Recent work in philosophy of science has shown how the challenges posed by extremely complex systems require that scientists employ a range of modelling strategies, leading to partial perspectives that make apparently conflicting claims about the target (Mitchell 2009b, Longino 2013). The brain is of course extremely complex, and the same arguments apply here. In this paper I present a variety of perspectivism called _haptic realism_. This account foregrounds the process by which the instrumental goals of neuroscience shape the way (...) that objects of investigation are probed experimentally and conceptualised through modelling. Because such models do not aim to represent their targets exactly as they are, but in ways that are most useful for the investigators, the models should not be interpreted as literal descriptions of neural systems. Scientific realism traditionally involves a semantic commitment to interpreting theories and models as literal descriptions of human-independent nature. Haptic realism makes a significant departure from this tradition. Haptic realism also calls us to reassess the ontological commitments and knowledge claims of neuroscientific models and theories. (shrink)

In this essay I propose a new theory of taste, starting from the assumption of the multisensorial and ecological approach to the senses, as proposed by Gibson in his psychology of perception and by Dewey in his philosophy and aesthetics. In contrast with an optical approach to tastes and tasting, here I propose the concept of haptic taste to describe a perceptual engagement deeply involved in the processes of experiencing food and beverages, although my examples are mostly related to wine. (...) Finally I spell out the implications of a theory of haptic taste for the way we approach cultivation of taste and expertise. I suggest we should turn from the idea of ‘good taste’ as the result of trained and acquired skills to taste as a task, to mean the practical and continuous attuning with the environment we actively contribute to shape. I believe it is appropriate today to move from a culture of taste, based on an elevation strategy, to a culture with taste, which emphasizes educated nurture. (shrink)

This article is a close analysis of a popular song by the Italian singer-songwriter Paolo Conte, ‘Sparring Partner’, in Ozon's film [Formula: see text]. With particular reference to what Barthes called the ‘grain’ of the voice, the article shows how the song does not work anempathetically, cutting across characters and narrative and undermining them; nor does it work empathetically to support the characters or reflect their emotions in a straightforward way. Rather, the song creates a complex haptic moment, where affect (...) and gender fluidity combine to form a ‘haptic metaspace’; this acts as a frame for productively unstable embodiments, marked by nomadic transitions and volatilities, focused on the male of the couple. (shrink)

During the pandemic there were many ways of handling the contagious SARS-CoV-2 virus, most of them in haptic terms, or in terms of touch: masks, hand disinfection, social distancing, quarantines, (self)isolations. Touch thus became not only the privileged object of the new bio-politics, striving to preserve life at all costs, but also what was lost during the pandemic. To be sure, a loss of something we never had that even the vaccine, which promised a return to normal, but actually paved (...) the way for a “brave new post-pandemic world,” could not rehabilitate. In short, one of the elements that radically changed with and in the (post-)pandemic world is precisely the elusive object of touch, which we propose to conceptually grasp through the coinage of the concept of its “mateReal hapticity.”. (shrink)

Traditionally, the sense of touch—alongside the senses of taste and smell—has been excluded from the aesthetic domain. These proximal modalities are thought to deliver only sensory pleasures, not the complex, world-directed perceptual states that characterize aesthetic experience. In this paper, I argue that this tradition fails to recognize the perceptual possibilities of haptic touch, which allows us to experience properties of the objects with which we make bodily contact, including their weight, shape, solidity, elasticity, and smoothness. These features, moreover, may (...) be indicative of how well-suited an object is for its function, and in feeling them we can thus feel the positive aesthetic quality of functional beauty. (shrink)

This article presents a conceptual discussion on the phenomenon of incorporation of tools and other objects in the light of Maine de Biran’s philosophy of the relation between the body and the motor will. Drawing on Maine de Biran’s view of the body as that portion of the material world which directly obeys one’s motor will, as well as on his view (supported by studies in contemporary cognitive science) of active touch as the perceptual modality that is sensitive to objects (...) as fields of forces resisting the perceiver’s movements, we discuss the phenomena of motor incorporation and haptic incorporation, as well as the relation between them. Motor incorporation occurs when something is integrated into the motor system, i.e. when practice enables one to animate an object as directly, effortlessly and fluently as one is able to animate one’s own body. The subject then has the experience of acting there, where the object is located, not at the body–object interface. In order to better understand the phenomenon of motor incorporation, we highlight the phenomenological difference between directly and indirectly moving something. Haptic incorporation occurs when something is integrated into the haptic system, i.e. when an object is used as an instrument for the haptic perception of other objects. Finally, we seek to shed light on the phenomenon of transparency, understanding the transparency acquired by the incorporated object as both a relational property and a matter of degrees. (shrink)

This chapter identifies two contrasting methodological reductions utilized in philosophical scepticism: withdrawal/doubt [R–]; immersion/attention [R+]. Moving toward a feminist ethics grounded in phenomenological scepticism, Aumiller explores how reduction relates to experiences of personal and global uncertainty such as a pandemic. Reduction involves our entire embodied being, challenging how we are fundamentally in touch with the world. How we respond to being disrupted makes all the difference.

