Multiple Instances and Multiple

‘Instances’
David Davies

The distinction between singular and multiple artworks is usually drawn modally in terms of the
notion of an ‘instance’ of a work. Singular works, it is claimed, can only have a single instance,
whereas multiple works allow of more than one instance. But this is enlightening only if we have a

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clear idea of what is meant by an ‘instance’. I argue that there are two different notions of a work’s
‘instances’ in play in the literature – what I term its ‘provenential instances’ (‘P-instances’) and its
‘purely epistemic instances’ (E-instances). I further argue that these notions are conflated in the
literature critical of Gregory Currie’s ‘instance multiplicity hypothesis’ (IMH) – the claim that all
artworks are multiple in nature. I defend a modified version of the IMH as a claim about a work’s
E-instances against a range of criticisms.

1. Introduction
The distinction between singular and multiple artworks seems to be both intuitive and easy
to characterize. Artworks are appreciated through experiential engagements with entities
that possess certain manifest properties that bear directly upon the works’ appreciation—
entities that, as we might say, ‘bear experientially’ upon the appreciation of the works.1
These entities are what we term ‘instances’ of the works. Some artworks, such as
Vermeer’s The View of Delft, have only one instance, whereas other artworks, such as Sibelius’s
2nd Symphony, Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, and Cartier-Bresson’s Abruzzi, have many. The
former works are singular, and the latter are multiple. Philosophers generally refine this
extensional account by talking in a modally inflected way about instances: singular works
can only have a single instance, it is claimed, whereas multiple works allow of more than one
instance.

1  Fiona Woollard has pointed out that this needs to be qualified if we are to exclude, from a work’s instances, various
kinds of accompanying text or documentation that provide information germane to the appreciation of a work – for
example, the text that accompanies a painting in a gallery, or the editor’s introduction to a novel. Such entities bear
inferentially upon a work’s appreciation by grounding certain inferences as to its contentful properties – often
higher-order contentful properties that it possesses in virtue of its manifest properties. A more qualified claim would
be that an instance of a work, in the general sense, is something capable of non-inferentially eliciting in a receiver an
experience of properties through which the primary content of an artwork is articulated. The ‘primary content’ of an
artwork, in turn, might be glossed as those contentful properties that may be the ground of other contentful
properties but which are not themselves grounded in contentful properties. However, since these refinements do not
bear in any crucial way on what follows, I shall allow the unqualified formulation to stand.

British Journal of Aesthetics Vol. 50 | Number 4 | October 2010 | pp. 411–426 DOI:10.1093/aesthj/ayq030
© British Society of Aesthetics 2010. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Society of Aesthetics.
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412 | DAVID DAVIES

Stephen Davies,2 for example, begins with the kinds of examples just canvassed. Then,
after noting some arguments by Gregory Currie for the claim that all artworks are mul-
tiple in nature—Currie terms this the ‘instance multiplicity hypothesis’ or IMH3—Davies
defends the singular/multiple distinction on the grounds that ‘it reflects real differences in
the way we identify and evaluate works of art’. After rehearsing the idea that singular
works differ from multiple works in allowing of only one instance, he maintains that the
key to understanding the ‘real differences’ between singular and multiple artworks lies in
‘the distinction between something’s being a copy of a distinct work and its being an in-
stance of the same work’. This distinction, in turn, can be understood in terms of the kinds
of intentions motivating those who generate such copies or instances, intentions under-
written by, and presupposing, certain institutionalized practices and understandings.

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Any attempt to illuminate the proposed extensional divide between singular and mul-
tiple artworks by appealing to possible instances, however, will be enlightening only if we
have a clear idea of what is meant by talk of an ‘instance’ of a work. But I think there are
two different notions of ‘instance’ in play in the literature. I shall begin by distinguishing
what I shall term a work’s ‘provenential instances’ (P-instances) from what I shall term its
‘purely epistemic instances’ (E-instances). This distinction will help us to see why Currie’s
claims for the IMH are not impugned by the kinds of considerations to which Davies ap-
peals, nor by other arguments to be found in the literature. It will also bring out analogies
between the arts that are masked in the existing discussions of multiplicity.

