Abstract
Through hearing we learn about source events: events in which objects move or interact so that they vibrate and produce sound waves, such as when they roll, collide, or scrape together. It is often claimed that we do not simply hear sounds and infer what event caused them, but hear source events themselves, through hearing sounds. Here I investigate how the idea that we hear source events should be understood, with a focus on how hearing an event relates to hearing the objects involved in that event. I argue that whereas we see events such as rollings and collisions by seeing objects move through space, this cannot be how we hear them, and go on to examine two other possible models. On the first, we hear events but not their participant objects. On the second, to hear an event is to hear the appearance of an object to change. I argue that neither is satisfactory and endorse a third option: to hear a source event is to hear an object as extending through time.
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Notes
Sound waves can of course also be produced by the movement of liquids or gases. Although I will talk only about material objects here, everything I say applies mutatis mutandis in these cases as well.
In contemporary philosophy of perception, Matthen comes closest to a sounds only view of audition: “objects are characterizable by the sound they make—there are squeaky violins, baritone singers, alto saxophones—but the inferential path from auditory experience to such dispositional characterizations is quite indirect” (2005, p. 285). Martin says: “One may pick out the source of the sound via picking out the sound itself—we might then understand the demonstrative expression, ‘that dog’ as involving deferred ostension, perhaps as the descriptive phrase, ‘the dog which is actually the source of this sound’” (1997, p. 93) but has a less hardline view in his later work, saying that, in some cases at least, source events can be heard (2012, p. 348).
This is in contrast to the sense-data theories of perception popular in the first half of the twentieth Century.
Representationalists such as Cohen, Nanay, and Matthen hold that perceivers represent material objects and attribute, or predicate, properties to them, but relationalists also think that material objects are, fundamentally, what we see, in that perception consists in their standing in a certain type of relation to a subject. See, for example, Brewer (2007).
Less mainstream views of vision can be found in Clark (2000) who argues that we see, first and foremost, places, portions of space, not the things which occupy them. And Matthen (2010) who suggests that we see two types of individual simultaneously: material objects, and the ambient light illuminating those objects.
Property variation will be returned to later when change perception is discussed.
We will see later that there is more to seeing movement than this.
At least, no non-pathological equivalent. Patients suffering from simultanagnosia (a symptom of Bálint's syndrome) can perceive only one object at a time and are unable to locate that object in relation to others. It is possible that if a sufferer of simultanagnosia were able to track an object as it moves (those with this condition also have difficulty fixating on moving objects) they would perceive an object moving, but not see where it was moving from or to (see Rafal 1997, 2003). Thanks to an anonymous referee for drawing my attention to these cases.
I am also uncertain how such a claim can be reconciled with O’Callaghan’s stronger claims quoted at the beginning of this section.
In more recent work, Kulvicki argues that “aspects of the events that cause vibrations, such as intensity, and properties of the spaces in which one hears” (2016, p. 91) are heard as well as stable vibratory properties. He does not, however, return to the question of how source hearing should be understood.
This idea has a long history and many variations. It can be traced back to William James’ notion of the specious present: “The practically cognized present is no knife-edge, but a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit perched” (1890, Vol. I, p. 609).
Although James suggested that the specious present could be as long as a minute, most contemporary versions of this idea estimate it to be much shorter. For example, Dainton (2000, p. 171) estimates it to be about half a second or less, Lockwood “a second or a second and a half’ (2005, p. 381), and Phillips supposes it to be approximately 300 ms (2011, p. 817).
Certain types of video playback can be thought of as something like the inverse of imperceptible change outlined at the beginning of this section: rapidly changing—rather than slow moving– stimuli can give rise to visual percepts of unchanging objects. The images on old cathode ray tube televisions, for example, are generated by electron beams illuminating different coloured pixels on the screen in rapid succession. Although most of the time this process will generate images of things moving or changing—people talking, balls rolling etc.—it is easy to think of cases in which the successive illumination of pixels generates images of entirely unchanging objects—people staring into the distance, balls at rest. Images generated in this way, however, still decompose in something like the same way as video files or frames of a film: any one of the pixels which make up an image could be presented to the viewer for a much longer time, giving rise to the perception of a single, unchanging, dot on the screen. I am grateful for an anonymous referee for drawing my attention to this type of case.
This type of challenge was first put to me by Casey O’Callaghan.
I am grateful to an anonymous referee for pressing me on this point.
Prosser’s overall aim in this paper is to give an account of the phenomenology of temporal passage, the experience of time as flowing, which can be reconciled with metaphysical accounts on which time does not flow: “…a key factor in time seeming to pass is that change is experienced as dynamic, and change is experienced as dynamic because the experience involves the representation of something enduring through the change. It is this notion of a single entity passing ‘through’ a change that captures at least a very important element of the experience of temporal passage” (2012, p. 16). One cost of rejecting the idea that perceptual experience always presents objects as enduring is that it would appear Prosser’s account of experienced passage must be given up as well. Given that there are other accounts available as to why passage is experienced which do not rely on objects being experienced as enduring (e.g. Paul 2010; Skow 2015; Torrengo 2017), as well as doubts that there even is a phenomenology of passage (Hoerl 2014), I think that this is a price worth paying.
Parsons (2000, 2004) proposes an alternative to the standard four dimensionalist model. He argues that one can accept objects are extended in time, without committing to the idea that they have temporal parts. Key to this is the idea that as well as possessing “qualities”, such as being red or being warm, objects can also possess spatial or temporal distributional properties, such as being polka-dotted, or being warm at one time and cold at another. On this account, objects endure, and yet are temporally extended. It is possible that the ideas I put forward in this section could be worked out in terms of temporally distributional properties, rather than temporal shape, although I do not see that very much hangs on this difference. Parsons suggests that shape is a “degenerate case” of a distributional property (2004, p. 4).
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to have received extremely useful comments on the ideas presented in this paper from my colleagues at the Centre for Philosophy of Time at the University of Milan, members of Bence Nanay’s Action and Perception research group at the University of Antwerp, and my audience at the Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society & the Mind Association in July 2016. Particular thanks to Davide Bordini, Clotilde Calabi, Laura Gow, Dave Ingram, Bence Nanay, Matthew Nudds, Casey O’Callaghan, Maarten Steenhagen, and Giuliano Torrengo.
Funding
This study was funded by Università degli Studi di Milano (Project Number 15-6-3007000-2021)
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Young, N. Hearing objects and events. Philos Stud 175, 2931–2950 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-017-0988-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-017-0988-0