Silence Perception and Spatial Content

ABSTRACT

It seems plausible that visual experiences of darkness have perceptual phenomenal content that clearly differentiates them from absences of visual experiences. I argue, relying on psychological results concerning auditory attention, that the analogous claim is true about auditory experiences of silence. More specifically, I propose that experiences of silence present empty spatial directions like ‘right’ or ‘left’, and so have egocentric spatial content. Furthermore, I claim that such content is genuinely auditory and phenomenal in the sense that one can, in principle, recognize that one is experiencing silence. This position is far from obvious, as the majority of theories concerning silence perception do not ascribe perceptual phenomenal content to experiences of silence.

KEYWORDS:

• silence
• audition
• absence perception
• spatial perception
• content

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 I do not postulate a stronger thesis that an ability for introspective recognition is necessary for content to be phenomenal. I merely postulate that such an ability is present in the case of experiences of darkness, and later argue that the same is true of experiences of silence.

2 The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments. The paper was presented during SemDok seminar at Jagiellonian University and 94^th Joint Session of the Mind Association and Aristotelian Society. The early idea of the paper was presented when I was a commentator on Phillip Meadows’s paper during the Auditory Perception and Musical Sound workshop organized by Elvira Di Bona and Michał Klincewicz.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the National Science Centre (Poland) grant 2018/31/D/HS1/00363.