Matthew Fulkerson

There is considerable empirical evidence that musical experience seems to alleviate the felt severity of painful episodes. On its face, this influence is philosophically puzzling. Why should hearing notes from a piano make the burn on my hand any less painful? The influence of music on pain does not seem easily explained using the frameworks developed for paradigm multisensory influences. In this paper, I critically survey and endorse the evidence that musical experience influences felt pain severity, a form of influence I call a “multi-affective interaction.” I argue that such interactions cannot be easily accommodated by extant accounts of traditional multisensory interactions. The difficulty arises in part from the complexity and multifaceted nature of both musical experience and the aversive qualities associated with pain. Despite this complexity, there remains a coherent structure and organization to the way in which these elements interact. I end the paper by exploring one such form of interaction, a limited resource model whereby affective-motivational states interact because they share—and therefore must compete over—a limited set of motivational tools.

This chapter addresses the issue of perceptual justification from the perspective of haptic touch. Touch raises a number of difficulties for traditional accounts of perceptual epistemology, since it involves a heterogenous collection of distinct sensory subsystems that must coordinate their activities and it essentially involves forms of emotional and bodily awareness that only derivatively provide information about features of the external world. These features suggest an epistemically interesting layer of sensory interaction that should be included in any plausible account of the justifying role of perceptual experience. The chapter argues that this layer of interaction, while perhaps more readily apparent in touch than in vision, is in fact ubiquitous in perception generally, and should be taken seriously by everyone working on the epistemology of perception.

Phenomenal Contrast Arguments (PCAs) are a prominent method in philosophy of mind for, among other uses, investigating how specific mental features shape the phenomenal character of experience. This paper identifies a general and underexplored obstacle to the success of PCAs: The necessity of demonstrating that the contrasts employed in these arguments are genuinely phenomenal, rather than merely cognitive or otherwise non-phenomenal. We contend that proponents of PCAs often assume a phenomenal difference without adequately ruling out these alternative explanations for the available contrast. While we do not preclude the possibility of successful PCAs, our arguments suggest that many existing instances fail to meet this burden.

The scientific investigation of pain faces many challenges. I argue that one of the central challenges posed by pain – its inherent complexity and supposed idiosyncrasy – is best understood as an instance of a more general issue in the mind sciences: the problem of psychological integration. This label is not yet an explanation or account of the underlying challenge, but rather a more precise, empirically tractable formulation of the worry as it arises in multiple domains. In this paper I first lay out a more substantive account of psychological integration, focusing on both the informational and regulative aspects of psychological coordination and control, and then apply this conception to the peripheral and central elements of sensory pain processing.

In this paper I argue that the answer(s) to Molyneux's question are not as important as usually assumed. This view stems from two directions: (i) I believe the question is generally under-specified, and can be made precise in several incompatible ways (something noted by many others) and (ii) in order to answer a precise formulation of the question we are forced to make a number of assumptions about the individuation of the senses, the nature of representation, and about psychological explanation. These assumptions play an outsize role in evaluating Molyneux questions compared to most other questions in cognitive science, lessening the interest of any particular study or finding on this matter, even when we are very precise in the formulation of our question. Further, if we take our best contemporary accounts of sensory taxonomy, representation, and psychological explanation to be inherently pluralistic, modestly interest-relative, and multivariate (as many do), then we should not expect any answer to a precise version of the question to definitively settle any issues about content, taxonomy, or psychological explanation. The focus of this paper is a defense of this second line of thought.

In this critical response, I begin with the positive features of Movements of the Mind, especially the flexibility and utility of Wu's account of attention and agency. I then focus my discussion on the relative absence of motivation and interaction in the account. Just as we cannot explain the motivating power of pain or emotions without understanding the role of attention and bias (a feature that makes MoM so useful), we also cannot fully understand attention and bias without understanding the role of motivation in driving human behaviour.

Many sensory states motivate. I offer an account of how such states compel intentional action. I focus on thirst as it is relatively simple in physiological and behavioral terms, it carries little theoretical baggage, and the motivational story for thirst seems likely to generalize. I argue that thirst motivates using a variety of flexible strategies, and that no single explanatory mechanism fully captures its motivational force. The resulting view, the aggregation model of sensory motivation, offers the most plausible account of how sensory states motivate.

