A Theory of Sentience - Tapa dura

A Theory of Sentience is as valuable for the questions it opens up as for the positive theory it puts forward. Austen Clark has brought to our attention a way of thinking about the details of sensory experience which opens up possibilities for fruitful interaction between philosophy, pscychophysics and the neurosciences. It is refreshing to read an exploration of sensory experience which fixes the terrain of investigation firmly within the actual world and which works hard to define tractable problems based around the basic, but often neglected, truth that sensory experience is sensory experience of a three-dimensional environment. (Mind)

There is much of interest to cognitive scientists working on the intentionality of sensation. (Barbara Montero, Times Literary Supplement)

Austen Clark offers a general account of the forms of mental representation that we call `sensory'. To sense something, one must have some capacity to discriminate among sensory qualities; but there are other requirements. What are they, and how can they be put together to yield full-blown sensing?

Drawing on the findings of current neuroscience, Clark proposes and defends the hypothesis that the various modalities of sensation share a generic form that he calls 'feature-placing'. Sensing proceeds by picking out place-times in or around the body of the sentient organism, and characterizing qualities (features) that appear at those place-times. Such feature-placing is a primitive kind―probably the most primitive kind―of mental representation. Once its peculiarities have been described, many of the puzzles about the intentionality of sensation, and the phenomena that lead some to label it 'pseudo-intentional', can be resolved. The hypothesis casts light on many other troublesome phenomena, including the varieties of illusion, the problem of projection, the notion of a visual field, the location of after-images, the existence of sense-data, and the role of perceptual demonstratives. A Theory of Sentience will interest anyone interested in the topics of sensation, representation, or phenomenal consciousness.