Diana Raffman - Language, music, and mind

1993 by Diana Raffman

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This book was set in Palatino by The MIT Press and was printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Raffman, Diana.
Language, music, and mind / Diana Raffman.
p. cm.
"A Bradford Book."
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-262-18150-9
1. MusicPhilosophy and aesthetics. 2. MusicPsychological aspects.
3. Music and language. 4. Cognitive psychology. 5. Philosophy of mind.
I. Title.
ML3800.R25 1993
781'.11dc2092-26560
CIP
MN

Parts of this book are reprinted from Language of Art, by Nelson Goodman, 1968, Hackett Publishing, Indianapolis; from "Quining Qualia" by Daniel Dennett, in Consciousness and Contemporary Science, 1988, edited by A. Marcel and E. Bisiach, Oxford University Press, New York; from "The Meaning of Music" by Diana Raffman, in Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Vol. XVI: Philosophy and the Arts, 1991 by University of Notre Dame Press; from A Generative Theory of Tonal Music by Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff, 1983, The MIT Press, Cambridge, 1983 by MIT; from The Modularity of Mind by Jerry A. Fodor, The MIT Press, Cambridge, 1983 by MIT; and from Aspects of the Theory of Syntax by Noam Chomsky, The MIT Press, Cambridge, 1965 by MIT. All excerpts reprinted by permission.

This book is ultimately about a pair of oppositions. The first erects a divide between two kinds of perceptual properties, where by 'perceptual' I mean properties that objects are perceived as havinglike colors, textures, pitches, and timbres. (Philosophers often call them 'secondary qualities'.) It turns out that some of these perceptual properties cannot be remembered. For example, we cannot rememberin the sense of being able to re-identify or recognize by inspection (e.g., by looking)precise colors. We can remember red and blue, even scarlet and indigo, as such, but we cannot remember precise shades of red and blue. In more traditional philosophical terms, we can remember the determinables (viz., the general categories) but not their determinates (viz., the finest values we can discriminate within those categories). Similarly, we can remember augmented fourths and major sixths as such, but not the specific "determinate" intervals we can discriminate within those general interval categories.

The second opposition has to do with what we can and cannot say. Not surprisingly, learning a word for a property one perceives requires that one remember the property (in the recognitional sense at issue); for example, learning to call major sixths 'major sixths', by listening, requires that one remember what a major sixth sounds like. Hence if there are perceptual properties that cannot be remembered, then there are perceptual properties that cannot be reported on the basis of inspection; for example, although we can report that a sound is a major sixth on the basis of listening to it, we cannot report that it is this or that particular determinate major sixth.

I suspect that this allied pair of oppositionsbetween what we can and cannot remember, on the one hand, and what we can and cannot say, on the otherlies close to the heart of such varied issues as the

possibility of a private language, the psychological plausibility of eliminative materialism about the mind-brain, and the metaphysical status of secondary qualities. I do not discuss those topics here, however. Here I examine the relationship between memory and verbalization as it figures in the perception of tonal music. Specifically, I invoke recent psychological theories of perceptual memory and language processing in order to shed light on the traditional philosophical problem of ineffable musical knowledge. Philosophers of art have long written of musical knowledge that cannot be put into words; I formulate a psychologically plausible account of its content and etiology in terms