Keith A. Wilson

University College Dublin | UCD · School of Philosophy

The dual role of olfaction in both smelling and tasting, i.e. flavour perception, makes it an important test case for philosophical theories of sensory individuation. Indeed, the psychologist Paul Rozin claimed that olfaction is a “dual sense”, leading some scientists and philosophers to propose that we have not one, but two senses of smell: orthon...

Each of our sensory modalities — vision, touch, taste, etc. — works on a slightly different timescale, with differing temporal resolutions and processing lag. This raises the question of how, or indeed whether, these sensory streams are co-ordinated or ‘bound’ into a coherent multisensory experience of the perceptual ‘now’. In this paper I evaluate...

Visual perception is widely taken to present properties such as redness, round-ness, and so on. This in turn might be thought to give rise to accuracy conditions for experience, and so content, regardless of which metaphysical view of perception one endorses. An influential version of this argument-Susanna Siegel's 'Argument from Appearing'-aims to...

Visual experience is often characterised as being essentially spatial, and auditory experience essentially temporal. But this contrast, which is based upon the temporal structure of the objects of sensory experience rather than the experiences to which they give rise, is largely superficial. By carefully examining the various sources of temporality...

It is widely accepted that there is a visual field, but the analogous notion of an auditory field is rejected by many philosophers on the grounds that the metaphysics or phenomenology of audition lack the necessary spatial structure. In this paper, I argue that many of the common objections to the existence of an auditory field are misguided and th...

Many philosophers and scientists take perceptual experience, whatever else it involves, to be representational. That is, to perceive an object via one or more of our senses is to represent it as being some particular way: that tomato is red, round, sweet, and so on. In ‘The Silence of the Senses’, Charles Travis (2004; 2013) argues that this view i...

Philosophers and scientists have studied sensory perception and, in particular, vision for many years. Increasingly, however, they have become interested in the nonvisual senses in greater detail and the problem of individuating the senses in a more general way. The Aristotelian view is that there are only five external senses—smell, taste, hearing...

In his account of visual perception, Thomas Reid describes visible figure as both ‘real and external’ to the eye and as the ‘immediate object of sight’. These claims appear to conflict with Reid's direct realism, since if the ‘immediate’ object of vision is also its direct object, then sight would be perceptually indirect due to the role of visible...

Many philosophers have held that perceptual experience is fundamentally a matter of perceivers being in particular representational states. Such states are said to have representational content, i.e. accuracy or veridicality conditions, capturing the way that things, according to that experience, appear to be. In this thesis I argue that the case a...

Throughout everyday experience, we take ourselves to be aware of events as occurring in a certain order or sequence, as having some particular duration, and of progressing from future to present and into the past. Yet such seemingly innocuous temporal phenomena are the source of many philosophical puzzles—not least the question of how such an aware...