Hearing That It Is Silent: How to Hallucinate a Non-Perception

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What do we perceive when we experience silence? The traditional position denies that experiences of silence are perceptions because to perceive is to perceive something. If this is the case, then it does not seem possible to hallucinate silence because there would be no object of the hallucinatory perceptual experience. Yet our ability to hallucinate silence is intuitively plausible. In this paper, I develop an account of the traditional view on which the hallucination of perceptual absences is possible. Utilizing a disjunctivist notion of hallucination, I emphasize one’s epistemic access to the relevant perceptual information rather than their perceptual object to account for the experience of silence for a hearing person in both veridical and hallucinatory cases. (Conference canceled due to COVID-19)

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