Edited May 30th, 2017

Re: Feynman’s ‘Ode to a Flower’ (youtube): Artist’s friend’s psychological conflation of descriptive
‘knowledge’ and instruction as to psychological stance. Feynman’s failure of an empathic mode of
inter-subjectivity to his friend. The friend’s similar failure. Hence an antagonism-go-round that fails
to affirm the legitimacy of the other’s differentiated self.

Music and Meaning: A reply

to Peter Kivy
Initiated summer 2014

Abstract
Peter Kivy (2007, Music, Language, and Cognition, pg. 137-153) argues
against musical meaning on grounds that propositional meaning
foundationally is the province primarily of shared language. I argue that the
logical possibility of linguistic meaning, and thus of language as a personal
and social good, is afforded by intellectual and motivational empathy,
both for self and others.
 Sound
Sound is motion. Even in a vacuum there is sound, though the instruments
capable of detecting sound in a vacuum vary: depending on the degree of
vacuum, and of the size and nature of the things moving in it, a given
instrument may not detect the sound. Further, even the quality of detection
varies. Of course, your knee may lack an organ for detecting sound in the
dedicated special way in which your brain-and-ear can. But your entire body
is not alien to itself, and that is why your knee and ear empathize with each
other. So sound is a basic property of the cosmos, and of every member of
the cosmos. But we might say that sound has meaning only in its intersection
with minds. This is not trivial, but foundational to the minded organism (the
animal organism). So we might say that only those sounds that constitute the
physical individual animal, including the human animal, have meaning. Or,
more precisely, such sounds are meaning. One nuance suggested here is that,
if sound is motion, then there qualitatively are many kinds of sound that
people usually do not think of as sound.

So, the sounds that have meaning are not just those that the physical
individual naturally can 'hear'. Meaningful sounds include all sounds that
constitute or intersect the animal, including all of the sounds that are too
quiet, or two slow or too fast in wavelength, for the given individual animal
to hear.

So, in the sense merely of pressure waves moving through, say, air, ‘sound’
possesses no meaning. Nor, for the main part, possess meaning the ‘sound’ in
the sense of the abstract concept of sound as (a) something coming from a
source external to the individual and (b) the conflation of ‘hearing’ with
those external sounds. This implies that, though most instances of sound
originate external to the individual, any sounds that intersect the physical
individual partly become part of that individual, and partly reflect off of the
individual.

All this has implications for shared language. For instances of a shared
language that are expressed into the world outside the authoring person’s
own mind (as distinct from ‘inner speech’), the meaning of such instances is
underwritten by the authoring person as a meaner: literally, a mind that has
things in mind. Thus even a given instance of ‘inner speech’ has meaning,
even though that instance is, by definition, unavailable to persons who are
not that of the inner speaker of that instance.

All this is born out even by so little as the etymology of the word ‘meaning’.
(see http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=meaning&allowed_in_frame=0.
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=mean&allowed_in_frame=0.

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=mind&allowed_in_frame=0.)

But it is as yet unclear as to what degree to which human minds depend for
their full development on the kind of expressed, and, in some ways more so,
communicated, meanings that we call 'language'. Personally, I hate 'language'
that people think of who think that communication is most truly realized
only through 'language'; that music and affect are not profoundly
communicative. These people's brains may be very good at language, but
may be poor at certain commonly crucial kinds of intuitive communication
This may be due to bio-developmental abnormalities, but but more
commonly is due largely to certain kinds of restrictive manner of 'education'
in their formative years. So they must, more than normal, rely on words in a
shared language. Many of them then legitimately may find distressing to be in
a foreign country where they do not know the language. They then are
experiencing, say, a resourceless non-connection to the people there.

In any case, expressions of meaning is by no means ancillary to the

development of the human mind. We express what is on our mind, or what is
in our ‘soul’, because we are social animals, not Platonic minds that we
mistakenly render in every way amusical (see Sacks’s 2008 book,
Musicophelia, opening page about Arthur C. Clarke’s amusical Overlords).
Human expression especially is not ancillary to an individual’s acts to
maintain, preserve, or have maintained or preserved, certain of that
individual’s basic physiological functions (see Feynman’s ‘Ode to a Flower.’
On youtube).

So the necessity of meaning to acts of communication does not entail that

acts of communication are the foundational substance of meaning. Meaning
itself exists entirely in, or, more precisely, alone constitutes, individuals. And
by this I do NOT mean disembodies minds. On the contrary: I mean persons
as creatures, and them within actual environments.

Of course, this entails that the communication of individuals constitutes a

kind of meaning. But this is communication itself, which is a property of
individuals, not of the constructs and phenomenon existing external to
individuals by which individuals communicate. Vibrations of the common
domestic medium of air, or the production or existence of written material,
have no meaning in themselves. They ‘have’ meaning only by virtue of being
produced, and intersected, by individuals.

Extra-individual entities thus ‘have’ meaning for individuals. Thus the having
of meaning is not that being have-ed by those extra-person ‘linguistic’
entities, but, rather by the persons themselves.

But Peter Kivy (2007, Music, Language, and Cognition, pg. 137-153) argues
against musical meaning on grounds that propositional meaning
foundationally is the province of shared language. I argue that the logical
possibility of linguistic meaning, and thus of language as a personal and
social good, is afforded by intellectual and motivational empathy, both for
self and others.
 On logical and etymological grounds, I show that shared language is the
province of the meanings that we persons have in any case, not in shared
language itself as a special entity or action.

Kivy argues as if text is the standard of language, and as if culturally

persistent speech acts, such as plays, are more foundationally linguistic than
is basic, live, personally originative linguistic interaction. This reversal of the
natural priority of meaning treats shared language not so much as a dynamic
temporal denotative act for mediating between persons’ meanings, but
mainly as inhering in the empirical forms constituting the ‘language’.

I argue that our meanings originate in, and never actually exist outside of, our
persons, and of how we relate to our physically and socially external worlds.
I demonstrate that a preference for the empirical forms of language as
denoting meaning, over a holistic sensitivity to our inter-subjectivity, not
only falsely renders music meaningless, but undercuts the effectiveness of
language both as an innate tool of personal reasoning and as a crucial social
mode of realizing, creating, and developing meaning.

1. Introduction: Shared Language vs. Meaning

We normally are born into a society that already has a shared language. So we do not much
see to develop a shared language. Instead, we see mainly to learn, to a more-or-less
conscious and deliberative degree, what language is. And we are left to learn what ‘it’
(language) means in a given instance.

The result of being born into a shared language is that we have some tendency to deify
‘language’ as at once that of the other’s meaning and that of its own meaning. Unfortunately,
our ability to understand the nature of shared language qua meaning is not helped by the
fact there are very few records by Signers of their own observations of the open-source
interactive development of modern full-fledge Sign language from its primitive gestural
roots.

So Peter Kivy, Rutgers University Philosopher, in arguing that absolute, or pure, music has
no meaning (2007, Music, Language, and Cognition, pg. 137-153), argues as if shared
language is the unqualified foundational, or ontologically primary, substance of meaning.
Moreover, Kivy does not reference language in its denotative function, but merely in the
social instantiation of that function: shared language. Thus, Kivy centers linguistic cognition
on shared language, as opposed to the root linguistic cognition. The latter is what makes
possible the development of shared language from scratch.

Such a ‘language’-centric conception of meaning fails to account for the fact that, as
suggested in Tiger Roholt’s book, Groove: A Phenomenology of Rhythmic Naunce (2014),
many instances of meaning and propositionality are properties of sensory and otherwise
bodily experience, and only secondarily of the abstractions particular to the intellectual
functions of a shared language.

Kivy thus overlooks both (a) the deep problem of ‘inner speech’ and thus of that by which
this ‘speech’ is made possible, and (b) the primacy of broad social dynamics (Schaeffer
2014) over shared language in the creation of much of the meaning that we acquire and
develop. Meaning does not so much inhere in conventions of form-usage involved in shared
language, but in the negotiations and other interactions of attempting to communicate. This
is because acts of communication are not simple one-way streets of information outgo, but
an almost-constant shifting of the many virtual patrons that each person has in others’
‘markets of thought’. This shifting is the act of assessing and re-assessing what it is we
think the other persons are ‘selling’, ‘giving away’, ‘displaying’, ‘hiding’, ‘throwing out’, etc..

So Kivy’s logic renders the human person incapable of propositionality outside of shared
language. In fact, that logic renders the person incapable of propositionality outside of the
conscious deliberation and abstractive intellect that shared language demands. This logic,
then, precludes the possibility not only of acquiring a shared language, but of partaking in
the from-scratch development of a shared language. If linguistic meaning merely is a sub-
category of propositionality, and if the term ‘meaning’ is, in everyday contexts, used flexibly
as to usage of meaning, then ‘propositional meaning’ ultimately is a redundant term, even
while we normally use this term for meaning qua shared language.

Kivy’s worry (see the quotes immediately below the present paragraph)
seems to be that if we allow ‘meaning’ to be so broad as to include pure music
in the things that have ‘meaning’, then we both reduce meaning to a triviality
and render shared language a trivial mode of meaning. But, it is one thing to
allow that everything inherently possesses meaning qua shared language, and
another thing to reason as if the only thing that can have meaning is shared
language. For, if only shared language could have meaning, then nothing that
we mean by way of shared language could be meant. ‘Inner speech’ would
have no meaning, as would the non-shared language forms of a person’s
thought processes.

So, unless we admit that anything IS meaning by virtue SIMPLY of its being on
our mind, then we render shared language logically impossible.
Kivy claims that

[the human auditory faculties often have a strong] tendency[…]to interpret sound
linguistically when given the least opportunity. [M]usic[…]offers that opportunity.
For[,] unlike random noise or […] ordered, periodic sound, music is quasi-
syntactical; and where we have something like [linguistic] syntax,[…] we have one of
the necessary properties of language. That is why music so often gives the strong
impression of being meaningful. (1990, Music Alone, pg. 8)

…and

Words have [psychological] magnetism. They wield a peculiar and subtle power
over us. And the word ‘meaning’ is one of the most magnetic[…] and powerful of all.
So unless we continually repeat to ourselves the mantra ‘This is not [linguistic]
semantic meaning [that music has, then] we are liable to forget how little we gain
when we grant ‘meaning’ to music[…]. (2007, Music, Language, and Cognition, pg.
149)

This ‘mantra’-necessity suggests that there is only one erroneous direction in which
scholars logically can go in prosecuting the relation between musical sound and meaning:
by culturally cannibalizing human musicality in the effort to obtain for its sonic products
some foundational kind of meaning. So Kivy here seems to think that scholars therein
effectively render their efforts those of meaning wannabes whose efforts thereto can
ultimately only confuse the issue for anyone who has a less-than-completely-right
(according to Kivy) sense as to the nature of meaning as that of sans shared language.

But to reduce propositional meaning to the instantiation of a proposition in the empirical

forms constituting a shared form of language is to render propositional meaning deeply
artificial and arbitrarily volitional, producing a proverbially ‘clinical’ approach that renders
meaning the intellectual equivalent of suspended animation. It even renders the mind a
pack of static sets of ‘true’ propositions the realms of contrast to which are thereby
presumed to be populated entirely by ‘wrong answers’.

Thus Kivy, at least in effect, conceives meaning to be the province primarily or exclusively
of shared language. And this conceives of meaning to be (1) strictly intellectual and (2)
inhering in the fact that we act to communicate that meaning (Kivy 2007: 152, Raphael’s
The School of Athens).

1.2. Philosophy of Meaning vs. the Everyday Normalcy of the Non-

exhaustion of Qualifiers
Per (b), and in contrast to (2), I argue that meaning foundationally is that in the individual
person, not either in any ‘authoritative’ collective of persons or in a deification of meaning
qua shared language. And per (a), and in contrast to (1), I argue that meaning is both
primarily personal and a co-extensionality or co-qualification of emotional and intellectual
content, not primarily either shared meaning or intellectual content (see Sacks, re: Clarke’s
Overlords). In order for a person to use language to attempt to communicate a particular
meaning, that person must already possess some or all of that meaning. Thus shared
language can have any meaning only because people have meaning. (Overlords and
Feynman)

The denotative function of shared language is a function of the intellect, not of the
emotions. But shared language is logically possible only because the person has a dedicated
linguistic or ‘intellectual’ cognitive modality. Emotion, sentiment, what-have-you, cannot
ultimately be separated from intellect, else we should say that intellect and emotion are
strictly mutually alien, incapable of any inter-informative relation. But humans are
deliberatively adaptable, by adapting the world to their needs, by a maximization of
intellect and minimization of emotion.

I argue that emotional and other visceral functions are merely direct functionality, making
intellect a matter of cognitive and neurological efficiency, or extension, that acts more-or-
less independently to, and yet in service of, the emotional and visceral self. This is
demonstrated, for example, by the fact that linguistic description of some instinctive act or
drive necessarily is peripheral to that act or drive, including even to the language instinct
and to any of the distinct acts of language. This is why, for two examples—and hark Gö del’s
Incompleteness Theorem—the lexical lie is not an instance of a lie, and the lexical noun is
not an instance of a proper or primary noun.

