Philosophy 86 (2):231-248 (2011)
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Abstract |
Is listening to music like looking through a kaleidoscope? Formalists contend that music is meaningless. Most music theorists concede that this austere thesis is surprisingly close to the truth. Nevertheless, they refute formalism with a little band of diffusely referential phenomena, such as musical quotation, onomatopoeia, exemplification, and leitmotifs. These curiosities ought to be pressed into a new campaign against assumptions that vagueness can only arise in the semantically lush setting of language. Just as the discovery of extremophilic bacteria led biologists to revise their opinions about the scope and preconditions of life, the marginal forms of reference that survive in the semantic desert of absolute music should lead philosophers to revise their assumptions much about scope and preconditions of vagueness
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DOI | 10.1017/S0031819111000052 |
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References found in this work BETA
Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts.Kendall L. Walton - 1990 - Harvard University Press.
A Generative Theory of Tonal Music.Fred Lerdahl & Ray Jackendoff - 1987 - Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 46 (1):94-98.
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Citations of this work BETA
Vagueness.Roy Sorensen - 1997 - In Edward N. Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford University.
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