She's Touch, Smell, Sight, Taste, and Sound

Evidence for the “Common Sense” of Aristotle in Modern Neuroscience and the
Application of that Understanding to Solving the Molyneux Problem

By Thomas Sundaram

05/12/10

Theory of Knowledge

Prof. Margarita Vega

Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology

The “Molyneux problem” has plagued philosophy since the time of Locke, and is considered unsolved

even today. The problem was posed in Locke's Essay on Human Understanding as follows: “Suppose

a Man born blind, and now adult, and taught by his touch to distinguish between a Cube, and a Sphere

of the same metal, and nighly of the same bigness, so as to tell, when he felt one and t'other; which is

the Cube, which the Sphere. Suppose then the Cube and Sphere placed on a Table, and the Blind Man

to be made to see. Qaere, Whether by his sight, before he touch'd them, he could now distinguish, and

tell, which is the Globe, which the Cube.”1 The character of the problem seems to present itself to an

empirical solution, but the complexity of developmental neurophysiology makes it difficult to say

anything definite about the matter. Experiments have been conducted with definite results, but they

seem to go either way; the question remains unresolved. The weight of the Molyneux question seems

to come down to this: is the modality of the sense of sight only developed by experience, or somehow

innately had even by the blind, but not brought into act by the defective organ of sense?

Various people have tried to answer this in equally various ways dependent upon their differing

philosophical presuppositions regarding human perception or their differing understanding of the

development of neurophysiology. In Locke's case, the answer was negative; Locke posited that the

senses come to be ordered in a healthy person through prior “experience”, so that for one born blind,

the senses would never develop, and there would be no ability to distinguish by sight; the modalities of

touch and sight would not be integrated. Berkeley thought the difference between the modalities was

arbitrary, and that therefore the newly-sighted person could immediately distinguish the difference.

Those favoring a passive understanding of sensation, either a simple or simple adverbial theory of

perception, concluded that the person would be able to tell the difference; these men usually posited an

innate knowledge of the difference and similarity in the senses. Such constitutes some of the different

philosophical attempts to answer the question.

Rather than being given a simple solution from experiment, this problem has required a more

1 Locke, John. Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Bk. II, ch. IX, para. 8
and more complex inquiry into the manner in which the brain interacts with the senses. Gallagher

(2000)2 proposes that one may answer Molyneux's problem by studying the perception-based behavior

of neonatal infants, saying that Locke's principles of empirical neurophysiology need to be revised to

account for the phenomenon that, firstly, infants seem to have organized intermodality even from birth;

that sense modalities communicate naturally; and that experience in one modality educates other

modalities. Despite these things, though, which would seem to evidence a positive answer, inasmuch

as they favor increased intermodality, Gallagher claims that the answer would in fact be negative,

because of the character of the circumstances of the patient. Neonatal infants are not equivalent to the

patient described by the problem itself; the child is not born blind, and thus does not go through the

same process. However, examining the development of neurons in the infant's cortical substrate, as

well as those in the substrate of the person born blind and now adult, one sees a strong deterioration in

the neuronal development, to the point that were the person given sight, they would be unable to tell the

difference; the necessary mental pathways would not be formed.

While Gallagher presents a very strong case, the jury is still out on the way in which one is to

interpret his basis as supporting his argument. This is not the weight of my paper, though. In the

process of coming to understand the problem, it has come to be viewed as more of a problem for

neuroscience than for philosophy. One wonders whether arbitrary philosophical theories can do

anything but speculate. It is true that there have been problems which, originally, were considered

philosophical in character, but have now come to be understood to pertain to the natural sciences.

While it may be the case that this may be answered through neuroscience, though, I would argue that a

strong understanding of the theory of the inner senses as put forward by Aristotle and developed

further by St. Thomas Aquinas, while not immediately answering the question, nevertheless gives a

strong indication as to where the problem's solution is to be located, how philosophy serves to

compliment neuroscience, and how one may investigate the possible solution on the basis of a

2 http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~gallaghr/molyneux.html
hypothetical necessity from the way sensation itself works. This will be achieved through an

understanding, specifically, of the common sense in its role as uniting the various diverse sensibles, of

the necessity of its being tied to a bodily organ inasmuch as it is concerned with particulars, and of the

necessity of that bodily organ being some processing center for the different modalities of sense data,

which according to reputable science is the brain.

