Controles criptográficos

Judging by its reception, an article by Grice can be taken as the starting point for the current debate.16 As a prelude to discussing criteria for counting senses, Grice asks us to

consider the assaults made by physiologists and psychologists on the so-called ‘sense of touch’. They wish, I think on neurological grounds, to distinguish three senses: a pressure-sense, a warm-and- cold sense, and a pain-sense. Would we be happy to accept their pain-sense as a sense in the way in which sight or smell is a sense? I think not.17

What ‘we’ should do is then briefly justified by word usage, pointing out the difference between the possibility of a smell being in the kitchen but the awk- wardness of saying that there is a pain in the kitchen. Grice neglects to mention that we are happy to say that the kitchen is warm, so on that criterion there is no reason to reject a sense of warmth even if pains cause some problems, and that once we leave kitchens and start visiting less pleasant places we are inclined to call these places painful too.18 _{Of course, not much can be decided}

about all this without a proper semantic analysis, but one must presume that it is not impossible or meaningless for us to say that there is pain in the torture chamber or warmth in the parlour, so the argument dissolves into conservative fussing about word use.

Grice’s swift retreat from actually consideringthe range of senses, or what might count as such, into considerations of idiomatic word use and purely logical possibilities is then carried through by two strategies. The first of these is to bring in four-eyed Martians, and the second is to talk mainly about human vision. This is done in the interest of examining criteria for counting but before those are looked at, some even less promising arguments from what we say should be mentioned.

In his book on bodily sensations, David Armstrong explains that:

16_{Grice (1962). This is reprinted in Butler (1962) and now in Macpherson (2010b) as} the first of the classic papers. Keeley calls it “perhaps the twentieth century’s most cited discussion of Aristotle’s problem”, Keeley (2002, p. 20), although, as we have seen, this is a dubitable gifting of the counting problem to Aristotle and, as we shall see, Grice’s main argument has nothing at all to do with Aristotle.

17_{Grice (1962, p. 134).}

18_{The fact that thumbscrews are painful is, however, mentioned as a kind of exception to} the linguistic rule; Grice (1962, p. 134).

For all other forms of sense-perception besides seeing, hearing, tast- ing and smelling we employ the word ‘feeling’. No doubt this is the reason [. . . ] why there is the doctrine of the five senses. We speak of only one further sense, because we have only one further word.19

Since this is introductory to making a distinction between touch and bodily affections, it should perhaps be charitably ignored, but it is still amazing to be told that we had to stop counting senses because we ran out of words.

In general what we now say is irrelevant to the counting problem. To see this we only need to imagine that someone comes to convince us that we should count nine senses. It is clearly no answer to say: ‘oh no, we count five’. What we say, or have said, is no reason at all unless inertia is a good reason; justification only begins once we start explaining not what we say but why we say it. Further, whatever our actual reasons are, they still have to be proved against the reasons that our innovator brings to the table.

An exploration of why we count five senses is one of the contributions from Matthew Nudds to the debate on the counting problem. He suggests that “a sense modality is what might be called a social kind rather than a natural

kind”20 _{and “what senses we distinguish is conventional”.}21 _{These comments}

echo Gibson’s talk of “five familiar modes of external attention”, and there is undoubtedly a component of social cultivation in our discrimination and naming of sensations, or even objects.22

It was pointed out above that we do not count five senses because Aris- totle did, and it was even said that five is merely a naive first count. Should convention be substituted for naivety? It is easy to see that convention is the wrong place to look in explaining the number five. Wherever convention plays an appreciable role in human affairs, a rapid divergence between isolated communities is noticed since humans cannot seem to leave well enough alone and so re-interpret and modify traditions as they see fit. This is typified in the variety of languages, but is also evident in ritual, technology and other manners and habits. Yet Nudds claims that “the distinction we make between

19_{Armstrong (1962, p. 9).}

20_{Nudds (2010a), emphasis original.} 21_{Nudds (2004, p. 50).}

22_{It is superfluous to go into great detail on this, since it is evident in the cultivation of} taste in food and drink, the visual and other arts, and other pursuits where we express, develop and share our sensibility. Our ability to notice and attend is often also highly culture specific—good examples of this specificity can be found in Everett (2008) and in the psychological literature on perception in unfamiliar environments.

five different senses is a universal one”.23 _{Something is amiss. It is true that}

there is considerable value in social conventions. As Nudds explains: We can answer the counting question, however, without appealing to any natural distinction. It is a familiar point about the nature of conventions that if doing something the same way as others has utility for each member of a group of people then we can explain why all members of that group do something the same way as being a matter of convention.24

But this only works for the proximal social group. If it was generally true then we would all be speaking English or whatever universal language eventually developed from the earliest signifying vocal gestures. Convention may have much to do with why we count seven or nine wits; it evidently has little to do with why we count four or five senses. To understand the lower counts at least some attention to ‘natural’ distinctions is needed, just as when faced with universal syntactical distinctions such as that between a verb and a noun, we need to appeal to general facts about how the human organism acts and thinks rather than the value of conventions.25

With an emphasis on convention we are still basically confined to semantic considerations. The limited value of arguments about what we say is that the mostly trivial examples of common expressions amenable to detailed analysis do not clarify the problem at hand, and we have already seen that common usage is sufficiently tolerant of variable uses of the word ‘sense’ to unsettle any claim that the number five is final.26 _{Unless, that is, one follows Grice and}

takes a censorious attitude to language. There are, however, other ways of exploring why we count as we mostly do count.

23_{Or almost universal. See Nudds (2010a). We have already seen that this universality} does not extend to scholarly traditions, but the existence of traditions not counting five does not affect the present argument since counting eyes, ears, etc.iswell-nigh universal, as Nudds claims, and the additional senses discussed in the previous chapter are sophisticated developments of naive views, not just alternatives.

24_{Nudds (2004, p. 48).}

25_{The enormous divergence in languages and other social conventions can be appreciated} from the material in Everett (2008), whence it follows that to argue that some conventions are so valuable that they will become practically universal—counting by numbers might serve as an example—is wrong. It should also be uncontroversial that eyes and ears are not conventional, they are biological, i.e. natural organs, and to neglect this is a failure to notice the very distinction on which the argument rests.

26_{That it is final seems to be the opinion of Nudds, and this is contested by Macpherson} who notices a more tolerant attitude in the use of ‘sense’. See Macpherson (2010a).