'Molyneux's question' asks, "if a man born blind can feel the differences between shapes such as spheres and cubes, could he similarly distinguish those objects by sight if given the ability to see?"
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PARIS: A conundrum about human perception has stumped philosophers and scientists alike since it was first articulated by an Irish politician in a letter to John Locke 323 years ago. But French scientists now claim that they have it solved.
Imagine, William Molyneux wrote to the great British thinker, that a man blind from birth who has learned to identify objects - a sphere and a cube, for example - only through his sense of touch is suddenly able to see. The puzzle, he continued, is "Whether he Could, by his Sight, and before he touch them, know which is the Globe and which the Cube?"
For philosophers of the time, answering 'Molyneux's question', as it was known ever after, would resolve a fundamental uncertainty about the human mind.
'Nurture vs. nature'
Empiricists believed that we are born blank slates, and become the sum total of our accumulated experience. So-called 'nativists' countered that our minds are, from the outset, pre-stocked with ideas waiting to be activated by sight, sound and touch.
If a blind man who miraculously recovered his sight could instantly distinguish the cube from the globe it would mean the knowledge was somehow innate, they argued.
More recently, this 'nurture vs. nature' debate has found its counterpart in modern neuroscience. "The beauty of Molyneux's question is that it also relates to how representations are formed in the brain," said Pawan Sinha, a professor at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston and the main architect of the study.
"Do the different modalities, or senses, build up a common representation, or are these independent representations that one cannot access even though the other modality has built it?" he asked.
Finding the cured blind
Recent studies have suggested that the mental images we accumulate through sight and touch do, in fact, form a common pool of impressions that can be triggered and retrieved by one sense or the other. But until now, no one has been able to design a definitive experiment.
The problem was finding subjects. They would have to have been blind at birth and then have had their sight restored, but not until they were old enough to reliably participate in tests. Most forms of curable congenital blindness, however, are detected and cured in infancy, so such individuals are extremely rare.
More precisely, they are rare in rich countries. So in 2003, Sinha set up a program in India in cooperation with the Shroff Charity Eye Hospital in New Delhi.
defintion
Wouldn't it be 'tactilely' rather than 'tactically?'
Editing suggestion
I believe the word is tactilely rather than 'tactically,' as in "the data blind people gather tactilely …"