Representing shape in sight and touch
Name
Representing_Shape_in_Sight_and_Touch_penultimate.pdf
Description
Accepted version
Size
1.8 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
873aaf43ace3f308d73ef8ab2558fbad
Author(s)
Green, E. J.
Date Issued
December 2020
Journal
Mind and Language
Publisher
Wiley
Citation
Green, E. J. “Representing shape in sight and touch.” Mind and Language (December 2020) © 2020 The Author
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
We represent shape in both sight and touch, but how do these abilities relate to one another? This issue has been discussed in the context of Molyneux's question of whether someone born blind could, upon being granted sight, identify shapes visually. Some have suggested that we might look to real-world cases of sight restoration to illuminate the relation between visual and tactual shape representations. Here, I argue that newly sighted perceivers should not be relied on in this way because they are unlikely to form the kinds of shape representations responsible for cross-modal recognition in normally sighted perceivers. I then argue that the available evidence makes a compelling case for the type identity view, on which the visual and tactual representations responsible for cross-modal recognition are type-identical.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1111/mila.12352
