The Objects of the Five Senses

We were talking about Grice (a nonblind man) and Borges (a blindman) with J.

I would like to consider in what respect the 'sense' of 'vision' differs from the others. Urmson wrote a paper (actually a Brit. Academy lecture) with the traditional title, "The object of the five senses". Surely there is nothing scientific about the senses having to be 'five' -- but let's assume they ARE five.

As a philosopher I cannot place ONE sense over the other. They all seem equivalent to me.

They all contribute to phenomenalist statements:

a seems phi.
b seems phi'.

Etc. There is a PERCEPTUAL modus -- if it's a 'visum', etc. "Visum" is Grice's and Warnock's technicism.

"We saw a visum of a cow on the way in".

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So, I wouldn't think that there is a priority of vision, philosophically, at all.

What J says is about 'perception', observation, the senses, in general. But we may want to mediate in what way a verb like 'see' behaves differently than a verb like 'smell'.

"I smelled John".

"I saw John".

They seem to behave differently, in terms of factivity. For Grice, if you saw John, John was there to be seen. Thus Macbeth cannot have seen Banquo, for example. Only 'seen' -- a loose use of 'see' which disimplicates that what you see is what you got.

With "I smelled a rat" (or "I smell a rat") there is possible a similar factivity. I don't know.

Surely you cannot smell a sweet rose ("a rose by any other name would smell as sweet") unless there IS a sweet rose in front of your nose.

Similarly with other senses.

Oddly, Aristotle thought that TOUCH was different. He is discussing weakness of the will, and some form of incontinence. Suppose a man sees a naked woman and wants to TOUCH her. Without permission, etc, that would be an incontinent action. For surely a man can CONTROL what he touches. But Aristotle says that if a man SEES a naked woman, etc., he is not being incontinent. "Seeing" (or vision) does not make a man incontinent. (I forget where Aristotle said this, though).

The sense of 'taste' as opposed to 'touch' is possible a distinction to be refudiated. I haven't checked the etymologies, but 'taste' seems like 'touch'. Isn't 'taste' to touch with your tongue?

Surely, to smell is possible to TOUCH, too, with your nose -- via particles in the air, etc. And for Boyle and other theoreticians in the age of Locke, it was all corpuscular. I.e. to SEE was to touch.

This had Locke thinking, rightly, that the only primary quality (not a mere epiphenomenal secondary quality) was bulk.

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But surely it requires a lot of analysis to reduce, "This rose smells very sweet" to bulkiness. Or perhaps it doesn't.

Patricia Churchland thinks that sensual qualia are redundant anyway.

My friend McEvoy says that the only good thing about Austin's Sense and Sensibilia is the title -- a pun on Austen. And Austen WAS into something. Sense and Sensitivity. In what ways are these different.

I was reading the life of Caruso and how his voice turned from 'sensously appealing' to something else: people were starting to detect the 'acting' qualities of his voice. So there is this further use of 'sense' as in sensuousness, sensual, and sensuality.

"Sense and Sensuality", or the life and times of Anna Nicole Smith?