Abstract

Animals, including ourselves, have sensitive bodies. Verbs of sensation can be predicated of parts of the body. Verbs of perception, on the other hand, cannot intelligibly be attached to names of sense‐organs. Animal perception is merely mechanical responsiveness to stimuli. It is unaccompanied by consciousness of sensory experience, that is, by the thought that it seems to one just as if one were perceiving. Organs of perception have both morphological and functional features. Deformation of a perceptual organ typically affects its functioning, and harmful deformation affects the exercise of the perceptual faculty the organ subserves. We traditionally distinguish five senses, five perceptual faculties sight, hearing, smell, taste and tactile perception (touch, feeling). The great discoveries of psychologists and neuroscientists over the last century and more have immeasurably increased our knowledge of how perception is physiologically possible and of what goes on in our brain when we perceive things.