This article explores forms of haptic sociality in interspecies interaction. Data examined are taken from a corpus of equine assisted therapy sessions, in Finland and France. During these sessions, therapists invite clients to pay close attention to the horse’s behavioral displays of comfort or discomfort and to react accordingly. In this way, the horse is regarded as a living, sentient creature, whose body has haptic and kinesthetic properties, resulting in socialization practices that cultivate forms of care. The study discusses Merleau-Ponty’s (...) concept of “esthesiologic body”, in light of analytical instances, draws on contemporary re-examinations of phenomenological notions (such as intersubjectivity and intercorporeality) by ethnomethodologists and analysts of social interaction, and proposes to respecify them in the particular context of human–animal interactions. The argument is inspired by a conversation analytic approach, sensitive to the orderly character of social actions. Two formats, displaying diverse ways in which participants interact with the horse as an _esthesiologic_ body, are examined in detail. The analysis shows the fundamental role played by touch and haptic practices in the practical accomplishment of intercorporeality. (shrink)

A further step in Pylyshyn's discontinuity thesis is to examine the penetrability of haptic (tactual-kinesthetic) perception. The study of the perception of orientation and the “oblique effect” (lower performance in oblique orientations than in vertical–horizontal orientations) in the visual and haptic modalities allows this question to be discussed. We suggest that part of the visual process generating the visual oblique effect is cognitively impenetrable, whereas all haptic processes generating the haptic oblique effect are cognitively penetrable.

‘Psychotechnics’, Weimar Germany’s science du jour, typically is framed as a symptom of ‘technological media’ – obscuring the persistent significance of ‘dexterity’, ‘skill’ and ‘manual labour’ at the time. More broadly, there is a tendency to construe ‘the haptic’ as predominantly a casualty of modernity: skilled hands replaced by conveyor belts; skilled hands defended by the rearguard actions of arts-and-crafts movements; skilled hands destroyed by industrialized warfare. Drawing on contemporary investigations into the ‘organ of touch’, this essay aims to complicate (...) this picture by reconstructing the proto-ergonomic project of Friedrich Herig, a German engineer, amateur prehistorian and expert on craft labour who rose to distinction in the 1920s as a designer of ‘ideal’ hand tools. Herig’s eclectic sources of inspiration reveal that matters of ‘touch’, far from obsolete, were intimately bound up with matters of tools – their design, uses and putative origins – and thus, with matters of labour. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

Haptic object recognition is usually an efficient process although slower and less accurate than its visual counterpart. The early loss of vision imposes a greater reliance on haptic perception for recognition compared to the sighted. Therefore, we may expect that congenitally blind persons could recognize objects through touch more quickly and accurately than late blind or sighted people. However, the literature provided mixed results. Furthermore, most of the studies on haptic object recognition focused on performance, devoting little attention to the (...) exploration procedures that conducted to that performance. In this study, we used iCube, an instrumented cube recording its orientation in space as well as the location of the points of contact on its faces. Three groups of congenitally blind, late blind and age and gender-matched blindfolded sighted participants were asked to explore the cube faces where little pins were positioned in varying number. Participants were required to explore the cube twice, reporting whether the cube was the same or it differed in pins disposition. Results showed that recognition accuracy was not modulated by the level of visual ability. However, congenitally blind touched more cells simultaneously while exploring the faces and changed more the pattern of touched cells from one recording sample to the next than late blind and sighted. Furthermore, the number of simultaneously touched cells negatively correlated with exploration duration. These findings indicate that early blindness shapes haptic exploration of objects that can be held in hands. (shrink)

