Hearing As

Abstract

Nearly everything ever written by philosophers on aspect perception has been about vision. This chapter catalogs some views and lessons regarding “seeing as,” and argues that not all of them carry over to aspect perception in hearing. In particular, the attention theory, very attractive for the case of vision, is not plausible for hearing. Hearing-as plays at least two central roles in human life. The chapter continues by illustrating them. One is in the appreciation of music: tonality, the ambiguity exploited in harmonic modulation, and the expressing of emotion. The other is in understanding speech: hearing sounds as speech at all, disambiguating utterances, and assigning illocutionary force.