Per the noun, a dictionary is not analogous to a physics textbook or mechanical conversion
chart. A dictionary primarily is a description of basic human linguistic behavioral metrics. A
dictionary does not explain the nature of the connection between (x) functionally distinct
sequences of human vocal sounds (or the static visual symbols for those sounds) and (y)
the fact that those sequences correspond to particular objects, actions, or human mental
contents. Rather, a dictionary, by way of its authors, assumes that the typical reference
access to a dictionary is aware that human diction is a behavior of linguistic cognition, not
an independent empirical phenomenon to which humans are subject.

Thus, despite that the empirical forms constituting the spoken or written lexical noun are
nouns, the lexical noun is a linguistic reference to nouns as such, not ultimately the
empirical forms comprising the spoken or written term. The name ‘Mississippi’ is not
normally used to reference the name, but to reference the political state of Mississippi. This
is why no typical dictionary includes in its definitions the terms being defined.

Therefore, I find that much of the solid substance upon which Kivy bases his argument is
slightly, yet profoundly, at odds with his argument. In all, I find the logic of Kivy’s argument
heavily imbalanced in favor of a phenomenological approach to the meaning of merely
shared language.

n. When Food is a Packaging

Let us suppose that the propositionality of shared language is the substance of meaning.
But, this supposition suggests that propositions, in order to be propositional, necessarily
must be instantiated in shared language, that is, in symbolic acts of persons toward
communicating propositions to other persons. Such a suggestion is untenable, by making
propositionality a circular property of acts of shared language rather than a property of
persons in any case. And, regardless, propositions that are instantiated in some form of
language therein are a-temporal, or static, packages of ‘idea’ or ‘meaning’.

Thus, to suppose that the propositionality of shared language is the substance of meaning
renders the mind a passive container of essentially deified ‘ideas’, in effect denying that the
natural ‘mind’ is a processive, and temporal, thing. Is the mind little more than a pack of
linguistic ‘propositions’? How does the mind even form any such ‘propositions’ to begin
with? If meaning foundationally is that of linguistic ‘propositions’, then the mind need be
conceived as nothing but a kind of machine for the manipulation, practice, recitation,
assent, and rejection, of various ‘propositions’. And intelligence thus may be conceived as
little more than the capacity to know which ‘propositions’ are ‘true’, and which are ‘false’.

It is not an uncommon perception among humans that one’s new knowledge of anything
necessarily coincides with one’s ‘inner speech’ about that knowledge. But, for persons
whose brains have an especially strong adaptation to language, language can seem to be the
sole or root substance of knowledge, learning, thought, comprehension, and meaning. For
such a person, his perception of any ambiguity in instances of language may seem strictly
and necessarily to be a flaw in those instances. In other words, ambiguity may not be seen
as an inherent property of a language that functions between non-identically subjective,
non-omniscient language agents. Such a person may grant that natural languages are not
naturally fixed systems to which persons merely abide like they abide, say, the fact of
meteorological activity. But, in the mind of such a person, ‘clarity’ of an instance of language
may be presumed to inhere in the empirical form of that instance, and thus that a
‘proposition’ necessarily and foundationally, if not exclusively, is a property of ‘language’.

Shared language centrally involves the use of empirical forms for socially denoting specific
mental intellectual content. These forms thus correspond to meaning in much the same
way in which packaging (i.e. cardboard, metal, plastic) corresponds to the food that is sold
in packages. This distinction between the meaning and the form is thus fairly sharp.

But the distinction between meaning and form is never exact. This is because human
instincts are not indifferent to the variations of form. Modern Sign Language is a full-fledge
instantiation of the linguistic capacities of the modern type of human. The natural linguistic
interactive development of Sign Language was logically possible only because its users had
a common natural intellectual-emotional recognition of a core set of visual forms of human
gesture. But without any common natural sensibility to the forms of empirical
phenomenon, we could not have a natural language. Instead of its natural open-source
functionality, we might have a centralized government-of-language-standard, the standards
of we all might be legally compelled to abide like so many traffic laws.

In the development of modern Sign Language, ...That virtually all of the core forms of
natural human gesture are ambiguous as to human instinctive meaning did not preclude
their being used to communicate meaning. Upon first uses between a given two persons,
these gestures often left some ambiguity remaining, and which was resolved by the
confirmative dynamics of further interaction involving these two persons. Human auditory
cognition may be far wider and, in some ways, deeper than human general gesture. But this
in no way means that humans find the direct sonic realm meaningless. In fact, human
intellectual processes and contents are not mutually inert with human auditory cognition.
[if they were, then we would not have a natural language instantiated in the sonic realm?
vocal gesture distinct from human general audition?]
Kivy implicitly emphasizes that pure music is just ‘sounds.’ .2. Presumably he implies that
sounds, as such, have no strict authorial expressed linguistic meaning..3. Cases of such
meaning obviously include, say, a child’s asking where babies come from. What is less
obvious to an every-day frame of mind is whether, say, the proto-‘linguistic’ infant’s inexact
attempts to let mommy know that the infant is thirsty or hot is a case of linguistic meaning.
Even less obvious to the merely everyday sense of language is the pre-‘linguistic’ infant’s
mind in terms of having or expressing meaning. Is a shared form of language prerequisite
to persons’ meaning anything? More so, is intent to communicate a meaning a necessary
dimension of meaning? Kivy’s focus on meaning is in respect to the arts and letters. So it
may be that his list of basic kinds of meaning is not intended to be exhaustive, but merely,
say, exemplary for the arts and letters: ‘semantic’ or ‘propositional’ .4. meaning includes,

not only the meanings of sentences in literary works but the [merely] implied
meanings of literary works; and pictorial meaning, in the sense in which Raphael,
for example, was “saying” something about the [respective] philosophies of Plato
and Aristotle in The School of Athens [painting], by having [his depiction of] Plato
pointing up[ and that of] Aristotle [pointing] down[…]..5.

Kivy admits that people often ‘sit for protracted periods of time doing nothing but listening
to’ the ‘meaningless’ sounds of music..6. But the mere sounds of speech are just sounds, too:
meaningless in themselves.

And is both classes of sounds are meaningless in themselves, yet how long would you sit
listening to speech in a language not one word of which you could begin to understand?
And, how often in a normal week would any normal adult stop her or his normal activity to
listen to the same fifteen-minute lecture given in a foreign language that, despite the
repeated listening, remains every bit as obscure as during the first listening? In contrast to
this seeming lack of enduring natural appeal of the mere sounds of speech, music appears
to be just the sort of sound for which people will sit in rapt attention despite its having no
‘meaning’.

Mere musical sound may have no meaning in the way that language has meaning; it has no
socially indispensable, discretely articulate ideational content. Thus we do not use pure
music to converse, to label highway signs, or to tell our mechanic or doctor about a
problem we are having. But, if pure music is as attractive as it is to us contra linguistic
thought and conversation, then it has some meaning for us, and this implies that that
meaning is created every time music is composed and performed, or produced
improvisationally-exploratively. One may be forgiven, therefore, for thinking that mere
musical sound has some basic kind of meaning.
Kivy seems quite intent on the fact that we all grow up knowing plenty about the linguistic
kind of meaning. Kivy therefore finds no little fault in those who would argue that it is not,
in fact, inappropriate to say that music has ‘meaning..7.

But what most people, including Kivy, seem not to know is why music, and not speech, gets
to sound so interesting. From a language-centric point of view, it might seem counter-
productive that the naturally most attractive kinds of sounds are meaningless. That is, if
meaning qua language is our main survival concern as a society, then why is it that we do
not use musical sounds for our language?

Whales might seem to use musical sound for their presumable meaningful whale songs. In
fact, we admit that whales have some ability to think, even more-or-less discretely. So the
question for Kivy’s position on meaning is whether whale song has meaning: do whales
have the capacity for authorial, and propositional, meaning?

2. Any Way You Cut It: Odyssey in a Diamond of Mind

Kivy has in mind to defend both language and music by arguing that it is ill-advised
generally to make any positive connection between the mere sounds of music and the very
word ‘meaning’:

Words have [psychological] magnetism. They wield a peculiar and subtle power
over us. And the word ‘meaning’ is one of the most magnetic[…] and powerful of all.
So unless we continually repeat to ourselves the mantra ‘This is not [linguistic]
semantic meaning [that music has, then] we are liable to forget how little we gain
when we grant ‘meaning’ to music[…]. [Therefore, w]e would do better [just never
to use the word ‘meaning’ in our affirmations of music]6

He finds this the more necessary because, according to his intuitions 7

[The human auditory faculties often have a strong] tendency[…]to interpret sound
linguistically when given the least opportunity. [M]usic[…]offers that opportunity.
For[,] unlike random noise or […] ordered, periodic sound, music is quasi-
syntactical; and where we have something like [linguistic] syntax,[…] we have one of
the necessary properties of language. That is why music so often gives the strong
impression of being meaningful.8

So it curiously seems that Kivy’s view of music and meaning is that resulting from an
adverse perception from both directions: from the direction of language comes the
overwhelming compulsion of language’s ‘meaning’, and thus of the word ‘meaning’ itself;
and from the direction of the mere surface structure of speech comes the compulsion to
find that any similar structure has the ‘sound’ of being ‘meaningful’. Personally, I do not, as
far as I am aware, share the least such perception of music. But, then, I have semantic
processing deficits, and which have a neuro-adapted opposite in a wider range of kinds of
things to which my brain is sensitive when ‘language is going on’.

For me, if anything, musical sounds are the opposite of those of speech in every way. I
experience the sonic structure of speech as highly aggregative, arbitrary, and
comparatively ‘crude’. I experience music (of nearly all genres) as recursive, integrated,
and either comparatively or objectively ‘graceful’. The often unbroken stream of tone in
phrases of relatively monotonic speech is graceful to me, but that is not what I identify as
the structure of speech. For me, the structure of speech is the consonants and the fact that
the consonants divide the tonal, or ‘humming’ feature of speech into arbitrary bits. I
conceive the polytonality of normal speech to be not that of language, but of the
partnership of human musicality with the human vocal instantiation of language.

The division which the consonants make of the humming sounds of most forms of natural
human vocal language is something I find, at worst, ‘unkind’. Moreover, the variety of
consonants, and their distribution, is fairly arbitrary in relation to the recursive coherent
nature of the sonic realm. The reason out speech is arbitrary in this way is because human
neuro-cognition is far more free and fluid than to be rigidly subject to the patterns of any
physical dynamic. The human brain is massive multi-dimensional in its capacity to learn of,
track, and manipulate the deeply multi-dimensional physical and social worlds.

Compare the physically fairly arbitrary patterns of human speech to mere sound. In any
homogenous and still medium, a single wavelength of sound propagates globally as
concentric, regular back-and-forth, spherical pair of vibrational ranges. Pictured in a plane
figure seem from above, or by a bisection of this ‘sphere’ into a circle disc, this vibration is
exactly that of the concentric recursive ripples in a still pond when a pebble is dropped into
it. This implies that the recursive arcs of sound in any complex environment reflect in
extremely ordered-yet-complex patterns. In other words, sound, even in the wild natural
world, is far more beautiful, in a non-visible way, that our mere everyday auditory
experience of that wild world indicates.

The sound of waves upon an ocean beach may be highly regular, but this is simple
regularity that does more than hint at the sheer regular complexity of hydrodynamic
motion. The collection of sound patterns of natural speech is not based on any symmetrical
recursive unit of physical dynamics. In fact, I often think of the sonic structure of speech
like pushing a laden wheel-less wheelbarrow up a gravel-, rock-, boulder’, branch-, and log-
strewn gravel road: there is no guided dynamic through the mess by way of a wheel. We do
have some regular perceptible rhythm in our speech, but if speech structure has any
foundation in physics, it is on a level imperceptible to the normal person’s everyday sense
of it: a bit like the minimum of 24 frames per second in film and video that is required to
match the processing speed of human vision for smooth motion-perception. 23 frames per
second presumably look to most humans to be not quite smooth continuous motion.

Thus in view of the sonic patterns of speech, I picture music like un-weighted downhill
skiing, or, if the music is especially moving to me in a relatively energetic or deep way, like
getting swept up into the air by a harmless-yet powerful tornado-like storm of avalanche. I
find music organic and alive.

I find the total sounds of speech more like riding in a loud-motored, really bumpy tank
through a random obstacle course while eating smooth pudding out of a nice little plastic
cup with a nice spoon.

But I digress, sort of. Or maybe I do only now:

As I said, Kivy’s view of music and meaning is that resulting from an adverse
perception from both directions: that resulting from a strong predisposition to
semantic processing; and that from the kinds of sonic structures of music that,
presumably, perceptually remind Kivy of ‘meaning’.

Thus Kivy’s view of music and meaning may be no more objective than is that of
anyone else whose brain is not the ideal of full balance of kinds of function. In
any case, what I find most interesting about his language-heavy view is that he
seems to predict that any imaginable kind of confusions could result from
achieving a broad cultural acceptance of the vague notion that musical sound has
meaning. Presumably, one such confusion is the hypothetically resultant
common belief that language is a second-rate means of communication. For
example, in rarest cases in such a pan-meaning culture, some parents would be
more inclined to play a tune to their children than actually to tell them to look
both ways before crossing the street.

The root logic of Kivy’s argument therefore seems to me to be the proposition

that,

 If meaning really were so broad as to obtain meaning to mere musical

sounds, then, either, language would be just one of many equally quite
effective ways to communicate, or, we could communicate by way of
language only as poorly as we already can by way of pure music.

