# Seeming to Hear Sounds ## Introduction Almost all contemporary accounts of auditory perception accept the following two claims: **Sound**: We hear sounds (e.g. chimes, thuds, smashes). **Source**: We hear source events (e.g. bells ringing, doors closing, glass breaking). One reason for endorsing Sound is that we seem to hear sounds. In this paper I argue that this is incorrect, SOMETHING %%What I want here is a very succinct little phrase which previews what's coming up here and doesn't repeat “seem” and “sound.” It would be good if it presented “phenomenal presence” or something like that.%% and, drawing on recent work on temporal phenomenology, explain how the belief that we do might have arisen. The structure of this paper is as follows. Section 1 outlines the main candidates for what sounds are, and the question of how hearing sounds relates to hearing sources. In Section 2 I introduce the idea that what is perceived through a perceptual modality is what experiences in that modality make phenomenally present, and argue that while audition makes source events present, it does not make any of the candidates for what sounds are present. Section 3 considers the most natural objection to this argument —that sounds are phenomenally present in just the way colours are— and argues that the comparison with colour in fact counts against Sound rather than for it. In Section 4 I explain how the belief that we seem to hear sounds could arise even if we do not. ## 1. Hearing Sounds and Hearing Sources While almost everyone agrees that we hear sounds, there is a great deal of disagreement as to what sounds are. On some accounts, sounds are a type of particular. The default, non-philosophical way of thinking about sounds is a version of this view: sounds are sound waves, produced in the air by vibrating objects (O'Shaughnessy 2002; Sorensen 2008, pp. 280–283).[^1] O'Callaghan (2007) argues that sounds are event-like particulars, specifically events in which the medium surrounding an object is "disturbed or set into motion in a wavelike manner" (p. 64) by that object's vibrations, while Casati and Dokic identify sounds with events one step earlier in the causal chain: sounds "are identical with, or at least supervene on, vibration processes in the source" (Casati et al. 2020). On other accounts, sounds are a type of property. Pasnau (1999) argues that sounds are not individuals that vibrating objects produce, but features that objects are heard to take on when they vibrate; Kulvicki (2008) suggests that sounds are stable dispositions of objects to vibrate at certain frequencies, revealed to listeners when the objects are stimulated, in a manner similar to how the colours of objects are revealed to viewers when light is shone upon them. Leddington (2019) takes a slightly different tack, arguing that sounds are properties not of objects but of source events themselves: the striking of a bell bears an audible property constituted by pitch, timbre, and loudness, in a similar way to how the bell itself bears a visible colour property constituted by hue, saturation, and brightness (2019, n. 6). Accepting both Sound and Source leads to the following question: what is the connection between hearing a sound and hearing its source? Those who think of sounds as particulars argue that we hear sources through, or by, the hearing of sounds. Nudds, for example, has suggested that the perception of sources is achieved by listeners hearing sounds as having been caused by their source events (2010, p. 118),[^2] while O'Callaghan (2011) argues that we hear sources by hearing sounds as parts of sources, in a way similar to how we see material objects by seeing their front-facing surfaces. According to proponents of property views, we hear sources in hearing their sounds. As Leddington puts it, "we hear things in hearing their sounds" (2014, p. 324). The question of how Sound and Source relate can be avoided if we give up one of the two. Giving up on Source might seem to be an appealing option: perhaps we simply hear the thud and quickly, unconsciously, judge that a door has been slammed[^3] In contrast, giving up on Sound might seem absurd. If we hear anything, surely sounds are what we hear? In fact, if we consider the grounds on which claims about what is heard might be settled, Sound turns out to be less well supported than Source. Appeals to ordinary language will not settle the matter: it is as natural to say that we hear thuds and chimes as it is to say that we hear doors slamming and bells ringing, and in any case we frequently talk about perceiving things that, when pushed, we would admit we do not really perceive —saying "I see that it is cold outside" is not a good reason for thinking that we see temperature. Considerations of evolved function favour Source: our ancestors had an interest in the movements and interactions of material things, since these might herald danger, prey, or a mate, and the auditory system does in fact group the frequency components of incoming sound waves according to the source events likely to have produced them.