Utilización de los medios de información

If someone looks in the right direction and then reaches out to grasp a teapot, it is natural to conclude that they saw where it was; if they miss, there is reason to think that something has gone wrong in perceiving its position or perhaps in executing the appropriate movement or even—against protests that they tried to pour some more tea—to question the intention informing the act. This complexity in the possible reasons for failure illustrates the fact that the inference from behaviour to what is perceived is underdetermined, and hence must rely on analogy with instances where both the perceptual experi- ence and the relevant behaviour are known more or less independently. Despite this, there have been attempts to bypass any consideration of subjective expe- rience (the enjoyment of sensations and discrimination among them) in favour of relating stimulus directly to behaviour. These attempts do not have to be as doctrinaire as the classical behaviourism of Skinner and Watson, which oc- casionally denies the very existence of subjective experience, and paying close attention to behaviour can also lead to valuable insight into the process of perception. For now the key question is whether considering behaviour can help in counting the senses.

The results depend on how behaviour is construed and to what extent it is privileged in classifying types of stimulus or provocation. Reductive strategies

63_{Simon Blackburn comes perilously close to saying this, not indeed in the context of} counting senses but in glossing how they work together, when in comments on behalf of a correspondence theory of truth he asserts that “we are good at cats because our senses make uscausally receptive to their presence or absence”; Blackburn (1984, p. 244). Presumably if we don’t notice some exotic animal then that’s because our senses are not receptive, as perhaps our eyes are not receptive in the ultraviolet part of the spectrum.

may tend to style all behaviour as movement and all stimuli, in common with some reductive descriptions of physical objects, as structured flows of energy or information. Strategies based on evolutionary accounts may strive to ex- plain all behaviour as more or less directly motivated and explicable by the demands of survival and reproduction. In either case, counting the senses is only peripherally relevant to what is at stake and the role of perception need not be made explicit. As a contrast to this it is instructive to also consider briefly an alternative proposed by J. J. Gibson.64

To begin with it should be acknowledged that examining behaviour is a promising strategy. We need to explain how we know where our hand is and which direction it should be moved in to grasp the teapot or to touch our nose. We need to know how it is possible to stand upright and walk. It is clear that extra senses informing the agent of the movement and position of the limbs are required. Not only are the senses required, the receptors and relevant nerve pathways have been identified and studied, so the whole picture looks quite consistent. This general approach can be extended by diagnostic studies of electrochemical brain activity and by interventions such as severing specific nerves or removing or disabling parts of the brain or sensory organs. What has in effect been done is to shift attention away from a specific physical stimulus (e.g. a blue flash of light) and direct it to the behaviour—in an inclusive sense— of the subject when engaged in some activity requiring perceptual skill (e.g. eating a meal).

Now what is not here being asked directly is what the world is like ‘qualita- tively’. Nor is it really necessary—to begin with—to consider the stories of how we got an ability (i.e. evolutionary or ecological accounts of skills development as well as theories of learning), or even to consider mechanisms underlying an activity (such as causal theories of perception). What is of concern is only how good this is for classifying the senses.

No approach based predominantly on behaviour seems suitable for helping to classify the senses. The trouble is partly that the specific behaviours of a complex organism, such as we are, are not easily reduced to the pursuit of the biological imperatives associated with food, sex and shelter. A great deal of behaviour is thus mysterious, unless we have already identified its specific purpose, or adopt a reductionist agenda. It is also a non-trivial task to infer

64_{Gibson’s views are presented mainly in two classic works; Gibson (1950) and Gibson} (1968). His ideas went through considerable development during his highly productive ca- reer.

any kind of knowledge (whether conscious or not) from behaviour, and further complications arise from the fact that the senses may be used together or separately in the performance of any task. In cases of sensory disruption or deficit, one sense can even compensate for another when a specific goal is desired. In the face of such difficulties there is a tendency to talk of perception rather than sensing. This is one way to take up Reid’s distinction and to imagine that in talking of perception of what is ‘really’ in the environment all the problems associated with sensations vanish.

This too fails to be of much use if a coherent and logical system of sense perception is what is desired. Instead of a plethora of receptors and organs, or of sensations and vague feelings, the goal is now to organise our perceptions. Durie goes as far as saying that:

The bottom line is that we make a mistake in concentrating on senses, and even in arguing about how many there are. Perception is what matters, and sensation is what accompanies it.65

It is not difficult to see the problems with this. To begin with, there is no evidently sensible way to classify perceptions. No doubt we perceive hot and cold, hard and soft, smooth and rough. Traditionally these were all objects of the sense of touch and qualities of bodies. Should we now admit that we have a separate sense of smoothness? We perceive form—distinctly according to both Reid and Berkeley66_{—by touching and looking. This might suggest that}

we have one or two senses for shape, one or two for size, perhaps one or two for sharpness. Now there is little doubt that our behaviour is informed by all sorts of perceptions. A sense of foreboding may be ascribed to an animal that is apprehensive, a sense of joy to someone who skips along merrily, a sense of humour to one who is laughing. It is no objection to say that the relevant ‘perceptions’ are not accompanied by sensations; they most certainly are. The number of senses is no longer limited by the anatomist’s skill but only by the poet’s imagination, and a distinct sense is created as soon as we distinguish something new in our experience, at least if it is something which can affect our emotions and influence our actions.

