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constrained by the standards of the genre and some not easily articulated rules of how the

audience perceives music. The following is according to Max Martin, one of the top producing

songwriters of the last decade:

I have lots of theories when it comes to [constructing a winning melody.] If you’ve got a
verse with a lot of rhythm, you want to pair it with something that doesn’t. Longer notes.
Something that might not start at the same beat… If the chords change a lot over the
course of a song, it’s better to stay within the same melodic structure. […] it’s all about
the balance. [reference]

[To be sure, there are infinite choices in how one can establish a correspondence between a

mental state and a musical structure. It seems describing the composer in the same way as we

describe a listener reducing possibilities of underdetermined content to one really belittles what

the composer does. But to say that the span of creativity is larger is not to say that the process is

not inherently the same.] Just as an audience in a conversation must reduce many possibilities

into a particular way of interpreting underdetermined content to one reality, the composer must

reduce many possibilities to make some arbitrary choices in how to interpret certain

The fact that the composer is forming a musical approximation of something he or she directly

experiences, while an addressee in a conversation is forming a mental approximation of

something in the mind of another agent may raise a worry for how similar the two actions are.

But it is not clear how such worry translates into a concrete objection. Both cases amount to

attempts to take two states (in the first case mental state in the mind of composer and musical
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state, in the second case mental state in the mind of speaker and mental in the mind of

interpreter) that lack a one-to-one correspondence and establish an approximate correspondence

instead. Whether the states are directly experienced may matter for how complicated of a task it

is but not for what kind of mental processes allow us to establish such correspondence. (If

anything, it seems that establishing a correspondence between direct mental states and musical

structures is more complicated than establishing a correspondence between mental states of two

interlocutors in a straightforward conversation.)

There is also a worry that my portrayal of a composer as an interpreter of his or her own mental

states is a far departure from the Gricean program which so far has framed my discussion. After

all, communication for Grice involves getting an audience to recognize one’s intention to change

the audience’s mental state. If the process of converting mental states into musical structures is

at all like Gricean communication, what role do intentions play, who are they directed at, and in

virtue of whose recognition do they get fulfilled? Dan Harris defends a speculative hypothesis

that intentions do not have to be communicative to take advantage of the language system. He

gives an IBS account of speaking in order to clarify ones own thoughts by speculating that

intentions playing the role here might be “intentions to pretend to communicate or the intention

to hold something in memory for a short time.” I do not see a reason why an intention can also

be an artistic one, an intention to create poetry, to create music, to create art and artifacts. An

intention to change the mental state of another is just a type of an intention to change

something in general. Why does it have to be the mind of another? It could be to change the

stone, the musical medium, the medium of poetry to some end.]

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Picturing a composer with intentions directed at him or herself and fulfilling them in virtue of his

or her own recognition seems like an unnecessary complication to describe how one converts

mental states into music. And yet, […]. So is this a problem for my argument or is it a problem

for Gricean program? I would not be the first one to say that there is something problematic in

[…]. Dan Harris has a discussion of how language use not involving an actual addressee

presents a problem for Grice. [The idea that we use language to clarify our thoughts seems to

entail that the content of one’s utterance is sometimes more articulate than the intention one has

in expressing it. But how could this be compatible with the claim that what one says is fully

determined by what one intends in saying it? And we seem to be put into a vicious circle by the

claim that the meanings of natural-language expressions can be explained in terms of the

contents of our thoughts.] .

The most glaring departure from the Gricean program in how I describe a composer as an

interpreter of his or her own mental states is that there is an intention to affect an audience and

that the intention is fulfilled in virtue of being recognized. [An objection about directing

intention. ok so, if not constraint maybe vector matters – problems with that. Or intention. ] But

[blah blha blha] is a glaring departure from the Gricean program that so far has framed my

discussion of [blha blha blha].

There

[add about artifacts]

[add about the word interpreting]

Next part should be how we interpret our own states of mind.

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Many artistic creations are links in the chains, taking the meaning created by some as inputs but

also serving as inputs in the creative expressions of others. A musician interprets the composer

score, creating musing which is then interpreted by a dancer, interpreted by an artist in creating a

painting of a ballerina, and so on.

Things do not stand differently when we consider the distinction between meaning and

interpretation in a regular conversation, albeit in a less obvious way. A large part of our day to

day communication is relaying: we relay to each other what we have learned from others, what

has happened to us, and how we feel. In such relaying, we both interpret other people's

messages, events, and feelings, and re-convey our interpretations to others with our own agendas

in mind. Just as a conductor cannot be viewed as a mere middleman between the composer and

the audience, no interlocutor should be viewed as lacking unique preferences and purposes in

relaying the information he or she has gained somewhere else. As interpreters, we are also never

impartial or un-creative. No communication will fully determine how it will be perceived: just as

the musical score leaves room for creativity of the performer, any communication will leave

choices for the interpreter to settle on his or her own, according to his own background, agendas,

and creativity.

