Mind Meaning and Rationality group seminar

Dr Phillip Meadows (The University of Manchester)
In defence of medial theories of sounds
3 June 2015

The recent literature on the nature of sounds has produced a consensus rejection of what might be thought of as the scientifically informed common-sense position: that sounds, whatever else they may be, must be an entity mediate between the source of the sound and the subject hearing it. In this paper I attempt to (i) resist the motivations for this rejection of what has been called a medial theory of sounds, and (ii) provide an independent argument for medial theories of sounds. This latter argument is intended to shift attention from the two considerations that have dominated the debate thus far: the relevant scientific facts about audition, and the spatial phenomenology of auditory experience.