Abstract
In this paper I address the question of whether bodily awareness is a form of perceptual awareness or not. I discuss José Luis Bermúdez’s and Shaun Gallagher’s proposals about this issue and find them unsatisfactory. Then I suggest an alternative view and offer some reasons for it.
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Notes
I follow here Armstrong’s (1962) classic classification of bodily experiences in bodily feelings, what he calls intransitive bodily sensations (pains and the rest), and what he calls transitive bodily sensations. Roughly speaking, my concern here is just with the latter.
Shoemaker does not initially include perspectival character in his object perception model, but he adds it later on in a footnote (Shoemaker 1996a, footnote 3). In any case, perspectival character is very often included in discussions about bodily awareness and –as we will see– it plays an important role in this paper. Perhaps I should also add that Shoemaker’s object perception model includes more aspects than the ones I have pointed out. I left those additional aspects aside because they are not relevant for our topic.
‘In contrast with vision, audition, and the other canonically extereoceptive modalities, there are certain spatial notions that do not seem to be applicable to somatic proprioception’ (Bermúdez 1998, 153). On that page it is clear that Bermúdez has in mind the spatial notions that have to do with perspectival character.
Bermúdez’s view is not just that proprioceptive information plays a role in the coding of information from sensory modalities at a subpersonal level, but also that bodily awareness contributes to shaping the egocentric perceptual field at the phenomenological level. See Bermúdez 1998, 141ff.
For an interesting discussion of Wittgenstein’s view, see Martin 1995.
Page numbers are from Gallagher’s paper in his website: http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~gallaghr/theoria03.html
This view, for instance, is not part of Shoemaker’s object perception model. ‘Objects of perception’ –Shoemaker writes– ‘are potential objects of attention. Without changing what one perceives, one can shift one’s attention from one perceived object to another’ (Shoemaker 1996a, 206).
Gallagher’s view is in part inspired by the following remark by Merleau-Ponty: ‘I observe external objects with my body, I handle them, examine them, walk round them, but my body itself is a thing which I do not observe: in order to be able to do so, I should need the use of a second body which itself would be unobservable’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 104; also quoted by Gallagher 2003, 9). But this has the same problem of Gallagher’s view. In a strict sense, Merleau-Ponty does not show here that our body is something we cannot observe. The most he gets is that through bodily awareness we do not perceive our body in the same way we perceive other things.
In fact, at a more general level it is a mistake to think that perceptual attention makes room to the possibility of misidentification. On the contrary, it is plausible to think that –as Campbell argues– perceptual attention is what explains the immunity to error though misidentification of some perceptual demonstrative judgments.
This is striking since Bermúdez and Gallagher quote O’Shaughnessy’s groundbreaking work on bodily awareness and in that work he unequivocally points in the direction of this view. Martin (1997) is another prominent exponent of this proposal. Fridland also overlooks the view I am considering. And Schwenkler mentions by passing that ‘certain philosophers have challenged whether the multiple-objects constraint identifies a necessary condition on perception at all’, but he claims that ‘this dispute will not concern us here’ (2013, 466). I think, though, that the dispute is crucial. If it is true that bodily awareness is a structurally peculiar form of perception that does not meet the multiple-object constraint, then –contrary to Schwenkler’s assumption– the single-object view (viz., the idea that the body is the only object of bodily awareness) will not rule out by itself that bodily awareness is perceptual. And if this is so, it is not necessary –as he thinks it is– to show that this awareness meets the multiple-objects constraint to regard it as a form of perception.
Shoemaker even includes in a footnote bodily awareness as a plausible candidate of a kind of perception that does not conform to the object perception model (ibid, 210, footnote 5).
It can be a matter of some debate whether all forms of perceptual awareness have phenomenal spatiality or there are also perceptions –perhaps some olfactory and gustatory experiences, for example– that are purely qualitative states with no spatial content at all (for an illuminating approach to this issue, see Smith 2002, Ch 5). But we do not need to enter in this debate here. For our current purposes, it is enough to observe that phenomenal spatiality is a feature of paradigmatic cases of perception that is also present in bodily awareness.
For a recent account of affective touch, see Fulkerson 2014, Ch. 7.
For a more detailed account of the role of bodily awareness in the specification of the perceptual perspective as well as in perceptual self-location, see Ávila 2014.
I am very grateful to the reviewers of this journal for their extremely helpful comments and suggestions about some of the points of this paper. The argument of the last section has been greatly benefited by their incisive remarks.
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Ávila, I. Is bodily awareness a form of perception?. Phenom Cogn Sci 16, 337–354 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-016-9453-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-016-9453-3