Hearing, Hearing Impairment, and the Audible World: A Theoretical Essay

Significant changes have occurred in the field of human perception, particularly from the work of Gibson [1966, 1979], at both theoretical and empirical levels, and from conceptually related work by researchers like Johansson [1950] and Michotte [1963]. A brief outline of Gibons's theoretical attack is given later. Enough to say at this introductory point that the general form of these authors' approaches is one that tries to produce adequate accounts of the real world to be perceived. Perhaps more accurately, the world available for human perception. For this reason the approach has been dubbed 'ecological' by Gibson [1979].

It is worthwhile bringing this strand of intellectual and scientific endeavour to the attention of workers in the field of audiology, because, I argue, researchers in audiology carry out their investigations of hearing and its impairment on the (unexamined) assumptive basis of a physico-biological model of 'what it means to hear'. Such a model-structuralist in character-is perfectly coherent in its own terms, but is perfectly incoherent, as explained below, in the framework of the real, day-to-day audible world-the ecological audible world.