2. Two Kinds of Instances

‘Provenential Instances’
Artworks, we have said, are appreciated on the basis of their instances. An instance of a
work is something that makes manifest to receivers certain properties that bear experien-
tially upon the appreciation of the work. Insofar as something counts as an instance of a
work in virtue of a role that it plays in its appreciation, ‘instance’ is an epistemic notion,
carrying no direct implications as to the ontological status of the entities to which it
applies. But one might think that the distinction between singular and multiple artworks
rests upon an ontological difference between the artworks themselves. Take Wollheim’s
proposal4 that works of painting and sculpture are physical objects, but that musical and
literary works are types. This might seem to entail that there can only be one thing that is
an instance of a pictorial artwork but many things that are instances of a musical artwork.
For types can have multiple tokens with which they share appreciable predicates.5 Indeed,
this is one of the things that led Wollheim to claim that musical and literary works are types

2  S. Davies ‘Ontology of Art’ in Jerrold Levinson (ed.), Oxford Companion to Aesthetics (OUP, 2003), pp. 155–180.
3  Gregory Currie, An Ontology of Art (London: St Martin’s, 1989).
4  In his Art and its Objects (CUP, 1968).
5  But not appreciable properties, if Wolterstorff is correct in claiming that artworks and their instances share properties
analogically rather than univocally. See Nicholas Wolterstorff, Works and Worlds of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1980).
 MULTIPLE INSTANCES AND MULTIPLE ‘INSTANCES’ | 413

having their tokens as instances. But a physical object stands in no such logical relation to a
multiplicity of other things.
Of course, physical objects can stand in other relations to a multiplicity of things. For
example, there can be multiple copies of a physical object. Why, then, shouldn’t paintings
and works of carved sculpture be multiple in virtue of their possible or actual copies? Why
shouldn’t such copies count as instances of the works? A natural answer to this query is
forthcoming if, like Wollheim, we take artworks to be essentially contextualized entities
whose appreciation is a matter, inter alia, of ‘retrieval’ whereby we locate the art object in
its history of making. An original painting has a particular history of making that distin-
guishes it from anything else having the same manifest properties—a perfect forgery, for
example, or a product of Currie’s hypothetical ‘supercopier’ that produces a molecule-for-

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molecule duplicate of a work of visual art.6 And having this history of making matters
because that is what we are trying to ‘retrieve’ in our critical engagement with the work.
Furthermore, we can identify anything else as having the kinds of manifest properties that
bear upon the appreciation of a painting only insofar as the original has them first. Suppose
we use the term ‘manifestation of a work’ to characterize anything that can bear experien-
tially on a work’s appreciation through possessing (all or some of) the manifest properties
that so bear. The original painting is then the standard against which other putative mani-
festations of the work must be measured, and it enjoys this status, as noted, in virtue of its
history of making. (As we shall see, there are two kinds of ‘other manifestations’ of a work
to be considered here, differing in the manner in which they are accountable to what I shall
term P-instances of the work. In the first place, ‘copies’ of a work must stand in a causal-
intentional relation to the work’s P-instances. Second, what I shall term E-instances must
share the manifest properties of a work’s ‘correct’ P-instances.)
We have identified two distinct roles that an original canvas, qua instance of a painting,
can play in the appreciation of that painting in virtue of the canvas’s history of making: (R1)
it is the original canvas’s history of making that bears upon attempts at ‘retrieval’; and (R2)
it is the original canvas that serves as the standard against which other visual manifolds are
measured to determine if they count as manifestations of the work. In art forms such as
photography and cast sculpture, analogues of the second of these roles are played not by a
single instance but by a class of instances—those prints or casts that stand in an appropriate
causal–intentional relation to the creative act of the artist. These prints and casts play R2
but they do not themselves play R1, They are distinguished from other manifestations,
however, by the causal relation in which they stand to entities that do play RI—those
entities (a negative or a mould, for example) created by the artist with the intention that they
be used to generate manifestations of the work. In music, we can again distinguish between
those manifestations of the work that stand in an appropriate causal–intentional relation to
the prescriptive act of the composer and those that do not. But while we have a historical
link between certain manifestations and the compositional activity of the composer, it is
the score that guides the performers, and not the performances themselves, that plays the
role R1. It is the history of making of the score that the contextualist seeks to ‘retrieve’ in

