The Spatiality of Haptic Touch and Tactual Filling-in

There is a puzzle concerning haptic touch that has by and large gone unnoticed in the philosophical and psychological literature. This puzzle arises from a tension between two claims concerning the spatial phenomenology of haptic perceptual experience: first, that we experience the objects of haptic perception as spatially continuous unified items; second, that we are limited to specific points of contact with such objects in any given moment of haptic perceptual experience. My contention in this paper will be that to solve the resulting puzzle we need to draw on a sufficiently clarified notion of what I call tactual filling-in, and an understanding of this notion in terms of the relation between haptic touch and peripersonal space.