The Senses and the History of Philosophy; edited by Brian Glenney and José Filipe Silva Format: Pinched_Crown (174 × 246 mm); Style: Handbook_1; Font: Bembo; Dir: //integrafs5/TFB/2-Pagination/TSHP_RAPS/ApplicationFiles / 9781138738997_text.3d; Created: 29/01/2019 @ 15:47:14 15 MOLYNEUX’S QUESTION Out of touch with the “world of the blind” Brian Glenney Might a person with blindness whose sight is restored visually identify shapes known to their touch at the moment of sight restoration? 1 The 300-year history of this question, known as Molyneux’s question, has produced a cluster of forward-moving philosophical theories, experimental designs, and publicization of important medical breakthroughs for people with blindness (Degenaar 1996). The question itself was inspired by just such a cluster of progressive aspirations, as William Molyneux, the creator of the problem, was an ardent supporter of empiricism, experimenting on numerous problems in optics including the problem of convergence in double vision, and finally attempting various cures for his own wife’s late blindness. Yet two philosophical failures permeate its discussion: 1. Testimonial injustice: Direct testimony from people with blindness is ignored, misconstrued, or relegated (Barnes 2016; Schillmeier 2006; Kleege 2005). 2. Content/Vehicle conflation: The sensory vehicles of the senses of sight and touch are often conflated with the sensory contents produced by sight and touch (Millikan 1991). My aim here is to present two novel answers to Molyneux’s question from people with blindness that correct these failures. 2 This contribution, like so much of the history of philosophy, hopes to rewrite history and chart a wider future horizon, which is one of the aims of the series in which this current volume appears. I begin by considering Thérèse-Adèle Husson’s “Reflections on the Moral and Physical Condition of the Blind” (1825), a memoir by a woman with blindness, for educating people with sight about people with blindness, a section of which I read as a “none” answer to Moly- neux’s question—an answer by a person with blindness who knows that their perspective is marginalized. 3 In the second section of this chapter, I consider Pierre Villey’s “The World of the Blind” (1930), a memoir by a man with blindness intended to correct various misconceptions of blindness, which includes a novel “inverse question” answer to Molyneux’s question that asks about the nature of new tactile experience. In the third section, I translate these answers into an avoidance strategy for the vehicle–content conflation fallacy, one that invalidates many answers including a most popular and egregious species of answer to Molyneux’s question that claims people with blindness lack spatial concepts altogether, a line of thought from Platner (1793) to Lotze (1887) to von Senden (1932). 267