Filozofija i drustvo 2019 Volume 30, Issue 1, Pages: 36-53
https://doi.org/10.2298/FID1901036G
Full text ( 399 KB)
Are musical works sound structures?
Guerreiro Vitor (Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto, Instituto de Filosofia, Porto, Portugal)
This paper is about the dilemma raised against musical ontology by Roger
Scruton, in his The Aesthetics of Music: either musical ontology is about
certain mind-independent “things” (sound structures) and so music is left
out of the picture, or it is about an “intentional object” and so its
puzzles are susceptible of an arbitrary answer. I argue the dilemma is
merely apparent and deny that musical works can be identified with sound
structures, whether or not conceived as abstract entities. The general idea
is this: both Platonism and nominalism about musical works are a kind of
fetishism: musical works are not “things”, in Danto’s sense of “mere real
things”; they rather involve complex relationships between objects, events,
and different kinds of functional properties. For this, I draw on Levinson
and Howell’s notion of indication, combined with Searle’s approach to
institutional reality... with a little twist of my own.
Keywords: musical ontology, Platonism, nominalism, artworks, types