There is an even more direct way of seeing how each act of meaning and each act of interpreting

is in reality both, depending on the perspective one adopts. When a speaker utters words directed

at an addressee, he or she is also engaged in interpreting his or her own state of mind. Just as

the musical score does not fully determine how the music should be played, the thoughts,
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intentions, and some kind of utterance planning mechanisms that direct our speech do not fully

determine the words that the speaker will utter. There are some speculative hypotheses why that

may be, but the phenomenon of clarifying out thoughts through speech is widely accepted. We

sometimes even surprise ourselves with new understandings as results of our own utterance.

(There is a charming quote from a famous philosopher Bertrand Russel about confessing his love

to Lady Ottoline: "I did not know I loved your till I heard myself telling you so -- for one instant

I thought "Good God, what have I said?" and then I knew it was the truth.")

All participants in this chain perform what can be described as creating content (or conveying

meaning) and consuming content (or deriving an interpretation), and if we try to draw a border to

decide how much of one or the other is allowed in order for the person to still act under There is

no way to draw a non-arbitrary border between content-creating processes and interpretive ones

for any of these participants.

All of these roles under certain descriptions appear the composer’s role is not purely creative

either and requires some amount of conformity and guessing that we typically associate only

with the interpreter’s role. And if we try to figure out how much of this “leakage” or “blurring”

of the roles is allowed for them still to remain conceptually separate, we will quickly run into the

problem that the whole exercise is just arbitrary drawing of the borders.

Articulating what the objects of our beliefs are is so difficult because we try to describe an object

in a different medium in the medium of language – it’s like trying to describe poetry in regular

language. The objects in the medium of thought do not have a one to one correspondence to the

objects in the medium of language. It is the heresy of paraphrase problem.

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Underdetermination arises from the fact that the objects in different mediums do not correspond

to each other on the one to one basis. You cannot translate from one medium into another and

get an exact match. The more different are the mediums, the more underdetermination. There is

less underdetermination in translating poetry into regular language (at least you can capture most

of the meaning), but there is more underdetermination when you translate from music to dance.

[But what about from musical notation to music? Maybe it’s not different mediums? The

relationship is more like written language to spoken language?]

Maybe the problem with AI understanding human language is that creativity aspect is missing,

the ability to fill out the underdetermined content. You can run neural networks all you want, but

all they do is record patterns that are already there, they do not create anything new. I think

people do. How does that kind of creativity work? A lot has been written on the interpretive

process, but I am not familiar with any literature on creativity process. And since I think they are

the same, I also think the problem with everything written on interpreting is missing the

creativity part.

Grice was possible one of the first who noticed that an producer and consumer roles were

somewhat blurred – that the interpreter almost always has to create content in order to interpret

and that a speaker does not start with a blank page but is rather constrained in the kind of content

he may produce. What we have not noticed before is that this is not simply a blurring, but rather

the fact that the roles are inherently the same. One thing that still may seem to require a

consumer producer designation is the vector of the content – who it is derected at. However, the
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direction of the content does not make the process of its production inherently different from the

process of its interpretation. Also, as the conductor example shows, a vector is also sometimes a

relative thing. In another example, I may be partially speaking to an interlocutor, and partially

musing to myself.

Can we object by saying that the conductor is a sort of pass through of the original content to

other interpreters, albeit with some creative additions? In other words, we may resort for a

“difference of a degree” between an idealized consumer and a realistic conductor explanation.

The conductor is still acting primarily an interpreter, mostly performing all the associated

interpretive mind processes, but whenever he or she comes across some indeterminacies of the

score then some creative mind processes kick in. However, a description of a conductor as a

middleman is not only insulting but also completely wrong.

It strikes me that the phenomenon of openness you describe is exactly the phenomenon that

arises in communication between an artist and the audience, a composer and a performer, a novel

writer and a reader, and those examples might be useful in figuring out what is going on in a

conversation. Communicating unspecific content does not seem particular to implicature,

instead, it is a pervasive feature of how we communicate in all kinds of ways. In the case of art,

when such indeterminacy arises, it does not seem surprising to us -- of course, there are many

legitimate ways to interpret a novel or perform a musical score! Why is it surprising to us that

there is also openness to interpreting a conversational interlocutor? We don't even realize that the

assumption that it is possible is in the back of our minds, usually, when confronted, we would

say, no there is a wrong and correct way to interpret a speaker.

