Language, Music, and Mind by Diana Raffman
By Diana Raffman
Taking a singular method of a longstanding challenge within the philosophy of artwork, Diana Raffman offers the 1st cognitivist concept of the character of ineffable, or verbally inexpressible, musical wisdom. within the approach she additionally sheds gentle on primary concerns within the thought of brain. Raffman invokes fresh conception in linguistics and cognitive psychology to supply an account of the content material and etiology of musical wisdom that "can now not be positioned into words." in the framework of Lerdahl and Jackendoff's generative conception of tune belief, she isolates 3 different types of ineffability attending our wakeful wisdom of song - entry, feeling, and nuance ineffability - and indicates how those come up. Raffman makes a close comparability of linguistic and musical realizing, culminating in an assault at the conventional concept that human feelings represent the that means or semantic content material of song. She compares her account of musical ineffability to a number of conventional techniques to the matter, relatively these of Nelson Goodman and Stanley Cavell. within the concluding bankruptcy, Raffman explores an important quandary that her idea poses to Daniel Dennett's propositional conception of recognition. Diana Raffman is Assistant Professor of Philosophy on the Ohio nation college.
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Additional resources for Language, Music, and Mind
Example text
But this] is an old and largely futile game. . [W]hatever music may "mean," it is in no sense comparable to linguistic meaning (1983, 5-6). < previous page page_43 If you like this book, buy it! next page > < previous page page_44 next page > Page 44 I suspect that much of the skepticism about a musical/language parallel in the semantic arena results from a failure to recognize the variety of places at which such a parallel might gain its footing. In what follows I shall argue that our musical feelings are in certain respects precisely comparable to linguistic meanings; while I am sympathetic to the separatist line of Lerdahl and Jackendoff, I think it is overstated.
This most abstract representation specifies the relative structural importance of pitch-time events "in terms of continuity and progression, the movement toward tension or relaxation, and the degree of closure or nonclosure" (1983, 123). For example, the fact that the tonic (I) harmony of bar 1 branches left with an open circle from the tonic (I) harmony of bar 12 (see arrows) means that the former is felt as a strong prolongation or anticipation of the latter. Although the operations of the four sets of rules are clearly distinguishable, none of the four components functions in isolation from the other three.
Next page > < previous page page_ii intentionally left blank next page > < previous page page_37 next page > Page 37 Chapter 3 Does Music Mean What It Cannot Say? Do we not, in truth, ask the impossible of music when we expect it to express feelings? 1 A Second Candidate for Ineffable Knowledge What is it to know a piece of music? 1 To be conscious of that knowledge is to be conscious of the content of that representation. Here, conscious knowledge takes the form of certain peculiarly musical feelings: we experience the feeling of rhythmic stress that comes with hearing (representing) an acoustic event as the downbeat, the feeling of stability that comes with hearing a given tone as the tonic, the feelings of tension and resolution that come with hearing a series of events as a harmonic progression, and so on.