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Lessons from beyond vision (sounds and audition)

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Abstract

Recent work on non-visual modalities aims to translate, extend, revise, or unify claims about perception beyond vision. This paper presents central lessons drawn from attention to hearing, sounds, and multimodality. It focuses on auditory awareness and its objects, and it advances more general lessons for perceptual theorizing that emerge from thinking about sounds and audition. The paper argues that sounds and audition no better support the privacy of perception’s objects than does vision; that perceptual objects are more diverse than an exclusively visual perspective suggests; and that multimodality is rampant. In doing so, it presents an account according to which audition affords awareness as of not just sounds, but also environmental happenings beyond sounds.

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Notes

  1. Brian Keeley reminds me that given such aims we shouldn’t limit inquiry to familiar human forms of perception, and I agree. This doesn’t diminish the value of casting a wider net in the human case.

  2. Whether you see objects by seeing surfaces is a complication for now safely ignored.

  3. Two things. First, I’m ignoring the difference between immediacy and directness. Bermúdez (2000) outlines good reasons to distinguish them. Not much hangs on this until § 5, at which point the story gains interesting detail with the distinction. Footnote 16 explains. Second, I’m ignoring the work ‘material’ does in talk about seeing material objects. This raises delicate issues, but my main concern is the contrast with audition rather than nuances of the story about vision.

  4. Perkins (1983) discusses hearing right after smell and feeling heat and cold, but before vision, in his defense of an indirect perceptual theory.

  5. Apparent distal spatial location and apparent objectivity might come apart, as perhaps they do in smell (Smith, 2002, chap. 5) and afterimages. Conceptually, at least, the spatial and mind-independent senses of ‘out there’ should be kept clear.

  6. Defenders of audition’s spatiality include Pasnau (1999); Matthen (2005); Casati and Dokic (2009); O’Callaghan (2007); O’Callaghan (2010).

  7. Locke says in the Essay that sounds are secondary qualities of bodies. Unfortunately, it isn’t wholly clear whether by ‘bodies’ he meant the objects or the medium.

  8. Consider also proper/common objects, direct objects, immediate objects, attentional objects, physical objects, perceptual objects.

  9. I say ‘-like’ because I’m not asserting that there is a genuine metaphysical difference between the manners in which objects and events persist. However, there is a difference, which might come in degrees, in how we perceptually regard them as persisting, and that is what I wish to capture.

  10. See, e.g., Kubovy and Van Valkenburg (2001); Scholl (2001); Matthen (2010); Nudds (2010).

  11. I am counting photographic and televisual seeing as not normal.

  12. See Nudds (2010) for a very instructive discussion.

  13. See also Clark (2010) on crossmodal cuing of attention.

  14. See also the closely related discussion of common sensibles in Tye (2007).

  15. Even if you think perceptual experience contents are Fregean modes of presentation (even sense-specific ones), the perceptual experience of intermodal identification must be captured.

  16. If you prefer to distinguish immediateness from directness à la Bermúdez (2000), and to say hearing the whole is mediated by hearing the part, you still might say one directly hears the whole if one can demonstratively refer to it. I believe the account presented in the text does provide the resources to satisfy Bermúdez’s reference condition.

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Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Clare Batty, Tim Bayne, Austen Clark, Brian Keeley, Amy Kind, Fiona Macpherson, Mark Okrent, and audience members at the non-visual perception symposium at the 2010 Pacific APA in San Francisco.

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  1. Philosophy Department, Rice University, Houston, TX, 77005, USA

    Casey O’Callaghan

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O’Callaghan, C. Lessons from beyond vision (sounds and audition). Philos Stud 153, 143–160 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9652-7

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