Such apparently foolish extravagance in multiplying the senses according to the objects of perception (which is, by the way, tolerated in the ordinary use of the word ‘sense’) can be made more sober if it is insisted that only

65_{Durie (2005).}

the perception of objectively real things is relevant. Such an objection leads almost inexorably back to reductive descriptions of physical stimulus unless an attempt is made to supply descriptions and explanations ofspecificactions and situations as is done, for example, in Gibson’s ecological approach to perceiving. This begins with the fact that the environment is structured and the objects in it furnish various ‘affordances’ to the perceiving organism. Thus one such object may be perceived as food, another identified as a suitable sexual partner; one surface can be walked on while another is seen to be a pond which we can bathe in. In this kind of world a rabbit that sees a flying hawk or an approaching wolf will sense fear, a fear which attends objective perceived danger and results in an effort to flee or hide.

The variety of affordances is limited only by the complexity of the organism and the range of interactions with its environment. For humans they would not only seem countless, but they can be created as we please through inventive modifications of our environment. Unless one embarks on classifying affor- dances and proposing mechanisms whereby compound interactions are built from elemental ones—which simply shifts the taxonomic problem away from the senses back to the properties of objects or the characteristics of our inter- actions with objects and situations—the growth in possibilities appears to be unstoppable.

Even if it is unclear whether classifying behaviours truly helps with the counting problem, some important insights emerge from considering this. These have to do with what constitutes ‘behaviour’ in the context of perception and here two distinctions need to be considered.

The first is between behaviour and action. Although it may be apparent that mere behaviour need not be purposive and intentional, movements in- formed by perception are goal directed, and in this sense meaningful. This is not to say that the motivation for a certain act has to be attributed to an indi- vidual organism or human agent—and indeed it is not in an ecological scheme such as Gibson’s—only that the act is to be explained as the fulfilment of a goal and that it can fail to serve its purpose. Such explanations are superflu- ous, even animistic, in cases where the perceiving agent or agency as such is absent.

The second distinction is between what the perceiving agent is aware of in acting, as against what they may be or can become aware of. Needless to say, our knowledge of our actions is incomplete, not just in that we do not become aware of everything that happens when we move an arm or say a word, but

also in that we do not comprehend all the effects of our actions, or the details of our reasons for carrying them out.

In formulating the distinction in this way, it should be clear that any dif- ference between an act and what the agent perceives themselves to be doing depends on how well the agent has learned any skills which the act entails and how they pay attention to what they are doing and perceive the context of their action. So in attempting to classify perceptions according to behaviours, we find that even separating behaviour from perception is no simple matter. Do- ing this according to categorising criteria of behaviour as voluntary and active as against perception as passive, as the involuntary reception of ‘impressions’ or ‘ideas’, is unlikely to do justice to the dynamic play between a perceiving agent and the world. Berkeley’s assertion that when “I open my eyes, it is not in my power to choose whether I shall see or no, or to determine what partic- ular objects shall present themselves to my view”67 is thus too crude. Since our knowledge of such objects is incomplete and amenable to revision, saying that what now feels to be something not subject to my will, or whim, must remain so, or even is so, requires positive proof. Berkeley is merely confessing a subjectivism in his doctrine.

From the foregoing it should be clear that behaviour is not an independent criterion which can overcome a lack of knowledge regarding the stimulus or in- deed what is perceived, and of how perception occurs. Introducing behaviour can at best serve a comparative purpose so that the incompleteness of a sub- ject’s awareness (or a temporary or pathological lacuna in it, as in cases of blindsight) may be discussed and understood in the terms normally reserved for deliberately acting agents—so that one speaks of what would be or might be perceived.

Furthermore, the sort of overt behaviour constituting gross movements or speech is also reciprocally undetermined with respect to the perceived object or situation. The incidental presence of particular movements or even vocal ex- pressions does not imply that a perceiving agent is acting or even perceiving. Conversely, the lack of overt activity does not imply absence of perception. The most that can therefore be asked for is that behaviour is generally consis- tent with the perceptual abilities of the individual agent. Any inconsistencies require specific explanations, but what ‘consistent’ means is inevitably based on typical perceivers.