[^4] Tracking sound waves, medium disturbances, or vibratory dispositions does not seem as if it would bestow any advantage in and of itself, and the suggestion that we evolved to track sounds because they alert us to sources would require an explanation as to why the auditory system evolved to track items one removed from the ecologically significant events, instead of going straight to the source. This leaves what I take to be the strongest reason for accepting a claim about what is heard: the deliverances of auditory experience itself. It is to these that I now turn. ## 2. What Audition Makes Present A third justification for Source is that we seem to hear sources. The auditory experience elicited by a door being slammed makes it seem as if there has been a collision between two wooden objects somewhere in your vicinity; that elicited by shattering glass makes it seem as if something fragile has not survived its impact against something more sturdy. Audition does not merely prompt thoughts about "material bodies and happenings" (O'Callaghan 2007, p. 5), but makes such things phenomenally present. The idea that what perception makes phenomenally present is what is perceived is fairly intuitive, but it is worth spelling out in a little more detail. Budek and Farkas put it as follows: > Perhaps [visual] experiences carry information about states of the retina, states of the optic nerve; perhaps a visual experience of the lights being on next door signals that the neighbor is at home. But the reason why we say that neither the retina, nor the neighbor is the object of the perception—that we don't see the retina or the neighbor—is that they are not phenomenally present in the experience. We don't seem to see these things when having the experience—we see (or at least seem to see) simply the lights. (2014, p. 360) A perceptual experience is caused by a long chain of events, and only some links in that chain are plausible candidates for what is perceived. Phenomenal presence tells us which: the ones that seem present in the having of the experience. The same test transposes directly to audition. Hearing taps running next door might signal that the neighbour is home, but this should not count as hearing the neighbour, because the experience does not make the neighbour seem present; only the running water does. Phenomenal presence is not a foolproof method for determining exactly what is and is not perceived. In particular, it is difficult to determine with any certainty whether something seems present because it is included in perceptual content or because a very quick, unconscious inference has been made as to its presence from that content; disputes about whether higher-level properties such as natural kinds figure in perceptual content turn on exactly this difficulty, and appeals to presence will not resolve them.[^5] It is, however, a good way of whittling down the sorts of things we potentially perceive. Vision does not make our retinas seem present, and audition does not make our cochleas seem present, so neither is a plausible candidate for what we perceive; vision does make material objects seem present, and audition does make source events seem present, so both are plausible candidates for what we perceive. What does audition make present? Suppose that you close your eyes and I roll a pen across your desk. Very plausibly, two objects seem present: something rolling, and a surface upon which that something is rolling. It is also at least tempting to say that some properties of these objects seem present, such as the hardness of both, the smallness and cylindricality of the roller, and the smoothness of the surface. This is presence, not prompting. Unlike thinking about a bell strike, or imagining how a bell strike would sound, the auditory experience produced by a bell strike impresses upon you that a bell is being struck, and it is because hearing makes sources present in this way that we act in response to what we hear: confronted with the sight of a car speeding towards you, you will instinctively move out of its path, and the same is true if you hear one approaching from behind. Here, in contrast, are some aspects of the world which, I contend, are not made phenomenally present by your auditory experience of the rolling pen: the vibrations of the pen as it rolls, its disposition to vibrate at certain frequencies when stimulated, its disturbing of the air surrounding it, and the sound waves which propagate through that air. That is, none of the candidates for what sounds are outlined in Section 1. A simple argument against Sound can therefore be stated as follows: 1. For an item in the causal chain leading to an auditory experience to be a candidate object of that experience, it must be made phenomenally present by that experience. 2. None of the candidates for what sounds are is made phenomenally present by auditory experience. Therefore, none of the candidates for what sounds are is a candidate object of auditory experience. The first premise is simply the Budek and Farkas test, restricted to audition. It is the second premise on which everything turns, and it is the second premise that the defender of Sound will deny. ## 3. Are Sounds Like Colours? It might be objected at this point that premise 2 gets the phenomenology plainly wrong: sounds are as manifestly present in auditory experience as colours are in visual experience, and the unsettled state of the metaphysics of sound no more undermines this than the unsettled state of the metaphysics of colour undermines the presence of colours. Kulvicki makes the comparison explicit: > There is no obvious consensus on what sounds or colors are. Where, in the chain of events leading to a typical experience of a sound, should we locate the sound? Can we locate it anywhere at all? These are quite general questions unsettled by the scientific progress that, at a certain level of description, is more poised for refinement than revolution. The same, unsurprisingly, can