Sound and music are described most frequently in synaesthetic (2) terms, applying language of touch and texture - hard, soft, sharp, round, warm, smooth - to different tones and arrangements.Īs for vision, Descartes suggested that it was based in the tactile sense, essentially an extension of touch that, like a blind man's cane, probes the shapes and textures of his surroundings.3 Though his proposal is not truly scientific, it has indeed been observed that the blind, when they gain sight through surgery, can transfer tactile knowledge into visual knowledge. Hearing shares with touch both many aspects of the physiological process and much of the same language. Taste, certainly, is dependent on touch - not merely for the necessary physical contact, but also because of the role that texture plays in tasting.
Sight, hearing, smell, and taste depend emanations (i.e., chemicals, vibration, reflected light) that travel through an "intervening substance" such as air or water.2 Touch, on the other hand, places the sensing organ in direct contact with the sensed object.īeyond this lack of mediation, touch is distinguished by its position as the basic sense. There is no time-delay beyond nerve impulse, and no medium through which the stimulus travels between the subject and the object.
" Touch" most frequently refers to the sense of touch, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as "That sense by which a material object is perceived by means of the contact with it of some part of the body."1 It is associated with the hand, and the art of sculpture.Ĭompared to the other senses, touch is both immediate and unmediated. The former could even be viewed as evidence for the latter.ġ4 Oxford English Dictionary Online, "touch, n." 4.a.ġ7 Oxford English Dictionary Online, "sympathy, n." 3.b. 60ġ1 the Oxford English Dictionary offers for "feel" the amusingly circular definition, "to examine or explore by touch." Oxford English Dictionary Online, "feel, v." 1.ġ3 The last two seem to have a bit of overlap in prophecy, where the prophet could certainly be more than a bit of each. 63-84Ĩ Oxford English Dictionary Online, "touch, v." 2.a.ĩ Encyclopedia Britannica Online, "scrofula"ġ0 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, MIT Press, 1994, p. Wallace, "Recovery From Early Blindness" section 4,ĥ John 20:25, New Revised Standard VersionĦ Colossians 2:21, New Revised Standard Versionħ Bruno Latour, "A Few Steps Towards an Anthropology of the Iconoclastic Gesture," Science In Context No. and a." 5.a.ģ Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry, and Meterology, Hacket Publishing Company Inc., 2001 (1637), p.
MIT Press, 1994ġ Oxford English Dictionary Online, "touch, n." 3.a.Ģ Oxford English Dictionary Online, "medium, n. "A Few Steps Towards an Anthropology of the Iconoclastic Gesture," Science In Context No. The New Revised Standard Version (Anglicized Edition), Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America, 1989 "Recovery From Early Blindness," Experimental Psychology Society Monograph No. Hacket Publishing Company Inc., 2001 (1637) Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry, and Meterology.
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