How sensations get their names

Abstract

There are normally four elements in any perceptual experience: a sensation or sensations, some cognitive state or states (i.e., belief states), an affective state or states (liking/disliking, among others), and some overt behavioral state or states.' The traditional theory in philosophy has been that of these four states the most important is the sensation. It is the having of a certain kind of sensation which determines what kind of perceptual experience we are undergoing. We determine what kind of sensation state we are having simply by having it, reidentify it when it recurs, and name the associated perceptual state accordingly. It is because we have visual sensations that we say we see. It is because blind people don't have these sensations that we say they don't see. It is because auditory sensations are so different from visual ones and both are so different from tactile ones, and so forth, that we say we have five (or more) kinds of perceptual experiences. And it is because the visual sensation of red is so different from the visual sensation of blue that we say one is the experience of red, the other of blue, and the like. It is because we have red sensations when confronted by certain objects that we ascribe the property "red" to those objects. Perceiving, according to this traditional theory, is essentially a sensory state. Understanding the sensation and its phenomenal properties is essential to understanding perception. I believe this picture of perceptual experiences to be quite wrong. I will argue that sensations are the least important element in perceptual experiences; that far from the nature of the sensation determining the nature of the experience, it is the nature of the experience, itself determined otherwise, that determines how we categorize the sensation: that rather than naming the sensation as a visual experience, say, simply by having it, we first name the perceptual experience, and insofar as sensations have names, they take them from the sorts of perceptual experi-