Such a proposition seems to presuppose that, since the system of empirical

forms by which we generally express-and-communicate our intellectual mental
content has meaning, and since that system so noticeably thereby is
meaningful, the only thing that has meaning are our expressions as
instantiated in that system.

According to this logic, ‘inner speech’ has meaning only because it is in the
virtual form of that shared system.

I end this Introduction by an analogous return to my sort-of digression into the

tank-and-pudding scene.

If music is organic, then so is history, including the history of the very word
‘meaning’. The fact that we have a semantic unit (‘meaning’) referencing the
general function of language does not mean that that unit was historically
initiated either in primary or exclusive reference to what every-day English
discourse knows simply as /language/. That semantic unit shares its surface
structure with that of the semantic unit referencing the particular inner
function of our persons that we alternatively call ‘intend’, ‘purpose’, and ‘mind’.
But this sharing of sonic form, or ‘word’, appears to be the result of the fact that
persons, not language, mean.

Let me repeat that: persons, not language, mean.

As mere behavior of persons, language means because it is a behavior of

persons for expression of discrete thoughts. But discrete thoughts cannot be
the only meaning, else there can be no such thing as an intuition, or any other
kind of holistic perception. The meaning of music is that of a non-particular
meaning generator, partly by its being the most active phenomenon of complex
coherent structure.

And as merely an empirical phenomenon or enduring empirical object,

language means nothing: it is merely an empirical phenomenon, essentially no
different than paper with ink marks. The shapes your eyes currently are
scanning have any meaning qua language only because they are the language
products of a person’s language behavior (namely me). If they had been
initiated by an automated device for cranking out the forms of its written
language, then you would not be reading anything that anyone means by way
of its shapes, despite how well they match your sense of semantic coherence
and thus semantic content.

Try the following paragraph and see what I mean above by coherence qua
content:

First left a hash browns September a duck pond, extensive why ovum
Trivial Pursuit, is to if as up tigress hillbilly Bob, it it phone number bee,
 lift truth or dare concession stand with four a is pond pond State of the
Union speech.

Such an every-day incoherent sequence of words could be thought to be a

code. But if you knew it was the random result of some random output device,
you would know it is not a code. Actually, in the present case, it is not such an
output, but rather my own attempt to mimic such a device.

Again, language means only because it is a behavior of persons for their

expression of some of their discrete thoughts. In fact, the root of the word
‘meaning’ is a ‘cognate’ to the words ‘mind’, ‘me’ and ‘mine’. That is, the
historical root of the word ‘meaning’ is identical to, or at least closely related to,
that for these other words. Thus, for example, language is a particular kind of
projection, or intention, of persons, namely that by which persons make known
to each other what they have in mind. The common query, ‘What do you mean
(by such-and-such utterance)?’ may well originally have been understood as
that which we currently would understand by the phrase, ‘What do you have in
mind by such-and-such utterance?’. ‘Meaning’ generally equals ‘minding’,
unless by ‘minding is meant, say, ‘pay attention to’ or ‘remember’, as in, ‘Mind
the store while I’m gone’ and ‘Mind my words’.

Therefore, the other common phrase, ‘The meaning of such-and-such instance

of language is x’, may well not have originally been understood as the kind of
language-centric phrase by which the set of empirical forms constituting that
instance of language itself means x. Rather, the words ‘meaning of’ in that
phrase was a short-hand which, for sake either of focal convenience or
‘objectivity’, left out the authorship of the x instance in question. Such focal
convenience could serve, say, to bring a multiple of persons’ attention more to
the instance itself than to any thoughts about the author(s) of that instance.
Thus, say, the Declaration of Independence is treated as a ‘document’ unto
itself, as if it is not a document of any event or any person’s thoughts, but
merely is an independent body of specific meaning ‘the meaning of’ which is
centrally important to know.

An allied phenomenon is that of the logical meaning of some symbolically

represented ‘equation’, so that once one has in mind both ‘the meaning of’ the
symbols and one’s own mind’s faithful instantiation of that equation, the
logical meaning is virtually apparent in the symbolic representation. One then
goes further and points to the representation and says ‘this equation’, or’ see
that equation on the chalkboard.’ A call to mind the appropriate contexts is
then normally expected for such descriptively ‘incomplete’ terms as ‘inflatable
people’ (essentially balloons that have the rough shape of humans and on
which are printed the likeness of human faces), ‘Look at that person on the TV’
(not normally an actual person atop the television set, but the broadcast
likeness of an actual person onto the television viewing screen), and ‘Tarzan
loves Jane’ (fictional person fictionally ‘loves’ another fictional person).

But, to project meaning onto the empirical forms constituting our linguistic
expressions is to risk all sorts of confusions if we fail to keep in mind that these
projections are only that. The lexical lie is not an instance of a lie, yet
structurally semantic ways of expressing our meaning can trip us up in our
capacity to imagine, pretend, that it is. Then we get lost around each corner of
the so-called Liar Paradox, like so many persons pointing us on to the next
corner, until we find ourselves back where we started except now with a sense
that there is a lie being specified here.

The natural social process of standardization of symbol usage is the process of

reducing the interpretative load of symbolic socio-mental interaction. But, the
efficiencies with which cognitively complex humans naturally are concerned
regarding inter-mental communication are only that: efficiencies. They do not
communicate most of the crucial kinds of meanings that make language
worthwhile. When our intended communicative effect is not achieved thereby,
we often can end up pressing our fellows with these efficiencies, under the
mistaken intuition that the language forms constituting these efficiencies is
equivalent to the meaning that we use it to express. After all, it is clear to
ourselves as to what we mean, and the words we use seems to ourselves to
really and unambiguously contain that meaning. But meaning sans language
often is more artificial meaning than meaning as such.

Developed language constitutes the neurocognitive and sensory efficiency of

‘getting to the point’. Our concern for ‘getting to the point’ demands a certain
cognitive remove from the fact that language ever means only because people
mean. Thus, we adaptively are not so much concerned for authorship as for the
author’s meaning; and, likewise, we are not so much concerned for the author’s
meaning as for the meaning alone. As if that is not enough, we are concerned
most actively for how the meaning we find (or mistake) in an instance of
language may impact us (the first-person-singular), or how it already does
impacts us.

So, despite that the lexical lie is not a lie, the complex set of that same lexical lie
can seem to be a lie, since we get lost around its corners as around so many
people pointing us on. Then our semantic clock stops, and we get lost by the very
thing causing our semantic panic: a direct trust in language as in a Deistic
Meaner.

The kinds of efficiency with which we linguistically are concerned are shared by
all human action. A most easily understood example of this is having so learned
to drive an automobile that we no longer deliberatively attend to how to
perform the standard operations of the driving task. We even become so
habituated to our personal standard usage of those driving operations that we
have sometimes, say, thought to stop by at the store only soon to become aware
that we simply have been driving straight home.

But the question is whether, for the sheer power of language, that power is the
sole substance of home, or meaning. We intended to communicate what we
had in mind, but neither the intention nor the communication constituted the
central substance of the meaning. As the pseudo-statement of the Liar Paradox
shows, you cannot get home merely by intending to.

2. Social Realities and Face Values

Three key factors in human success are active emotional empathy, reflectivity, and
articulate imagination. Music stimulates all three, first by constituting sound. Sound is
physically moving, and emotional empathy must be physically actualized in order to be
realized for practical benefit. Sound also is the first extended sense perception in the womb.
Audition also is the most extended and projected source of empathy between mother and
fetus, including through the mother’s responses to extra-maternal sources of sounds.

Sound is reflective-izing precisely by being motion of mass, as opposed to the

comparatively static sense of sight through light. Further, where much of any sight begins
for the fetus long after thermal warmth, light for vision serves mainly for independent
survival outside the womb and thus more independently from emotionally empathic
attachments.

For the young’s life outside the womb, human hearing is concerned centrally with other
human voices. This is because, as the socially and enigmatically linguistic animals that we
are, the more-or-less continual vocal behavior of surrounding humans signals community
fitness, security, and the child’s connection to both practical and emotional intelligence.
The bulk of that surrounding vocal behavior is language, but human sonic intelligence
divides itself into two different functions, by the original general sonic function producing
both the sonically specialized function of musicality and the precise-articulate intellectual
specialty of sonic vocal language.
Musicality is a special general connection between self and sound. The sonic linguistic
function is the sonic-intellectual speciality of the anthropo-minimal viscerality of sounds.

Added to Kivy’s ‘language’-centric conception of meaning is Kivy’s admission to an

overwhelming predisposition to ‘realistic’ perception of ‘abstract’ information [[[and
perhaps of non-linguistic thought]]], at least in certain sensory modalities such as vision:
He cannot help but see ‘real’ shapes in cloud forms. 9 Do most people find themselves
always compelled automatically to see likenesses of, say, a dog when they gaze at a forest
canopy in a mountain vista; or, to see the likeness of a favorite person when they
knowingly look close up at the texture of a flower petal while strolling a beautiful garden?

I do not doubt that it is normal and healthy for persons to be able to see ‘familiar’ objects in
‘abstract’ patterns; and that cognitive-visually normal persons have the potential even to so
automatically and compulsively see such things that the automaticity temporarily takes on
a life of its own. But, to my way of thinking—and, in my own experience—, there is a vast
difference between the potential for such overwhelmingly automatic ‘realistic’ perception
of ‘abstract’ inputs and the various possible causes for the ‘realistic’ perception being
overwhelming. On the unhealthy side, there is the extreme case of being able to so focus on
achieving the reductive result constituting such ‘realistic’ perception that one becomes
temporarily locked out of a more balanced or full-on perception. A more familiar example
is when, in the present age of instant cameras and camera phones, the effort to preserve
scenes by photographing them reduces photography-zealots’ sense of the in-their-face
living beauty to a very sub-normal level, especially when they find themselves without a
camera. I doubt that Kivy sees ‘realistic’ things in place of the bulk of actual clouds; he sees
the clouds as themselves, in general, as I presume is normal.

But, added even to Kivy’s overwhelming predisposition to ‘realistic’ perception of ‘abstract’

input is that, throughout the first chapter of his book Music Alone, he seems implicitly to
draw a certain analogy between sight and language: that for which it may be supposed that
sight and language are those modes by which we may apprehend their respective realms in
the most true way: language for an accurate knowledge of the world of ideas, and sight for
an accurate knowledge of the physical world of which we are a part.10 I promise I shall
return to this analogy near the end of the present section.

As if all this were not enough, the kind of ‘meaning’ of which Kivy says that music has none
is the kind that ordinary discourse knows simply as the ‘propositional’ meaning of
‘language’.11 This is a problem because, as I said in the opening paragraph of my
Introduction, Kivy argues as if this ‘propositional’ meaning of ‘language’ constitutes the sole
foundational, ontologically primary, kind of meaning. As shall begin to become apparent
shortly, this view of such ‘propositional’ meaning is at once entirely mistaken and, by effect,
begging to see the proverbial ‘man behind the curtain’.

What Kivy actually means by the ‘propositional’ meaning of ‘language’ might more
descriptively be called the specificational, quasi-philosophic representational function of
shared language. I call it the curtain in the magic show of thought, and behind which stands
ourselves. Kent Bach references it by way of his charge of the ‘linguistification’-al
tendencies of modern scholarship.12 Plato, in effect, warned of its potential drawbacks by
way of his own disparagement of text-based philosophical education. 13 Kivy defines it to
include

not only the meanings of sentences in literary works but the [merely] implied
meanings of literary works; and pictorial meaning, in the sense in which Raphael,
for example, was “saying” something about the [respective] philosophies of Plato
and Aristotle in The School of Athens [painting], by having [his depiction of] Plato
pointing up[ and that of] Aristotle [pointing] down[…].14

It is this kind of meaning about which Slevc and Patel briefly hypothesize effectively in
Kivy’s favor:

[Since l]inguistic semantics[…]involves specific referents and

propositions[, language’s…] representations are likely to be more
salient than the relatively vague semantic [nature of] music.
[Hypothetically, therefore,] linguistic semantic[ expectations could]
interfere with music[al cognition;]15

But this notion of propositional meaning is nothing but the academic version of the
propositionality of shared language. If I automatically smile in joy at seeing you, my smile
has no such propositional content, since such a smile is both instinctive (and thus not
symbolic) and not particularly intellectual. Nevertheless, to conceive any act by a conscious
being, including a smile, as lacking any subject-predicate complex, is to presuppose, in
effect, both that the act has no relation to anything (is not part of an internal-external
complex) and that the act does not constitute a complex.

Left to run its course unchallenged, this merely academic version of propositionality allows
us to conceive of propositionality as pertaining strictly to an ‘articulately intellectual’ mode
of thought and expression. Thus it intuits that the intellectual substance of ‘inner speech’ is
subsidiary to language qua shared. This intuition renders language an artifact to which
persons are subject, rather than an instinct which persons express. It denies, in effect, the
possibility of shared language as a product of human interaction, and presumes hand sign
language to be mere iconography regardless of the fundamental human capacity for
symbolic usage-perception of forms in the linguistic mode of interaction.
If I a build a boat, both the building of it and my knowing how to build it constitute
meaning. If this were not so, then these doings and knowings could not be meant in the
form of any language acts used to relate them to other people. If my building of the boat
were not meanings, then I could not tell you the details of that building effort. But if the
building of a boat is meanings, then how is my smile not a meaning? My smile may not have
or possess or convey meaning in the narrowly linguistic sense of meaning. But language
cannot be meaning unless there already are things for us, by way of language, to mean.
There must be meaning before language, else language is the creation of meaning ex nihilo.
This is ridiculous, because whatever things we mean in language already exists, and we
have those things in mind.

