Diversity Reading List

Abstract:

In this chapter, Laack analyzes a migration account visually depicted in the Mexican early colonial pictorial manuscript known as the Mapa de Cuauhtinchan No. 2. This pictographic map tells the story of a group of Aztecs leaving their primordial home, changing their social, cultural, and religious identity through migration and the passing of ordeals, and finally settling in the town of Cuauhtinchan. It is painted in the style of Aztec pictography, which used visual imagery to convey thoughts and meanings in contrast to alphabetical scripts using abstract signs for linguistic sounds. Drawing on the theories of embodied metaphors and embodied meaning by philosopher Mark L. Johnson and cognitive linguist George P. Lakoff, I argue that Aztec pictography offers efficient and effective means to communicate embodied metaphors on a visual level and evokes complex layers of embodied meaning. In doing so, I intend to change perspective on the narrative powers of religious stories by transcending textual patterns of analysis and theory building and opening up to non-linguistic modes of experience and their influence on narrative structures and strategies.

Abstract: A recent study published in Nature Neuroscience purports to have answered a question posed to Locke in 1688 by his friend William Molyneux, namely, whether ‘a man born blind and made to see’ would be able to identify, immediately and by vision alone, objects previously known only by touch. The answer, according to the researchers – and as predicted by Molyneux, as well as Locke, Berkeley, and others – is ‘likely negative. The newly sighted subjects did not exhibit an immediate transfer of their tactile shape knowledge to the visual domain’. Since then, however, many commentators have argued that the answer is still not clear. Moreover, in the contemporary literature on Molyneux’s Question, and more generally on cross-modal perception and the individuation of the senses, it is sometimes hard to determine what question is being investigated. In this paper, I distinguish a number of different questions about the relation between visual and tactual perception that can arise when considering Molyneux’s problem.

Abstract: I argue that we should reject the sparse view that there are or could be only a small number of rather distinct senses. When one appreciates this then one can see that there is no need to choose between the standard criteria that have been proposed as ways of individuating the senses—representation, phenomenal character, proximal stimulus and sense organ—or any other criteria that one may deem important. Rather, one can use these criteria in conjunction to form a fine-grained taxonomy of the senses. We can think of these criteria as defining a multidimensional space within which we can locate each of the senses that we are familiar with and which also defines the space of possible senses there could be.

Abstract: Sensorimotor enactivism takes perceptual experience to be constituted by a kind of attunement to sensorimotor contingencies - law-like relations between sensory inputs and bodily activity. The chemical senses have traditionally been construed as especially simple and passive, and a number of philosophers have argued that flavour and smell are problem cases for the sensorimotor approach. In this article, I respond to these objections to the sensorimotor approach, and in doing so offer the beginnings of a sensorimotor account of the chemical senses.

Abstract:

The cultural construction of experience and perception has been a topic of interest among scholars working in Mesoamerica for decades. Archaeological remains, art, ancient and historic textual sources, and ethnographic observations complement and inform one another in those investigations, many of which stress the particular conceptions of bodies, sensorial hierarchies, and lived experiences across the culturally and linguistically connected region extending geographically from northern Mexico to Costa Rica. This chapter provides an overview of sensorial studies in Mesoamerica that highlights the rich and diverse evidence available. It emphasizes a diachronic, comparative approach, common in Mesoamericanist archaeology, which forces scholars to go beyond the identification of specific stimuli on discrete senses and enables them to study contexts of heightened synaesthetic experience, as well as those contexts’ affective and symbolic meanings. Finally, I suggest possibilities for considering an archaeology of the senses that extends beyond the limits of a singular human body in order to more fully embrace the conceptual nature of ancient Mesoamerican experience.

Introduction: I am inclined to think that what was in Molyneux’s mind, because of which he drew that conclusion from those premises, was this: that what affects one’s touch so or so could have affected one’s sight such and such instead of so or so—i.e., that what feels so or so could have looked such and such instead of so or so. Thus, for example, that what standardly feels like a globe could have standardly looked like a cube instead of like a globe, and vice versa. Certainly anyway, if you did think this, it would seem to you plausible to say that if a man hasn’t had the experience of how things that feel so or so look, he can’t tell by sight, i.e., from how a thing looks, how it feels. And plausible, then, to reason, as Molyneux does, that, if a man hasn’t had the experience of how things that feel so or so look, he can’t tell by sight, i.e., from how a thing looks, whether it feels like, and so is, a globe, or whether it feels like, and so is, a cube. The best he can do is guess.

It’s a proposal worth looking at, in any case, whether it is Molyneux’s or not. Or rather, under some interpretations of it, it's a proposal worth looking at.