One possibility is that the sense of touch, while distinct from proprioception, nevertheless always involves it (O’Shaughnessy 1998, 2000; Ratcliffe 2008). Since proprioception is nothing other than awareness of the location and orientation of our own bodies, there is a strong sense in which touch nearly always involves awareness of the body. Citing groundbreaking work on the relation between tactual and bodily awareness by Merleau-Ponty (2002), Gibson (1966), and Martin (1992), Ratcliffe (2012) offers a detailed overview of the ways in which touch seems to bring both an awareness of things external to the body and of the body itself.  The body is that by which we measure the features of things in the external world, and so is always present in our awareness of things through touch. There are many reasons for thinking of this connection as relatively weak. There are plausible examples, like playing sports or quickly touching objects, where we seem to have external awareness through touch but no direct bodily awareness (Scott 2001).[3]