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Grant it for the moment that whenever we hear a sound source, we also hear its sound. We should question whether we do ever only hear sounds sometimes.

Armstrong wants to say that we do:

But we can be said to have heard the coach only because we have heard the sound. We may not have paid much attention to the sound, we may have been much more interested in the coach than in the sound, but we must have heard the sound in order to hear the coach.

But the reverse implication does not hold. Somebody who heard a noise, which was in fact made by a coach, but who was unfamiliar with the noise that coaches make, could not say that he heard a coach.

Or at any rate he could not say that he knew he was hearing a coach.

(1961, p. 20, italics in the original)

Although he pulls back a bit at the end of the quote by limiting his denial to the hearer’s self-knowledge of his auditory experience, Armstrong seems to be more attracted to the stronger conclusion that the hearer does not hear the coach.

Armstrong’s view is challenged by Jackson:

But the reverse implication does hold. If I hear ‘a noise, which was in fact made by a coach’, then ipso facto I hear the coach—whether or not I am in a position to say that I do, or know that I do. (1977, p.

8, italics in the original)

Jackson charges Armstrong for confusing perception with belief about per-ception. This is related to Armstrong’s way of distinguishing between immediate and mediate perception—another way to call the distinction between direct and in-direct perception. For him, a mediate perception involves inference from the imme-diate object. Right after the above quote, Armstrong continues with an elaboration of what he means by “inference” (op. cit., p. 21). He makes it very explicit that what he means is more like the association of ideas, which is a kind of psychological process which suggests the mediate object.

We may then interpret Armstrong as saying that if a perceiver is unfamiliar with coaches, the sound he hears would not be able to suggest the idea of a coach to his conscious awareness. If something does not appear in the perceiver’s con-scious experience, then it would be a mistake to say that he perceives that thing.

Much more has to be said to make this view clear and precise, but we can already see in this primitive formulation that—without subscribing to Armstrong’s view which ties perception and belief-formation together—the basic idea in the quote above can be developed into a view which escapes Jackson’s charge.

Mediated perception, accordingly, can give rise to non-belief mental repre-sentations which partly constitute our phenomenal consciousness. However, such representations are acquired through prior experiences, such that the lack of prior experiences implies the lack of the relevant representation. In that case, there would not be any such representation to constitute our conscious experience, and hence the object would not be represented in the experience. If an object is not represented in our experience, then we do not perceive it.

My aim is not to defend such a simple view of perception. My purpose in presenting it is to bring out a fundamental difference between Armstrong’s concep-tion of percepconcep-tion and Jackson’s one. While Armstrong emphasises the representa-tional aspect of perception, Jackson emphasises the causal aspect instead. This ech-oes our distinction between auditory objects and heard objects.

The distinction between auditory objects and heard objects helps us to see that Armstrong and Jackson might be talking past each other. For Jackson, to per-ceive a material object is to be in a certain perceptual state caused by the action of that object (op. cit., p. 1). Since the coach plays such a causal role, the perceiver hears it regardless of how he thinks of the experience. In our terms, the coach is a heard object. In contrast, Armstrong’s view can be understood as saying that the coach is not represented in our auditory experience if we have no relevant prior experiences. He is then denying that the coach is, in our terms, our auditory objects in such a case.

The relevance of this detour into the more general issue about the nature of perception to our current target issue—whether we sometimes hear sounds only—

is that it depends. Every sound has its cause. If it is the causal aspect of perception which matters, then we never hear sounds only.⁷ If we instead focus on the repre-sentational aspect of our auditory experiences, then it may seem plausible that only sounds can be heard when we were infants, as the lack of prior experiences limits the scope of what objects can be represented in auditory experiences.

It is reasonable to say that we should consider both aspects in our proper understanding of auditory perception, but the problem then is what should we say when we try to reconcile the two views? We either do sometimes hear sounds only or do not. If we allow sound sources to be counted as heard objects, then we never hear in the causal sense sounds only. But shall we make this allowance? On the other hand, even if we accept that sound sources are not represented in auditory experiences of infants, this does not tell us what significance this case has on our—

adults’—auditory experiences.

7 But how far can we get to? Do I hear your parents when I hear your voice? That sounds absurd, but why? This is a version of a further issue about perception—the “stopping problem” (Montague, 2016, p. 19)—which concerns what can be heard in the whole causal chain leading to a perceptual experience. If there is no further constraint, then it seems we should say that we also hear events like the reflection of compression waves by our torso and pinnae and the vibration of our eardrums. This would be a very extreme if not absurd view. Therefore, we would then like to introduce some limi-tations from considerations about what is represented in our conscious auditory experience. Percep-tion is neither a purely causal matter nor a purely representaPercep-tional matter.

No decision could be made without a more thorough investigation into the general nature of perception, which we do not have space to do. At the bottom line, we should not take it for granted that we sometimes hear sounds only.