I suspect that Kivy would deny to claiming that a smile has no meaning. But, the dichotomy
is too easy to restrict in terms of paradigmatic cases such as smiles and descriptions of
smiles. This seems to be because (a) a simple smile is not an articulate form of the
expression of human articulate cognition; and (b) the single most crucial thing humans
have for their individual and collective survival and thriving is the discrete capacity for
their social expression of their articulate cognition.

Per (b), the non-human animals have fur, claws, and other specialized inborn adaptive
stuff. Humans are specialized in nothing. Even our body plan is so generally adaptive as to
have no way directly to compete with other animals. It is only by how we use our bodies by
way of our brains that we are enabled to live above the most pathetically vulnerable
subsistence. For example, imagine having no more sense for augmenting our own bodily
warmth than has a squirrel. Without its own natural fur, a squirrel would slowly freeze to
death hunting for food before ever realizing the mere technical possibility of making for
itself an artificial coat out of anything. Therefore, in other words, a smile generally is
anything but crucial to humans, while the general ability of articulate cognition—of which
language normally is an expression—is.

Nevertheless, the strictness to which we are wont to draw the propositional/non-

propositional dichotomy is a not-insignificant problem. And, it applies for music as well.
Kivy seems willing to reason that pure music is not a thing obtaining so much to human
musicality as obtaining to the artifacts called ‘works’ of music. It seems to me to be a
profound flaw in reasoning. In so far as the shared form of language is a human artifact,
such reasoning seems effectively to presuppose that the exclusive primary ontology goes to
human artifacts, rather than to human sociality and to human general and perceptual
intelligence.

In fact, perhaps no human artifact is more pronounced in this artifact-centrism than the
phenomenon of the Liar Paradox, discussed in the previous section.
This actually gets back to music and meaning, but I shall explain that later. Along the way
you might see that explanation in the things that I put to leading up to it. For now, suffice it
so say that human intelligence can be too powerful for itself in making only the particular
distinctions that, in only the crudest ways, it finds ‘crucial’.

To stress the overall point thus far: According to the academic conception of meaning, in
order for an expression to have propositional content, the expression must be that of some
measure of mental-on-mental recursion: if I describe my smile—use words to reference my
smile—, then that description has propositional meaning.

As shall shortly be most profoundly seen by the namesake of the present section, the
problem here is that a description can be taken in place of a meaning such that whatever
answers to the description, but is not the meaning, may be mistaken for the meaning
because it answers to the description.

If we admit that ‘a smile has meaning, just not propositional meaning’, then what are we
doing insisting that propositional meaning obtains only to our mere descriptive function? Is
it not propositional of me wordlessly to take you by the hand and draw you to the dance
floor? Say you are hoping I will do so. And say, even, that you are, then, as much taking me
to the dance floor as I am taking you. Have we then cancelled each other’s taking the other,
since neither of us then is merely being taken?

Thus Kivy argues against musical meaning as if propositionality obtains only to conscious
content, and only to that as expressed by way of a form that deliberately stands apart from
that content. Moreover, he presupposes that the expression must be toward another
person, which implies that mere ‘inner speech’ is meaningless sans language.

Moreover, Kivy’s argument seems to imply that propositional meaning arrives ex nihilo
from the mere ability to represent one thing by way of another. In other words, if meaning
sans meaning is exclusively a function of ‘language’, then it looks like the meanings that we
mean by way of language do not exist apart from the occasional fact that we mean them by
way of language. I can know how to rebuild a rusted-out car from the ground up, but none
of that merely mechanical knowledge is propositional unless I can put that knowledge in
words. What if my words are just a few grunts? I mean all my complex articulate
mechanical knowledge in those few simple grunts. Is that enough description to count as
propositional of all that complex articulate knowledge?

Kivy seems willing to go ‘out on a limb’ to admit that music means something to the whole
human race.6 But he is not willing to admit that this equates to music having meaning qua
idomaticity. By analogy, it might not be fallacious, misleading, or ill-advised to state that the
whole human race has meaning. But, when we take the propositional form, ‘the whole
human race has meaning’ merely from the point of view of the individual human person,
might that form seem to imply something too different to be simply called ‘meaning’?

Kivy well points out that the cognitively articulate instantiation of propositionality is not
the same as the meaning we find in the mere sounds of music. But Kivy puts this as the
difference between the meaning ‘of’ something, and the meaning which something has ‘to’
us.7 Thus when we ask ‘What is the meaning of that speech?’ about that in a language we do
not understand, we are asking about a kind of meaning that does not apply to the mere
sounds of the speech. This kind of meaning is, of course, not the same kind of meaning as
that which might attract our attention to, say, a mere sunrise. Thus, a sunrise is
‘meaningless’ in the sense of language. Yet would we say, ‘A sunrise is meaningless’, or
even, ‘The Sun is meaningless’? No, we normally would say the opposite, and we would
know that we do not mean that the Sun is a bit of language.

In face of this, Kivy’s argument seems simply to say that music is merely too intimate with
our normal, sonic instantiation of language to wisely allow music generally to be said to
have meaning. The fact that there can, at least on occasion, be some confusion in that
regard, is not in doubt. But, that is not the issue.

An automatic smile for joy at seeing you is not a deliberate ‘pointing to’ the joy. Rather,
such a smile obtains merely instinctively as part of the function, or even part of the
substance, of that joy. Such a smile, therefore, is like part of the total experience of eating:
the taste cannot be merely an expression that stands apart from the eating: One could hold
one’s nose closed and thereby severely limit the taste experience; But, part of the natural,
and functionally normal, experience of eating is the ‘subjective’ experience of tasting the
actual chemistry that comprises the food.

But, part of my concern is that, by way of the analogy, if no one ever had any sense of taste,
we could well end up eating some nasty tasting poison. We then, short of a requisitely
stocked chemical testing lab, would have no ready way even of arriving at the idea that the
cause of someone’s getting sick is because they ingested some nasty substance. To remove
the analogy, when someone loses their way around what, for them, are the confounding
corners of some seemingly authoritative bit of ‘propositional meaning’, we would find it too
easy just to insist to them that they are not really lost, because we can see those corners. As
if their own minds do not matter except as how we presume their minds to be. Or, as if
their sense of their orientation in their efforts to keep us from being displeased with them
is inaccurate or ‘unmotivated’; that if only they will simply abide the protocols of our
instructions, they will come out Ok.

The normal reality is that our persons are anything but blindly loyal to, or indifferent
consumers of, the academic instantiations of propositionality. But, the normal reality is not
the only reality in which we find ourselves. Each language is a different way of discoursing
with the world, and the same goes for each person. Thus, one person’s good intellectual
‘food’ can, when effectively forced upon another person, act to oppress or injure that
other’s inner functional integrity. Our minds are not the same by virtue of being invisible.
The meaning of your words does not actually travel with the words, but resides ever inside
yourself. It is only by how we interact by way of words and other things that I may, or may
not, acquire a functionally identical meaning in myself relative to those words.

I just hope it is not too much against anyone’s sense of orientation that I argue as I do: To
limit our conception of meaning to that of the linguistic instantiation of propositional
meaning renders the individual’s self-affirming senses of meaningfulness and motivation
subordinate to, and even the result of, a merely collectively normalized form of shared
language.

As I explain in the final section, the status quo meanings of the various culturally
foundational social relations, including science and science education, then are accorded a
kind of personified authority that is used to steamroll persons’ adaptive differences,
making outsiders of those whose effective language disability ‘causes’ them to fail to ‘adapt’
to the way in which some consider to be the sole normal way. The word ‘meaning’ itself
then is so accorded that sole way, so that its use within that accord only reinforces the
perception that the very word ‘meaning’ can have no individual-centric historical basisXY in
the mindful word ‘mean’. ‘I mean such-and-such’, and ‘Bill did not mean to trip you’. The
social function of language is then sacrificed for some deification of language, an
untouchable standard of both idiom and intersubjectivity in accord to which we all simply
must keep.

It is instructive here to note that the fictional Vulcans are not so much social creatures as
isolated minds each acting in prime loyalty to a deified abstraction called ‘survival of the
species.’ The same is the case for assenting to a description of a truth while mistaking the
object to which it the description logically must mean.

It is telling here that Computer of the original Star Trek TV series spoke in mechanical
monotone. And, what is even more telling is the fact that we can comprehend that mono-
tonic speech. If such comprehension is possible, then would it not be productionally more
streamlined, vocally more energy-efficient, just to speak in monotone?

But dance with me just a little longer:

It is quite plausible that the way in which we acquire language (in infancy) is
first, or mainly, by ‘locking onto’ a concern for what other persons’ mean by their
language behavior. There is a particular subset of their sonic behaviors which
we, by then, have come to expect to be linguistic in nature. Some human vocal
sounds are non-linguistic. An identifiable subset of others’ vocal sounds are
linguistic.

Second, I suggest that, for language, we adaptively are not so much concerned
for authorship as for the author’s meaning; and, likewise, we are not so much
concerned for the author’s meaning as for the meaning alone. This lattermost
concern is, I suggest, the most central. Why meaning alone would be our most
central concern could be if we are concerned most actively for how the meaning
we ‘find’ in an instance of language may impact us (the first-person-singular), or
already impacts us.

But, the question is what we find in a given instance of language, and whether
what we find is accurate to reality, either or both to that of authorship and of the
world independent of authorship.

It is when the sense we may have that it is the form constituting an instance of
language that possesses the meaning that we can end up taking it for granted:
That the description is identical to the meaning.

That’s when we begin to take for granted that the meaning of language is a
super- or a-natural irreducible reality, like how many of us may think of gravity,
or of the ‘up’ , ‘down’, and ‘sideways’ directions.

In effecting these erroneous intuitions, our linguistic neurocognitive efficiency

then ends up subsuming our concept-forming faculties to the presupposition that
it is not people who mean, but language that means. This explains why we intuit
that ‘inner speech’ essentially is meaningful, even though no bit of ‘inner speech’
constitutes meaning ‘of’ for anyone except the person who is doing their thinking
by way of such ‘inner speech.’ There is, for ‘inner speech’, either none of Kivy’s
meaning ‘of’, or, if there is supposed to be, then it is an ‘of’ that is not therein
realized by anyone but that person.

Thus, I find Kivy’s argument against musical meaning to be not so much an

argument, as an effort to convincingly reiterate a particular, only partly-founded,
intuition:

‫ﬡ‬ Language, and language alone, so foundationally constitutes meaning that

one has simply to accept the meaning of language as an irreducibly
simple, un-analyze-able reality.

Such an intuition presumes, at least to a precursory effect, a foundationally

privileged position to the linguistically articulate mental capacities for
perception and knowledge. In fact, promised earlier, Kivy seems to draw the sort
of analogy between language and sight that notes that each is that by which we
can most truly and clearly know its respective realm of perception. XY He then
judges hearing to be essentially inferior to sight in primates, with the suggestion
that human musicality has no adaptive connection to anything ‘real’. XY

The fact that the phrase…

 “Sight is the paramount sense for survival in primates.”

…may describe a truth is undeniable.

But, a ‘propositionistic’ sense of meaning could be expected to reduce such a

phrase to a narrowly over-simplistic conception of the relation between sight
and survival. In other words, depending on exactly what active semantic
compound one makes of the semantic set of, ‘sight’, ‘paramount’ and ‘primate
survival’, the inference is that hearing is some unimportantly abstract experience
inside the head, and that sight is the sole necessary sense for knowledge about
external objects.

This inference seems to me certainly false. For, without any sense of self in
general—such as that afforded by a sense of our own physical and physiological
coherence, and of temperatures, tastes, sounds, etc.—, I propose that we would
be left with no more perceptual competence for our individual adaptability to an
external world than that which obtains for an astronaut in the moment she
wakes to find a ‘disembodied’ hand floating in front of her face.

In other words, without any internal senses of ourselves in terms of how the
external world affects our bodies, our moods, even our cognition, we might have
no knowledge of external objects save for how they merely visibly appear to
relate merely to each other, and to our own merely visual sense of ourselves.
Imagine wondering of so much as a cranberry is good for your body and not
being able to tell it apart, by taste, from anything else, no matter how poisonous.

So, it seems reasonably to be the case that sight is not the most important sense
for survival in any species. It seems it only is the most crucial for the individual
animal organism’s most independent survival in face of a macro-mechanical,
dynamically impinging external world.

Thus it seems to me that a language-centric concept of survival is a lopsided,

merely energy-conserving perception of physiological robustness; that it is a
concept of life in view merely of a reactive and defensive sense of vibrancy,
thereby conceiving of, and fulfilling, itself in grossly minimalist terms; It does not
dance through, and with, its environment, but acts mainly in regard to which to
achieve its fullest possible potential by a primarily adversarial relationship. The
null hypothesis therewith simply is granted, and thus only within the language-
centric conservative rationalistic strictures is there allowed to be any attempt to
establish biologically positive theories of the ‘meaningless’ arts, and of
explorative play. Music is the most directly so disregarded, because music is so
like language while acting the most directly contrary to, and in ‘willful’ ignorance
of, a language-chauvinistic view of language, mind, and knowledge.

