Problemistics Notebook : Sensation

Sensation

Definition (Longman Lexicon of Contemporary English)
Definition (Deobold B. Van Dalen)
Definition (Russell L. Ackoff and Fred E. Emery)
Sensation and perception (William James)
Sensation and perception (L. E. Bourne and B. R. Ekstrand)
Classification of senses (Encyclopaedia Britannica)
Classification of senses (Julian E. Hochberg)
Classification of senses (Stafford Beer)
Classification of senses (Richard D. Gross)
Function of senses (Adam Ferguson)
Senses and experience (John Dewey)
Present sensation and past experiences (J. Z. Young)
Errors of senses (Francis Bacon)
From stimuli to knowledge (Thomas S. Kuhn)
Sensation and knowledge (Richard Neutra)
Education of senses (Karl Marx)

Definition

[1981] Longman Lexicon of Contemporary English
"Sensation : the power of feeling in the body.” (F2, p.237)

[1979, First Edition 1962] Deobold B. Van Dalen, Understanding Educational Research
“Sensation is the immediate result of a stimulus to the sense organs: a sound, a smell, or a visual experience. This information is not useful unless it is interpreted. One can hear a sound, but it remains a mere noise until one learns to identify it as the ringing of the telephone, rumbling of thunder, or mewing of the cat.” (Chapter 3, p. 42)

[1972] Russell L. Ackoff and Fred E. Emery, On Purposeful Systems
“Sensation : a response by a subject to a change in one of his structural properties.” (Chapter II, p. 68)

Sensation and perception

[1890] William James, The Principles of Psychology
“The words Sensation and Perception ... name processes in which we cognize an objective world; both (under normal conditions) need the stimulation of incoming nerves ere they can occur; Perception always involves Sensation as a portion of itself; and Sensation in turn never takes place in adult life without Perception also being there. They are therefore names for different cognitive functions, not for different sorts of mental fact. The nearer the object cognized comes to being a simple quality like ‘hot’, ‘cold’, ‘red’, ‘noise’, ‘pain’, apprehended irrelatively to other things, the more the state of mind approaches pure sensation. The fuller of relations the object is, on the contrary; the more it is something classed, located, measured, compared, assigned to a function, etc., etc.; the more unreservedly do we call the state of mind a perception, and the relatively smaller is the part in it which sensation plays.
Sensation, then, so long as we take the analytic point of view, differs from Perception only in the extreme simplicity of its object or content. Its function is that of mere acquaintance with a fact. Perception’s function, on the other hand, is knowledge about a fact; and this knowledge admits of numberless degrees of complication. But in both sensation and perception we perceive the fact as an immediately present outward reality, and this makes them differ from ‘thought and ‘conception’, whose objects do not appear present in this immediate physical way.”
(Ch. XVII - Sensation: Sensation and Perception Distinguished)

[1985, Fifth edition] L. E. Bourne and B. R. Ekstrand, Psychology
“Sensation is generally used in reference to the immediate effects of incoming stimulation impinging on some sense organ and includes the activity of the sense organ itself. In contrast, perception is used in reference to the aftermath of receptor activity, that is, the processes that follow stimulation and engage the organism’s more central cognitive functions.”
“Simply put, sensation refers to the reception of information input from the external environment, and perception refers to the further processing, interpretation and utilization of that input.” (Chapter 3, p. 74)

Classification of senses

[1982] Encyclopaedia Britannica: Human Sensory Reception
- Cutaneous (skin) senses
- Kinesthetic (motion) senses
- Vestibular sense (equilibrium)
- Taste (gustatory) sense
- Smell (olfactory) sense
(vol.16, p. 547)

[1964] Julian E. Hochberg, Perception
“We observe the world through our several senses or modalities of sensation.
1. The distance senses : seeing and hearing;
2. The skin senses : touch, warmth, cold, pain, and the closely related chemical senses of taste and smell;
3. The deep senses : position and motion of muscles and joints (kinesthesis), the senses of equilibration (vestibular), and the senses of the internal organs.” (Chapter 2, pp. 6-7)

