Abstract

The topic of the dissertation is the question of what I or anyone hears in listening to someone speak. This question is taken from the commonly accepted philosophical view that the ordinary case of listening to and understanding someone in conversation must be one in which I hear the sounds that my interlocutor produces in speaking, and that my hearing these sounds makes a fundamental contribution to my knowning what was said. ;I begin by discovering reasons to resist this view and, in resisting it, I offer an alternative to sounds as our conversational "object of hearing" in the guise of "what someone said." These alternatives are played off against each other in a number of examples in which I try to see which of the two we would more reasonably or more naturally be said to hear. Feeling pulled both ways, I try to maintain the tension between my inclination to believe that we do hear sounds as an element of our conversational listening and my inclination to deny this. My first approach on behalf of the commonly accepted view is to try out examples which might support the idea that we hear sounds to which we learned to supply a meaning in learning to talk; my second, to suppose that we do hear what someone says, my proposed alternative, but that "what someone says" is always analyzable into "his words" and, ultimately, word-sounds. It turns out that the examples tend to undermine rather than to support these readings of the commonly accepted view, and I next come up against the objection to my alternative "object of hearing" that it is the wrong metaphysical type to be "heard." This objection is disposed of on the ground that, if it were correct, it would have to be true that most of the sounds that we commonly suppose that we hear are equally of the wrong type. ;In the outcome, I realize that I have been resisting the wrong thing. I took "sounds" to be an unsatisfactory answer to the question of what we hear in listening to someone speak and tried to provide a better one, but finally I must ask whether most of the objections that can be raised against this answer wouldn't equally apply to the question