And it is, according to Kivy’s preferred way of thinking, an irreducibly true proposition that
sounds, as such, have no meaning worthy of the word ‘meaning’. Sounds, as such, do not
put us in mind of anything, simply because, unlike language, what they do put us in mind of
never is discretely, much less controllably, dependable.

2. Music as Monolith
In the beginning of his book about the puzzle of human musicality, Oliver Sacks relates the
experience which Clarkes’s fictional Overlords have of music. According to Sacks, these
Overlords’ estimation of music is that music ‘has no concepts, makes no propositions; lacks
images, symbols, the stuff of language. It has no power of representation. It has no
necessary relation to the world.’ I agrue that that last bit is as far from the truth as anything
can be.

First, recall that I said earlier that Kivy well points out that the cognitively articulate
instantiation of propositionality is not the same as the meaning we find in the mere sounds
of music. I went on to say that when we ask ‘What is the meaning of that speech?’ regarding
a language we do not understand, we are asking about a kind of meaning that does not
apply to the mere sounds of that speech. I then observed that, though a sunrise is
‘meaningless’ in the sense of language, we nevertheless might not commonly say, ‘A sunrise
is meaningless’.

Kivy seems to want for pure music to be not just meaningless, but meaningless in a most
uniquely important, even critically beneficial, way. He even tries, quite admirably, to find a
rational reason for the virtually universal perception that music is profound, not just
profoundly moving; and equally admirably, he admits to having found no such reason.

But, what Kivy seems to presuppose is that,

 Music is not like a sunrise at all, because a sunrise is a natural occurrence in the non-
human world, while music is a human artifact.
This proposition, by itself, would tend to render music fairly special in terms of its
‘meaninglessness’. Even if we conceptually reduce music merely to that of one human
artifact among many, it would seem to put music above a mere sunrise in terms of its
relation to linguistic ‘meaning’: if a sunrise, for all its crucial benefits to life on Earth, is
meaningless, then surely an artifact as meaningless as music must be so very much more
meaningless for being seemingly so lacking in any utility. One could even reason that this
logically means that music is the epitome of human freedom and of the human power to
innovate for mere innovation’s sake.

Indeed, this seems to be Kivy’s view, in that he centers his conception of pure music not
around human musicality in any holistic sense, but in the most narrow possible of senses:
that for which humans will sit for protracted periods of time doing nothing but listening to
it; as if they believe that sound itself is just so much abstract experience going on inside
their heads: having no necessary relation to the world.

Surely, music is unique in the way in which it attracts our attention, and in what, exactly,
we experience in it. But whether paradigmatically human musical sounds are so special is
anything but settled.

Nevertheless, what is settled is that none of the non-human world, at face value, contains
that kind of such music. None of the non-living environment seems to include such music,
and none of the non-human life forms produce such music.

Thus, it is true enough, to start with, to say that no non-human animal spontaneously
makes music as we know it, and the non-living world does not ever sound to us like music
as we know it.

The first thing to tally here, however, is that this can be said of so many of the things that
humans do, or that humans make.

The second thing to tally is that, despite that humans make, say, glorious and often
powerful boats, in nature there have always been objects that float, and certain aquatic
animals move through water in ways that no human craft has yet equaled, never mind that
that unaided human body can ever equal.

This is not to say that humans have never made, say, water craft that can do things that no
animal can, or at least not as well. Many jet boats can travel across water faster than the
fastest fish (or, if not, with modern technology certainly can be made to, with a little extra
engineering to that end). And no aquatic animal can carry humans on its back as
luxuriously as can a standard sail boat, much less a luxury yacht or a cruise ship.

Even at this point, it might seem only reasonable to suppose that what sets music apart
from all other things is not just that it is a particular kind of sound, and which humans
alone seem to enjoy, but that that kind of sound exists purely as a human construct. Like a
cruise ship or superyacht, music can carry humans in luxury. Or, like an aircraft carrier that
can service some of the most powerful aircraft in the world, music can serve as an
articulate platform for the human imagination.

In fact, science writer Philp Ball claims that, since no non-human animal makes the kinds of
sounds that humans recognize as paradigmatically musical, such music does not exist in the
natural, non-human world.5 And Bard College President Leone Botstein takes it as a given
that ‘music does not exist really in nature.’6 One can say that as well for rocket ships that
carry communications satellites into orbit. Music, like a space craft, just does not exist in
nature. This certainly would make music unique. There are no spacecraft in Nature, just a
lot of lifeless stuff floating or whizzing around. Unless, of, one includes Earth.

It is Earth that I liken to music. Nature has no music outside Earth. At least none that can be
heard as music at face value. And that’s human intelligence comes in, or should:

consider that an unmoving acoustic space into which is injected a single, local source of
sound reflects that sound recursively, even digitally. This is because a sound wave is a
regular pattern. In fact, a sound wave may be thought of as a bit of music: it has all three of
melody, harmony, and rhythm. Thus, a single sound wave reflected in any
complex, sonically reflective environment is literally a bit of music.

But, no non-human animal seems the least to care directly and simply about even a single
tone. They are not curious about physical world as such, but take it at face value.

Therefore it is not the case that music is exclusively a human construct. In fact, music, in its
essence, is not a human construct at all.

Music merely is something natural for which humans have the enigmatic perceptual and
practical capacity to select, and which humans alone have the enigmatic capacity and
interest to control and refine.

Consider that a boat is nothing but a human refinement of the natural phenomenon
involved in boat-ness: Humans did not create the ability of objects to float on, and move
through, water; nor of water to be at once fluid and solid, giving-yet-resistive. Humans
merely refined upon these natural phenomena. Even a massive cruise ship borrows upon
the natural structural capacities of the materials out of which the ship is made.

Humans may, indeed, assemble unnatural combinations of things, such as to create a rocket
ship, or to use a rocket to insert a high-tech communications satellite into orbit. Humans
themselves now are in orbit, which is a highly unnatural combination.
But by presuming that music does not spontaneously occur in the non-living sonic
environment, we tend to look for music only in the part of nature that we, as music makers
sans anthropocentric, expect would be the most likely to produce music: other animals. The
error in such an expectation is already suggested: it presupposes that music, as such,
originates with animals, as such. This is as profound a mistake as presuming that ‘boatness’
is the creation of animals.

Thus, the problem for us techno-centric humans is that, in presuming upon our perception
that the non-living world has any genuine music, we are looking at the non-living world no
better than how any non-human animal sees that world: merely at face value.

There are two initial empirical facts underwriting the view that music ‘is a human
construct’:

One, the non-human, or ‘natural’, world, as a whole, does not filter itself so as to select for
any of its own discrete inter-recursive sonic patterns. In other words, nature does not
constitute a single identifiable ‘musical’ output. Rather, nature is somewhat like a fully
chaotic city block full of both recursively and randomly played human musical instruments.

Two, no non-human animal, in being exposed only to such chaos, has the perceptual
capacity spontaneously to select for, much less spontaneously retain-and-refine a special
memory for, any recursion, sonic or otherwise, above a certain, very small level of
complexity. A peacock, despite the recursive glory of its own plume, could never
deliberately draw a likeness of any one of its own feathers, even if its species’ survival
depended on it. Likewise, no feathered bird, in the history of feathered birds, could, despite
its ability to scratch in the ground, spontaneously scratch into the ground a likeness of any
of its fellows. And, no flying bird, despite its natural ability to fly, has the capacity
spontaneously to engineer and build even the most crude of artificial gliders. If geese could,
they surely would spontaneously augment their migratory efforts with artificial powered
flight. But, that would require more than the intelligence for natural winged flight. It would
require a much more general kind of intelligence, one that could engineer an artificial
propulsion system by reducing the problem of such engineering to an initially manageable
level. Such reduction would mean something functionally far less complex that geese’s own
muscles-and-metabolism, yet more dynamic than a feather.

So, despite that human standards of musicality seem utterly obvious to human hearing,
virtually no individual non-human animal spontaneously produces anything so simple as a
regular digital note scale rise such as ‘do, re, me, fa, so, la, ti, do’.

~
So, to put in proper light the comparison between the human and non-human animal, one
could justifiably say that most intelligent non-human animal makes the most isolated tribes
in the Amazon jungle look like starship engineers.

But, we should not take for granted that such extremely refined human technology is
analogous to human music. For, there is only so much, in terms of sounds as such, that
humans can do for mere musicality. Artificial sonic production, enhancement, distribution,
and ever recording technology certainly are part of human direct sonic enjoyment. But, the
actual basic structure of the music, however complex, is not—metaphorism aside—
logically analogous to humans-in-orbit.

3. Language as Efficiency
Kivy well points out that the cognitively articulate instantiation of propositionality is not
the same as the meaning we find in the mere sounds of music. But Kivy puts this as the
difference between the meaning ‘of’ something, and the meaning which something has ‘to’
us.8

When we ask ‘What is the meaning of that speech?’ in a language we do not understand’, we
are asking about a kind of meaning that does not apply to the mere sounds. This is, of
course, not the same kind of meaning as that which might attract our attention to, say, a
mere sunset. Thus, a sunset is ‘meaningless’ in the sense of language. The same goes for
mere sounds. Yet would we say that a sunset is meaningless, or that the Sun is
meaningless?

Yet a sunset may hold our attention better than speech in a language we do not understand.
In fact, many of us enjoy taking in ‘meaningless’ BMX stunts, ice skating, ballet, a mountain
vista, downhill skiing, or a cozy crackling fire. So, the mere sounds of pure music are not
unique in the fact that we enjoy them despite their being ‘meaningless.’

But, if there is a meaning ‘of’ something, then what is the meaning of anything? Is the
meaning ‘of’ something that in the forms themselves, or, instead, in the way we use those
forms? It seems to depend on what use we already naturally have for the something. I drive
a car in so far as it already is a car. Therein is the meaning of the car, even when I make a
car from scratch. When you drive the car I made, its meaning does not obtain in where you
drive it, but that it take you where you want to go. Pure music is the same, and not
primarily because of the ‘work’ of music, but because it is largely music in any case: that
kind of sound that meets the paradigms of human musicality.

Even in my making a car, I recognize that my personal wishes as to specific destinations for
it-and-you are not the meaning of the car. The same applies to when I make, say, a shovel, a
house, clothing, or anything else. There is a natural reason for why speech sounds are not
music to our ears. Similarly, there is so very much behind the fact that music is not our
mere language.

Koopman and Davies (2001) observe that, despite that any form, can, in principle, serve as
a ‘meaning bearer’, music as music cannot well serve as our language.15 Implicit in their
observation is that, regardless how we might commonly accomplish it, if we were to
replace our normal linguistic forms with those constituting music, we could well find
ourselves, say, having to borrow our neighbor’s piano just to be able to ask to borrow a cup
of cream. Or, imagine, say, you are watching a Tom Hanks movie and suddenly the musical
score happens to be quite discordant with the dialogue. Does the name ‘Wilson’ really
mean the same to us when it happens to be instantiated in the tune-and-instrumentality of
some dark Brahms symphony? Hank’s character would have had to come up with a name
that does not require an orchestra to pronounce. Then there is the problem of how to
change your tone from happy to angry if the statement necessarily is instantiated in a ‘with
feeling’ soothingly soft acappella.
14
Ian Cross, in Nicholas Bannan (ed.), Music, Language, and Human Evolution ( Oxford
2012), 269-271
15
Koopman and Davies, “Musical Meaning in a Broader Perspective”, 262.

As if these sorts of problems would not be too much, imagine your brain ending up
insensibly habituated to some great music just because War and Peace is semantically
instantiated in what we today call ‘The Pastoral’ by Beethoven. Finally, to take the other
side of this coin, do you really think we would be just as well off to normally speak in
robotic monotone?

So, it seems clear that (1) our language is concerned not only both for semantic precision
and for the efficiency with which that precision is handled (i.e. mentally denoted and
communicated), but for the effectiveness of its own concerns for communicating our
meaning; and (2) our self-affirming concern for sounds, as such, is to have these
‘meaningless’ sounds be the cognitively flexible opposite to our ‘linguistic burdens’ of mere
precision and mere efficiency. In short, music-as-language would be ‘semantically bulky’,
and would tend to undercut our natural, dynamic value for the music.
Full-fledged language is the only fairly fixed, mass-persons conventional use of a potentially
infinite number of fairly arbitrary, functional basic semantic forms for a potentially infinite
host of mental-conceptual and mental-communicative purposes. The numbers of this basic
kind of form naturally are vastly multiplied so as to accommodate those numbers and
varieties of meanings of which humans are de- re- and compositionally capable and
concerned.

Nevertheless, due partly to involving so many of these basic semantic forms, or words,
language also is about an efficient minimum number of another basic kind of form, and each
of these further limited. For English speech, these basic forms number about 44 functional
sounds, and each sound is further limited to very short vocal duration.

In terms of human musicality, one of the most curious things in all this efficiency is that all
human vocal languages together comprise a small percentage of the range and types of
human vocal, and auditory-cognitive, ability. Moreover, for a given vocal language, such as
English or Chinese, this limit is further reduced. Thus, even allowing for the polytonality of
normal speech, the total range and typologies of a single given human vocal language is an
extremely paltry set compared to the full range and typologies of human vocal ability.