6  Currie, An Ontology of Art, pp. 110–111.

414 | DAVID DAVIES

order to appreciate the work. Nor, in the case of music and theatre, is the role R2 usually
played by instances.7 We do not ‘measure’ a performance against established performances
of a musical or theatrical work in order to tell whether it is a manifestation of the work.
Rather, we measure it against the contextualized prescriptions that themselves enter
crucially into the history of making of other manifestations of the work. Nevertheless,
whether or not they play the roles R1 and R2 in the appreciation of a work, we can identify,
for works in all artistic media, a class of manifestations that stand in the kind of historical–
intentional relation to the work’s history of making that, in the case of painting, renders a
unique object worthy to play the roles R1 and R2.
What I shall term a ‘provenential instance’ of a work X (a ‘P-instance’ of X) is a manifestation
of X that stands in just this kind of relation to X’s history of making. A work’s P-instances are the

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logically first products8 of the artist’s generative activity that possess the kinds of manifest prop-
erties required in entities that are to ‘bear experientially’ on the appreciation of the work. In
those arts where instances of a work play the role R1, it is the history of making of P-instances
that bears upon ‘retrieval’9 rather than that of ‘copies’ causally derived from them whose history
may vary in fortuitous ways. This is also why P-instances can serve, in at least some arts, as the
standard by reference to which we identify those manifestations of the work that are not them-
selves among its P-instances. We can then draw a distinction between ‘P-multiple’ and
‘P-singular’ artworks in terms of the number of P-instances that they admit—the number
of manifestations that can stand in this specific relation to provenance. Note that, in the
case of P-multiple works, if there is fallibility in the process whereby P-instances of a work
are generated, this will entail that a work can have both correct and flawed P-instances. Flawed
P-instances are ones that fail to possess all of the relevant manifest properties bearing on the
appreciation of the work of which they are instances—for example, screenings using damaged
prints of films, or performances of musical works containing wrong notes.

‘Purely Epistemic Instances’

As noted above, the extensional difference between singular and multiple works is usually
glossed in terms of a modal difference in the number of instances a work can have. However,

7  Instances do play this role in musical and theatrical works that are transmitted orally or through shared practices
rather than through the written instructions furnished by scores and scripts.
8  P-instances have logical priority over other manifestations, given their role in determining what counts as a ‘copy’ or
‘E-instance’ of the work, But they may not have temporal priority. For, in an art such as photography that allows of
multiple P-instances, some copies of P-instances of a work may temporally precede the generation of other
P-instances. On the notion of a ‘copy’ of a work, see below.
9  However, the first role (R1) of P-instances, as characterized, bears upon the appreciation of works only if one is a
contextualist. An empiricist theory of appreciation prescinds from the history of making of a work’s artistic vehicle in
respect of this first role. The empiricist will, however, acknowledge the significance of those things that play the
second of the two roles distinguished above (R2). For it is by reference to those things playing the second role that we
determine the work’s ‘aesthetic object’, and thus the class of things that can play the role played by what I shall term
‘E-instances’ in a work’s appreciation. However, as just noted, instances of works only play this second role in certain
artforms. On the distinction between empiricist and contextualist models of appreciation, see chapter 2 of my Art as
Performance (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).
 MULTIPLE INSTANCES AND MULTIPLE ‘INSTANCES’ | 415