Touch is the first sense to develop in the womb, yet often it is overlooked. The Senses of Touch examines the role of touching and feeling as part of the fabric of everyday, embodied experience. -/- How can we think about touch? Problems of touch and tactility run as a continuous thread in philosophy, psychology, medical writing and representations in art, from Ancient Greece to the present day. Picking through some of these threads, the book ‘feels’ its way towards writing (...) and thinking about touch as both sensory and affective experience. -/- Taking a broadly phenomenological framework that traces the tactility from Aristotle through the Enlightenment to the present day, it examines the role of touch across a range of experiences including aesthetics, digital design, visual impairment and touch therapies. The Senses of Touch thereby demonstrates the varieties of sensory experience, and explores the diverse range of our ‘senses’ of touch. (shrink)

When we reach to pick up an object, our actions are effortlessly informed by the object’s spatial information, the position of our limbs, stored knowledge of the object’s material properties, and what we want to do with the object. A substantial body of evidence suggests that grasps are under the control of “automatic, unconscious” sensorimotor modules housed in the “dorsal stream” of the posterior parietal cortex. Visual online feedback has a strong effect on the hand’s in-flight grasp aperture. Previous work (...) of ours exploited this effect to show that grasps are refractory to cued expectations for visual feedback. Nonetheless, when we reach out to pretend to grasp an object (pantomime grasp), our actions are performed with greater cognitive effort and they engage structures outside of the dorsal stream, including the ventral stream. Here we ask whether our previous finding would extend to cued expectations for haptic feedback. Our method involved a mirror apparatus that allowed participants to see a “virtual” target cylinder as a reflection in the mirror at the start of all trials. On “haptic feedback” trials, participants reached behind the mirror to grasp a size-matched cylinder, spatially coincident with the virtual one. On “no-haptic feedback” trials, participants reached behind the mirror and grasped into “thin air” because no cylinder was present. To manipulate haptic expectation, we organized the haptic conditions into blocked, alternating, and randomized schedules with and without verbal cues about the availability of haptic feedback. Replicating earlier work, we found the strongest haptic effects with the blocked schedules and the weakest effects in the randomized uncued schedule. Crucially, the haptic effects in the cued randomized schedule was intermediate. An analysis of the influence of the upcoming and immediately preceding haptic feedback condition in the cued and uncued random schedules showed that cuing the upcoming haptic condition shifted the haptic influence on grip aperture from the immediately preceding trial to the upcoming trial. These findings indicate that, unlike cues to the availability of visual feedback, participants take advantage of cues to the availability of haptic feedback, flexibly engaging pantomime, and natural modes of grasping to optimize the movement. (shrink)

A general shortcoming of the localist, decompositional, approach to neuroscientific explanation that the target article exemplifies, is that it is incomplete unless supplemented with an account of how the hypothesized subsystems integrate in the normal case. Besides, a number of studies that show that object recognition is proprioception dependent and that cutaneous information affects motor performance make the existence of the proposed subsystems doubtful.

Four-month-old infants were allowed to manipulate, without vision, two rings attached to a bar that permitted each ring to undergo rotary motion against a fixed surface. In different conditions, the relative motions of the rings were rigid, independent, or opposite, and they circled either the same fixed point outside the zone of manipulation or spatially separated points. Infants’ perception of the ring assemblies were affected by the nature of the rotary motion in two ways. First, infants perceived a unitary object (...) when the felt ends of the object underwent a common, rigid rotary motion; perception of object unity was stronger in this condition than when the ends underwent either independent or opposite rotary motions. Second, infants perceived two distinct objects when the felt ends of the objects underwent independent rotary motions that centred on distinct fixed points. Perception of the distinctness of the objects was less clear when the ends underwent opposite or independent rotary motions that centred on a common fixed point. These findings provide the first evidence that infants are sensitive to rotary motion patterns and can extrapolate a global pattern of rigid motion from the distinct, local velocities that they produce and experience at their two hands. (shrink)

Driving a car is a highly visual task. Despite the trend towards increased driver assistance and autonomous vehicles, drivers still need to interact with the car for both driving and non-driving relevant tasks, at times simultaneously. The often-resulting high cognitive load is a safety issue which can be addressed by providing the driver with alternative feedback modalities, such as haptics. Recent trends in the automotive industry are moving towards the seamless integration of control elements through touch-sensitive surfaces. Psychological knowledge on (...) optimally utilizing haptic technologies remains limited. The literature on automotive haptic feedback consists mainly of singular findings without putting them into a broader user context with respect to haptic design of interfaces. Moreover, haptic feedback has primarily been limited to the confirmation of control actions rather than the searching or finding of control elements, the latter of which becomes particularly important considering the current trends. This paper presents an integrated framework on haptic processing in automotive user interfaces and provides guidelines for haptic design of user interfaces in car interiors. (shrink)

Using Jean-Luc Nancy's productive concept of resonant listening, this article interrogates silence in the films of Michael Haneke. Arguing for a kind of open, resonating and sonorous form of philosophic listening, Nancy articulates the distinctions among listening, hearing and understanding. Working from these concepts, this article considers the particular form of resonance in the instance of cinematic silence and in particular the use of silence in the philosophically engaged cinema of Haneke.

