tactuality

English

Etymology

tactual +‎ -ity

Noun

tactuality (countable and uncountable, plural tactualities)

1. The quality of being tactual (relating to the sense of touch); that which concerns or is characterized by touch.
   • 1858, William Robinson Pirie, An Inquiry into the Constitution, Powers, and Processes of the Human Mind, Aberdeen: A. Brown, Chapter 7, p. 398,^[1]

     […] we are just as conscious of a cause of vision as of a cause of tactual feeling, and it is not improbable that we have even a sense of tactuality, if we may so speak, in the secondary sensations.

   • 1949, Oets Kolk Bouwsma, “Descartes’ Evil Genius” in Alexander Sesonske and Noel Fleming (eds.), Meta-Meditations: Studies in Descartes, Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1965, p. 32,^[2]

     Each heard with the same ear what the other heard. For every sniffing of the one nose there were two identical smells, and there were two tactualities for every touch.

   • 1971, Ashley Montagu, Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin, New York: Columbia University Press, Chapter 5, p. 170,^[3]

     […] what [Sigmund Freud] calls infant sexuality appears to be, as Lawrence Frank has observed, largely tactuality.

Synonyms

• tactility