Awful noises: evaluativism and the affective phenomenology of unpleasant auditory experience
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Awful noises: evaluativism and the affective phenomenology of unpleasant auditory experience Tom Roberts1
Accepted: 30 August 2020 The Author(s) 2020
Abstract According to the evaluativist theory of bodily pain, the overall phenomenology of a painful experience is explained by attributing to it two types of representational content—an indicative content that represents bodily damage or disturbance, and an evaluative content that represents that condition as bad for the subject. This paper considers whether evaluativism can offer a suitable explanation of aversive auditory phenomenology—the experience of awful noises—and argues that it can only do so by conceding that auditory evaluative content would be guilty of widespread error. Defending such an error-theory, moreover, comes with several explanatory costs. Keywords Pain Affective phenomenology Auditory perception Sounds
1 Introduction Recent work on the nature of unpleasant mental states has focused closely on the case of somatic pain, and competing theories have been developed in order to explain the aversive phenomenal character of painful experiences1—what it is in virtue of which these states feel bad. Ideally, a philosophical account of pain’s unpleasantness would be transferable to other disagreeable sensory states, so as to afford a unified understanding not only of headaches and stubbed toes, but of 1
E.g. Aydede (2009), Bain (2013, 2017, 2019), Barlassina and Hayward (2019), Corns (2014, 2018), Cutter and Tye (2011), Gray (2019), Jacobson (2013, 2019) and Klein (2007).
& Tom Roberts [email protected] 1
Department of Sociology, Philosophy, and Anthropology, University of Exeter, Rennes Drive, Exeter EX44RJ, UK
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T. Roberts
encounters with awful noises; noxious tastes, odours, and textures; and—perhaps— of nausea, vertigo, claustrophobia, and other embodied discomforts.2 The project would be to explain what these undesirable experiences have in common, that sets them apart from affectively-neutral psychological states such as beliefs or visual depictions of everyday scenes. This paper takes an incremental step in pursuit of this project, by considering unpleasant auditory experiences such as the sound of fingernails being dragged down a chalkboard; the scrape of a chair against hard flooring or a fork against a china plate; the screech of a heavy vehicle’s brakes; an abrasive laugh; the whine of a mosquito; burps, slurps, chewings, and the noisy operation of other bodily functions. What is it that makes it the case that some things sound bad to us, and other things don’t? This enquiry is complicated by the fact that there is little philosophical consensus over what it is, exactly, that we hear when we make auditory contact with our surroundings. Options include sounds; ordinary objects such as bells, whistles, and fireworks (e.g. Pasnau 1999); and everyday events such as collisions and breakings (e.g. Casati et al. 2013; Leddington 2014). If we hear sounds, alone or in conjunction with objects or happenings, then we must address
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