Hearing meaning: in Defense of High-Level Properties in Auditory Perception Experience

On the basis of the normativity of belief thesis in epistemology, belief is a normaAbstract: Are our auditory perceptual experiences, in the language we are familiar with, in themselves related to meaning? Some philosophers answer affirmatively and argue that auditory perceptions include meaning or semantic structures. Two of most important criticisms of this view concern what this view can say about: First, homophones-words with the same sound but different meanings; Second, understanding the linguistic phrases that their meanings depend on the context they are expressed in. In this paper, we provide some answers to these two worries. To the first, we show that our phenomenological experiences differentiate homophones. To the second worry, our reply depends on the publicity of meaning and defending the top-down processing of linguistic understanding.