Dr Adrian Alsmith: 'Distal touch and the sensational model'

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In a wide variety of cases, we engage our sense of touch to perceive the tangible world at a distance from our bodies by means of some mediating object. There is a long history of characterising such cases of ‘distal touch’ in terms of what might be called the ‘sensational model of touch’, according to which tactual perception involves experiencing sensations located in parts of one's body in contact with the objects of our tactual experience. This yields the remarkable claim (often made, and all the more frequently of late) that distal touch involves distal bodily sensations, i.e., sensations apparently located beyond the boundaries of the biological body. The aim of this paper is to show why a sensational model of distal touch is mistaken. I regiment disparate remarks about distal bodily sensations into two kinds of account, illusion accounts and extension accounts. I show that each of these fails to meet one of three plausible desiderata for an account of distal touch: its epistemic capacity (not met by illusion accounts), its diversity (not met by extension accounts) and its phenomenology (met by both). I suggest the outlines of an account which can capture all three without positing distal bodily sensations, suggesting new directions in the study of this remarkable capacity.