[lit-ideas] Re: Wittgenstein and Grice on sounds
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2011 11:57:20 EST
R. Paul adds: "Sound is only heard when sound waves impinge on the sensory
surfaces of the ear. (I don't know what to say about having a ringing in
your ears or hearing voices.) To say, as I'm trying to, that sound is what we
hear may sound tautological—and would be if only sensation were to count
as sound. ... it might be tempting to say that the sensation is the real
thing and those waves aren't. It's a temptation that should be avoided. Unless
Berkeley was right."
--- which has the right Griceian ring to it --. "It rings a Griceian
bell". So I spent last night re-reading his "Remarks about the senses" and
quote
verbatim some phrases I find there, including "Berkeleian"
Only THEN should we go back to Witters's quote that started the thread.
Grice titled his thing, "Some remarks about the senses", but it should be
read as "Some remarks about NOT distinguishing the senses beyond necessity",
as it were.
Grice is concerned with _criteria_ for talking of an
***** auditory property *****
Why can't we see the noise of a gull?
----
The 'sound' the gull makes is described then as a primary
'auditory' property.
Grice adapts Urmson's view ("The object of the five senses", British
Academy Annual Philosophical lecture) that the sense are five ("Surely 'moral
sense' and 'sense of humour' are different _animals_").
a. visual
b. auditory
c. olfactory
d. tactual
e. --- gust-based
and so are their properties. These can be 'direct' or indirect, or
superior and inferior, as Grice prefers.
While the property you would think attaches to the object (x) you hear,
this is dubious, Grice says, since it is impossible, logically, to describe
the experience of hearing unless by mentioning the properties of the objects
you hear -- the 'sound'. (Strawson also deals with sounds as individuals
in "Individuals").
Grice uses a sense-neutral verb,
"to sense"
"X senses that the gull is noisy."
---- As specifies for 'hears' we get some oddities.
He considers the oddity of saying
"I heard the explosion on the right"
Or
"The sound of the explosion came from my right"
or:
"The explosion _sounded_ *as if* it were on my right".
Grice notes that 'x is on the right' is usually not accounted by one's
ears. This shows the oddity, which is entailed by the conceptual impossibility
that "spatial characteristics be auditory".
Similarly, "The sound was in the kitchen" is odd. Sounds are in one's
ears, not in kitchens.
"There may be an implicature, to the effect that, if we were to _see_ x
(while it explodes) x is in kitchen" but surely we cannot _hear_ 'in the
kitchen'" (adapted).
cfr. "There was a strange sound in the garage". Similarly odd.
Grice goes from the sense-neutral, X senses that x has this [auditory,
etc.] property', to define 'hear' specifically. He proposes:
"to hear" = df.
"To hear" is "to perceive things (or better, events) as having certain
degree of loudness, certain determinates of pitch, and certain
tone-qualities." (Grice, WoW: 250).
According to the criterion he adopts, the anatomy of the ear is all
important. The type of _stimulus_ (Grice's word) for the ear is "sound wave".
The
following are tautological (Grice's word -- as Paul's):
We hear by sound waves (analytic)
as "we see by light rays".
Grice notes that in some cases, we can use a nonpersonal subject, incl.
'it':
"It sounded awful to me"
This resembles:
"The rose smelled good" (Literally: "I smelled the rose as good").
"The rose looked red" (Literally: I look at the rose and it is red").
He favours the nonpersonal phrases as being "more British".
He dispatches Berkeley soon enough: "this more or less Berkeleian
position", i.e. that 'on the right', or 'on my right' are 'ambiguous' as to
the
sense-modality: 'you hear something as being on the right'. Odd.
"This more or less Berkeleian position is perhaps unattractive
independently of the current argument." And right he is.
Grice notes why Berkeley is wrong: "The logical relations," Grice writes,
generally, but with 'sounds' in focus, "between the different sections of
the determinability range and those of the simplicity-complexity range may
need detailed examination. For instance, consider, again, the statement:
'The sound of the explosion came from my right'.
---- or
"The explosition sounded as if it were on my right"
Grice notes:
"It may be IMPOSSIBLE to specify anything about the way the explosion
sounded which determined its sounding as if were on my right, in which case my
criterion being on my right will qualify as an
***** auditory simple property. ****"
[But this is ridiculous].
Grice then concludes:
"Yet certainly the explosion's sounding, even in the most favourable
observational conditions, as it it were on my right is a SECONDARY (inferior)
test for the location of the explosion."
--- "So we would have an example here of a property which is auditorily
simple without being auditorily determinable."
--- and thus an 'otiose' property as far as they go.
"This may be of interest" in view, Grice suggests of the oddity when
"asked if spatial characteristics -- x is on the right -- as being auditory".
---
Grice introduces a visum. "I saw a cow in the field". Loose grammar.
Literally, you saw the VISUM of a cow.
Similarly, he proposes AUDITUM, 'what we hear' or heard..
We hear what we hear.
"Sound" is perhaps ambiguous in that respect. It is not a Latin term.
Grice speaks, like Paul, of analytic, and tautology: "It does NOT seem to
be just a contingent fact that we do not HEAR things as being on the right,
but rather as noisy, etc." (adapted) -- This is "tautological", Grice
notes on p. 259 of WoW. He goes on to explain a sort of Martian that has
TWO SETS of ears
They call the thing, x-ing and y-ing. When asked by us, they reply that
x-ing something as noisy and y-ing something as noisy, makes for "all the
difference in the world". (They x with the upper set of ears, and they y with
the lower set of ears). "We should be puzzled." Grice notes:
He grants: "I am well aware that here, those whose approach is more
Wittgensteinian than my own might complain that unless something more is said
about the difference between x-ing and y-ing might 'come out' or show itself
in publicly observable phenomena, then the claim by the Martians that x-ing
and y-ing are different would be one" which should puzzle us less. Or not.
McEvoy is quoting the early Witters on 'sounds'. There's the latter
Witters, too. And so on.
Speranza
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