In this paper, we study the interactional organization of an instructed object exploration among sighted and visually impaired people (VIPs) in order to contribute to studies of instructional activities and the observable accomplishment of haptic perception. We do this by showing the situated, interactional, and co-operative organization of achieving object understanding. We focus on the dynamics of haptic perception as being reliant on instructions, while at the same time being an observable production that furnishes further instructions. We show the organization (...) of visual and verbal instructions versus the touching of objects for haptic perception. Based on ethnomethodological conversation analysis of video data, we study a VIP’s haptic actions in interaction with a professional, sighted ICT consultant who provides instructions on what an object is and what it can do. We show how the instructions are sequentially adjusted to make them relevant for a simultaneous, emerging exploration in which the VIP uses their hands and fingers to perceive very specific details of the object. We argue that achieving object understanding is accomplished in and through the fine-tuned coordination of haptic exploration, both as a response to verbal instructions and also as a means of conveying perception-related actions, which the ICT uses to build new actions. The paper thus makes a case for instructed and distributed haptic perception as observable in social interaction and as a resource for building object understanding within phenomenal fields. (shrink)

In this article I examine the perceptual metaphor at the heart of perspectivism, discussing three elements: partiality, interestedness, and interaction. I argue that perspectivists should drop the visual metaphor in favor of a haptic one. Because the sense of touch requires contact and purposeful exploration on the part of the perceiver, it is obvious that with touch one apprehends an extradermal reality in virtue of and not in spite of its interactive and interested nature. By analogy, perspectivists should investigate the (...) thesis that scientific representations inform us about the natural world in virtue of their interactive and interested qualities. (shrink)

This article presents a conceptual discussion on the phenomenon of incorporation of tools and other objects in the light of Maine de Biran’s philosophy of the relation between the body and the motor will. Drawing on Maine de Biran’s view of the body as that portion of the material world which directly obeys one’s motor will, as well as on his view (supported by studies in contemporary cognitive science) of active touch as the perceptual modality that is sensitive to objects (...) as fields of forces resisting the perceiver’s movements, we discuss the phenomena of motor incorporation and haptic incorporation, as well as the relation between them. Motor incorporation occurs when something is integrated into the motor system, i.e. when practice enables one to animate an object as directly, effortlessly and fluently as one is able to animate one’s own body. The subject then has the experience of acting there, where the object is located, not at the body–object interface. In order to better understand the phenomenon of motor incorporation, we highlight the phenomenological difference between directly and indirectly moving something. Haptic incorporation occurs when something is integrated into the haptic system, i.e. when an object is used as an instrument for the haptic perception of other objects. Finally, we seek to shed light on the phenomenon of transparency, understanding the transparency acquired by the incorporated object as both a relational property and a matter of degrees. (shrink)

In On Touching Derrida locates Jean-Luc Nancy (and, briefly, Gilles Deleuze) within a tradition of haptic ethics and aesthetics that runs from Aristotle to the present. In his early work on Husserl, Derrida had already claimed that phenomenology's commitment to the genesis of sense and the sensible is at one and the same time a commitment to pure and rigorous philosophy at the same time as it threatens to over-turn the primacy of conceptuality and cognition.Whereas Nancy (and those other figures (...) whom Derrida cites, such as Merleau-Ponty) express a faith in a return to the sensibility of flesh, Derrida presents his own work as manifestly more cognisant of the necessary distance between flesh and sense. Another ‘approach’ to the haptic is suggested by Gilles Deleuze, whose work Derrida locates within phenomenological presence, despite Deleuze and Guattari's trenchant rejection of ‘the lived’ and the human organism that inevitably subtends any discussion of the relation between sensibility and sense. Rather than decide for or against this border between flesh and cognition, between post-deconstruction and deconstructive rigour, this essay examines this curious border of touch between philosophy and sensibility, and does so by referring to William Blake's problem of returning the signs of sense to the sensibility of the hand. (shrink)