Hearing, Philosophical Perspectives

Objects of Hearing

One sort of question about what we hear concerns the objects of auditory perception. What kinds of things do we hear? We hear sounds. But what kinds of things are sounds? Recent answers include the following: sensible properties, events, or something that depends on pressure waves. We can also ask what other sorts of things we hear. For instance, we might auditorily perceive things and happenings that make sounds, such as clarinets, crashes, or conversations. Perhaps we even hear silence.

Contents of Hearing

A related question about what we hear concerns the contents of auditory experience. In hearing, how do we experience the world to be? One common way to pose this question appeals to the correctness or veridicality conditions for auditory perceptual experiences. Framed in this way, audition's content is prima facie relevant to theorizing about audition's objects.

Hearing and Space

One central philosophical question about auditory content concerns space. Hearing furnishes information about space: Thanks to hearing, you can learn that the fridge is to the left or that the dump truck is far away. Does audition represent space or have spatial content? An extreme view is that it does not. Some claim that although we “work out” spatial facts on the basis of audition, hearing itself is aspatial; it reveals no spatial features.

[Page 388]However, empirical research on spatial hearing suggests that audition does have spatial content. Subjects auditorily discern direction and distance in a way that suggests perception rather than “working it out.”

Nevertheless, vision and audition differ with respect to space. Following P. F. Strawson's example, some philosophers hold that audition, unlike vision, is not intrinsically or inherently spatial. On such an account, audition may have some spatial content, but it inherits that content from another spatial modality, such as vision or tactile-kinesthetic perception. So a purely or exclusively auditory experience would not be spatial. Perhaps this is because audition lacks vision's inherent spatial structure.

An alternative account rejects that audition is inherently aspatial. The difference between vision and audition, instead, is said to be one of degree. Vision's spatial content is more fine-grained and accurate than audition's.

Furthermore, the spatial characteristics of the objects of vision and audition differ. Vision's objects include cohesive three-dimensional items akin to material objects. Not only do they seem located in space relative to each other, but they also have a rich internal spatial structure. While audition's objects include individual items located in three-dimensional space, they do not seem to have the rich internal spatial structure of vision's objects. Vision's objects are perceptually individuated and identified in terms of their spatial features, while space is less important to individuating and identifying audition's objects.

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