Perception

Does synesthesia have any significant implication for philosophies of perception?

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Synesthesia is a phenomenon in which the activation of one sensory modality leads to experiences in a second sensory modality: one common form of synesthesia is the perception of letters or numbers as inherently colored. This phenomenon has, I think, received relatively little attention from philosophers--although there are related remarks scattered throughout Wittgenstein's 'later' writings--in part because after years of neglect by psychologists, it has only relatively recently begun to receive sustained attention from them. Consideration of the phenomenon may well offer insights into a range of questions in the philosophy of mind, including the philosophy of perception, such as: the relation between different sensory modalities; whether different sensory modalities represent the world differently; and even the nature of consciousness, insofar as one problem for accounts of consciousness is explaining the experience of sensible qualities--sometimes called 'qualia', for qualitative experiences, a topic that consideration of synesthesia might well illuminate.

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