Daniel Kim and Daniel Garcia
Affiliation: University of York
Category: Philosophy
Keywords: Touch, Phenomenology, Bodily awareness, Spatial properties, Sense of reality
Date: Thursday 4th of September
Time: 18:30
Location: Room 154 (154)
View the full session: The Senses
In contemporary philosophy of perception, it is widely accepted that touch provides an awareness of the body as a bounded entity (Martin, 1992; 1993; 1995; De Vignemont, 2017; De Vignemont and Massin, 2015; Skrzypulec, 2022; 2024; Serrahima, 2023). This sense of bodily boundedness is typically understood as involving both an awareness of the limits of the body and an awareness of the wider space against which the body is located.
This paper challenges the prevailing view by offering an alternative account of the sense of bodily boundedness that better aligns with the phenomenology of touch and the body. We argue that the notion of bodily boundedness is not grounded in touch itself but arises through an abstraction from sensory experience, which takes the body as an object among other worldly entities. Drawing on insights from the Phenomenological tradition, we suggest that touch is primarily a non-boundary sense, differing from other sense modalities like vision, which clearly demarcate the perceiver from the perceived (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2012).
This challenges two key arguments for the claim that touch provides an awareness of the body as bounded: (1) the bipolarity of tactile sensation and (2) the role of the long-term body image.
The first argument holds that tactile sensations phenomenally ground the limits of the body (O’Shaughnessy 1989, 1995; Martin 1992, 1993; De Vignemont 2017; Serrahima 2023). On this view, tactile sensations are bipolar in that they inform us both about external objects and about our own bodies as distinct entities, allowing attention to shift between the external and internal poles of sensation (Martin, 1992). Proponents argue that this dual nature of touch underlies our experience of the body as standing within a larger space, thereby grounding the sense of bodily boundaries.
While this account explains why, in touch, the body is experienced as distinct from what it comes into contact with, it fails to fully capture the phenomenology of tactile experience. In particular, it overlooks the fact that, in tactual perception, the body is not primarily an ‘object’ of perception but the ‘medium’ through which tangible objects (e.g., apples, tables) and properties (e.g., hardness, softness) are experienced. This mediating role of the body contributes to shaping the phenomenology of touch. For instance, when using a pen effortlessly, the hand typically remains inconspicuous. However, if the hand begins to ache or itch, this shift in bodily self-awareness alters how the pen is experienced – it is no longer felt as a seamlessly usable tool but as something affected by discomfort.
The second argument posits that the sense of bodily boundedness is grounded in the fact that tactile sensations are felt as spatially located within the body even if they are not bipolar. According to this view, the long-term body image – a sub-personal representation of the body with relatively rich spatial content – underpins the localization of felt bodily sensations that entails the spatial awareness of bodily boundaries (De Vignemont & Massin, 2015; De Vignemont, 2017).
However, while the long-term body image may account for the localization of tactile sensations within bodily parts, it is unclear how its spatial content alone can give us knowledge of their location within the larger frame of reference of the space that lies outside the body (Campbell, 2021). Moreover, if the body image is understood as a sub-personal level psychological postulate, it cannot fully capture the ‘felt’ sense of bodily boundedness as a personal-level phenomenon.
We argue that existing accounts conflate the ‘fact’ of boundedness (the fact that the body, as a physical entity, has defined boundaries ending at the skin) with the ‘feeling’ of boundedness (the sense that the body is felt as bounded). While the former underlies tactile experience of external objects, it does not itself manifest in the phenomenology of touch.
This conflation stem, in part, from the assumption that the phenomenology of touch conforms to visually accessible boundaries between the body and the world. This privileging of sight over touch is itself rooted in the nature of vision itself, which inherently involves depth and distance, enabling a detachment between perceiver and perceived. Such detachment allows for the abstraction necessary to take the body as a distinct entity separate from the world (Jonas, 1954). By contrast, touch does not provide such a clear demarcation between subject and object (Ratcliffe, 2013).
We propose an alternative account of bodily awareness in touch – one that does not presuppose awareness of the body as a bounded object. In touch, we are aware of our bodies while simultaneously having a sense of space extending beyond them. This is not because tactile sensations have a dual structure or are represented as spatially located within bodily parts, but rather because tactual experience already incorporates the possibilities of perceiving a space through other sense modalities (e.g., visible space). On this account, the tactile awareness of bodily space is shaped and constrained by the spatial domains of other senses implicated in touch, which remain inaccessible in tactual experience itself.
While the notion of bodily boundedness relies on an abstraction that touch alone does not provide, we argue that this very capacity for abstraction presupposes a more fundamental, pre-reflective integration of intersensory possibilities – one that grounds our sense of reality and habitual familiarity with the world through touch.
Touch grounds the sense of reality and other sense modalities build on that to provide a derivative sense of reality, which involves presenting reality as a matter of object-properties (De Vignemont & Massin, 2015). We claim that this is an abstraction from the fundamental sense of reality of touch. And we suggest that this derivative sense of reality as instantiated by properties is what grounds the idea of the body as having spatial boundaries, where having boundaries as physical attributes is a matter of having certain spatial properties like location, extension, and continuity (Skrzypulec, 2024).