Conclusion

Abstract

This chapter recounts the arguments and conclusions reached in preceding chapters concerning the respects in which perception and perceptual consciousness involve the coordinated use of multiple senses. It provides a synopsis of considerations favoring a richly multisensory account of perceptual processes, capacities, awareness, and experience. It retraces the book’s approach to differentiating senses construed as bundles of perceptual capacities unified and distinguished by the manner in which they are exercised, and to distinguishing perception from extraperceptual cognition by means of the explanatory roles the distinction plays in empirical psychology, rational psychology, and phenomenology. It describes the theoretical consequences of multisensory perception, negative and positive, and it explains their significance. The chapter concludes with the implications and future directions for a multisensory philosophy of perception.