# Space, Time and Molyneux's Question  ## Metadata - Author: [[Louise Richardson]] - Full Title: Space, Time and Molyneux's Question - Category: #articles - Summary: insert summary - My notes: - Summary: The text discusses how perceptual experiences have spatial and temporal structures that can vary across senses. It explores how differences in spatial perception across modalities do not necessarily impact the objectivity of perception. The author uses Molyneux's Question to examine the relationship between spatial features of perception and objectivity. - URL: https://readwise.io/reader/document_raw_content/189777109 - Source File: SPACE, TIME AND MOLYNEUX’S QUESTION by Louise Richardson.pdf ## LLM Chats ## NotebookLM ## LLM Audio ## Highlights > It has seemed obvious to many that perceptual experiences are transparent: when we turn our attention to them, it ‘passes through’ to the mind-independent objects and properties that we perceive. But it is equally obvious that in so doing we find those objects and properties presented to us in certain ways: seeing a lemon and the shape of the lemon is phenomenally unlike per- ceiving those things by touch, for instance. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j1mdsqcq3aecmd93cz6f2hkj)) > Though it may be that the only things to which we can directly attend, in reflecting on our per- ceptual experiences, are the lemons, tables and suchlike that we perceive, in thus attending we become aware of the sense-specific structure or form ofour perceptual experiences ofthose objects and their properties. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j1mdtbb9hezp44j9a5am142k)) > At the heart of the structural explanation of ASYMMETRY is a > notion of the visual field quite different to that endorsed by the > proponent of the DSST explanation.17 > To understand this notion, > begin by thinking of the boundaries of the region of space that we > are, in some way, aware of in visual experience. The boundaries in > question are not best thought of as objects of awareness. They are > not further things that we see, as we see the edges of objects in the > field. And they are not the edges of some object or portion of > stuff. Instead, they are boundaries delimited by our own visual, > sensory limitations and we aware of them as such. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j1meakrba9jqmjeg3pk44r7w)) > Not only do we know that there is more space beyond our left shoulders, though we cannot see anything in that space without moving, but it seems to us, visually, as if there is more space beyond the boundaries. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j1mednfgkb160f2j8k3pg2c4)) > Tactile perceptual experience is quite different, spatially, from visual experience. I have, here, space only to remark positively on the spatial structure of visual experience. But (I hope) it suffices ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j1mefdh1bq6qh623j3w0sem7)) > to say about tactile experience only that its spatial structure is not like this. We are not, in touch, aware of a region of space within which we tactually perceive objects in just this way. We are aware of the things we perceive, tactually, as in contact with the bounda- ries of an object, namely, one’s body. The difference between vision and touch thus described is, we have said, a structural one. Why is ‘structural’ apt? For two reasons. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j1mef8ppgqvj6a0q1nh8bpx5)) > First, the difference is in how experiences are built or config- > ured, independently ofwhat they are experiences of. The features > in virtue of which vision has a spatial field, and in virtue of which > there is not, in this way, a tactile spatial field are, as Matthew > Soteriou puts it, ‘relatively invariant’.18 > They stay the same when > we re-arrange, change or take away the objects (and properties of > such objects) of which we are aware. And, across the senses, they > can differ when all the objects and their properties are the same. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j1mehg62kgqdwx53j9rpkfaw)) > Vision’s having its spatial field, on this view, is not a matter of our being aware of another object, or property of an object, in addition to, say, the lemon and the table and their properties. So there is no appropriate additional object or property of an object to attend to, when reflecting upon these structural features of perceptual experience. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j1mek0096q05feqa26z8c3ys)) > Nevertheless, we find these structural features in attending to the worldly objects and properties. This reflects the fact that structural features are features of the way we are aware of the objects of experience and their properties: in the case of vision, we are aware of the lemon and the table as occupying and extending into a region of space within which things can be seen. In touch, we are not aware of the lemon, or of anything else, in this way. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j1mekahwqa89rvf8vty3qaw0))