But language natural is never just a strict expression of its own articulate ‘academic’
propositional meaning. By our language interests, we do not just take whatever medium in
which we instantiate language and reduce the linguistic expressions in that medium to an
‘academic’ minimum. We augment that linguistic minimum with the natural effects of that
medium, because we need the effective breadth of that medium to ensure maximum
effectiveness for our linguistic communication. We are not creatures of language; language
is a creature of us. And ‘us’ is not a merely ‘rationally’ adaptive thing, but a massively
parallel thing in a massively multi-dimensional cosmos.

Shared language enables different persons to understand each other despite their more
and less invisible functional and incidental differences. But, due both to the human need of
fairly abstract cognition and to the sheer number of meanings humans need and wish to
communicate, shared language does not use just any set of symbols; It uses a set which is
the opposite of Raphael’s ‘semantically bulky’ painting. For just four of the most simple of
many examples: (1) Almost any given natural vocal language, such as English and Chinese,
has less than six dozen functional sounds as basic building blocks for a potentially infinite
number of semantic units; (2) Due to relatively special historical factors, English writing
has only twenty six analogous building blocks, called ‘letters’, for spoken English’s forty-
four basic building blocks; (3) The building blocks in all spoken languages, and in most
written languages, are very simple in form, as opposed to being ‘bulky’ and involved; (4) All
extant spoken languages combined constitute a cosmically paltry subset of the total range
and typologies of human normal vocal and auditory capacities.
But here is where natural meanings come into play against the strict notion that musical
sounds are meaningless: It is humans’ natural commonalities that make it possible for
humans’ interaction naturally to develop a shared language. All other natural common
things being as they really are, if persons in linguistically primitive conversation had no
common ability to comparatively emphasize selected semantic units, the rate at which the
language developed, and the total level of development finally attained, would be
significantly less than that at which shared language has developed, and that to which
shared language has attained.

In any case, in the absence of any fully developed language, a primitive shared language is
developed to such an extent that it meets its users’ common highest normal level of mental
articulation relative to the costs of conversing in that language. This, in mere pragmatic
terms, seems essentially to be what constitutes full-fledge language: that which meets a
particular group of users’ common highest normal level of mental articulation.

The substance against Kivy’s argument against musical meaning is all that of which human
cognitive articulation is concerned, in that music is both expression and practice our
cognitive articulative capacities.

Kivy observes that composers of musical sound do not have the ‘obiter dicta’ to determine
for the rest of us, and for all time, what we can, or cannot, get from that sound. XY After all,
such mere sound is just that. Therefore, we individually, and thus by way of any collective,
have the right to perceive such mere sound either as mere musical sound, or as something
more than. For example, if a composer intends for a particular sound to be perceived
merely as such, yet if that sound far too much reminds a particular auditory culture of the
choo-choo-ing of train, then, despite the composer’s pure musical intent for those sounds,
that auditory culture shall not find those sounds to be that of pure music, but instead of a
choo-choo-ing of a train.

This observation against composer’s potential obiter dicta logically admits that pure music
has a natural kind of meaning. Of similar naturalness is a painting depicting a man pointing
up and another man pointing down. But, though the painting may be naturally obvious (at
least if it is a remotely realistic rendering of a real and familiar object), what its artist may
have otherwise meant by that depiction is obscure to us save either a shared system of
objective interpretation of that artist’s depictions, or a one-off knowledge of, say, a certain
two Greece thinkers and a basic ability to read the title affixed to the painting. The mere
musical sound, however, need not be an authorially intended sonic depiction of anything in
particular in order for that sound idiomatically to be referenced as ‘meaningful’ or as
‘having meaning’. A relatively language-exclusive idiom culture of ‘meaning’ may well find
the reference unnatural. But, there can be no strictly singular natural idiom culture within a
language that, in the first place, developed to its initial ascendency internationally and
inter-culturally, never mind one that, to date, spans the globe.

Moreover, Kivy implicitly admits to the natural central meaning of that thing which the
most ordinary discourse knows simply as ‘language’:

In the sense merely of the raw ideas that Raphael had in mind to express by way of his
painting, that painting is equivalent to Raphael’s speaking that same meaning. But, Raphael
was aware that a given instance of his speaking could not endure after the moment he had
spoken it. And, he believed that he could not just go on speaking forever, nor than anyone
would just pass on his speech faithfully to all time. And he wished for what he had in mind
to endure long after he himself was gone. But, at a particular point, what he actually had in
mind was not language as such, but art. So it is that his art means what he means by it. And
yet he likely recognized that art is not language, so he allowed that his painting might not,
of itself, preserve the central meaning he had in mind for it. One may assume that he at
least had a good hope that the then-extant language documents about Plato and Aristotle
would be preserved for far longer than his own life, so that he spent so much time painting
that painting in order to hope it would meet the cumulative preservational devotion which
he expected would be used for those documents.

There is for language something quite profound in view of what I have called the ‘semantic
bulkiness’ of Raphael’s The School of Athens. Namely that one of the profound advantages of
symbols is that they normally need not be anything but symbols. Expressive obiter dicta is
not the aim of shared language, structurally semantic communication is.

Thus, in mind of Robinson Crusoe’s efforts at building his home base on his island, symbols
normally do not require a structural engineer to realize, or a combination of pickaxe and a
lot of sweat to form. The more durable instances of symbols may, of course, require some
extra effort, such as those carved into a wooden door. But, in fact, as it relates to durability,
the purely symbolic advantage of symbols is seen in that epitome of symbolism that we
know as speech: Symbols naturally, as such, do not require any effort toward their own
durability. This non-durability feature of symbols has a most profound advantage in terms
of production and reception. And that advantage is singularly most realized in speech.

If Raphael had been inclined to a certain kind of cleverness (of which the present is author
is, for non-‘language’ reasons, taken), he could have written his ‘painted essay’ in such a
pattern as to result in its appearing, at a relative distance, to be that of his actual School of
Athens painting.

But, there is the problem of how humans could have, in some alternate universe, in the first
place developed a natural, or even artificial, visual language according to which the set of
what has turned out to be the world’s fine art paintings could constitute unambiguous
essays on topics of their respective artists’ choices. How could humans, as individuals, have
retained their artistic, and thus artifactual, autonomy and, at the same time, keep within a
basic convention according to which their paintings unambiguously constituted instances
in an established shared language?

As if that would not be too difficult, imagine if we somehow made all our artifacts serve
such a double duty: Imagine your house is at once just a house as far as houses go and, in
terms of some kind of language system, unambiguously constitutes your doctoral thesis. In
other words, just like you can read the present article, you have to be able to read other’s
houses by the same ‘house language’ according to which your own house is
‘advantageously’ ‘written’.

In normal circumstances, most people would not listen to incomprehensible speech even
for a minute. Yet such speech is nothing but sounds, no more than is music. And we listen to
mere musical sounds all the time.

If we say that neither linguistic nor musical sounds themselves have ‘meaning’, yet it looks
like musical sounds have a lot of meaning, and that linguistic sounds have none.

From this it might be imagined that the reason we use linguistic sounds to actually describe
things is because these sounds otherwise would have nothing to do. But we use these
sounds quite a lot for this, and they serve this purpose well. You cannot make a case in
court by instead humming a tune to the jury.

What something necessarily or ‘logically’ puts us in mind of, at least if we are attending to it
as it is, is akin to the specificationally compulsory nature of linguistic meaning. For
linguistic meaning, we mutually have need of understanding, or being understood by,
others when they or we ‘mean’ particular things. Thus, we accord each other’s language
acts fixed meaning, specifically, whatever meanings that we, as respective authors of our
own language acts, mean by those acts. This might be called the ‘default proposition’ of
language. People want to communicate with each other. And, in given instances, they want
this communication to be as precise as already are their own minds in those instances.

Thus, when someone means something with language, we grant that that instance of that
expressed form means what is author means by that form. This is true of every word and
sentence in the present article. I wrote these instances of these forms, so it is an objective
fact that I mean by them what I mean by them. So, in other words, for any language act, we
grant the objective fact that there is a particular relation between its two basic elements:
(a) its own instance if its particular forms, and (b) what its author means by those
16
Kivy, Music Alone, 21 (17-25).

forms.

Likewise, for what something ‘means’ in the merely logical sense, when you attend to any
two or more ideas, those ideas can be found to have a particular relation to one another.
For a most simplistic example, 2+2 means 4. In other words, the combination of the two
elements means something. Such a combination also means that each 2 is qualitatively the
same thing as the other 2: each functional, or explicit, element in the combination means
things in itself. In fact, that is how the two elements, when combined, mean something
more than a mere reiteration of their respective selves. In other words, ‘2+2’ means not just
‘2+2’. It means, also, 4. Each functional element in the combination means “I am made up of
two 1’s’. That is how, together, the two elements mean 4. (There may be other things that
this combination means, besides 4). Finally, by implication, the combination of more
complex elementsconstitutes more meaning. Say, 2+3, or 2x3.

Now, none of this seems to be the case for music, pure music anyway, from the point of
view of language qua meaning, sans meaning. Pure music does not have ideas, so it does not
mean anything. Pure music has no meaning to begin with, so its combinations of
‘meaningless’ sounds do not mean anything together. In other words, pure musical sounds
cannot, of themselves, necessarily put us in mind of anything else in particular. In short,
music does not imply particular things: no particular ideas necessarily follow from it. This,
however, overlooks the fact that pure musical sounds are (at least for those musically
normal humans who find musical sounds to be enjoyable) a particular kind of enjoy-ability,
what I like to call psychologically and cognitively ‘affirming’ to the hearer. We, as unique
individuals, do not wish to listen to music that we individually find either ‘unappealing’
musically or that makes us feel oppressed or manipulated. Thus, though we may find much
music ‘sad’, this often is a version of ‘sad’ that we find affirming to our sense of our
ourselves, hence we listen to that music. For the same essential motive, I presume, do some
people watch horror movies, or read horror novels: these things give these persons’
perhaps uncommonly firm sense of reality an invigorating workout. In short, there is really
nothing that anyone ever is naturally happy to do that they find basically adverse to their
sense of themselves and, or, how they feel about their state among other people. Not
everything works our sense of ourselves in the same way, and pure musical sound
necessary, objectively, is its own particular and unique way.

Language is its own way, too. And, its way is quote central, and typically by far the most
powerful practical, of any way we have for expressing our sense of ourselves, and
interacting with that of others. We decide to ‘mean’ something by way of something else,
such that the something else serves as a symbol of the thing we mean. But, insist that this
way of expressing ourselves is the foundational kind of meaning, and upon which all other
kinds of meaning depends, just might be the sort of insistence that accurately answers to
the description, ‘language-chauvinism’. Bach points out that xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxx.17

So, the real question is what is the reason we ever make any music to begin with? From a
merely language-centric point of view, it may seem that we lack any reason for making, or
listening to, music in the first place; that there is no ’meaning’ of it. But, this point of view is
like taping our own mouths shut, or cutting out our own tongues, and then concluding that
that which we wish to affirmatively speak is just the sort of thing on which there logically is
nothing affirmatively to speak.

Obviously, language—or more precisely, the specifically linguistic mode of our cognition—
is very particular in the kind of meaning to which it attends. One might say it ‘parses’ the
world, or our thoughts, or a given part of either or both. But, in fact, the unit of meaning of
language, the ‘proposition’, is not necessarily ‘parsing’ within itself. Propositions come in
many forms, and in many degrees. On the lowest end is the mere linguistic labelling of
something. In other words, a mere name constitutes a kind of genuine proposition, in that,
by way of the name, we can ‘mean’ that thing to other minds who know that name, its
object, and the combination of the two. So, propositions are merely that spectrum of things
that fill our minds: ideas, thoughts, complex statements, etc.. In fact, in general, without
propositional content, we seem not to be able to ask questions, as such: I see a bird, called a
hawk. I ask, say, what hawks eat. Once I have the answer, ‘hawk’ now means to me not just
any bird that has a unique form, but a bird of that form which eats particular things. So,
now, when I say ‘hawk’ among persons who know of hawks’ diets, I am the more justifiably
presumed by such persons to know ‘what’ a ‘hawk’ is.

Thus, without some propositional content to begin with, we have nothing about which to
ask. But, whence our first propositional content? The ultimate
17
Kent Bach, xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxx
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answer would be: I think, therefore, I am. This is our own, ultimate, default proposition: us.

This is where the problem for the strict, oxymoron-perceiving argument against musical
meaning really gets going. What do I think, such that I am? There seems to be no ultimate
distinction between our ultimate default proposition (us), and whatever it is that
‘proposition’ originally encounters. It is pre-linguistic. Or, at least, it is not language alone:
it is self-reflection; it is recognition; and, if you will, it is proto-question. In short, humans
do not invent language, nor the question, ex nihilo. Humans are their own ‘question’: their
own ponderer, explorer, analyzer, wonderer. I wonder, therefore, I am.

So, ‘language’, in the everyday sense of the thing, is not something without prior reference
or prior substance. We didn’t come up with such a thing as ‘language’ at random. Rather,
language is, at root, us. The same is true of that creature that we call a ‘question’. A
question, by its nature, it is that special, dynamic factor that, only to our everyday sense
seems necessarily not to exist until we purposely make one, or at least until we become
aware of one as it first rises in our consciousness.

