Sound Research WIKINDX

In rejecting the idea that sounds are proximal stimuli (cf. (O'Shaughnessy 2009)), a number of arguments are used including:

• if sound is at the hearer's position then the number of sounds = the number of listeners
• Failing this, then a single sound can exist in multiple locations

Also rejected is that, while the fact that the sound of something distant sounds different if one were close up (an argument for sound as proximal stimuli), that we have no notion of distal volume or loudness of a sound—we do. A motorcycle at a distance can still be judged to be loud.

The fault, apparently, is that the proximal stimulus theory does not "distinguish between source and informational channel." Thus, the information derived from a sound wave includes not only information about the original sound wave but also filtering in the medium, reflections, absorption, echoes and so on.

Another fault is that our everyday experience locates sound where the sound wave source is.

Arguments against the medial/wave view include:

• the existence of infrasound and ultrasound (the same physical nature as other sound waves but not sensed)
• a sound wave does not necessarily depend on the physical property of the sounding object (cf loudspeakers)
• as with proximal theories, medial theories do not locate sounds where our everyday experience would locate them (at the source and so at a distance and unmoving)
• if sounds were sound waves where then is the information contained in them that informs about the sound source, its distance, the sound's loudness, and so on—everything that we experience in everyday perception of sound?

• Sound is a property. Like colours, smells, and shapes, sounds are secondary qualities being sensory qualities. One might object that an object does not have a sound—unlike the object that has a smell, colour, or shape—rather the object produces a sound. Another objection is that sounds are dynamic and "intrinsically temporal entities" and, unlike colours and shapes, are individuals.
• Sound is a located event. Sounds are events that happen to material objects. They are located at the material source and can be identified with, or at least supervene on, the vibrations of that object. A medium is required to transmit the sound to a listener but is not required for the sound' existence—a tuning fork in a vacuum still produces a sound; it simply cannot be transmitted to us. In this theory, sound is also an "intrinsically temporal entity." Nevertheless, sounds can also be mislocated, as with echoes, and the Doppler effect might suggest that sound is in fact medial. However, a proponent of this distal theory would simply argue that it is the medium that affects our perception of pitch change—to anyone remaining with the sound source, the sound does not change. Other objections are typically countered by the charge that the objector confuses sound with a sound wave.
• Sound is a relational event. Sounds are events involving both source and medium. Developed from Aristotle's statement "everything that makes a sound does so by the impact of something against something else, across a space filled with air" (De Anima II.8 420b15). This is usually taken as an argument for the medial view of sound as a sound wave but has been interpreted by O'Callaghan to mean that sound waves are not the sounds themselves but the effects of the sounds. Thus, the medium is required for sound and so sound does not exist in a vacuum.
• Sound is the disposition of an object to vibrate upon being stimulated. In this way it is like colour which might be explained as the disposition of an object to reflect white light in a particular way. Without vibration, objects may well have sounds but they cannot be heard. Hitting, or 'thwacking,' an object is akin to shining white light upon an object—it reveals the sound as the light reveals the colour. An objection might be that, in fact, there are many dispositions to vibrating/sounding when thwacked as illustrated by the different vibratory characteristics of an amplitude envelope. Equally, there are many types of thwackers that can be used, each eliciting a different vibration and sound. What also of the sound that lasts once the vibrational disposition has ceased? We also hear sounds as unfolding over time which is more process and event than disposition.

This syllogism, rejected as a bad syllogism by Dignāga, was put forth by a school of Brahmanical thinkers who held, for doctrinal reasons, that sound is eternal. To maintain this claim in the face of observation to the contrary, these thinkers maintained instead that what is transitory is the revelation of sound, not sound itself. According to them, in other words, sound is constantly present, but we hear it only when its presence is revealed.

Welch, R. B. and D. H. Warren, 1980, “Immediate perceptual response to intersensory discrepancy,” Psychological Bulletin, 88(3): 638–667.

The discipline of phenomenology may be defined initially as the study of structures of experience, or consciousness. Literally, phenomenology is the study of “phenomena”: appearances of things, or things as they appear in our experience, or the ways we experience things, thus the meanings things have in our experience. Phenomenology studies conscious experience as experienced from the subjective or first person point of view. This field of philosophy is then to be distinguished from, and related to, the other main fields of philosophy: ontology (the study of being or what is), epistemology (the study of knowledge), logic (the study of valid reasoning), ethics (the study of right and wrong action), etc.

