Sounds : a philosophical theory / Casey O'Callaghan.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

O'Callaghan, Casey.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Sounds--Philosophy.

Sounds.

Auditory perception--Philosophy.

Auditory perception.

Philosophy.

Physical Description:

xi, 193 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2007.

Summary:

Vision dominates philosophical thinking about perception, and theorizing about experience in cognitive science has traditionally focused on a visual model. In a radical departure from established practice, Casey O'Callaghan provides a systematic treatment of sound and sound experience, and shows how thinking about audition and appreciating the relationships between multiple sense modalities can enrich our understanding of perception and the mind.

Sounds proposes a novel theory of sounds and auditory perception. Against the widely accepted philosophical view that sounds are among the secondary or sensible qualities, O'Callaghan argues that, on any perceptually plausible account, sounds are events. But this does not imply that sounds are waves that propagate through a medium, such as air or water. Rather, sounds are events that take place in one's environment at or near the objects and happenings that bring them about. This account captures the way in which sounds essentially are creatures of time, and situates sounds in a world populated by items and events that have significance for us. Sounds are not ethereal, mysterious entities.

O'Callaghan's account of sounds and their perception discloses far greater variety among the kinds of things we perceive than traditional views acknowledge. But more importantly, investigating sounds and audition demonstrates that considering other sense modalities teaches what we could not otherwise learn from thinking exclusively about the visual. Sounds articulates a powerful account of echoes, reverberation, Doppler effects, and perceptual constancies that surpasses the explanatory richness of alternative theories, and also reveals a number of surprising cross-modal perceptual illusions. O'Callaghan argues that such illusions demonstrate that the perceptual modalities cannot be completely understood in isolation, and that the visuocentric model for theorizing about perception-according to which perceptual modalities are discrete modes of experience and autonomous domains of philosophical and scientific inquiry-ought to be abandoned.

Contents:

1 Sonic Realism 1

1.1 The Tyranny of the Visual 1

1.2 Sounds and Visuocentrism 4

1.3 Toward Sonic Realism 8

2 What Is a Sound? 13

2.1 What Kind of Thing Is a Sound? 13

2.2 Sounds as Properties 15

2.3 Sounds as Waves 24

3 The Locations of Sounds 29

3.1 Where Are Sounds? 29

3.2 Locational Hearing 31

3.3 Located Sounds 32

3.4 'Coming from' 34

3.5 Sounds without Locations? 37

3.6 Locatedness and the Metaphysics of Sounds 42

3.7 The Durations of Sounds 43

4 The Argument from Vacuums 47

4.1 Sounds in Vacuums? 47

4.2 The Argument from Vacuums 49

4.3 The Medium as a Necessary Condition 52

4.4 Involving the Medium 55

5 Sounds as Events 57

5.1 Sounds Are Events 57

5.2 Disturbings 59

5.3 Individuating Sounds 61

5.4 Two Objections 64

5.5 Sounds, Waves, and Experience 69

6 Audible Qualities 72

6.1 Periodicity and Pitch 76

6.2 Pitch and the Event Theory of Sounds 83

6.3 Loudness 86

6.4 Timbre 88

7 Sound-Related Phenomena 91

7.1 Explaining Sound-Related Phenomena 91

7.2 Transmission 93

7.3 Destructive and Constructive Interference 100

7.4 The Doppler Effect 103

8 The Argument from Echoes 110

8.1 Do Echoes Show That Sounds Are Not Events? 111

8.2 Sounds Do Not Travel 112

8.3 Reencountering Sounds 117

8.4 Trick Reencounters 124

9 Echoes 126

9.1 The Problem of Echoes 126

9.2 The Solution 127

9.3 Are Echoes Distinct Sounds? 131

9.4 Are Echoes Images? 135

9.5 Is the Illusion Tolerable? 137

10 Hearing Recorded Sounds 141

10.1 The Puzzle of Recorded Sounds 141

10.2 Spatial Perspective in Perception 144

10.3 Perspective in Audition 147

10.4 Do Kind Differences Matter? 149

10.5 Perspective and Perceiving 152

10.6 Hearing and Seeing the Past 158

10.7 Hearing Musical Performances 160

11 Cross-Modal Illusions 163

11.1 A Puzzle about Audition 166

11.2 The Composite Snapshot Conception of Perceptual Experience 169

11.3 Cross-Modal Illusions 172

11.4 Explaining Cross-Modal Illusions 174.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [181]-188) and index.

ISBN:

9780199215928

0199215928

OCLC:

183144352