In his investigation of the manner in which the human being senses, Aristotle describes the five

exterior senses with which we are very familiar: touch, smell, sight, taste, and sound. He also posits, in

addition to the usual five, four interior senses which act prior to the phantasm being received into the

immaterial intellect. These four “inner senses” are imagination, memory, the “common sense” and the

“estimative sense” (which in man, having been changed by his rationality, is the “cogitative sense.”)3

Of these, my interest, as said above, is principally in the common sense. The common sense takes the

data from the different sense modalities and combines them into the perception of one object,4 while

still allowing us to distinguish between them. For example, looking at my laptop, I realize that the keys

I am pressing are part of a larger thing which I can see and touch, my keyboard, or even that as I press

the “a” key, that this hardness I am touching and this black and white I am sensing inhere in the same

substantial thing. I am, by this sense, able to distinguish by sight the shape of the key which I touch.

This, of course, makes it of the greatest relevance to the Molyneux problem, which is concerned

precisely with these differing modalities. What Locke posits as being a function of some experience,

by which the different external senses “learn” their difference or similarity, and Berkeley posits as

being some nonexistent arbitrary distinction between the modalities of apprehending a sense object that

is itself unified, such that the five senses are only diverse in account, Aristotle posits as the act of some

sense fully formed in the perfect animal. Accordingly, inasmuch as the senses are thus more integrated

as powers, and it is not attributed to some mystical effect of experience which may or may not be

required to acquire sight on the basic level which even infants have, Aristotle's theory is able to avoid
3 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, P1-1 Q78 A4
4 Aristotle. De Anima, Bk. III, Pt. 2
the pitfalls presented even by modern neuroscience to Locke as studied by Gallagher; in fact, modern

neuroscience seems to support his answer in this respect and others which will be examined below.

Having recognized that the common sense need not be viewed as some acquired experience, but

as a power of sensation in the same way as the external senses can even be adequately formed in

infants, it is interesting to pursue those things which Aristotle determined about the different sensitive

powers. One of these things is that those powers prior to the intellect in operation, including those of

sensation, are all tied to bodily organs. Aristotle himself, according to Kemp and Fletcher (1993),5

posited the organ of the common sense to be the heart, but following the investigations of Galen, the

Medievals placed the common sense in the brain. The inner senses were the prevalent theory of

sensation for most of pre-Enlightenment history, and only ceased to be so because of misapprehensions

of how the theory depended upon this or that bodily organ, combined with a general distaste towards

Aristotle and the Scholastic movement held by most of the philosophers after Descartes, who was

reacting to a perceived stagnancy in the Scholastic investigation of things. Since then, the theory of the

inner senses has enjoyed little attention by modern science, which to this author seems an unfairness

grounded upon a combination of Aristotle's lack of press, chronological snobbery and a pathological

dislike of what has now been deemed obsolete. Yet in the investigation of Aristotle's deduction of the

existence of the common sense, there arises a somewhat poetic justice. Whereas Locke supposed that

the senses developed out of some “experience”, where it was never so clearly defined what sort of

cause that this experience is supposed to be in itself, Aristotle's theory, as developed into the Medieval

theory expressed by Aquinas, places the seat of the integration of the different sense modalities into a

bodily organ, and as far back as Galen posited it to be some part of the brain. In this sense, Aristotle is

already in accord with modern neuroscience.

Why, though, did Aristotle posit that the common sense requires a bodily organ? After all, it

could have been a lucky shot; a broken clock is right twice a day, and one could conceivably place what
5 The Medieval Theory of the Inner Senses, Simon Kemp and Garth J. O. Fletcher, The American Journal of Psychology,
Vol. 106, No. 4 (Winter, 1993), pp. 559-576
turns out to be brain function in the brain simply out of not seeing any other use to which it fits.

Aristotle himself, to be fair, missed, originally placing the organ of the inner senses as the heart. Yet

the fact that he should attribute an organ to this sense is itself a remarkable feat of understanding.

