Attached is a philosophy paper that I need to write a review for. It draws heavily on the two other attached philosophy papers by O'Callaghan and Borough, and copied in below is my review that I'm gonna send out. Do you think my review is fair and accurate? Please be very thorough and very specific in your feedback. Don't be sarcophantic. I would prefer honesty to you being kind. # Referee Report: Against Perceiving Meanings: Empedocles Leaped or Loves? \*\*Journal:\*\* Review of Philosophy and Psychology \*\*Manuscript:\*\* ROPP-D-25-00264 --- This paper argues against a strong version of the hearing-meanings thesis — the view that distinct sentence meanings figure in auditory phenomenal character — by combining interlingual homophone cases with empirical models of bilingual lexical access. The argument is clearly presented, the engagement with the psycholinguistic literature is thorough, and the Lena and Amy thought experiment does well to show what the strong hearing-meanings view is committed to. By shifting the focus from introspection to independently motivated empirical constraints, the paper does move this debate along. I do, however, have one substantial concern about how the paper handles existing work by Brogaard, and it is for this reason that I recommend revise and resubmit with major revisions. The paper presents the disagreement between \[\[Casey O'Callaghan\]\] and \[\[Berit Brogaard\]\] as a purely introspective stand-off: > At this point, the dispute seems to turn largely on whose introspective verdict one finds more credible. Brogaard and O'Callaghan simply disagree about what it is like to hear these sentences, and there is no independent way, within this dialectical frame, to adjudicate between their reports. (§3) > Rather than trying to resolve this stand-off by demanding ever more fine-grained introspection, I propose to shift focus. (§3) First, neither O'Callaghan nor Brogaard relies on introspection alone, and the paper should make this clearer. O'Callaghan (2011) does not only offer an introspective verdict about homophones. He develops a \*sedulous\* thought experiment targeting meaning in isolation, a \*mismatch argument\* about mid-sentence disambiguation, and an alternative explanation of the familiar/foreign language contrast in terms of phonological feature sensitivity. Brogaard (2018) does not merely counter with a competing introspective report. She distinguishes linguistic from utterance meaning, offers cross-linguistic contrasts, and argues from perceptual learning and non-penetrating top-down processing. Presenting the dispute as a purely introspective stand-off makes the shift to empirical constraints look more novel than it is. Moreover, Brogaard explicitly raises the cross-linguistic observation on which the paper's own interlingual argument relies: > Second, as we will see below, two different languages can have exactly the same speech sounds but nonetheless have different meanings associated with those speech sounds. Even though the speech sounds are the same, learning the language nonetheless changes the phenomenology of our overall experiences of utterances in the language. The most plausible explanation of this difference is a shift in the perception of what was said. (Brogaard 2018, p. 2972) This is close to the observation behind the Lena and Amy case. The author discusses Brogaard's Danish sentence case ('Giv dukken til Poll') in §3, but that is a narrower point — a monolingual hearer encountering a foreign sentence. The more general observation — that two languages can share speech sounds while differing in meaning, and that learning a language changes the phenomenology — doesn't get mentioned. Brogaard takes this observation to \*support\* her hearing-meanings view: "the most plausible explanation of this difference is a shift in the perception of what was said" (2018, p. 2972). In §4, the author takes the same observation and goes in the opposite direction: > Yet, given the standard models just sketched, extra-linguistic information about which language is being used — information that is naturally encoded in their beliefs and expectations — determines which sentence meanings are selected. If the strong hearing-meanings view is correct, then these differences in selected meanings should be reflected in differences in auditory phenomenal character. Thus, on that view, Lena's and Amy's auditory experiences must differ phenomenally throughout the speech, in a way that systematically covaries with their background information about which language is spoken. (§4) The paper should acknowledge this shared starting point and explain why the same observation supports a different conclusion. The author does have resources for this in §4.2, where the bilingual case is argued to satisfy even Brogaard and Gatzia's (2015) restrict/Users/nickyoung/Downloads/In Defense of Hearing Meanings by Berit Brogaard.pdfive criterion for cognitive penetration. But §4.2 addresses only Brogaard's general account of penetration, not her specific argument (Brogaard 2018, §5; Brogaard and Gatzia 2015) that top-down influences on meaning perception are non-penetrating. Brogaard would likely reply that the bilingual case involves attention selecting between two perceptually learned routines, not beliefs driving perception. Finally, there is an ambiguity in §4.3 about how demanding the penetration commitment is. The author moves between the idealised A/B scenario, where penetration is pervasive, and real bilingual environments, where it depends on the frequency of interlingual homophones. The idealised case is acknowledged to be 'not essential to the core argument' (§4.3), but the paper does not say clearly whether the realistic claim is that cognitive penetration would be \*pervasive\* in bilingual experience or merely \*systematic\* — occurring reliably whenever interlingual homophones arise, but not continuously. These are different commitments, and a defender of the hearing-meanings view might accept the latter. ---