But, if anything, we are always asking questions; seeking things not yet possessed; and,
ultimately, acting toward things that we need cyclically to acquire, such as air, nutrition,
rest, and otherwise any kind of refreshed sense-of-self. In short, we are a rhythm, and a
harmony, and a melody.

So, the point here is that music is that thing that we do that we leave vague, flexible, merely
suggestive. One could, in many cases, say that music is something that we mean—yes mean
—to be vague, flexible, and suggestive. If this meaning for music were not essentially the
case, then could we have created any pure music to begin with? It would not be ‘music’ to
us. Instead, it would be nothing but ‘sounds’ in our ears, however complex and harmonious
we might still ‘perceive’ the sounds to be. It would just not be the sense of harmony,
melody, and rhythm in which we could or would partake. It would just be sounds, having
no meaning to us, in us, or through us.

The simple fact is that we find sound, as such; we do not create the category of creature that
we know as sound; rather, we experience it. And, what we experience of it is not that of an
indifferently ‘objective’ perception, but of a pure, suggestive substance. If anything, we are
sound, and so is our environment. The two, combined, mean something.

Without this meaningful combination, we could never make sounds that we find to be
‘music’. Music, in the everyday sense, is a product, or artifact, of our ‘subjective’ self-
affirmative sense of sounds. And, we humans, with our enigmatically perceptually
deliberately complex artifactive cognition, spontaneously craft sounds for ourselves to
meet ever newer, or more complex, suggestive heights, depths, breadths, vistas. It is a bit
like a boat: we did not invent the phenomena of floating and moving through water, we
merely refined on these. This is what humans do; we perceive the spectrum of things in
whatever environments to which we turn our attention, and we parse that spectrum, and
create new things with its functionally discrete parts. Language, in its bulk, merely
describes, denotes, those parts, and of our ways with those parts. If such description were,
as Kivy seems to say, the foundation of meaning, then, indeed, mere sounds would have no
use to us, and our way with mere sounds would be meaningless except by the merest of
strictly arbitrary symbolism.

But, one thing that we realize that we can make sounds to do for us is to fulfill that very
socially particular thing called ‘language’: we can use sounds to ‘mean’ particular things;
things that we already have in mind, and which are particular, practical, and often complex
in ways that we find useful. I work at something, I pretend to work at it, I pretend to
pretend to work at it; I pretend no to work at it, etc.. Theory, reflecting upon itself; our
thoughts reflecting upon our thoughts, ever more the refining of our perceptions of
ourselves, and of our world, and of the combination of the two.

Thus, for ‘mere’ sounds, we humans, with our complex discretionary cognition, seek to the
more fill in the possibility space of selected or filtered sound; to fill its every unpopulated
bit with an ever greater number and variety of reflections of our own flexible, meaning-
seeking selves.14

In its bulk, then, human musical sounds are not just not meaningless, they are one of the
most meaning-laden things there is. This just is not the reductive, crudely practical kind of
meaning that we naturally require in the vast bulk of our general practical-social lives. We
cannot just replace our language with mere music and expect the communication simply to
proceed. But, we make music so ‘meaningless’ on purpose, for, surely, we logically could
make it otherwise.

This does not logically mean that we could just as easily make music to be not-music. Even
the occasional ‘obiter dicta’, on the part of composers or creators of pure music, grants the
foundational natural fact that a certain human way with sounds is not language, and should
not be used as if it could just as well serve as language. That is, the forms by which we
merely denote, and merely communicate, the ‘meanings’ of our merely linguistic cognitive
interests cannot serviceably be that of those that we recognize as ‘music’.
But, what, exactly, is ‘propositional meaning’ such that the musical kind of sounds does not
have it?

Kivy’s answer seems to be that propositional meaning obtains only to our actually
‘proposing’ something: specificational, quasi-philosophic representation:

[…]not only the meanings of sentences in literary works but the [merely] implied
meanings of literary works; and pictorial meaning, in the sense in which Raphael,
for example, was “saying” something about the [respective] philosophies of Plato
and Aristotle in The School of Athens [painting], by having [his depiction of] Plato
pointing up[ and that of] Aristotle [pointing] down[…].3

This notion of propositional meaning is what I call the ‘Professorial’ definition of

propositionality. It views propositionality strictly as that pertaining to an ‘articulately
intellectual’ mode of thought and expression. Thus, if I automatically smile in joy at seeing
you, my smile has no propositional content, since such a smile is both automatic and not
particularly intellectual.

According to this academic view of meaning, in order for an expression to have

propositional content, it must be the expression of some measure of the mental-on-mental
recursive kind of meaning. If I describe my smile (that is, use words to reference my smile),
the description has propositional meaning, since the words merely represent the smile.
Thus, propositionality obtains only of a bit of conscious conent which is expressed by way
of a form that deliberately stands apart from, and thus ‘points to’, that particular bit of
conscious content.

An automatic smile for joy is not a deliberate ‘pointing to’ the joy, but obtains instinctively
as part of the function, or even part of the substance, of that joy. Such a smile is like part of
the total experience of eating: the taste cannot be merely an expression that stands apart
from the eating. One could hold one’s nose closed and thereby severely limit the taste
experience. But, part of the natural, and functionally normal, experience of eating is the
‘subjective’ experience of tasting the actual chemistry of the food.

But, part of my concern is that, by way of the analogy, if no one ever had any sense of taste,
we could well end up eating some nasty tasting poison. The reality is that our persons are
anything but either blindly loyal to, or indifferent consumers of, Professorial propositions.
And part of that reality is like that of different languages, each language a different way of
discoursing with the world. We each are different in the way we discourse with our world.
One person’s good intellectual ‘food’ can, when forced upon another person, act to injure
that other’s inner functional integrity.
So, to begin with, perhaps what we usually meaning by ‘propositional meaning’ is a
meaning that has any number of versions. Say you want to order an ice cream from the ice
cream truck, and the ice cream truck carries lots of flavors. You could just say that you want
an ice cream, and the ice cream truck person could just hand you an ice cream. But if you
really want a strawberry ice cream, and if the ice cream truck person hands you a vanilla,
you have not got what you want.

That’s why they invent names for things, one name for one thing and another name for
another thing. Without names, we would be left with a whole lot of ‘vanilla’, and no
strawberry. Except that what is ‘strawberry’ for one person may be ‘plain’ for another.

So, only to begin with, without names we would have to settle for whatever we get. And
that would not work in a world that had both wrenches and ice cream. If you needed a
wrench for something, you probably could not settle for an ice cream in place of the
wrench. And if you are an ice cream truck person, and if the truck’s freezer has broken
down in the lot, your ice cream is going to melt before you can sell it all, and then you’ll get
fired. All this can happen just because you have no easy way of asking for a wrench. And
then you might be left thinking, ‘All the world needs is a wrench.’

And the rest of us may be left thinking, ‘All the world needs is a name for a wrench.’
Because we wanted an ice cream, and we didn’t even get a chance to have to settle for
vanilla.

So, the consumer, or the end user, invented names. In other words, language is open-
source. But, as I said, we are not all the same.

Once the world had enough names to get by day-to-day, we settled for names like ‘vanilla’
‘strawberry’, and ‘wrench’, since these names were commonly understood. We could
thereby be sure to get a wrench when we needed one, and no longer have to settle for an
ice cream to repair a freezing machine.

And that is where the merely academic sense of ‘propositional meaning’ comes in. Say I ask
simply for a wrench, and you assume I am asking for an ice cream. After you hand an ice
cream toward me, I can just I repeat ‘wrench’. In that interaction, my repeating ‘wrench’ is a
propositional use of a simple name.

In fact, were you only just beginning to learn names of things, and if I knew this, then my
initially asking you for a wrench would be a kind of proposition as well. In that case, my
initially uttering ‘wrench’ would function as a question. An explicitly elaborate version of
that question could be, ‘I want a particular thing by such-and-such a name. Do you know
what is meant by that name?’
But music is not a like ‘flavor-less’ ice cream. And that’s a big part of why music is not
meaningless. Music already has many different flavors of its own. Of course, if music had
only one ‘flavor’, it still would not be meaningless. It would only be like a single word that
we use as the name for everything. Except that music is not a name for something. Music is
something. It’s just like the fact that you are not a name. You are you. And what may be
surprising is that, despite that you are not made of names, you are anything but non-
propositional. It’s how you can ‘propose’ something with words in the first place.

I propose that every function in your body is a genuine proposition, just not in ‘language’.
After all, if a bunch of mere names for things can propositionally represent something, then
actual somethings can be propositional in themselves. This allows that your whole self, as a
particular kind of thing, is a proposition in how it relates to the general world. You are your
own discourse, your own language.

The real question, then, is not whether music is, or is not, propositional, but what music is
made of such that music, as a particular kind of thing, can be a particular proposition in its
own right. This gets back to my initial obvious question: Is it not a proposition that humans
enjoy music?

Thus, to answer whether music has propositionality, I propose that we have to answer why
human’s enjoy music. What is it that we are enjoying that we call ‘music’? What does music
have to do with anything in the general world?

Here is the logic here: One, you, as a human being, have propositionality partly by how you,
a human being, are related to the general world. Two, you enjoy music. So, does music have
no relation to the general world? I shall begin to answer that in a moment. But first it would
be helpful to aggregate just a little more about propositionality.

Humans enjoy music regardless if human beings have either ice cream or wrenches.
Moreover, humans enjoy music even when the humans in question have no ‘language’.
That’s what human infants are: language-less humans who enjoy music. Though human
infants may, due to a combination of comparative cultural in-exposure and developmental
earliness, enjoy music much less than do human adults, the uniqueness of music as a source
of enjoyment is not unknown to human infants. They may not yet know any names for
things, but this does not logically mean they have no sense of propositionality.

Even little dogs have propositionality. Just tease them by pretending to throw their favorite
toy, and their doggy selves may get very loudly propositional at you. If only that particular
propositionality could be translated into ‘Professor Speak’, it would sound like this: “I
propose that you stop pretending to throw my favorite toy. In matter of fact, if you do not
stop pretending to throw it, then I propose that I should bite you on the foot—like this. And
if you still do not stop, then I shall continue so proposing these things. I admit that I may
not have much capacity to cause you to stop. But, then, as you can well see, I am just a little
dog; and a quite tame one at that. If only I knew of such things as big angry Rottweilers,
then I could chance to have one right here to do my barking-and-biting for me.’

So, now to the question, does music have no relation to the general world?

Various thinkers have said that music is unnatural. Science writer Philip Ball says, ‘Music is
not a natural phenomenon but a human construct.’The Music Instinct (pg. 2) Musicologist and Bard
College President Leone Botstein (president@bard.edu) says, ‘music doesn’t exist really in
nature.’ http://bigthink.com/videos/the-great-unexpected-utility-of-the-arts (4:37); http://www.floatinguniversity.com/botstein-outline

Most such thinkers immediately reference the fact that no non-human animal makes
anything that we humans universally recognize as music; that we humans find
paradigmatically ‘musical’.

And only a small number of such thinkers specifically reference the fact that the non-
animal portion of the natural sonic environment seems absent any such ‘music’.

Either way, it is a perfectly normal, everyday-justified view to think that paradigmatically

human musical structures are strictly human products. We do not hear such sonic
structures in the non-human sonic environment—at least not at face value.

But, what is it about those sonic structures that are a human artifact? To say that ‘music’, as
such, is a human construct is to say that paradigmatically human musical structures are
alien to the natural world. In fact, Botstein seems to go so far as to conceive of such music,
like he conceives of art in general, as ‘fictive’.

But, what, exactly, is it about mere, cleverly recursive sounds that is ‘fictive’?

There are two primary issues here. One is the fact that ‘art’ is artifact. The other is that
artifact, in the cosmos, is never purely artifact, because such artifact necessarily makes use
of naturally pre-existing things.

There are two basic questions here. One, if art is ‘fictive’, and if art is artifact, then is artifact
‘fictive’? Two, There are two different depths needed to thoroughly answer this question.
The primary depth is to the natural, the secondary to the artificial.

On the natural side are questions such as whether sounds, as such, are a human artifact,
under the assumption that they are natural.

On the artificial side are questions such as whether any non-human animals have the least
artifactive capacity. The answer to this secondary question is yes. Everything from bee
hives and beaver dams to probing sticks made-to-length by crows and apes; all are
artifacts.
Likewise, a common modern handled hammer, made of a steel head and an attached
wooden handle, is an unnatural empirical object: ‘unnatural’ in that the details of its
structure do not exist in the non-human world; ‘empirical’ in that the hammer exists
externally to the human mind and senses.

The basic kind of use to which we put such a hammer is natural. But, the exact details of our
use of it are unnatural due its empirical details being unnatural. Is a hammer ‘fictive’? Is its
basic use ‘fictive’? Are the unnatural details of its use ‘fictive’? If the empirical hammer is
not ‘fictive’, then how is empirical music ‘fictive’?

Is music alien to the natural world?

Humans create music by making use of the fact that sound is a pre-existing element of the
natural world. This implies the crucial answer to the notion that music is ‘fictive’: virtually
everything that any animal, including the human, makes is some kind of refinement upon
what already exists in the non-living world. On the most general scale, we admit that,
say, fundamental geometry exists in the natural world independently of animals. So,
whatever animals make that involves fundamental geometry is the result, necessarily, of
borrowing upon a pre-existing natural thing.

