Speech perception is multimodal. Depriving a person of speaking in one of the constituent modalities consigns her to expressing herself incompletely. Therefore face coverings, including especially those that cover the mouth, deprive their wearers of full oral expression. Therefore, the niqab and the burka are wrong.
This is an argument against face coverings that I have not seen. Some claim that veils are oppressive, but many women deny it. They say that they are more comfortable not showing their faces. Others say that women who cover their faces offend community standards. I am really not clear how defensible this argument is: at the very least, it is explicitly a proposal to limit individual freedom, and there must be a clear and sufficient reason when this is done. It’s not obvious that a fuzzy appeal to nebulous standards will do the trick.
But what if there is a hitherto overlooked and unacceptable limitation on the liberty of women who wear a complete face covering? A limitation that depends on an empirical proposition?
On the modal view, vision affects what we hear in these cases. The experience is auditory, but it is influenced by visual input. On the multimodal view, the experience is audiovisual. It is neither an auditory experience, nor a visual experience, but rather a new experience that is specific to neither modality. How can we decide between these views?
Philosophers generally rely on the phenomenal test. “What it is like” to perceive speech reveals that it is auditory in character. Moreover, think of what happens when you shut down one channel: watch TV with the mute button on, or listen to speech on the radio. In the first case, you don’t perceive speech at all. In the second case, you hear it just the way you would if you were looking at the speaker—though if you were also looking, you might hear something different and you would hear something more accurately and clearly.
Is the phenomenal test reliable? We know, for instance, that when monkeys watch other monkeys vocalize, their neural response is quite different from what it is when they merely listen or merely watch. As well there is the evidence of mental imagery. When you listen to speech on the radio, you have a strong tendency to visualize somebody speaking. When you watch somebody speak with the mute button activated, you have an auditory image of speech. You might even sub-vocalize. None of these results is conclusive, but they are suggestive. They suggest, in particular, that the phenomenal test could be mistaken, or (more significantly) that we can systematic mistakes about “what it is like”
It is possible that speech is audiovisual, but that when one or other input is zeroed, you have a deficient experience. This, I think, is the best way to interpret the evidence. Regardless of what I think, it is pretty clear that the empirical jury is out on whether speech perception is modal or multimodal.
Let’s come back to the ethical case against face coverings. I take it that nobody takes into consideration that they deprive a woman of the right to her speech being fully heard. In other words, they do not consider that they deprive her of the right to express herself in the manner characteristic of her species. Using the “what it is like” test, they think of speech as purely auditory. They may concede that vision contributes to speech, but they may think that this can be compensated for in other ways, for example, by the use of a microphone. But they may not realize that speech perception is inherently audiovisual, and that women wearing a niqab or burka are not being allowed to be perceived.
There is an evident objection to my argument. It is that speech is the communication of meaning; it is not simply, and not primarily, the production of a perceptible act. Freedom of expression can be ensured by allowing people simply to write; there is no need to speak. And there is certainly no need to speak in my allegedly complete sense, provided that the communication of meaning is assured.
I don’t buy this. Our species communicates by talking. It may communicate in other ways, but this is a natural and primary way of communicating. And talking is an audiovisual form of communication, I believe. Some may be deprived of this means of communication—they may be mute; they may be blind or deaf. These individuals are deprived of a natural means of communication. To deprive others of this means of communication, even though they are fully capable of it, is to take away something to which they have a right.
Recently, face coverings have been considered in the context of the rights of a secular community. These face coverings, along with head scarves and turbans, are being treated as an insult to Québec social values. (I have written about this here, here, and here.) I am outraged by this atavistic appeal to community values as a means of suppressing the rights of minority communities. But in thinking about the issue in the context of my other research, I have come to realize that community rights are not the only issue here. There is a difference between head coverings and face coverings, and the latter may differentially threaten individual rights.
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