be said for color. (2008, p. 1) Colours are the model case of the phenomenologically obvious but metaphysically mysterious: there is vigorous and very long-running debate as to whether they are objective properties of objects, mind-dependent dispositional properties, or properties of experiences themselves, yet nobody takes this debate to show that colours are not visually present. Perhaps sounds have exactly the same status. If so, the disagreement documented in Section 1 is no evidence at all against their presence. The comparison, however, requires something that the colour case has and, I will now argue, the sound case lacks: an agreed description of the manifest character, prior to and constraining the metaphysics. Consider Chalmers's description of visual phenomenology: > At some level, perception represents our world as an Edenic world, populated by perfect colors and shapes, with objects and properties that are revealed to us directly (2006, p. 382)... Phenomenologically, it seems to us as if visual experience presents simple intrinsic qualities of objects in the world, spread out over the surface of the object (2006, p. 398). Irrespective of what colours actually are, few would disagree with Chalmers's description of what colours seem to be. They seem to be properties, instantiated on the surfaces of material objects. A flat-footed way of describing the philosophical debate about colour would be: colours seem to be properties; the question is what sort of properties they are. The reflectance physicalist can live comfortably with the fact that colours are not revealed to us as reflectance properties, precisely because there is a stable manifest character —the simple intrinsic quality spread over the surface— for reflectance properties to be the hidden nature of. The debate is a debate about what could vindicate, or explain away, an appearance on which everyone agrees. There is no such consensus on what sounds seem to be, and the disagreement is not about detail but about ontological category. When Nudds reflects on auditory phenomenology, he finds that sounds "appear to be individuals that instantiate properties", and indeed appear "to be independent of the material objects that produce them—independent, that is, of their sources" (2010, p. 116). When Leddington reflects on the same phenomenology, he finds that sounds seem to be properties, "heard as bound to, or fused with, their sources" (2014, p. 330). O'Callaghan reports that audible individuals "appear to occur, to unfold, and to require time to take place", and takes this as showing that sounds are event-like rather than object-like individuals (2007, p. 26); Kulvicki is unmoved, holding that experience is equivocal between temporally extended experiences of enduring individuals and experiences of individuals that themselves have duration (2014). If sounds were auditorily apparent in the way that colours are visually apparent, we would expect debate as to what sort of property, or what sort of particular, sounds are. It is difficult to see how there could be disagreement as to which of the two categories they fall into. While it is conceivable that some philosophers of audition are simply better phenomenologists than others, and have successfully identified how sounds really appear, it is not clear how this matter could be decided. The other possibility, the one I think we should accept, is that the reason there is so little agreement on how sounds seem is that we do not seem to hear sounds at all. Notice that sources pass the very test that sounds fail. The philosophers just cited disagree about nearly everything, but their descriptions of what audition tells us about sources converge: O'Callaghan's material bodies and happenings, Leddington's things heard in hearing, Nudds's streams segregated by the events that produced them, Casati and Dokic's happenings located at the object. Everyone who disputes what sounds seem to be agrees on what sources seem to be: events of certain kinds —collisions, scrapings, rollings— involving objects with certain properties, at certain locations. For sources there is a Chalmers-style consensus description available and used on all sides; for sounds there is not. The same instrument, applied twice, returns opposite verdicts, and it is worth being explicit that this is the situation, since it blocks the complaint that phenomenal presence is being wielded selectively. Premise 2 does not rest on my report of my phenomenology outweighing Nudds's report of his. It rests on the fact that where presence is genuine, reports of it agree. It might also be objected that presence can be acquired. Budek and Farkas themselves argue that repeated encounters can add objects to an experience: for the practised coffee drinker, entering the kitchen, it is the coffee, and not merely its odour, that is phenomenally present (2014, p. 362). Why not say, then, that the acoustician, or the practised listener trained to attend to what is heard in abstraction from its source, comes to have sounds phenomenally present, so that premise 2 holds at most for the untrained? The framework, however, supplies its own limits. Budek and Farkas consider the expert taster who reliably identifies pinot noir, and who knows that pinot noir is red; redness does not thereby become phenomenally present in the gustatory experience, because the flavours that indicate red are too diverse for there to be any phenomenally unified flavour of red for a recognitional capacity to key into (2014, pp. 365–366). The