Maria Giovanna Corrado (Warwick) A puzzle about the Nature of Auditory Perceptual Experience

We commonsensically take it that one of the functions of perception is to enable us to enter in cognitive contact with a variety of elements populating one’s environment, including events in which ordinary material objects participate. The case of auditory perception poses a challenge to accommodate this function of perception. A set of phenomenological considerations seems to suggest that the only objects present in auditory perceptual experience are sounds and not events in which ordinary material objects participate. One approach to resisting this view, found in the literature, is to characterise the nature of sounds and their ontological relationship with events in which ordinary material objects participate and, consequently, to derive an account of auditory perception that allows that sounds aren’t the only objects present in auditory perception. I argue that this approach fails by putting forward a puzzle about the nature of auditory perceptual experience. The puzzle purports to show that sounds sufficiently determine the auditory perceptual experiences we undergo and exclude events in which material objects participate from doing so. After providing some motivation for the puzzle and addressing some worries, I will point to the direction of my solution and, hence, of an alternative approach to argue that events in which ordinary material objects participate are present in auditory perceptual experience.