered the most surprising aspects of the physical world through sight, there is something about matter of which we can perceive best through sight.

As for space being responsible for this surprise, yes it could be. Space and time (as Kant and Schopenhauer pointed out) are quite special for everything really, we bring it to the world and think with them. But we can't as it were, go behind space and time to analyze them, we see only appearances.

But it's hard to articulate how space ties to vision the way it does. For me anyway.

it may well be the sense that gives us most depth of understanding — Manuel

Spacial extension is built into the concept of a physical thing. No other sense can detect that from a distance.

Sight is the favored sense of materialism?

I'd modify that to matter, not materialism per se.

There is something about the nature of matter to which sight informs us best in relation to its effects, instead of some other sensory modality.

Apologies for the length of the reply, but I felt I had to respond in kind.

Great post by the way. — Manuel

Thanks, that's kind of you to say. And thanks for this delightful exchange.

No reason to apologize. I thought your reply was admirably concise, especially given the length of my first reply to your provocative prompt.

In a hopeless effort to emulate your admirable concision, I'll reserve discussion of nociception and of Reid's remarks on color for another occasion. Even so, I thought it might aid digestion to break today's reply into three posts.

In this section, I address some preliminary matters. In the second, your citation of Reid's passage on olfaction. In the third, your remarks and citations about "innate" ideas or "innate" knowledge.

If that's too much prose for one turn, I'll find some way to narrow focus going forward, should we have the good fortune to continue.

https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/reid1764.pdf — Manuel

Thanks for the reference. At a glance it strikes me as an exemplary work of modern philosophy. I look forward to reading more of it.

So far Reid's discourse doesn't seem to entail the sort of visual bias we've discussed above.

When you look at a horse, I don't ask myself, how else could this creature look like? When the horse starts racing, it would not be evident to me that his hooves would sound the way they do. In this respect, you can recreate the sound of hooves with your tongue.

But, point taken in so far as I'm privileging vision. It seems to bother me somehow. — Manuel

What is it that bothers you along these lines?

To me it seems clear that each perceptual modality puts us in touch with objective states of affairs in its own way, without thereby providing us with complete information or a basis for infallible judgment about those states of affairs. In each case, it's up to us to learn from the experience, and to extend and coordinate our investigations, while aiming to avoid and to correct conceptual confusions that may contaminate the judgments we make on the basis of perception.

It may go a long way in adjusting for the visual bias to develop the habit of trying analogous conceptual treatment across perceptual modalities: The sound of a horse running or whinnying does not suggest the look of a horse any more or less than the look of a horse suggests those sounds -- until we learn what to expect from such looks and from such sounds.

Likewise, the look of a horse's hoof does not suggest the look of a horse's head until we learn what to expect. Perhaps, in some cases, the sound of a horse's gallop does not suggest the velocity of a horse's gallop until we learn what to expect.

Such expectations are informed on the basis of experience.