such modal talk also allows of an interpretation in purely epistemic terms. An instance of a
work in general, as we have seen, is something that makes manifest to receivers certain
properties that bear experientially upon the appreciation of the work. An instance in what
I am terming the purely epistemic sense fully satisfies this requirement, and does so simply in
virtue of the manifest properties that it possesses, independently of how it came to have
these properties. A natural way to introduce the purely epistemic notion of an instance of
a work is by noting, again, that, in arts such as film, music, literature, photography, and
carved sculpture, we treat different events and objects as ‘equally legitimate’ renditions of
a given artwork, whereas in painting and carved sculpture we do not.What they are equally
legitimate for is a particular kind of role in the appreciation of that artwork distinct from
the roles discussed in relation to a work’s P-instances. As noted at the beginning of this

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paper, to properly appreciate an artwork requires a particular kind of experiential engage-
ment with the work. We hold claims to appreciate artworks answerable to such experi-
ences because many qualities of a work bearing on its proper appreciation can be fully
grasped only through an experiential engagement with something that can enable us to
properly grasp those qualities.
What may be termed a ‘purely epistemic instance’ (‘E-instance’) of a work X, then, is
anything that can fully play this role in the appreciation of X in virtue of possessing those
manifest properties required in any event or object that can provide the experiential
engagement necessary for the proper appreciation of X. To say that different events or
objects may be ‘equally legitimate’ relative to a given artwork is to say that the work
admits of a plurality of E-instances. And this yields a corresponding distinction between
‘E-singular’ and ‘E-multiple’ artworks in terms of the number of E-instances that they
admit—the number of things that can play this specific role in a work’s appreciation. While
we treat classical music, film, literature, and cast sculpture as E-multiple, we seem to
require, for the appreciation of paintings and works of carved sculpture, that one experi-
entially engage with a unique object that admits of no equally legitimate substitute. Thus
we seem to treat such works as E-singular.
Note three things. First, we have defined an E-instance of a work in terms of its mani-
festing to receivers those experienceable properties required in any event or entity that is
to enable proper appreciation of the work through our experiential engagement with it.
Thus flawed versions of a musical or literary work that fail to manifest at least some such
properties will not count as E-instances, even if they qualify as P-instances by standing in
the right kind of causal-intentional relation to the provenance of the work.
Second, we have not restricted E-instances of works to artifacts, but have defined them
purely epistemically in terms of properties made manifest to receivers in an experiential
engagement.Thus naturally occurring events or objects can be E-instances of works as long
as they make manifest all of the properties required in E-instances of those works. Whether
such events or objects are E-instances of works and whether we have good grounds for
thinking that they are E-instances of works are of course different matters. Generally, we
accord the status of E-instance only to those events or objects for which we can obtain
some guarantee that they have that status, as is the case with copies of novels, screenings of
films, and performances of musical works, which are products of human agency. In the case
of natural objects or events, however, their status may be less certain. But, if we can certify
416 | DAVID DAVIES

that a naturally occurring event or object meets the requirements to be an E-instance of a

given work, then we should regard this event or object as being an E-instance, given our
purely epistemic characterization of the latter. For there is no principled difference be-
tween this kind of case, and the Cervantes/Menard case discussed in Section 4 below.
Third, in the examples examined thus far—painting, music, and photography—works
are P-multiple (or P-singular) just in case they are treated in our practice as being E-multiple
(or E-singular). We treat The View of Delft as both P- and E-singular, while we treat Abruzzi
as both P- and E-multiple. Interestingly, however, a literary work such as Gravity’s Rainbow
is P-singular and E-multiple, if, as has been suggested, literary works come into existence
through the production of an exemplar which then serves as the basis for generating other
copies of the work.10 While the exemplar has no special status as an E-instance—indeed, if