same holds for the acoustician: there is no unified appearance-type answering to being a longitudinal pressure wave or being a disposition to vibrate, over and above the source-event profile that every listener already has, and so the acoustician who identifies the 440Hz wave is in the position of the taster identifying red —identification routed through theory, not presence. Notice also the direction of travel in every case in which Budek and Farkas allow learning to add an object: from odour to coffee, from a sensation on the skin to the key one's fingers have found, from the glove to the scalpel it grips, from the blind man's stick to the surface it explores. Familiarity and expertise push presence outward along the causal chain, towards the items of practical significance; the cases in which presence sits at the proximal stimulus —a sting on the skin, an unfamiliar stale smell on a country road— are generated by unfamiliarity, the inverse of training. The objection therefore asks the framework to do something it does nowhere else: produce presence that migrates from the source back towards the stimulus as a result of training.[^6] ## 4. Sounds as Cognitive Error If we do not seem to hear sounds, why does nearly everyone believe that we do? Without an answer to this question, the defender of Sound retains a powerful reply: the near-universal belief that we seem to hear sounds is itself best explained by our seeming to hear sounds. My answer is adapted from a recent proposal by Miller, Holcombe and Latham (2020) concerning the phenomenology of temporal passage. Regardless of whether time actually passes —a significant portion of physicists and philosophers believe that it does not— many are attracted to the idea that it seems, experientially, to pass. Schuster, for example, writes that "the flow of time, or passage, as it is known, is given in experience, that it is as indubitable an aspect of our perception of the world as the sights and sounds that come in upon us" (1986, p. 695). Against this, Miller et al. argue that we do not have experiences as of time passing at all; rather, we falsely believe that we do. To believe that time seems to pass is to make a cognitive error. The challenge for such a view is to explain how we come to have this false belief, and Miller et al.'s explanation begins with language. The temporally asymmetric features of the world —that causes precede their effects, that we know more about the past than the future— mean that any adequately expressive language must locate events in relation to the standpoints of temporally embedded speakers, and so languages come to include grammar and vocabulary which places events in the past, present, or future ("yesterday", "will occur"), and often moving-time and moving-ego metaphors besides: the summer is approaching; we are approaching the summer. Such passage-friendly language, they argue, leads its users to conceptualise time as passing, and so to believe that it passes. From this belief there are two routes to the further belief that time seems to pass. On the first, Misdescriptionism, believers describe their experience in the terms their language supplies, and thereby come to believe that its content is as of passage. Compare our talk of the sun rising: the sun does not rise, and our phenomenology is presumably as of the relative motion of the earth and the sun, but "sunrise" is how we describe it, and having so described it we take our experience to present a rising sun. On the second, Inferentialism, believers reason that their belief that time passes, being a belief about the perceptible world, must be grounded in their experience, and so attribute to that experience a content as of passage. The two routes are not exclusive. An analogous explanation is available for sounds, and in one respect the auditory case is easier than the temporal one. Miller et al. must explain how language that tracks nothing —motion metaphors in a world without temporal motion— could nonetheless arise; sound-friendly language, by contrast, tracks something real. What is heard is transitory: clangs, crashes, and splashes last mere moments, and it is rare to hear sources which continue indefinitely.[^7] What is heard is also activity-dependent: audition never makes us aware simply of material objects, but of material objects doing something —we hear doors slamming, creaking, scraping, and water rushing, dripping, or pouring. Contrast vision. Something seen will often stick around, available to be seen again or seen by someone else; a tree might be seen swaying, but it might just as well be seen to be completely still. It therefore makes sense for language to describe what is seen in terms of persisting objects, to which speaker and hearer can return. If I am talking about something I heard, however, there is a fair chance that the opportunity for you to hear it has passed, and since what I heard was in any case an object doing something, what my report must pick out is the episode itself. Count nouns are the grammatical device for doing exactly that: "did you hear that?" needs a that. There is a further pressure in the same direction. Heard events are frequently unidentified at the moment of report —something bangs, and you do not yet know what— and when you do not know what banged, "a bang" is the only noun phrase available to you. A community whose members routinely need to report audibly detected events of unknown provenance will coin source-neutral event nominals as a matter of communicative necessity, and