This paper compares Harold Garfinkel’s phenomenologically informed “radical” ethnomethodology and Emanuel Schegloff’s “classical” Conversation Analysis, by focusing on their treatments of a ringing telephone as a summons. In their diverging accounts, Garfinkel and Schegloff use similar yet different terminologies in relation to the action of hearing. Garfinkel speaks of the “hearability” of the ringing phone, while Schegloff speaks of a recipient’s “hearership”. This lexical distinction is not irrelevant. “Hearership” stresses the obligations of parties to a phone call to speak and (...) listen to each other while co-producing conversation. In contrast, for Garfinkel an analysis limited only to the parties’ work of speaking and listening to each other from within the hearable world glosses over the pervasive presence of the “hearability-structures” of the ordinary world. His “radical” version is predicated on the claim that the ordinary world is a hearable world. Accordingly, a phone summons is a familiar sound in which “hearability” is inseparable from the “hearability-structures” endogenous to the Lebenswelt. (shrink)

Rapid advances in digital hearing technologies, also known as hearables, are expected to disrupt the direct‐to‐consumer health market. For older adults with higher incidence of hearing loss, such disruption could reduce hearing problems, increase accessibility to hearing aids, and mitigate related stigmas. This paper delves into the intersection of disruptive innovation and hearables within the realm of biomedical ethics. Through a comprehensive exploration, we shed light on the ethical implications surrounding hearables. By critically evaluating the key ethical (...) advantages and drawbacks, we find that no single concern presents an insurmountable a priori objection to hearables. We conclude with some ideas to maximize the benefits of hearables and further promote opportunities for equitable hearing health. (shrink)

Julian Dodd has argued that the type–token theory in musical ontology has a ‘default’ status because it can explain the repeatability and audibility of musical works without the need for philosophical reinterpretation. I present two challenges to Dodd's claims about audibility. First, I argue (a) that a type–token theorist who, like Dodd, adheres to Wolterstorff's doctrine of analogical predication must grant that musical works themselves are hearable only in an ‘analogical’ sense; and (b) that alternative musical ontologies are able to (...) explain the latter just as well as the type–token theory. Second, I argue that Dodd cannot evade this objection by claiming that what matters in musical ontology is accounting for audibility ‘in a derivative sense’, since the latter also allows of explanation by a range of musical ontologies. (shrink)

Making a show of conceding by using a three-part structure of proposition, concession and reassertion has the effect - in contrast to other ways of conceding - of strengthening one's own position at the expense of a counter-argument. This three-part structure can be also exploited so as to carry the battle to the enemy, as it were, and make the concession do more offensive work. We detail three such ways: Trojan Horses where the speaker imports a caricature of the opposition (...) into the conceded material; stings in the tail, where the speaker specifically overturns the concession they have just made in the original claim; and cheapeners, where the speaker works pragmatically to devalue even a positive endorsement of the opposition's case. In all their variety, what marks the concession as being hearably in the speaker's own interest is the robust, normative three-part proposition - concession - reprise structure. It is available for use in supporting or demeaning any position, whether mundane or explicitly ideological. (shrink)

The debate between emergentists and reductionists rests on the observation that in many situations, in which it seems desirable to work with a coherent and unified discourse, key predicates fall into different groups, such that pairs of members one taken from each group, cannot be co-predicated of some common subject. Must we settle for ‘island’ discourses in science and human affairs or is some route to a unified discourse still open? To make progress towards resolving the issue the conditions under (...) which such segregations of predicates seem inexorable must be brought out. The distinction between determinable and determinate properties throws light on some aspects of this problem. Bohr’s concept of complementarity, when combined with Gibson’s idea of an affordances as a special class of dispositional properties is helpful. Several seeming problems melt away, for example, how it is possible for a group of notes to become hearable as a melody. The mind-body problem and the viability of the project of reducing biology to chemistry and physics are two issues that are more difficult to deal with. Are mental phenomena, such as feelings and memories emergent from material systems or are they actually material properties themselves? Are the attributes of living beings emergent from certain accidental but long running collocations of chemical reactions, or are they nothing but chemical phenomena? If emergent, in what way are they distinctive from that from which they emerge? (shrink)

