Sounds and temporality

Oxford Studies in Metaphysics 5:303-320 (2010)
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Abstract

What is the relationship between sounds and time? More specifically, is there something essentially or distinctively temporal about sounds that distinguishes them from, say, colors, shapes, odors, tastes, or other sensible qualities? And just what might this distinctive relation to time consist in? Apart from their independent interest, these issues have a number of important philosophical repercussions. First, if sounds are temporal in a way that other sensible qualities are not, then this would mean that standard lists of paradigm secondary qualities offered by Locke, Galileo, and other modern philosophers — lists which include colors, odors and sounds without any significant distinctions — overlook significant metaphysical differences. This, in turn, would threaten to undermine the coherence of the modern understanding of secondary qualities itself. Moreover, a number of authors have recently urged that the essential temporality of sounds makes it impossible to understand sounds as properties (except on a trope theory of properties; see note 3). If true, and given the more or less universal view that colors are properties, this last conclusion would make potentially inapplicable to sounds much of the comparatively well-developed philosophical taxonomy and apparatus that has arisen in philosophical disputes over the status of colors (for presentations of this taxonomy and apparatus see, for example, Byrne and Hilbert (2003); Cohen (2008b)).1 Therefore, the conclusion that sounds are distinctively temporal would be a serious blow to hopes for a theoretically unified treatment of the sensory qualities.2 For all these reasons, quite a lot seems to hang on the question of the temporality of sounds.

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Jonathan Cohen
University of California, San Diego

Citations of this work

Sounds.Roberto Casati - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
XIII—Hearing Properties, Effects or Parts?Casey O'callaghan - 2011 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 111 (3pt3):375-405.
Husserl, the absolute flow, and temporal experience.Christoph Hoerl - 2012 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 86 (2):376-411.

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References found in this work

Perception: A Representative Theory.Frank Jackson - 1977 - Cambridge University Press.
Color realism and color science.Alex Byrne & David R. Hilbert - 2003 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 26 (1):3-21.
The Red and the Real: An Essay on Color Ontology.Jonathan Cohen - 2009 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press UK.
The elements of being.Donald Cary Williams - 1953 - Review of Metaphysics 7 (2):3-18, 171-92.
Moderate Realism and Its Logic.Donald W. Mertz - 1996 - Yale University Press.

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