When philosophers talk of perception and perceptual experience they are usually talking about visual perception and visual experience* and they often assume that what is true of vision is true of perception generally. I doubt that assumption is true (see Auditory Perception) and so am interested in what account should be given of the five senses, in what the differences are between them, and in how they are related to each other. I explore some of these questions in the following papers.

The significance of the senses. Standard accounts of the senses attempt to answer the question how and why we count five senses (what I call the counting question); none of the standard accounts is satisfactory. I argue that any adequate account of the senses must explain the significance of the senses, that is, it must explain why distinguishing different senses matters. In this paper I provide such an explanation, and then use it as the basis for providing an account of the senses and answering the counting question.

The senses and psychological kinds. In this paper I argue that there are not five kinds of psychological mechanisms involved in perceiving, and hence that it is not possible to answer the question of why we distinguish five different senses by appealing to the different psycholgical mechanisms involved in perceiving.

Modes of perceiving and imagining. We enjoy different modes of sensory imagining corresponding to our five modes of perception – seeing, touching, hearing, smelling, and tasting. An account of what constitutes these different modes of perception needs also to explain what constitutes the different modes of sensory imagination. In this paper I argue that we can explain what distinguishes the different modes of sensory imagination in terms of their characteristic experiences without supposing that we must distinguish the senses in terms of the kinds of experiences involved in perceiving. Thus, the fact that we enjoy different modes of sensory imagining poses no threat to someone who thinks that the five senses are to be distinguished by appeal to the kinds of mechanisms or psychological capacities their exercise involves and not by appeal to kinds of experiences.

Kinds of experience and the five senses. In this paper I argue that two commonly held views about perceptual experience are incompatible and that one must be given up. The first is the view that the five senses are to be distinguished by appeal to the kind of experiences involved in perception; the second is the view – called Representationalism – that the subjective character of perceptual experience is determined solely by what the experience represents. We could take their incompatibility as a reason for rejecting Representationalism; but I suggest that it's open to the Representationalist to claim that the experiences of a single sense need have no common subjective character.

(*See, for example, the essays in Gendler and Hawthorne, eds., Perceptual Experience, OUP 2006. It would have been far more accurate to call the book Visual Experience.)