Should We Resist the Seductiveness of the Space : Time : : Vision : Audition Analogy ?

We cannot "imagine a visual or auditory event that is nonspatial or atemporar' (Handel, 1988, p. 315); this statement either begs the question or is false. He claims that people mentally transform space and time in both modalities; I argue that we never mentally transform auditory space but often transpose in pitch and translate in time. Handel claims that all other "modality translations," including my theory of indispensable attributes (space-time:pitch-time::vision:audition), "are possible and relevant" (p. 316) and that theoretical commitment on this matter is unnecessary; I reject this tolerance. I show that the analogy rejected by Handel is partly true: (a) Space is the province of vision. (b) Vision is not inherently temporal. (c) Audition is intimately tied to time. (d) Audition is not inherently spatial. These statements are implied by my theory of indispensable attributes. People who are not cognitive psychologists have theories about cognitive phenomena; the corpus of such theories constitutes folk cognitive psychology. (For the analogous idea of folk taxonomy, see Lakoff, 1987, pp. 32-38). Some scientific cognitive theories are rational reconstructions (or systematic reformulations) of folk cognitive theories, and some contain implicit assumptions drawn from folk cognitive theories. It was to the latter that Garner (1981) was referring when he wrote about "experiments we know better than to do" (p. 137). Handel's article "Space is to Time as Vision is to Audition: Seductive but Misleading" (Handel, 1988), makes explicit a fragment of folk cognitive psychology (space:time::vision:audition), rejects it, and then proceeds to lay out alternative views, one of which is my theory of indispensable attributes (Kubovy, 1981, 1987), in which I propose the analogy space-time:pitch-time::vision:audition. Handel concludes that "all of the modality translations are possible and relevant" (except, presumably, the one he rejected), and that "there is no need to make a theoretical commitment" (p. 316). The analogy is not easy to dismiss. Handel wishes to persuade us that vision and audition are both spatial and temporal by asserting that "it is impossible to imagine a visual or auditory event which is nonspatial or atemporal" (p. 315). But we should not be persuaded: This statement either begs the question, or it is false. If, on the one hand, the statement referred to a visual event, then of course it would be true, but trivially so, because by definition events involve change. If, on the other hand, the statement referred to a visual object or scene, then …