We do not have 5 senses. Psychologist J.J. Gibson (1979) argued, we have outward-orientated (exteroceptive) senses and inward-orientated (interoceptive) senses. But there are bodily senses that dancers and athletes know about that psychologists are only now getting to grips with. Proprioception is our awareness of our body's position in space, and the vestibular sense is concerned with balance. Kinaesthesia is the sense of movement through space. I write about these somatic senses in a forthcoming article 'Haptic Geographies' for Progress in Human Geography (Paterson, forthcoming) and in a review essay for Society and Space entitled 'Charting the Return to the Senses' (Paterson 2008).

These bodily (somatic) senses inform our perception of 'inside' and 'outside,' of inner and outer space. Rather than discrete and separate, these senses act in concert to help give us our embodied perceptions of space. Touch is not only of the skin surface, but also involves the tactile-muscular and tactile-kinaesthetic senses, and these are inherently spatial.

The notion of ‘haptic space’ is not based purely on touch alone, nor on the duality between toucher and touched. It is “an orientation to sensuality as such that includes all senses” as Iris Marion Young in Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays (1990) phrases it. Following French philosopher Luce Irigaray, Young states:

Touch immerses the subject in fluid continuity with the object, and for the touching subject the object reciprocates the touching, blurring the border between self and other...

Thus we might conceive a mode of vision, for example, that is less a gaze, distanced from and mastering its object, but an immersion in light and color. Sensing as touching is within, experiencing what touches it as ambiguous, continuous, but nevertheless differentiated.

This is an example of the multisensory nature of our perception. We never perceive by vision alone; in fact, percipere means 'to grasp'. We have many expressions about 'knowing' that invoke touch, such as wanting a 'hands on' experience. Especially in our relation to 'things', we desire to know them through closeness and the mediation of our touch.

"Seeing is believing, but feeling's the truth." We get to know objects, things in the world, through touch. We engage with the world proximally through touch, rather than merely encounter it in distanced, abstracted vision alone.

After art historian Alois Reigl's haptic/optic distinction, Deleuze & Gauttari also widen the definition of haptic space in A Thousand Plateaus (1988), implying the ability to communicate or evoke touch by other means, for example Cézanne’s artwork. This haptic space is discussed by geographer Paul Rodaway (1994:55), who suggests that "each space and place discerned, or mapped, haptically is in this sense our space and because of the reciprocal nature of touch we come to belong to that space." Cartesian optics leads to a sense of detachment from the world, from the thingness of things, and this is exemplified in the camera obscura and the perspective machines in use during the Renaissance (e.g. Crary 1990).

This detachment is of the eye, whereas the hand draws us into the world. Henri Focillon for example beautifully argues 'In Praise of Hands':

Sight slips over the surface of the universe. The hand knows that an object has physical bulk, that it is smooth or rough, that it is not soldered to heaven or earth from which it appears to be inseparable. The hand's action defines the cavity of space and the fullness of the objects which occupy it. Surface, volume, density and weight are not optical phenomena. Man first learned about them between his finger and the hollow of his palm. He does not measure space with his eyes but with his hands and feet. The sense of touch fills nature with mysterious forces. Without it, nature is like the pleasant landscapes of the magic lantern, slight, flat and chimerical
[Focillon 1989:162-163]

CRARY, J. (1990) Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (London, MIT Press)

DELEUZE, G & GAUTTARI, F (1988) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Tr. B Massumi (London, Athlone)

FOCILLON, Henri (1989) The Life of Forms in Art, Tr. C B Hogan & G Kubler (London, Zone)

GIBSON, James J. (1979) The ecological approach to visual perception (London, Houghton Mifflin)

PATERSON, Mark (2008) 'Charting the Return to the Senses', Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 26(3), pp. 563-69

PATERSON, Mark (In Press) 'Haptic Geographies', Progress in Human Geography

RODAWAY, Paul (1994) Sensuous Geographies: Body, sense and place (London, Routledge).

YOUNG, Iris Marion (1990) Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Philosophy and Social Theory (Bloomington, Indiana University Press)