We represent shape in both sight and touch, but how do these abilities relate to one another? This issue has been discussed in the context of Molyneux's question of whether someone born blind could, upon being granted sight, identify shapes visually. Some have suggested that we might look to real-world cases of sight restoration to illuminate the relation between visual and tactual shape representations. Here, I argue that newly sighted perceivers should not be relied on in this way because they are unlikely to form the kinds of shape representations responsible for cross-modal recognition in normally sighted perceivers. I then argue that the available evidence makes a compelling case for the type identity view, on which the visual and tactual representations responsible for cross-modal recognition are type-identical.

中文翻译：

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在视觉和触觉中表现形状

我们用视觉和触觉来表示形状，但这些能力如何相互关联？这个问题已经在 Molyneux 提出的问题的背景下进行了讨论，即天生失明的人是否可以在获得视力后从视觉上识别形状。一些人建议我们可以看看现实世界的视力恢复案例来阐明视觉和触觉形状表示之间的关系。在这里，我认为不应该以这种方式依赖新近视力的感知器，因为它们不太可能形成负责正常视力感知器的跨模态识别的那种形状表示。然后我认为可用的证据为类型身份提供了令人信服的理由视图，负责跨模态识别的视觉和触觉表示是类型相同的。