Carlota Serrahima  (University of Valencia): Subjective structure and objective presence

Abstract:

Philosophers of perception have often talked about the sense of presence to refer to the following phenomenological feature of visual perception: visual perception presents its objects as “being there in front of us” (Dokic, 2010), “independently of us” (Farkas, 2013), “clearly distinct from the very experiences of them” (Miyazono, 2021). Contemporary discussion on presence does not quite address other sensory modalities; in particular, the phenomenology of touch is hardly discussed in this context. But touch is the sensory modality in which objects are most obviously given as present. Starting from this observation, in this paper I propose to model the sense of presence involved in vision on the tactile sense of presence. My proposal is based on, and draws upon, some important phenomenological similarities between vision and touch: in a nutshell, that they both involve a sensory field, given as subjective, that needs to be transparent for objects to be (re)presented.