What are Senses and Sense Modalities?

Abstract

Abstract Perceptual experiences not only have cognitive aspects, through which we acquire information about some objects, but sensory aspects, through which we experience how the object appears. In the traditional view, the sensory aspects have been reduced to sensations or senses, which have the function of supplying materials for cognition. Against this view, E. Strauss characterized sensing as a kind of “communication” with the world in a pathetic dimension and each sense modality as a way of embodied “Being in the world” in its own way. My paper tries to combine this phenomenological view of senses with the ecological approach of J.J. Gibson, according to which senses are considered as perceptual systems. With this attempt at an ecological phenomenology, the paper focuses on the embodiment dimension of perceptual experiences and clarifies the multi-dimensional and multi-sensory character of various perceptual experiences.