In fact, the only evidence ever provided to support the intuition that music, as such, is a
human construct are (a) no non-human animal spontaneously makes any sounds that
humans recognize as paradigmatically human music, and (b) the face value of non-living
part of the natural sonic environment does not constitute music.

Such evidence certainly is solid on its own terms. But, as suggested by the fact that all
animals, including humans, create principally by borrowing upon the non-living world,
such evidence is far from conclusive in fully empirical terms. In these broader terms, there
is no warrant to presume upon the mere face value of the non-human world to conclude
that ‘music as such’ is alien to the non-human world.

Consider, for a moment, the fact that a boat is nothing but a human refinement of the
natural phenomenon involved in boat-ness: Humans did not create the ability of objects to
float on, and move through, water; nor of water to be at once fluid and solid, giving-yet-
resistive. Humans merely refined upon these natural phenomena. Even a massive cruise
ship borrows upon the natural structural capacities of the materials out of which the ship is
made.

Humans may, indeed, assemble unnatural combinations of things, such as to create a rocket
ship, or to use a rocket to insert a high-tech communications satellite into orbit. Humans
themselves now are in orbit, which is a highly unnatural combination. But, we should not
take for granted that such extremely refined human technology is analogous to human
music. For, there is only so much, in terms of sounds as such, that humans can do for mere
musicality. Artificial sonic production, enhancement, distribution, and ever recording
technology certainly are part of human direct sonic enjoyment. But, the actual basic
structure of the music, however complex, is not—metaphorism aside— logically analogous
to humans-in-orbit.

One could respond to all this by presuming that the ‘musical’ kind of sound is an unnatural
combination of natural phenomenon.

But, by presuming that music does not spontaneously occur in the non-living sonic
environment, we tend to look for music only in the part of nature that we, as music makers
sans anthropocentric, expect would be the most likely to produce music: other animals.

The error in such an expectation is already suggested: it presupposes that music, as such,
originates with animals, as such. This is as profound a mistake as presuming that ‘boatness’
is the creation of animals.

Thus, the problem for us techno-centric humans is that, in presuming upon our perception
that the non-living world has any genuine music, we are looking at the non-living world no
better than how any non-human animal sees that world: merely at face value.

Let me now give a combination of summary of, and top-off to, these considerations.

There are two initial empirical facts underwriting the view that music ‘is a human
construct’:

One, the non-human, or ‘natural’, world, as a whole, does not filter itself so as to select for
any of its own discrete inter-recursive sonic patterns. In other words, nature does not
constitute a single identifiable ‘musical’ output. Rather, nature is somewhat like a fully
chaotic city block full of both recursively and randomly played human musical instruments.

Two, no non-human animal, in being exposed only to such chaos, has the perceptual
capacity spontaneously to select for, much less spontaneously retain-and-refine a special
memory for, any recursion, sonic or otherwise, above a certain, very small level of
complexity. A peacock, despite the recursive glory of its own plume, could never
deliberately draw a likeness of any one of its own feathers, even if its species’ survival
depended on it. Likewise, no feathered bird, in the history of feathered birds, could, despite
its ability to scratch in the ground, spontaneously scratch into the ground a likeness of any
of its fellows. And, no flying bird, despite its natural ability to fly, has the capacity
spontaneously to engineer and build even the most crude of artificial gliders. If geese could,
they surely would spontaneously augment their migratory efforts with artificial powered
flight. But, that would require more than the intelligence for natural winged flight. It would
require a much more general kind of intelligence, one that could engineer an artificial
propulsion system by reducing the problem of such engineering to an initially manageable
level. Such reduction would mean something functionally far less complex that geese’s own
muscles-and-metabolism, yet more dynamic than a feather.

So, despite that human standards of musicality seem utterly obvious to human hearing,
virtually no individual non-human animal spontaneously produces anything so simple as a
regular digital note scale rise such as ‘do, re, me, fa, so, la, ti, do’.

So, to put the comparison between the human and non-human animal in proper light, one
could justifiably say that, compared to any bird or non-human mammal, the most isolated
tribes in the Amazon jungle not only are like, but potentially really are, starship engineers.

Now, as for music in the non-living world, consider that an unmoving acoustic space into
which is injected a single, local source of sound reflects that sound recursively, even
digitally. This is because a sound wave is a regular pattern. In fact, a sound wave may be
thought of as a bit of music: it has all three of melody, harmony, and rhythm. Thus, a single
sound wave reflected in any complex, sonically reflective environment is literally a bit of
music.

But, no non-human animal seems the least to care directly and simply about even a single
tone. They are not curious about physical world as such, but take it at face value.

Therefore it is not the case that music is exclusively a human construct. In fact, music, in its
essence, is not a human construct at all.

Music merely is something natural for which humans have the enigmatic perceptual and
practical capacity to select, and which humans alone have the enigmatic capacity and
interest to control and refine.

The music that humans make is, indeed, sonic artifact. But this no more means that music,
as such, is defined as a ‘human construct’ than that sounds, as such, are defined as a human
construct. Humans make sounds. But humans are not the exclusive source, or creators, of
sounds; much less of naturally occurring sonic recursions.

Music, then, is only as much of a ‘human construct’ as is a boat.

And speaking of recursions: It already is known that human music usually is highly
recursive: tonally, rhythmically, harmonically, and melodically. What is all-but-unknown is
that this enigmatically human way with sound constitutes a recursion of its own: it reflects
upon the human enigmatic capacity and predisposition to discretely perceive and enjoy the
basic recursive structures and functions of the physical and living worlds.
Recursions, as such, are not a human construct, but are one of the fundamentally natural of
Nature’s own things. But, of all the animals, only the human animal seems to recognize
recursions as such. There is nothing either ‘fictive’ or meaningless about that. When we
humans deliberately make recursions of mere sounds, our brains are proposing something
to our conscious minds: something broad and profound.

And as the Holy scripture says, ‘Not even Solomon, in all his finery, was remotely as well
dressed as a mundanely common flower.’

Feynman flower, loss of emotional self-empathy a matter of social and social-linguistic

rhythm? of social empathies? in which the rhythm is comprised of rhythms inside of
rhythms inside of rhythms? and one or more of which can be broken? and the momentary
total of which may constitute the break of the main rhythm? but the total of which may
crudely be repaired by keeping the main rhythm?

Feynman, Richard, ‘Ode to a Flower’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIZhgLKSBaY

Feynman, Richard, ‘Names don’t Constitute Knowledge’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=lFIYKmos3-s

Smith (2009) states that the term emotional empathy is used to describe ‘an emotional response in an individual that stems
from and parallels the emotional state of another individual.’ Smith cites De Vignemont and Singer’s (2006) four criteria for this
empathy:

There is empathy if (i) one is in an affective state; (ii) this state is isomorphic to another person’s affective state; (iii)
this state is elicited by the observation or imagination of another person’s affective state; (iv) one knows that the other
person is the source of one’s own affective state. (p. 435)

REFERENCES
Adams, Hazard, and Searle, Leroy, eds., (1986). ‘Emile Benveniste’, in Critical Theory Since
1965 pg 724.
Roholt, T. C. (2014) Groove: A Phenomenology of Rhythmic Naunce, Bloomsbury Academic.

Schaeffer, Frank (2014). Why I am an Atheist Who Believes in God, (‘There is much more
going on offstage than onstage.’). CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.
http://www.frankschaeffer.com/contact--social.html

Smith, A. (2009), “The Empathy Imbalance Hypothesis of Autism: A Theoretical Approach

to Cognitive and Emotional Empathy in Autistic Development”, The Psychological Record,
59, 489-510. http://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1031&context=tpr

White, Alan (2014). Toward a Philosophical Theory of Everything: Contributions to the

Structural-Systematic Philosophy. Bloomsbury Academic.

Burrows, David L. (1990). Sound, Speech, and Music. University of Massachusetts Press.

http://www.amazon.com/Sound-Speech-Music-David-Burrows/dp/0870236857

In this examination of the relation of thought to sound, David Burrows offers the thesis that
sound has played a liberating role in human evolution. Burrows proposes that the limitless
expansiveness of human thought stems primarily from the unique capacity of vocal sound to
rapidly articulate meaning while simultaneously encouraging the listener to remain detached
from the immediate physical world. But ironically, sound - particularly musical sound - also
enables the hearer to feel connected to and grounded in the world, an orientation that helps
compensate for the emphasis in speech and verbal thinking on the elsewhere and the
otherwise, the former and the eventual. Burrows also examines the conflict that results
between the naturally flowing diffuseness of sound and the tendency of the human mind to
seek fixity and permanence. He explores this conflict in two chapters that examine musical
instruments and the verbal, notational and gestural representation of music.
Worby, Robert (2006). ‘An Introduction To Sound Art’
http://www.robertworby.com/writing/an-introduction-to-sound-art/ (originally appeared in
Sound and the City, published in Beijing and London, by the British Council)

The multiple threads of sound art practice weave a fabulously rich tapestry. It celebrates
the ear in a world that we mostly perceive with our eyes. Language, our tool for thought,
is very much orientated towards what we can see. Sound art encourages us to listen, it
sharpens the ears and the imagination and so develops what it is to be human.

Koopman and Davies (2001, Musical Meaning in a Broader Perspective, pg. 262) observe that,
any form, can, in principle, serve as a ‘meaning bearer’, but that music as music cannot well
serve as our -language. Implicit in their observation is that, regardless how we might commonly
accomplish it, if we were to replace our normal linguistic forms with those constituting music,
we could well find ourselves, say, having to borrow our neighbor’s piano just to be able to ask
to borrow a cup of cream.

Or, imagine, say, you are watching a Tom Hanks movie and suddenly the musical score happens
to be quite discordant with the dialogue. Does the name ‘Wilson’ really mean the same to us
when it happens to be instantiated in the tune-and-instrumentality of some dark Brahms
symphony? Hank’s character would have had to come up with a name that does not require an
orchestra to pronounce.

Then there is the problem of how to change your tone from happy to angry if the statement
necessarily is instantiated in a ‘with feeling’ soothingly soft acappella.

As if these sorts of problems would not be too much, imagine your brain ending up insensibly
habituated to some great music just because War and Peace is semantically instantiated in
what we today call ‘The Pastoral’ by Beethoven. Finally, to take the other side of this coin, do
you really think we would be just as well off to normally speak in robotic monotone?

So, it seems clear that (1) our language, and -language, is concerned not only both for semantic
precision and for the efficiency with which that precision is handled (i.e. mentally denoted and
communicated), but for the effectiveness of its own concerns for communicating our meaning;
and (2) our self-affirming concern for sounds, as such, is to have these ‘meaningless’ sounds be
the cognitively flexible opposite to our ‘linguistic burdens’ of mere precision and mere
efficiency. In short, music-as-language would be ‘semantically bulky’, and would tend to
undercut our natural, dynamic value for the music.

Full-fledged language is the only fairly fixed, mass-persons conventional use of a potentially
infinite number of fairly arbitrary, functional basic semantic forms for a potentially infinite host
of mental-conceptual and mental-communicative purposes. The numbers of this basic kind of
form naturally are vastly multiplied so as to accommodate those numbers and varieties of
meanings of which humans are de- re- and compositionally capable and concerned.
Nevertheless, due partly to involving so many of these basic semantic forms, or words,
language also is about an efficient minimum number of another basic kind of form, and each of
these further limited. For English speech, these basic forms number about 44 functional sounds,
and each sound is further limited to very short vocal duration.

But language natural is never just a strict expression of its own articulate ‘academic’
propositional meaning. By our language interests, we do not just take whatever medium in
which we instantiate language and reduce the linguistic expressions in that medium to an
‘academic’ minimum. We augment that linguistic minimum with the natural affects to ourselves
from that medium, because we need the affective breadth of that medium to ensure maximum
effectiveness for our linguistic communication. We are not creatures of language; language is a
creature of us. And ‘us’, individually and collectively, is not a merely a ‘rationally’ adaptive
thing, but a massively parallel thing in a massively multi-dimensional cosmos.

Shared language enables different persons to understand each other despite their more and
less invisible functional and incidental differences. But, due both to the human need of fairly
abstract cognition and to the sheer number of meanings humans need and wish to
communicate, shared language does not use just any set of symbols; It uses a set which is the
opposite of Raphael’s ‘semantically bulky’ painting The School of Athens. For just four of the
most simple of many examples: (1) Almost any given natural vocal language, such as English
and Chinese, has less than six dozen functional sounds as basic building blocks for a potentially
infinite number of semantic units; (2) Due to relatively special historical factors, English writing
has only twenty six analogous building blocks, called ‘letters’, for spoken English’s forty-four
basic building blocks; (3) The building blocks in all spoken languages, and in most written
languages, are very simple in form, as opposed to being ‘bulky’ and involved; (4) All extant
spoken languages combined constitute a cosmically paltry subset of the total range and
typologies of human normal vocal and auditory capacities.

But here is where natural meanings come into play against the strict notion that musical sounds
are meaningless: It is humans’ natural commonalities that make it possible for humans’
interaction naturally to develop a shared language. All other natural common things being as
they really are, if persons in linguistically primitive conversation had no common ability to
comparatively emphasize selected semantic units, the rate at which the language developed,
and the total level of development finally attained, would be significantly less than that at
which shared language has in fact developed, and that to which shared language has in fact
attained.