[1972] Stafford Beer, Brain of the Firm
- Telereceptors : eyes, ears
- Chemical receptors : taste and smell
- Cutaneous receptors : touch
- Exteroceptors : warm, cold
- Interoceptors : internal states of the organism
- Visceroceptors : about viscera
- Proprioceptors : kinaesthetic sense
(Chapter 7, pp. 131-132)

[1993, Second edition] Richard D. Gross, Psychology. The Science of Mind and Behaviour

Sense modality Sense organ

   - Vision (Sight)                                                  Eye
   - Audition (Hearing)                                        Outer/Middle/Inner Ear
   - Gustation (Taste)                                           Tongue
   - Olfaction (Smell)                                            Nose
   - Cutaneous Senses (Touch)                           Skin
   - Kinaesthetic & Vestibular Senses                Inner Ear

(Part III, Chapter 8 : Sensory Processes, p. 205)

Function of senses

[1767] Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society
“To receive the information of sense, is perhaps the earliest function of an animal combined with an intellectual nature; and one great accomplishment of the living agent consists in the force and sensibility of his animal organs.”
(Part One, Section V, Of Intellectual Powers)

Senses and experience

[1979, First Published 1934] John Dewey, Art as Experience
"The senses are the organs through which the live creature participates directly in the ongoings of the world about him. In this participation the varied wonder and splendour of this world are made actual for him in the qualities he experiences."
"Since sense-organs with their connected motor-apparatus are the means of this participation, any and every derogation of them, whether practical or theoretical, is at one effect and cause of a narrowed and dulled life-experience."
(Chapter II, p. 22)

Present sensation and past experiences

[1951] J. Z. Young, Doubt and Certainty in Science
“Contrary to what we may suppose, the eyes and brain do not simply record in a sort of photographic manner the pictures that pass in front of us. The brain is not by any means a simple recording system like a film.”
“Many of our affairs are conducted on the assumption that our sense organs provide us with an accurate record, independent of ourselves. What we are now beginning to realize is that much of this is an illusion; that we have to learn to see the world as we do.” (Fourth Lecture, p. 66)
“In trying to speak about what the world is like we must remember all the time that what we see and what we say depends on what we have learned; we ourselves come into the process.” (Sixth Lecture, p. 108)

Errors of senses

[1620] Francis Bacon, Novum Organon
“... by far the greatest impediment and aberration of the human understanding proceeds from the dullness, incompetency, and errors of the senses; since whatever strikes the senses preponderates over everything, however superior, which does not immediately strike them.” (First Book, Aphorism 50)

From stimuli to knowledge

[1970, Second Ed. Enlarged] Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
"... the route from stimulus to sensation is in part conditioned by education. Individuals raised in different societies behave on some occasions as though they saw different things.” (p. 193 - Postscript 1969)
“What is built into the neural process that transforms stimuli to sensations has the following characteristics: it has been transmitted through education; it has, by trial, been found more effective than its historical competitors in a group’s current environment; and, finally, it is subject to change both through further education and through the discovery of misfits with the environment. Those are characteristics of knowledge.” (p. 196 - Postscript 1969)

Sensation and knowledge

[1954] Richard Neutra, Survival through Design
“Sensory perception merely ushers in an automatic process of higher brain activity. The entire associative machinery of the mind is bound to be set in motion. From beginning to end our emotions are co-activated.” (p. 78)
“... a large part of what laymen consider a sensory occurrence may in reality involve higher mental activity and represent a performance based on many preceding purposive experiences, sedimented in us over a long stretch of time.” (p. 179)

Education of senses

Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
"Man is affirmed in the objective world not only in the act of thinking, [VIII] but with all his senses."
"... the meaning of an object for me goes only so far as my sense goes."
"Only through the objectively unfolded richness of man's essential being is the richness of subjective human sensibility (a musical ear, an eye for beauty of form - in short, senses capable of human gratification, senses affirming themselves as essential powers of man) either cultivated or brought into being. For not only the five senses but also the so-called mental senses, the practical senses (will, love, etc.), in a word, human sense, the human nature of the senses, come to be by virtue of its object, by virtue of humanised nature. The forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present."

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