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it contains slips of the pen it may not be an E-instance—it is the work’s sole P-instance.
And it also plays both role R1 and role R2 in the work’s appreciation. It is the exemplar’s
history of making that bears upon ‘retrieval’ and its (corrected if necessary) manifest prop-
erties, qua text, that provide the standard against which putative manifestations of the work
must be measured to determine whether they count as ‘copies’ and/or E-instances of the
work. ‘Copies’ of literary works, like ‘copies’ of paintings, are not themselves P-instances
of those works, but stand in an indirect relation, through the process of copying, to the
history of making of the P-instances. Copies, then, unlike E-instances, are defined partly in
terms of the causal relation in which they stand to a work’s history of making, a relation
mediated by the P-instances of the work.11

3. Davies on the ‘Instance Multiplicity Hypothesis’

We noted earlier Currie’s claim, disputed by Davies, that all artworks are multiple.We can
now clarify this claim in terms of our distinction between P- and E-multiplicity. Currie
defines an ‘instance’ of a work in purely epistemic terms, as something that plays a particu-
lar role in our experiential engagement with that work. Instances are ‘all those concrete
things that we come into contact with when we experience a work of art’.12 I take the
claim that all artworks are multiple, then, to be the claim that all works admit of multiple
instances so construed, that is, multiple E-instances. In defence of this claim, Currie notes
that, in the case of a supposedly singular artform such as painting, we can imagine a ‘super-
copier’ that would produce a molecule-for-molecule duplicate that, ex hypothesi, provides
a perceptual experience in principle indistinguishable from the original, at least at the time
it is generated. In this case, Currie claims, the super-copy would be ‘equally legitimate’, in
the sense defined above, to play the role that the original plays in appreciation. Thus the
painting will have multiple E-instances. We can run a parallel argument for other artworks

10  See, for example, Davies, ‘Ontology of Art’.

11  The difference between copies of literary works and copies of paintings is the Goodmanian one (see Languages of Art,
ch. III). Whereas it is easy to tell if a copy of a literary work is an E-instance of that work, this is precisely what we
cannot normally do in the case of a copy of a painting.
12  Currie, An Ontology of Art, p. 5.
 MULTIPLE INSTANCES AND MULTIPLE ‘INSTANCES’ | 417

ordinarily treated as being E-singular—for example, works of carved sculpture. Thus it

turns out that all artworks are in principle, if not in practice, E-multiple. While we treat
paintings as E-singular, we fail to realize that a super-copy would serve equally well as an
E-instance of the work, since E-instances are defined in terms of what they can do and it is
equally qualified to do what an E-instance does.
In defending the singular/multiple distinction against Currie, Davies notes that Currie
is not assuming, as an empiricist might do, that the identity of a work depends only upon
its appearance—although Currie is well aware that empiricism, were it correct, would
entail the IMH. Currie maintains that provenance is partly constitutive of the identity of
the artwork, but takes this to be compatible with the multiplicity of all artworks. Davies
puts Currie’s point this way: ‘What is needed for aesthetic identification and appreciation

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is not information regarding the origin of the copy, but knowledge of the original’s causal
origin coupled with a guarantee that the copy is qualitatively identity at the physical
level.’13 Davies grants that the super-copy of a painting might be ‘an invaluable substitute’
for the painting if one were for some reason unable to see the original, but insists that we
would not thereby concede ‘that the supercopy is an instance’ of the work that the painter
painted. ‘One might learn a great deal about the appearance of a work from something that
looks like it, but similarity in appearance does not entail that the two are instances of the
same thing.’14
But this seems to run together questions about E-instances and questions about P-
instances of works. And, arguably, this is precisely the distinction upon which Currie wishes
to insist in holding that the IMH is compatible with acknowledging the significance of prov-
enance to the individuation of works. E-instances, we saw, are defined in terms of a particu-
lar role that they play in appreciation in virtue of their manifest properties alone, whereas
P-instances are defined in terms of the relation in which they stand to the provenance of a
work, in virtue of which they may play different roles in appreciation. As Davies’s gloss on
Currie’s argument acknowledges, the P-instances of a work bear upon its appreciation,
for the contextualist, primarily to the extent that it is the history of making of a work’s
P-instances that directly or indirectly provides the context in which its E-instances have to
be located if the work is to be properly appreciated. It is, then, the notion of P-instance that
bears directly upon the individuation of works. In claiming that all works are E-multiple,
Currie need not deny that some works—such as paintings and, indeed, literary works—
are P-singular. When Davies remarks that ‘similarity in appearance [between two entities]
does not entail that the two are instances of the same thing’, he is right if we are talking
about P-instances, but arguably wrong if we are talking about E-instances. If, as I am claim-
ing, Currie’s IMH is a claim about E-instances, then he can freely grant Davies’s claim as a
claim about P-instances. Since Davies seems to grant that the super-copy can play the
same purely epistemic role as the original, he seems in fact to be granting that even paintings
are E-multiple. But then he leaves Currie’s IMH unimpugned, if Currie’s point is that