a vocabulary of source-neutral nominals is exactly a vocabulary that appears to denote items distinct from sources. The vocabulary we actually have confirms this genealogy. Casati, Di Bona and Dokic observe a "natural language propension to classify the objects of auditory perception in terms of events, with no reference to a supplementary category of separate sounds" (2013, p. 464): when we speak about the things we hear, we typically refer either to source events themselves (banging, clapping, scraping), or use words which are nominalisations of the verbs we use to describe source events (a bang, a clap, a scrape). Folk sound-talk, on the account I am proposing, is therefore largely true. "I heard a bang" reports a banging, and bangings are heard. The error enters not with the reports but with what the noun invites: the treatment of a bang as an individual over and above the banging —something that could be counted and re-identified, that instantiates properties, and that is independent of its source. This surplus is precisely what Nudds reports the phenomenology as containing and Leddington reports it as lacking. On the present account, it was never in the experience at all; it was only ever in the noun. This is also why the dispute cannot be deflated as merely grammatical. If the difference between hearing a banging and hearing a bang carried no commitments, there would be no sound-ontology debate to have; the debate exists because the nominal's commitments —particularity, independence, property-bearing— have been taken as phenomenological data and pursued into the world. Misdescription and inference divide the remaining labour between them. Misdescription fits the everyday reporter, who describes source-event phenomenology in the sound-nominal terms her language supplies, as harmlessly as she describes the relative motion of the earth and sun as a sunrise. Inference fits the theorist, for whom the second-order claim —not "I heard a bang" but "it seems to me that I hear sounds"— is largely an artefact of reflection, reached by exactly the two-step Miller et al. describe: I believe that there are sounds; that belief is perceptual if any belief is; therefore my experience must present them. A version of this two-step is visible in the literature's appeals to the sheer obviousness of Sound. Finally, the dialectical role of this explanation should be made explicit. In Miller et al.'s hands, the cognitive error theory does no negative work: the case against passage is made elsewhere, by physics, and the error theory only discharges the explanatory debt that denying the seeming incurs. The division of labour here is the same. The argument that we do not seem to hear sounds was given in Sections 2 and 3, and nothing in this section adds to it. What this section removes is the remaining ground for resisting that argument —namely, that the belief that we seem to hear sounds would otherwise be inexplicable. ## Conclusion What supports Sound? Not ordinary language, which speaks as happily of hearing slammings as of hearing thuds, and which is unreliable in just this territory. Not evolved function, which favours the tracking of sources over the tracking of anything one removed from them. And not phenomenal presence: audition makes source events present, and the descriptions of source phenomenology offered across the literature converge in just the way that Chalmers records for colour, while for sounds there is no agreed manifest character at all —only rival reports which cannot even settle whether what we allegedly hear is a particular or a property. The belief that we seem to hear sounds has an explanation which does not require its truth: the transience, activity-dependence, and frequent anonymity of what we hear make source-neutral event nominals a communicative necessity, the resulting sound-friendly language yields the belief that there are sounds, and misdescription or inference yields the belief that we seem to hear them. This account also makes a prediction that its rival does not: reports of auditory phenomenology should track the nominalising structure of the reporter's language, rather than holding constant across languages that package heard events differently.[^8] If the phenomenology were doing the work, no such variation would be expected. --- [^1]: While Nudds does not argue that sounds are identical to sound waves, he maintains that the two are intimately connected: sounds are "structures or patterns of frequency components... instantiated by sound waves" (2010, p. 290). [^2]: He has since distanced himself from this view. [^3]: This would be to adopt a Berkeleian view of audition: "in truth and strictness, nothing can be heard but sound" (1713/2012, p. 67). [^4]: As Nudds puts it, "the auditory system groups together all and only frequency components that are likely to have been produced by the same source because they are likely to have been produced by the same source" (2009, p. 74). See Bregman (1994, ch. 2) for a fuller account of the grouping principles involved. [^5]: See Siegel (2006) and Byrne and Siegel (2017) for this dispute. [^6]: There is also a dialectical cost to retreating to the trained listener which the defender of Sound may not wish to pay: a sound-presence available only to the initiated forfeits Sound's standing as a datum of common sense, and it is that standing which made the appeal to presence an objection in the first place. [^7]: Running water might be an exception here. 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