In this paper I consider two related issues raised by Aristotle 's treatment of hearing and sounds. The first concerns the kinds of changes Aristotle takes to occur, in both perceptual medium and sense organs, when a perceiver hears a sounding object. The second issue concerns Aristotle 's views on the nature and location of the proper objects of auditory perception. I argue that Aristotle 's views on these topics are not what they have sometimes been taken to be, and (...) that when rightly understood they compare favourably in many respects with leading contemporary accounts. (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)

Echo experiences are illusory experiences of ordinary primary sounds. Just as there is no new object that we see at the surface of a mirror, there is no new sound that we hear at a reflecting surface. The sound that we hear as an echo just is the original primary sound, though its perception involves illusions of place, time, and qualities. The case of echoes need not force us to adopt a conception according to which sounds are persisting object-like particulars (...) that travel through space. (shrink)

What is the relationship between sounds and time? More specifically, is there something essentially or distinctively temporal about sounds that distinguishes them from, say, colors, shapes, odors, tastes, or other sensible qualities? And just what might this distinctive relation to time consist in? Apart from their independent interest, these issues have a number of important philosophical repercussions. First, if sounds are temporal in a way that other sensible qualities are not, then this would mean that standard lists of paradigm secondary (...) qualities offered by Locke, Galileo, and other modern philosophers — lists which include colors, odors and sounds without any significant distinctions — overlook significant metaphysical differences. This, in turn, would threaten to undermine the coherence of the modern understanding of secondary qualities itself. Moreover, a number of authors have recently urged that the essential temporality of sounds makes it impossible to understand sounds as properties (except on a trope theory of properties; see note 3). If true, and given the more or less universal view that colors are properties, this last conclusion would make potentially inapplicable to sounds much of the comparatively well-developed philosophical taxonomy and apparatus that has arisen in philosophical disputes over the status of colors (for presentations of this taxonomy and apparatus see, for example, Byrne and Hilbert (2003); Cohen (2008b)).1 Therefore, the conclusion that sounds are distinctively temporal would be a serious blow to hopes for a theoretically unified treatment of the sensory qualities.2 For all these reasons, quite a lot seems to hang on the question of the temporality of sounds. (shrink)

I argue that sounds are best conceived not as pressure waves that travel through a medium, nor as physical properties of the objects ordinarily thought to be the sources of sounds, but rather as events of a certain kind. Sounds are particular events in which a surrounding medium is disturbed or set into wavelike motion by the activities of a body or interacting bodies. This Event View of sounds provides for a uni- ?ed perceptual account of several pervasive sound phenomena, (...) including transmission through barriers, constructive and destructive interference, and echoes. (shrink)

Cross-modal perceptual illusions occur when a stimulus to one modality impacts perceptual experience associated with another modality. Unlike synaesthesia, cross-modal illusions are intelligible as results of perceptual strategies for dealing with sensory stimulation to multiple modalities, rather than as mere quirks. I argue that understanding cross-modal illusions reveals an important flaw in a widespread conception of the senses, and of their role in perceptual experience, according to which understanding perception and perceptual experience is a matter of assembling independently viable stories (...) about vision, audition, olfaction, and the rest. (shrink)

1. In the Physics and Metaphysics, Aristotle lays out four kinds of causes and provides examples of each. Bronze and silver are offered as examples of the material causes of artefacts, the father a...

The long history of theorizing about perception divides into two quite distinct and irreconcilable camps, one that takes sensory experience to show us external reality just as it is, and one that takes such experience to reveal our own mind. I argue that we should reject both sides of this debate, and admit that the phenomenal character of experience, as such, reveals little about the nature of the external world and even less about the mind.

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)

A person listening to music can be said to “hear space” in two senses: metaphorically, when the musical features of a composition, such as melody, harmony or rhythm, evoke a space (e.g., if she hears a “rising” melodic line) or suggest abstract concepts related to an imaginary spatial scene; and literally, when she perceives spatial information relating to sound sources and the spatial region where they are located. In this paper I will analyze the way we perceive space when listening (...) to music, focusing on the experience of physical space. I will apply a model of the way we experience non-musical (or environmental) sound sources to the perception of musical sound sources. I will argue that our experience of musical and non-musical sound sources involve similar perception of the spatial properties of sounds sources, by applying a specific model of spatial experience of non-musical sound sources to some musical compositions which exemplify different roles of space as an aesthetic tool, I will argue that our experience of musical and non-musical sound sources involve similar perception of the spatial properties of sound sources. Accordingly I will suggest that if we want to capture the difference between musical experience and the auditory experience of non-musical sounds with relation to space, we should probably focus on the experience of metaphorical space. (shrink)

Pitch is an audible quality of sound which can be explained not only in terms of strong correlation with sound waves’ properties, but also by a neat correlation to the properties of the sounding object. This seems to be in favour of the theory of sound labelled “distal view”, according to which sound is the vibration of the sounding object.