In defense of hearing meanings

According to the inferential view of language comprehension, we hear a speaker’s utterance and infer what was said, drawing on our competence in the syntax and semantics of the language together with background information. On the alternative perceptual view, fluent speakers have a non-inferential capacity to perceive the content of speech. On this view, when we hear a speaker’s utterance, the experience confers some degree of justification on our beliefs about what was said in the absence of defeaters. So, in the absence of defeaters, we can come to know what was said merely on the basis of hearing the utterance. Several arguments have been offered against a pure perceptual view of language comprehension, among others, arguments pointing to its alleged difficulties accounting for homophones and the context-sensitivity of ordinary language. After responding to the arguments against the perceptual view of language comprehension, I provide a new argument in favor of the perceptual view by looking closer at the dependence of the justificatory qualities of experience on the notion of a defeater as well as the perceptual nature of language learning and language processing

On Experiencing Meaning: Irreducible Cognitive Phenomenology and Sinewave Speech

Upon first hearing sinewaves, all that can be discerned are beeps and whistles. But after hearing the original speech, the beeps and whistles sound like speech. The difference between these two episodes undoubtedly involves an alteration in phenomenal character. O’Callaghan (2011) argues that this alteration is non-sensory, but he leaves open the possibility of attributing it to some other source, e.g. cognition. I discuss whether the alteration in phenomenal character involved in sinewave speech provides evidence for cognitive phenomenology. I defend both the existence of cognitive phenomenology and the phenomenal contrast method, as each concerns the case presented here

Hearing meanings: the revenge of context

According to the perceptual view of language comprehension, listeners typically recover high-level linguistic properties such as utterance meaning without inferential work. The perceptual view is subject to the Objection from Context: since utterance meaning is massively context-sensitive, and context-sensitivity requires cognitive inference, the perceptual view is false. In recent work, Berit Brogaard provides a challenging reply to this objection. She argues that in language comprehension context-sensitivity is typically exercised not through inferences, but rather through top-down perceptual modulations or perceptual learning. This paper provides a complete formulation of the Objection from Context and evaluates Brogaards reply to it. Drawing on conceptual considerations and empirical examples, we argue that the exercise of context-sensitivity in language comprehension does, in fact, typically involve inference

On what we experience when we hear people speak

According to perceptualism, fluent comprehension of speech is a perceptual achievement, in as much as it is akin to such high-level perceptual states as the perception of objects as cups or trees, or of people as happy or sad. According to liberalism, grasp of meaning is partially constitutive of the phenomenology of fluent comprehension. I here defend an influential line of argument for liberal perceptualism, resting on phenomenal contrasts in our comprehension of speech, due to Susanna Siegel and Tim Bayne, against objections from Casey O'Callaghan and Indrek Reiland. I concentrate on the contrast between the putative immediacy of meaning-assignment in fluent comprehension, as compared with other, less ordinary, perhaps translation-based ways of getting at the meaning of speech. I argue this putative immediacy is difficult to capture on a non-perceptual view (whether liberal or non-liberal), and that the immediacy in question has much in common with that which applies in other, less controversial cases of high-level perception

"Phenomenal Conservatism" - Ch 2 of Seemings and Epistemic Justification

In this chapter I introduce and analyse the tenets of phenomenal conservatism, and discuss the problem of the nature of appearances. After that, I review the asserted epistemic merits phenomenal conservatism and the principal arguments adduced in support of it. Finally, I survey objections to phenomenal conservatism and responses by its advocates. Some of these objections will be scrutinised and appraised in the next chapters

Chapter 9 When Inner Speech Misleads

This chapter examines whether and when the experience of inner speech can be inaccurate and thereby mislead the subject. It presents a view about the representational content of speech experience generally and then applies it to inner speech in particular. On such a view, speech experience typically presents us with far more than simply the low-level acoustic properties of speech: it conveys the relevant mental states of the (actual or hypothetical) speaker. Similarly, inner speech presents inner speakers with their own mental states. In light of this, inner speech can mislead either by presenting the subject with mental states they do not in fact have, or by presenting these mental states as belonging to another agent. The chapter reflects on the sorts of contexts in which either of these could occur

What Do We Experience When Listening to a Familiar Language?

What do we systematically experience when hearing an utterance in a familiar language? A popular and intuitive answer has it that we experience understanding an utterance or what the speaker said or communicated by uttering a sentence. Understanding a meaning conveyed by the speaker is an important element of linguistic communication that might be experienced in such cases. However, in this paper I argue that two other elements that typically accompany the production of spoken linguistic utterances should be carefully considered when we address the question of what is systematically experienced when we listen to utterances in a familiar language. First, when we listen to a familiar language we register various prosodic phenomena that speakers routinely produce. Second, we typically register stable vocal characteristics of speakers, such as pitch, tempo or accent, that are often systematically related to various properties of the speaker. Thus, the answer to the question of what we typically experience when listening to a familiar language is likely to be a complex one. Dedicated attention is needed to understand the nature and scope of phenomenology that pertains to linguistic communication. This paper lays some groundwork for that project