Sensation, according to Aristotle, is always of particulars. We see “this white”, we hear “this yelp”, we

smell “this odor.” Sensation is intentionally directed towards these particulars through the materiality

of the organ: the eye is the eye according to the final cause of seeing, and accordingly has such a form

and matter as to receive the impressions of the thing through the medium of light, receiving the form

but not the matter of the thing. It pertains to the reception of particular, material impressions that the

organ be a particular, material organ; thus he describes even the methodology of sensation in terms of

the moist and the dry, where the moist is more apt to receive sensations, but not retain, whereas the dry

is more apt to retain, but not receive. Accordingly he posits the imagination, that by which the

sensational images are retained, as an inner sense; because to posit it, as others have, as a function of

the external senses which receive the sense impressions would be to attribute two principles (the moist

and the dry) of two exclusively different functions in the same organ, which would be difficult to

justify, to say the least. Seeing that the impressions of the five senses have not left the level of the

particular until they reach the immaterial intellect, which is concerned with universals, he deduces that

the organs of the inner senses remain on the level of the material, and thus bodily. Thus, moving

rationally from function to principle, guided by a natural understanding of the manner in which other

things tend to work (which, while seemingly primitive, is no less true,) Aristotle deduces that the

common sense, this inner sense taken out of hypothetical necessity from the senses we observe we have

and the unity which we observe unites them, has a bodily organ.

Aristotle does not stop there, though. In order for the common sense to be truly “common”, it

must in some way know the objects of the other senses.6 This is obvious on a very basic level. If one

is attempting to unite several things, one must know, on a basic level, what those things are in some

6 Ibid
respect that allows their bringing-together; moreover, if one wants to divide some complex unity into

discrete components, one must know something of their differences. This much is fairly

straightforward, and since we know that the common sense has some bodily organ, one must expect

that that organ will be one in which the different data from the various sense modalities will be united.

Furthermore, it must be a bodily organ capable of acting on the different modal data, unifying and

distinguishing it according to intentionality. We now realize that the organ which interacts thus with

our sensational data is none other than the brain; moreover, the study of neuronal pathways in the

cortex connecting the senses is precisely the understanding through which Gallagher claims to answer

the Molyneux problem.7 This, in fact, is becoming the way to understand a great many different

diseases or syndromes concerning the unity or disparity of the different sense modalities: for example,

synaesthesia, the association with particular instances of one modality consistently with particular

instances of another, is widely believed to be an instance of the brain connecting too much, forming

excess neuronal pathways in the same cortex, connecting the sense modality, for example, of hearing

with the area concerned with governing our sensation of colors, so that people “hear” colors they see,

or “see” things they hear as floating colors, and recognize them as conjoined.

Perhaps this seems to be a very general claim, that the brain, in “dealing with” the various sense

modalities and their data as an organ, must therefore know the different data as different. This, though,

is not all of the picture. It is rather easy to think of the brain as an encasement of many different

machines, which could be operating each on their own data and then combining them later on in a

separate faculty. This, however, would not correspond with more recent research. In their studies of

synaesthesia, Ramachandran and Hubbard8 discovered a rather unique case: a colorblind synaesthete.

This man, who was “peripherally colorblind” (he could not perceive normally certain shades of color

due to a pigment deficiency in the eye,) nonetheless perceived certain numbers as “martian colors”,
7 Gallagher, Shaun. “Neurons and Neonates: Reflections on the Molyneux Problem” URL =
<http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~gallaghr/molyneux.html>
8 Ramachandran VS, Hubbard EM. “Synaesthesia: A window into perception, thought and language.” Journal of
Consciousness Studies 2001b; 12: 3-34
colors which to him seemed otherworldly. This, Ramachandran has proposed, is possible because

despite the deficiency in his eyesight, the man's V4 center, the part of the brain concerned with optical

processing, nevertheless was still in possession of the way to project colors not seen by the subject in

normal perception. The reader will recall that the brain, as the seat of the common sense, is supposed

to “know” the objects of the different senses by the philosophical inquiry. This is a dramatic

confirmation of this theory in a way Aristotle could never himself have deduced. Although the organs

of reception were deficient in their potency to receive, the common sense itself, possessing both a

cross-connection between sense modalities and the proper object of the sense itself as a function of its

role, provides the object! A thing cannot provide what it does not have, and the phantasm, as received

through the eyes, does not possess that color (unless one wants to posit an un-evidenced ability of the

organ of sense to receive what it positively lacks the means to receive); thus the human being in

sensation must, in some way, have the color without having the reception. This is not to say that

someone can know without first sensing, because the common sense is itself a sense. Furthermore,

Ramachandran proposes, the evidence indicates that children, initially, have a sort of total but indefinite

cross-connection, and that growth is not a process merely of “growing” neuronal connections, but

principally a “pruning” of those connections; thus, even a child possesses the common sense as

interrelated. This aligns very nicely with what Gallagher claims, that “perception is intermodal from

the very start.”

