Status Updates From I See a Voice: Deafness, La...

Diderot's anonymous 'blind man from Puiseaux' would speak plausibly about vision and mirrors, so that his hearers might almost forget he 'could not have attached any idea to the terms he was using' - a lesson which, the philosopher suggested, we would do well to apply to all the other glib gabblers who can discourse endlessly about matters they do not remotely understand.

European philosophers used to imagine that signing would be encouraged in the East, because of its supposed similarity to non-alphabetic scripts, but it would seem that there are no records of indigenous Eastern signing systems, and modern Chinese sign language appears to have been originated in schools set up by Western missionaries.

Pitman believed that his 'system of phonetic shorthand' would add 'a sevenfold celerity' to the practice of writing. The productivity of authors would be so much improved that they would be able, within the span of an ordinary lifetime, to write bodies of work that would otherwise have taken at least three hundred years to complete.

It has been supposed that speech is invested with a mysterious virtue, which makes it the natural and living expression of thought and feeling; appeal has been made to a few vague notions of Plato's about the relation between language and ideas; and the old equivocation, which enabled the word logos to refer both to speech and to reason, has been treated as if it embodied some profound truth.

I was just thinking that the dramatic story of the Abbé de l'Epée ought to be turned into a movie, and turning the page discovered that it was a play as early as 1799. Josephine Bonaparte may have attended a performance.

Leibniz liked the situation of the deaf to that of the Chinese, who, he thought, would have little to lose if they all became deaf and dumb: their speech was acknowledged to be impoverished and barely articulate, but their writing system compensated by being 'abundant, and independent of language'.

Newton's reason for preferring to find seven colours in the spectrum was that it helped clinch his analogy between light and sound. For if there were seven colours, ascending from Red to Violet, then they could be aligned with the seven notes of the ancient Greek musical scale - that is to say, the octave, which later became the basis of early Christian church music as well.

"It is primarily through the voice that people make known their inwardness, for they put into it what they are."~paraphrasing Hegel

"For our voices are the radiant centre of our auditory world."~Speaking of the connection between hearing and vocalizing.

"If there are such things as natural symbols, then sounds are surely the natural symbol of transience and the lostness of past time."

"A sound can barely survive the moment of its creation."

"Without visual or tactile clues, it seems, we could not begin to frame an idea of space, so it would not occur to us that there might be a difference between our own bodies and a world of objects independent of it."

"We respond [to voices] as we do to faces: as immediate embodiments of personal character and sensitive indicators of fluctuating mood." ~One reason mere text cannot replace in-person relationships.

"Hearing distinguishes itself from the other senses because of its unique partnership with an active faculty, namely the voice." ~No other sense has a companion ability to transmit intentional meaning.

Four delusions shared by both friends and enemies of voice: 1. That voice is connected to the soul, 2. That experience must be analysed by senses, 3. That hearing=time & vision=space, 4. That language has two forms (audible speech and visible writing).