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I had a few observations, that I was wondering if I could get your thoughts on...

Buchanan's way of dealing with the "openness" of implicature is to say that an implicature is not

communicating any specific proposition, but rather a type of a proposition. But something in this

proposal seems unsatisfying to me. When we look at some possible propositions within the type

that is supposedly being communicated, we see that the only feature that they share is that they

pass the filter of the constraints that the speaker imposes on the possible interpretations. Those

constraints are the linguistic meaning of the words, but also the shared knowledge that

handwriting and punctuality do not bear on someone's qualifications as a job candidate. The

endless variety of propositions that fit the type share only one quality, and that's the quality of

passing the filter of those constraints. But to designate them as a type seems tautaulogical for

that reason seems kid of tautaulogical: what is being communicated? whatever fits the

constraints? what fits the constraints? a type of proposition. what type is that? one that fits the

constraints.

I am starting to come to a conclusion that indeterminacy is something that arises when we

translate content from one medium to another: from the musical score to a musical performance,

from musical performance to the movements of a ballet dancer, from the architect's drawing to a

building, from the from the linguistic meaning of a novel to an interpretation in the mind of a

reader. In all these cases, the medium of the first member of the pair has only vague

correspondence to the medium of the second member, not one to one. There are many possible

ways to perform the same musical score or choreograph the same ballet music because the

mediums to not correspond.

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What is the difference in mediums that produces indeterminacy in the case of Smith? Smith is

clearly trying to cause the listener not to hire the student, to cause a decision in the listener's

mind to not hire the student. But what is the medium of a decision? A greatly controversial

topic. But most probably would agree that at least not all thoughts are in the form of propositions

and not in the forms of types of propositions. For example, the decision to eat an ice-cream

probably does not come about as a proposition "I am going to eat an ice-cream" and not even as a

type of a proposition about eating ice-cream. I am not going to speculate what medium decisions

are in, but if Smith is trying to get the listener to decide not to hire the student, that kind of

decision may also be described in words but not necessarily be in words.

When we say that content is specific -- it seems that it is expressed in the same medium, and

indeterminate -- when the difference in mediums.

A different model of communication. We don't send each other parcels of content. We send each

other constraints within which content can be generated.

There are a couple of options. Say, the output of the interpretive process includes the making the

creative choices to fill in what is unspecified by the score (the exact tempo, the decision to

emphasize a certain part, the character of certain sounds, etc.). In this case, the task is already

exhausted before content production even begins, since there is no other kind of content that the

conductor can create while still adhering to the constraints of the original score. Now suppose

the output of the interpretive process pertains only the specified content and serves as an input
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for choosing how to fill in the unspecified content. For example, specifies which note

to play but does not specify the duration. Can we say that the former kind of content serves as an

input for filling in the latter kind of content?

Surely a decision of whether something is meaning or an interpretation, whether someone is

producing content or interpreting it cannot hinge on an arbitrary decision exactly how much

constraint or how much creative choices is appropriate for that to be counted as one or the other

role. ]

http://www.sea-acustica.es/fileadmin/publicaciones/Sevilla02_mus01008.pdf

This is an important note, to which I will return: how the necessity to supply the unspecified

content arises only when we translate content into a different medium.] Identifying the

constraints and filling in specificities is the same process which we sometimes describe as

content production and sometimes content interpretation. But the best argument for this is that

everyone is doing it.

[How do I reconcile this with neuro data, how people can lose an ability to speak but not

understand and the other way?]

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There is an idea among communication theorists (and we already came in contact with it) that

some content is precisely specified by the medium of communication while some content is

specified as a range of possibilities (we referred to it as underspecified or underdetermined).

[A conductor interprets a musical score by realizing it in actual sound (a conductor, so to say,

“plays the orchestra”). There is never a single way of realizing the same instruction, however

precisely stated, in the medium of sound. Say, the pitch conveyed by a note is a precise enough

instruction, while the duration is not quite. There is no way to realize the pitch of a particular

note without also realizing its duration. To say that realizing the instructions given by the same

musical note requires two co-occurring but inherently different mental processes – one

inferential and one creative – is a strange and unnecessary complication. ]

