Molyneux's Question Reconsidered

• Main Authors: Lai, Wen, 賴文
• Other Authors: Cheng, Hsi Heng
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2013
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/85579159856690770468

碩士 === 國立清華大學 === 哲學研究所 === 101 === My aim in this MA thesis is to reconsider Molyneux’s question which was originally proposed by John Locke in 1689. I intend to use enactive approach’s key concepts developed by Alva Noë to reexamine this issue. The basic claim of enactive approach is that sensory stimulation alone is not sufficient to produce perceptual experience. Human subject can acquire perceptual experience only if they possess and exercise sensorimotor knowledge. Noë also argued that every sensory modality of human subject is governed by its own corresponding sensorimotor knowledge. At an appropriate level of abstraction, tactile and visual sensorimotor knowledge are isomorphic to each other. This is a key reason for Noë to give a positive answer to Molyneux’s question. However, according to my interpretation, Noë’s assertion is not qualified to claim that the newly-sighted person can identify immediately an object whether it is a cube or a sphere. Noë’s answer is subjected to certain important qualifications: the newly-sighted person has to move or being moved in order to learn sensorimotor knowledge of vision. Noë’s contribution to this question is that he asserts vision can directly acquire spatial experience like touch does, and that the spatial content which vision acquire has inner connection to the previous tactile experience. I try to argue that tactile and visual sensorimotor knowledge are isomorphism, because the subject already has one and only has one behavioral space. Enactive approach implicitly contains the theory of behavioral space developed by Gareth Evans. I also maintain that although both Noë and Evans answered Molyneux’s question positively, Evans’s theory do not support a positive answer. In contrast, Noë’s theory does. Molyneux’s question has two aspects: theoretical one and experiential one. I try to indicate that the result of experiment which removed cataract to restore sight cannot offer a negative answer to the experiential question. I claim that only the experiment on infants can prove that the answer to Molyneux’s question is probably “Yes”. But apparently there exists a conflict between the evidence from infants and Noë’s theory. I show that we can modify Noë’s theory to mitigate this conflict.