Some sensory experiences are pleasant, some unpleasant. This is a truism. But understanding what makes these experiences pleasant and unpleasant is not an easy job. Various difficulties and puzzles arise as soon as we start theorizing. There are various philosophical theories on offer that seem to give different accounts for the positive or negative affective valences of sensory experiences. In this paper, we will look at the current state of art in the philosophy of mind, present the main contenders, critically compare and contrast them. In particular, we want to examine how they handle the reason-giving power of affective states. We will look into two representationalist proposals (Evaluativism and Imperativism) and a functionalist proposal, and argue that, contrary to their own advertisements, the representationalist proposals don’t have good accounts of why and how sensory affect can motivate, rationalize, and justify subsequent behavior and intentional mental activity. We will show that our own functionalist proposal does a much better job in this regard, and that when the representationalist proposals are modified to do a better job, they fare better not because of their representationalist credentials but due to their functionalist ones.

Recently, a number of writers have presented an argument to the effect that leading causal theories make available accounts of affect’s motivational role, but at the cost of failing to understand affect’s rationalizing role. Moreover, these writers have gone on to argue that these considerations support the adoption of an alternative (“evaluationist”) conception of pleasure and pain that, in their view, successfully explains both the motivational and rationalizing roles of affective experience. We believe that this argument from rationalization is ineffective in choosing between evaluationist and causal theories of affective experience, and that the impression to the contrary rests on a serious misunderstanding of the dialectic between the two views. We’ll describe general forms of causal and evaluationist theories, set out the argument that has been deployed by evaluationists against causal theorists, and then show how that argument rests on crucial and highly controversial presuppositions.

I argue on the basis of extensive empirical research that perception and emotion are more deeply entangled than we might have thought. This evidence strongly suggests that we should expand our conception of perception to include emotional elements, and our conception of emotion to include perceptual ones. This expansion poses a challenge to our current taxonomic practices. In the face of this challenge, I advocate principled pluralism about psychological kinds. This view holds that, depending on our explanatory purposes, psychological processes can be legitimately classified in more than one way.

It is through touch that we are able to interact directly with the world; it is our primary conduit of both pleasure and pain. Touch may be our most immediate and powerful sense—“the first sense" because of the central role it plays in experience. In this book, Matthew Fulkerson proposes that human touch, despite its functional diversity, is a single, unified sensory modality. Fulkerson offers a philosophical account of touch, reflecting the interests, methods, and approach that define contemporary philosophy; but his argument is informed throughout by the insights and constraints of empirical work on touch. Human touch is a multidimensional object of investigation, Fulkerson writes, best served by using a variety of methods and approaches. To defend his view of the unity of touch, Fulkerson describes and argues for a novel, unifying role for exploratory action in touch. He goes on to fill in the details of this unified, exploratory form of perception, offering philosophical accounts of tool use and distal touch, the representational structure of tangible properties, the spatial content of touch, and the role of pleasure in tactual experience. Fulkerson’s argument for the unique role played by exploratory action departs notably from traditional vision-centric philosophical approaches to perception, challenging the received view that action plays the same role in all sensory modalities. The robust philosophical account of touch he offers in The First Sense has significant implications for our general understanding of perception and perceptual experience.

In this paper, I argue that in touch, as in vision and audition, we can and often do perceive objects and properties even when we are not in direct or even apparent bodily contact with them. Unlike those senses, however, touch experiences require a special kind of mutually interactive connection between our sensory surfaces and the objects of our experience. I call this constraint the Connection Principle. This view has implications for the proper understanding of touch, and perceptual reference generally. In particular, spelling out the implications of this principle yields a rich and compelling picture of the spatial character of touch

I argue for sensory pluralism. This is the view that there are many forms of sensory interaction and unity, and no single category that classifies them all. In other words, sensory interactions do not form a single natural kind. This view suggests that how we classify sensory systems (and the experiences they generate) partly depends on our explanatory purposes. I begin with a detailed discussion of the issue as it arises for our understanding of thermal perception, followed by a general account and defense of sensory pluralism.

Haptic touch is an inherently active and exploratory form of perception, involving both coordinated movements and an array of distinct sensory receptors in the skin. For this reason, some have claimed that haptic touch is not a single sense, but rather a multisensory collection of distinct sensory systems. Though this claim is often made, it relies on what I regard as a confused conception of multisensory interaction. In its place, I develop a nuanced hierarchy of multisensory involvement. According to this hierarchy, touch turns out to be a single modality in that its various receptors assign their features to the same tangible objects. When we grasp an object a range of distinct properties?shape, warmth, heft, texture, etc.?are all felt to belong to the object, just as different visual properties are associated with a visual object. Paradigm multisensory experiences, on the other hand, involve associations between distinct perceptual experiences, as when the way something looks affects the way something sounds. Thus despite its functional and physiological diversity, haptic touch can be regarded as a single sense