Against perceiving meanings: Empedocles leaped or loves?

Abstract

According to a strong “hearing-meanings” version of high-levelism about perceptual experience, distinct utterance meanings can themselves figure in the phenomenal character of perceptual experience. Existing debates press this thesis from two directions: homophone-based objections and context-sensitivity objections. This paper develops a bilingual version of both pressures by focusing on interlingual homophonic sentences and standard models of bilingual lexical access. Empirical work suggests that, in fluent bilinguals, lexical candidates from both languages are activated non-selectively, and that extra-linguistic cues, encoded in beliefs and expectations about which language is being used, guide the inhibition of non-target candidates. When a strong hearing-meanings thesis is combined with such models of bilingual lexical access, the resulting view incurs a substantial commitment to systematic cognitive penetration in bilingual overlap cases. This commitment is both theoretically costly and empirically ill-supported, and it provides a principled reason to resist the strong hearing-meanings thesis.