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Molyneux's questions - from the philosophical problem of representation to intermodal transfer

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Fazekas P., Zemplen G.

Magyar Pszichologiai Szemle (Hungarian Psychological Review)

2005

vol. 60

issue 4

527-552

The article investigates some of the major themes in the history of psychology and philosophy in connection with the Molyneux-question. The first section investigates the philosophical debates concerning the theoretical possibility of recovery from blindness. The authors show the several connections of 17th- and 18th-century replies to earlier (at times even Aristotelian and Epicurean) perceptual theories, discuss replies by Locke, Berkeley, Reid, Diderot, and others. The development of surgical techniques and how the Molyneux-question (originally a thought-experiment) was instrumental in the development of experimental procedures based on the analysis of cases reported by Cheselden, Home and Franz is discussed. The recognition of critical periods in perceptual development and research on cortical plasticity in the last decades questioned the fruitfulness of the original query by Molyneux. As a result, the original formulation of the question has ceased to be instrumental to the progress of research, and, instead, several reformulations have taken its place. On a more abstract level, the question has been reinterpreted as addressing the intermodal transfer: (how) can tactile and visual representations interact? Classical experiments by Meltzoff and Moore, Streri and Gentaz show intermodal transfer days after birth. Apart from reviewing these results, in the last section the authors discuss two theoretical frameworks: the one proposed by Monique Radeau, where from an amodal sensory system of newborns a gradual differentiation gives rise to the specific modalities, and the one recently termed 'sensorimotor' approach by Kevin O'Regan és Alva Noë, rejecting traditional representation-based views and stressing sensorimotor contingencies and active exploration of the environment. In their analysis the authors show that even in these novel frameworks there is no trivial answer to the modified Molyneux-question addressing intermodality. Finally a suggestion is made to reconstruct Molyneux's original question as a neurological one in such a way that the question might once more receive genuine interest from experimental approaches.

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1 Magyar Pszichologiai Szemle (Hungarian Psychological Review)

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1 Fazekas P.

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Molyneux's questions - from the philosophical problem of representation to intermodal transfer