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FLORENCE, Italy — WE think of our senses as hard-wired gateways to the world. Many years ago the social psychologist Daryl J. Bem described the knowledge we gain from our senses as "zero-order beliefs," so taken for granted that we do not even notice them as beliefs. The sky is blue. The fan hums. Ice is cold. That's the nature of reality, and it seems peculiar that different people with their senses intact would experience it subjectively. 意大利佛罗伦萨——我们把自己的感官想成是通往世界的既定大门。很多年前，社会心理学家达里尔·J·贝姆(Daryl J. Bem)把我们通过感官获取的认知描述成“零级信念”。它们被如此强烈地视为理所当然，以至于根本没有被我们留意到，这其实是一种信念。天空是蓝色的，风扇会发出嗡嗡声，冰是冷的。这是现实世界的本质，而感官完好的不同族群会对此有主观体验的想法，似乎有些奇怪。 Yet they do. In recent years anthropologists have begun to point out that sensory perception is culturally specific. "Sensory perception," Constance Classen, the author of "The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch," says, "is a cultural as well as physical act." It's a controversial claim made famous by Marshall McLuhan's insistence that nonliterate societies were governed by spoken words and sound, while literate societies experienced words visually and so were dominated by sight. Few anthropologists would accept that straightforwardly today. But more and more are willing to argue that sensory perception is as much about the cultural training of attention as it is about biological capacity. | 
