In the realm of the philosophy of sounds and auditory experience there is an ongoing discussion concerned with the nature of sounds. One of the contestant views within this ontology of sound is that of the Property View, which holds that sounds are properties of the sounding objects. A way of developing this view is through the idea of dispositionalism, namely, by sustaining the theory according to which sounds are dispositional properties (Pasnau 1999; Kulvicki 2008; Roberts 2017). That portrayal, however, (...) is not sufficient, as it has not inquired the metaphysical debates about dispositions beyond the conditional analysis. In this paper, I try to advance this view by including recent developments (for instance Bird 2007; Vetter 2015) in the field of dispositionalism and I analyse whether this new version can sort out known and new objections to Property View. (shrink)

A proof employing no semantic terms is offered in support of the claim that there can be truths without truthmakers. The logical resources used in the proof are weak but do include the structural rule Contraction.

Theorists have recently defended rival analyses of sound. The leading analyses reduce sound to sensations or mental representations, longitudinal compression waves, or sounding objects or events. Participants in the debate presuppose that because the features of the world targeted by these reductive strategies are distinct, at most one of the analyses is correct. In this article I argue that this presupposition is mistaken, endorsing a polysemy analysis of ‘sound’. Thus the ‘What is sound?’ debate is largely merely verbal, or so (...) I argue. All participants in this debate agree that there are the various reductions, they simply differ over which of them ‘is sound’. Yet there is no reason to think that, say, psychologists studying auditory sensations/representations, audio physicists studying sound waves, and anthropologists/ethnomusicologists studying sounding objects/events aren’t just studying different reductions of ‘sound’ despite the different explananda of their research. According to the polysemy theory of sound, we do not need to uniquely identify sound with one of these various explananda, outside of some context. (shrink)

I argue against the Primary Sound Account of Echoes (PSAE) – the view that an echo of a sound just is that sound. I then argue that if my case against PSAE is successful, distal theories of sound are false. The upshot of my arguments, if they succeed, is that distal theories are false. Towards the end, I show how some distal theories can be modified to avoid this conclusion and note some open questions to which the modified theories give (...) rise. (shrink)

Perceptual experience strikes us as a presentation of the here and now. I argue that it also involves experience of the past. This claim is often made based on cases, like seeing stars, involving significant signal-transmission lag, or based on how working memory allows us to experience extended events. I argue that the past is injected into perceptual experience via a third way: long-term memory traces in sensory circuits. Memory, like the receptor-based senses, is an integrated and constituent modality through (...) which we experience the environment. Because of this modality, we experience the sensed properties of stimuli partly as they are now, but also partly as we encountered them in the past. (shrink)