Dan Cavedon-Taylor

I distinguish between two kinds of sensorimotor expectations: agent‐ and object‐active ones. Alva Noë's answer to the problem of how perception acquires volumetric content illicitly privileges agent‐active expectations over object‐active expectations, though the two are explanatorily on a par. Considerations which Noë draws upon concerning how organisms may ‘off‐load’ internal processes onto the environment do not support his view that volumetric content depends on our embodiment; rather, they support a view of experience which is restrictive of the body's role in perception. My objections undercut central arguments which Noë gives for his brand of enactivism.

Seeing one’s laptop to be missing, hearing silence and smelling fresh air; these are all examples of perceptual experiences of absences. In this paper I discuss an example of absence perception in the tactual sense modality, that of tactually perceiving a tooth to be absent in one’s mouth, following its extraction. Various features of the example challenge two recently-developed theories of absence perception: Farennikova’s memory-perception mismatch theory and Martin and Dockic’s meta-cognitive theory. I speculate that the mechanism underlying the experience is a body schema that has failed to update itself.