The First Sense

Abstract

An empirically informed philosophical account of human touch as a single, unified sensory modality that plays a central role in perception. It is through touch that we are able to interact directly with the world; it is our primary conduit of both pleasure and pain. Touch may be our most immediate and powerful sense—“the first sense” because of the central role it plays in experience. In this book, Matthew Fulkerson proposes that human touch, despite its functional diversity, is a single, unified sensory modality. Fulkerson offers a philosophical account of touch, reflecting the interests, methods, and approach that define contemporary philosophy; but his argument is informed throughout by the insights and constraints of empirical work on touch. Human touch is a multidimensional object of investigation, Fulkerson writes, best served by using a variety of methods and approaches. To defend his view of the unity of touch, Fulkerson describes and argues for a novel, unifying role for exploratory action in touch. He goes on to fill in the details of this unified, exploratory form of perception, offering philosophical accounts of tool use and distal touch, the representational structure of tangible properties, the spatial content of touch, and the role of pleasure in tactual experience. Fulkerson's argument for the unique role played by exploratory action departs notably from traditional vision-centric philosophical approaches to perception, challenging the received view that action plays the same role in all sensory modalities. The robust philosophical account of touch he offers in The First Sense has significant implications for our general understanding of perception and perceptual experience.

Expanding Aesthetics

“…Touch is thought to be the first sense to develop ( 43 ) and it is fundamental for interacting directly with the world: “ our primary conduit of both pleasure and pain ” ( 44 ). As an example of the connection between touch and positive affect in non-human animals, studies have shown that tickling captive rats induces them to chirp as if they were engaged in rough and tumble play with each other, thereby demonstrating their apparent pleasure ( 45 ).…”

Mesoderm: The Possible Key to the Organic Basis of Freud’s Theories

“…1) Touch as the primary "sense" A possible answer to Freud's question regarding perception involves touch, which probably is the first sense to develop (Fulkerson, 2015) in the embryo, and, unlike the other senses, it appears to be multisensory. Touch is more than perceptual awareness constituted by signals made available through the receptors in our skin, but is also associated with bodily awareness (Fulkerson, 2014(Fulkerson, , 2015.…”

Experience, Seemings, and Evidence

“…Vision presents us with color (more precisely, hue, saturation, and brightness), audition with volume, pitch, and timbre and touch with what Matthew Fulkerson has recently called intensive features like thermal qualities (hot/cold), texture qualities (smooth/rough) etc. (Fulkerson, , ch. 5).…”

“…In contrast, seeing a red apple on a table involves the objectification of both the apple and the table – when you move or shift your gaze your experience varies, but there is a distinct sense of the objects' staying the same and being independent of your experience . Something similar can be said about hearing a bird singing where it's the sound that is objectified and in relation to which we can move, as well as touching the ball where it's the ball that becomes objectified and which we can tactually explore (Fulkerson, , ch. 6; O'Callaghan, , chs.…”