Representing shape in sight and touch

Abstract

We represent shape in both sight and touch, but how do these abilities relate to one another? This issue has been discussed in the context of Molyneux’s question of whether someone born blind could, upon being granted sight, identify shapes visually. Some have suggested that we might look to real-world cases of sight restoration to illuminate the relation between visual and tactual shape representations. Here I argue that newly sighted perceivers should not be relied on in this way because they are unlikely to form the kinds of shape representations responsible for cross-modal recognition in normally sighted perceivers. I then argue that the available evidence makes a compelling case for the type identity view, on which the visual and tactual representations responsible for cross-modal recognition are type-identical.