[more on how inferential thinking is constrained thinking. Boghosian thinks it’s rule following

thinking. It seems to involve at least identification of some constraints. While creative thinking

is creative filling in between the constraints. ]

https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/941/expression-of-emotion-in-music-and-vocal-

communication#articles

[It seems that something like penumbral shifts happens in how we use physical artifacts. We are

certainly not as mystified by it when it happens with physical stuff. Take a token of an arrow

used for hunting. It can be successfully used to kill a rabbit. However, in a different context,

one that requires taking down a mammoth, the hunter will say, “No, this is actually not going to

work here. Not quite sharp or sturdy enough,” and pick a much larger token or another tool

altogether. A hunter may similarly struggle to articulate the exact contexts in which this token of
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arrow will serve well and in which it won’t, very similarly to how a speaker may struggle

articulating the exact rules of where the word “boy” applies, but that will not prevent the hunter

from using the arrow successfully just as it won’t prevent a speaker from using the word

successfully. We often demonstrate the same penumbral ignorance and indifference about many

objects we productively manipulate day to day. While in communicating, we have intentions to

change the mind of the other, in using artifacts, we have intentions to change the environment

around us (an intention to kill a rabbit, to flip a pancake, to build a house), and in both cases, we

search for the best tools to fulfill those intentions. In the latter case, we are constrained by the

environmental context (how small and soft is the rabbit) and by the characteristics of the tools

(how sturdy and sharp is the arrow). We never know for sure if the tool will be good enough to

fulfil a particular intention – we always run the risk that the arrow will be just a little bit too dull

to kill the rabbit – but we manage, for the most part. Our purposes are often novel, and we

manage either with old tools or by modifying them and inventing new ones. More often than

not, our purposes are so complicated that require multiple steps with multiple tools. None of this

seems to require anything like “compositional semantics” of how we manage to fulfill our

infinite purposes with our tools. Natural language is also often thought of as a toolbox. It is also

certainly not static – old tools get modified all the time, and new ones get added in depending on

our needs. What is different about language that presses us to search for something like a

compositional semantics theory to explain how we use it?

Are the parallels I am trying to construct how we use language expressions and physical tools too

crude? You can work out parallels to linguistic meaning (generally known purposes of tool-

types: “a chair is for sitting”), content (what a particular tool is being used for on a particular

occasion), and the parallels to being true or false is simply being successful at fulfilling a
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particular purpose. We know that chairs are mostly for sitting, but there are many other uses of a

chair that would not surprise us that do not constitute sitting (resting our feet on, leaning on,

putting our stuff on) and there are many chairs that may not fulfill the purpose of sitting in a

particular situation (too small, too weak, etc). This seems to me a lot like vagueness of

expressions.

Can we distinguish what instructions the conductor or an independent player is merely inferring

and what instructions they are producing? If it is a performance of a particular scored work, all

of the content – whether the kind that is inferred or the kind newly created – must be constrained

by the composer’s score, various kinds of knowledge shared between the composer and the

performer, and the principles of musical cooperation. Therefore, the only way a performer can

create new content is by choosing from a pre-existing range of possibilities. Could we then say

that whenever the performer is inferring what is precisely specified, then the performer is acting

as a consumer, and whenever the performer is choosing from a range of possibilities conforming

to certain constraints, then the performer is acting as a producer of content?

Even the most subtle of possibilities present opportunities for the performers to create their own

impact on the audience.

Different orchestras will respond differently to the same conductor, as Zubin Mehta illustrates:

"If I give the first beat and nothing happens, [I know that I am standing in front of the Vienna

Philharmonic]." A recent study has confirmed that different orchestras play with distinctive
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styles, recognizable by professionals and non-musicians, which cannot be distilled to the efforts

of a conductor [reference].

[Worry: my description of conductor is missing for who he is interpreting, and the

description of the audience is missing for whom it is creating. But is this objection against

me or against Grice? Latter, because similar worries have been raised against Grice: use

of language for inner speech seems meaningful but it is missing for whom it is creating. I

am hoping that my examples actually help IBS respond to these objections. This shows

that presence or absence of an audience should not matter for whether we describe

something as meaning and interpreting. This is a response to the objection that I am

departing from Gricean requirement that to mean one strives to change the mind of the

other.]

as constructing a musical approximating for a mental state the composer experiences. Just as an

addressee in a conversation exploits certain established correlations between past speaker

meanings and their utterances to form an approximation of what a speaker means on a given

occasion, a composer may exploit common correlations between mental states and musical

structures to form a musical approximation of a mental state. The correlations between musical

structural features (such as tempo, mode, volume, melody, and rhythm) and mental states (such

as feelings of joy and sadness, and even propositional attitudes, such as hope and fear) have been

a subject of extensive empirical research [reference]. While the source of such correlations is
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controversial (whether they are conventional or have some deeper neurological causes), their

existence is not.