What this amounts to is that Aristotle, Ramachandran and Gallagher are speaking about the

same thing; Gallagher, in the hypothetical necessity of Aristotle's biology of sensation, is essentially

speaking about the common sense, according to the common understanding (that part of the brain

which combines the senses into one object) and positing that, materially, it is fully intermodalized at

infancy and only later becomes divided, by the senses adjusting to the requirements of human life; and

if a human being is blind, it makes logical sense to the author that the sense, not being used, acts as a

sort of dead weight, and the neural connections de-integrate themselves to adjust to the situation.
Gallagher claims as much; science corroborates, as he says in his paper, that “there is a critical period

of three to twelve weeks in early infancy in which visual experience is necessary for the proper

formation of ocular dominance columns in the visual cortex.“9 Furthermore, “as demonstrated

experimentally, neurons degenerate in animals deprived of vision or raised in the dark.“10 One must,

indeed, use it or lose it. Ramachandran corroborates the idea of the common sense further (probably

unintentionally) by explaining that the brain “knows” the proper objects of the senses, as, by analogy, a

processor has to know the programming language and the effect in order to produce the intended

program, and moreover, knows it in a more perfect way than the deficient sense organ, despite the idea

that the person who cannot sense a color cannot “think” that color. In fact, while they may not be able

to do so consciously, the case of the colorblind synaesthete reveals that their brain quite possibly can on

a subconscious level, even producing seemingly “alien” colors. In this case, then, to “know” the

objects is more than just the knowing one has, for example, in touching an unidentified surface; it is to

possess the object even to the degree that the brain can reproduce a color the subject has never

consciously seen.

This, then, confirms Aristotle's deduction of the common sense as knowing the different objects

in a dramatic and shocking way. Not only does it know them in the sense of acting on the proper

objects, it knows them in the sense of possessing them for projection even in the absence of a direct

sensation by which they may enter the brain as data. This, in itself, is enough to justify the continued

validity of Aristotle's postulation regarding the common sense, but in the spirit of scientific honesty,

one must investigate the whole situation: what is synaesthesia in respect of the common sense? As we

have said above, the common sense develops from infancy through a “pruning” of the mental

pathways.11 The common sense is thus “undeveloped”, but not from an absence of intermodality;

rather, it is from an excess. When these pathways do not get thus “pruned away” in a normal manner,

9 Ibid
10 Ibid
11 Ibid
the brain develops strange connections between the sense modalities. These connections constitute

synaesthesia. Thus, a case of synaesthesia is not a case of an “overdeveloped” common sense, but an

underdeveloped or improperly developed common sense. What does this mean for Locke and the

Molyneux problem? Locke is, according to Gallagher, incorrect in his reasoning but right in his

conclusion;12 it is not by some added experience by which the brain constitutes the sensations from the

absence thereof, but by a determination of the already existing but unrefined intermodality; the

common sense is present in all human beings, not as a developed experience, but as a pre-existing

faculty which is refined in growth, as a block of marble becomes a sculpture. Thus, the situation

whereby the answer is negative does not come from a complete absence of the coming-to-be of the

common sense, but rather the decay of the pre-existing but primordial immature common sense. Since

this can be shown neurologically, it is reasonable to conclude that the answer to Molyneux is negative,

as Gallagher does; moreover, since philosophically we understand this common sense to be a bodily

organ, which, like all bodily organs, decays and atrophies from lack of exercise, it is reasonable to

conclude this from Aristotle's theory of the common sense as being tied to a bodily organ.

As a postscript to what has been shown, it is interesting to see what this says about the embrace

of science and philosophy in even the most seemingly empirical investigations. What modern

neuroscience is only now “fleshing out”, Aristotle seems to have predicted in general in his own De

Anima from simply observing the manner in which our perceptions come to us, the character of

particularity and material, and the manner in which a bodily organ is necessitated in the life of a being.

This is not to argue that in particular investigations of, for example, neurons, the one is better than the

other, but to say that the one is complimentary with the other; empirical science provides the sense

knowledge of the reality of the thing, natural science postulates the material, efficient, formal, and

perhaps final causality of the thing as we experience it, and philosophy provides the investigation of the

ultimate causes of things naturally, which can coincide with natural science, but under a different

12 Ibid
notion, which is usually more general, but can sometimes be very specific, even to the point of

predicting the character of a particular brain function, while not necessarily going very far into its more

obscure methodology. If in fact the observations I have made are the case, and there is such a common

sense in the human person proven to be so by these connections, then this complementarity has, I think,

been well illustrated.