The historical movement of phenomenology is the philosophical tradition launched in the first half of the 20^th century by Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, et al. In that movement, the discipline of phenomenology was prized as the proper foundation of all philosophy—as opposed, say, to ethics or metaphysics or epistemology. The methods and characterization of the discipline were widely debated by Husserl and his successors, and these debates continue to the present day. (The definition of phenomenology offered above will thus be debatable, for example, by Heideggerians, but it remains the starting point in characterizing the discipline.)

In recent philosophy of mind, the term “phenomenology” is often restricted to the characterization of sensory qualities of seeing, hearing, etc.: what it is like to have sensations of various kinds. However, our experience is normally much richer in content than mere sensation. Accordingly, in the phenomenological tradition, phenomenology is given a much wider range, addressing the meaning things have in our experience, notably, the significance of objects, events, tools, the flow of time, the self, and others, as these things arise and are experienced in our “life-world”.

Phenomenology as a discipline has been central to the tradition of continental European philosophy throughout the 20^th century, while philosophy of mind has evolved in the Austro-Anglo-American tradition of analytic philosophy that developed throughout the 20^th century. Yet the fundamental character of our mental activity is pursued in overlapping ways within these two traditions. Accordingly, the perspective on phenomenology drawn in this article will accommodate both traditions. The main concern here will be to characterize the discipline of phenomenology, in a contemporary purview, while also highlighting the historical tradition that brought the discipline into its own.

Basically, phenomenology studies the structure of various types of experience ranging from perception, thought, memory, imagination, emotion, desire, and volition to bodily awareness, embodied action, and social activity, including linguistic activity. The structure of these forms of experience typically involves what Husserl called “intentionality”, that is, the directedness of experience toward things in the world, the property of consciousness that it is a consciousness of or about something. According to classical Husserlian phenomenology, our experience is directed toward—represents or “intends”—things only through particular concepts, thoughts, ideas, images, etc. These make up the meaning or content of a given experience, and are distinct from the things they present or mean.

The basic intentional structure of consciousness, we find in reflection or analysis, involves further forms of experience. Thus, phenomenology develops a complex account of temporal awareness (within the stream of consciousness), spatial awareness (notably in perception), attention (distinguishing focal and marginal or “horizonal” awareness), awareness of one’s own experience (self-consciousness, in one sense), self-awareness (awareness-of-oneself), the self in different roles (as thinking, acting, etc.), embodied action (including kinesthetic awareness of one’s movement), purpose or intention in action (more or less explicit), awareness of other persons (in empathy, intersubjectivity, collectivity), linguistic activity (involving meaning, communication, understanding others), social interaction (including collective action), and everyday activity in our surrounding life-world (in a particular culture).

Furthermore, in a different dimension, we find various grounds or enabling conditions—conditions of the possibility—of intentionality, including embodiment, bodily skills, cultural context, language and other social practices, social background, and contextual aspects of intentional activities. Thus, phenomenology leads from conscious experience into conditions that help to give experience its intentionality. Traditional phenomenology has focused on subjective, practical, and social conditions of experience. Recent philosophy of mind, however, has focused especially on the neural substrate of experience, on how conscious experience and mental representation or intentionality are grounded in brain activity. It remains a difficult question how much of these grounds of experience fall within the province of phenomenology as a discipline. Cultural conditions thus seem closer to our experience and to our familiar self-understanding than do the electrochemical workings of our brain, much less our dependence on quantum-mechanical states of physical systems to which we may belong. The cautious thing to say is that phenomenology leads in some ways into at least some background conditions of our experience."

Driver: Do I turn left?
Passenger: Right.

English can be lethal. Philosophers have long motivated appeals for an ideal language by pointing out how ambiguity creates the menace of equivocation:

No child should work.
Every person is a child of someone.
Therefore, no one should work.

Happily, we know how to criticize and correct all equivocations. Indeed, every natural language is self-disambiguating in the sense that each has all the resources needed to uniquely specify any reading one desires. Ambiguity is often the cause but rarely the object of philosophical rumination."