En 1928, à la suite d’une « conversion » qui le tourne vers des « valeurs spirituelles de poésie », le poète Pierre Jean Jouve renie tous ses ouvrages antérieurs à 1925 et proclame le début d’une « vita nuova ». Désormais, son œuvre ne cessera de représenter cette « scène originaire » de mort et de résurrection, mise sous le signe d’une « imitation du Christ ». Parmi ces représentations, le phénix occupe une place plutôt discrète mais significative. L’article (...) examine les différentes occurrences du symbole du phénix dans l’œuvre de traduction, de roman et de poésie de l’auteur, et y reconnaît une figure de la représentation, en tant que celle-ci exige la mort de l’objet tout en lui donnant une nouvelle vie. Le phénix jouvien apparaît comme une figure de l’« accomplissement » de cette représentation, aux multiples sens du mot. Il la montre en train de s’accomplir, via le sacrifice du corps « visible » comme présidant à un amour éternellement « audible » dans les mots. Il la représente sous une forme « accomplie » dans la prostituée qui, objet d’un meurtre sacrificiel, prend la figure d’un gouffre, lieu où toute représentation s’abîme, mais où toute représentation trouve aussi son origine et sa condition de possibilité. Il permet enfin d’en entrevoir le terme : l’oiseau, qui représente l’essence amoureuse et sacrificielle de la poésie, est d’autant plus « près » d’incarner cette essence qu’il renonce à se montrer ; il s’effacera derrière la représentation du lieu où son mystère s’est manifesté. In 1928, as a result of his “conversion” which turns him to “spiritual values of poetry”, the French poet Pierre Jean Jouve repels all the works he wrote before 1925 and announces the beginning of a “vita nuova”. From now on, his œuvre will never stop representing this “primitive scene” of death and resurrection, interpreted as an “imitation of Christ”. Among these representations, the Phoenix is a discrete but significant image. The article examines the different places where the Phoenix symbol appears, in Jouve’s translations, novels and poetry. The bird appears as a symbol of representation, based upon the death of the object and giving it a new life. Jouve’s Phoenix is a figure of the “accomplishment” of this representation. It shows representation in statu nascendi, as a sacrifice of the “visual” corporal appearance in order to realize a life and a love “hearable” in words. It represents representation as “accomplished” in the image of the prostitute, who was killed in a sacrificial way, and takes the appearance of an abyss, where every representation stops, but where every representation also finds its origin and its possibility. It finally puts in perspective the end of representation: the bird which represents the “essence” of poetry—an essence of love and sacrifice—is imagined “near to essences and God”, and the nearer as it becomes invisible and stops showing itself; in one of the last poems, it disappears behind the representation of the place where its mystery has revealed itself. (shrink)

Tan and Moghaddam’s ‘reflexive positioning’ expansion of Harré’s positioning theory provokes consideration of psychological factors underlying the discursive production of selves. However, it understates the issue, why do people appropriate particular positions, hearable in utterances, as applicable to themselves. Some of the theoretical ambiguities dissipate when positioning is approached from a personal-constructs perspective , which draws attention to personal construction of selves, as distinct from social construction, and describes the dynamics of individual continuity, though understating the concrete contextuality of personal (...) becoming. The present essay considers the compatibility of the personal constructs approach with Harré’s positioning theory. (shrink)

I investigate patterns of usage of thanking formulae in the closing section of a corpus of 94 telephone calls made by tenants to a UK housing association. The data suggest that unilateral thanking is the norm when calls are institutionally and interactionally unmarked. In contrast, mutual thanking correlates mainly with the presence of interactional problems of various kinds, or, in a few cases, with features that are not problematic as such, but simply interactionally marked given the nature of the activity. (...) When initiated by agents rather than by callers, thanking is frequently hearable as conveying an apologetic stance. Participants thus seem to orient to different thanking patterns as devices which may be used either to mark the preceding interaction as an instance of ‘business-as-usual’ or, if such is not the case, to restore interpersonal harmony or index awareness that aspects of the preceding interaction have otherwise deviated from situational expectations. (shrink)

Identity has often been approached by asking questions about it in interviews. However, speakers sometimes reject, resist or modify category membership because of the sensitive inferential and interactional issues invoked. This article aims to provide a systematic analysis of category-eliciting question–answer sequences from a large corpus of Syrian interview data concerning several identities. Using conversation and membership categorisation analysis, four Q-A sequences are identified: minimal confirmation of questions seeking the hearably demographic fact of membership; modifying membership claims in response to (...) factual-type questions by rejecting some not other category-bound attributes; characterising membership as fact and nominating an alternative identity in response to questions about feelings; and, in response to questions seeking confirmation of a category implicated through the prior talk, warranting the denial of membership. The analysis therefore highlights a paradox: asking direct questions about category membership is used to generate talk about the topic of identity that would be difficult to collect otherwise, but this may in turn provide for a reluctance to self-identify, thus making identity a delicate business. (shrink)

A wide range of previous research has pointed out important interactional features of televised political interviews including the cooperative dimensions to encounters between interviewers and interviewees and the extent to which news interviews differ to everyday conversation. Drawing upon an analysis of 29 televised political interviews broadcast in the UK, this article seeks to build on such work. A preliminary quantitative inspection of the data suggested that a sizeable minority of interviewee responses `hearably' challenged the prior interviewer turn. A conversation (...) analytic approach to the turn-response pairs suggested that whilst a wide range of interviewer turns were potentially vulnerable to such problematizing moves - the challenges made were often boundaried. That is, in making challenges, interviewees typically refrained from developing them in highly personalized terms; they often raised them in passing and, in cases where the interviewee refused to cooperate with interviewers, they typically did so by producing a justification. Further analysis suggested that both interviewers and interviewees did not take the steps to ward off disagreement commonly found in everyday conversation - instead both interviewer and interviewee seemed to orientate to the normality of disagreement. This picture of `boundaried but normalized' challenge was made sense of in terms of different preference structures to those found in everyday talk in which both interviewee and interviewer were understood as skilfully orientating to the normativity of challenges whilst safeguarding the interview structure itself. (shrink)