13  Davies, ‘Ontology of Art’, p. 157.

14  Ibid., 158. See also Christopher Shields, ‘Critical Notice of Currie, An Ontology of Art’, in Australasian Journal of
Philosophy, 73 (1995), pp. 293–300.
418 | DAVID DAVIES

P-multiplicity/singularity and E-multiplicity/singularity can come apart. Painting and

literature are P-singular but E-multiple, if Currie is right.
It might be thought, however, that this response misses Davies’s point. The objection
against Currie, it might be said, is that he is wrong to talk, in the case of paintings,
about multiple instances rather than multiple copies, given the ‘real differences’ in the
way we talk in our ordinary artistic practice. But the notion of an ‘instance’ is a phi-
losopher’s notion that we very rarely encounter in our ordinary discourse about art.
Indeed, it figures most prominently precisely in the proposed distinction between
singular and multiple artworks. Nor, if we turn to ordinary discourse, do we find any
consistency in the use of ‘copy’ and ‘instance’ relative to this distinction. Literary
works are generally held by philosophers to be multiple, yet we talk of the supposed

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multiple instances of a literary work as its ‘copies’. We would encounter a bemused
response were we to walk into a bookstore and ask if they had an instance of Gravity’s
Rainbow, for example.
Even if there were a firm difference between ‘copies’ and ‘instances’ (or, perhaps
more charitably to Davies, between ‘copies’ and ‘originals’) in our ordinary talk
about painting, this would not count against Currie. For the ‘super-copier’ thought-
experiment is intended to test our intuitions on a case where the practical equivalence
between P-instances and E-instances comes apart. In practice, the only things we treat as
E-instances of paintings are their P-instances. But this may be because, as Goodman sug-
gests, we have no way of identifying a work’s E-instances save in terms of their being
P-instances. Currie’s ‘super-copier’ thought experiment presents us with a situation in
which we have something that we know is capable of doing what a work’s E-instances do.
So why should we refuse in this case to view it as an E-instance, given the purely epi-
stemic nature of the latter? Furthermore, the standard use of ‘instance’ in philosophical
discourse seems to be the purely epistemic one. The singular-multiple distinction is
standardly drawn in terms of the number of entities that can play a particular role in our
experiential engagements with artworks.

4. The ‘Instance Multiplicity Hypothesis’ Defended

But is Currie right in insisting that all works are E-multiple? And is this indeed compat-
ible with upholding the distinction between P-singularity and P-multiplicity? Let me
spell out in more detail an argument for answering both of these questions affirmatively.
I shall begin by defending a modified Curriean account of literature—‘modified’ in light
of the preceding reflections on the relationships between P-instances, E-instances, and
copies. I believe this account to be strongly intuitive. I shall then suggest how the same
pattern of analysis can be extended, first to music, and then to painting and other art-
forms generally deemed to be singular. I thereby present a defender of the E-singularity
of certain works with the following options: either dispute the proposed account of lit-
erature as E-multiple, or challenge the extension of this account to the other arts. If the
first option is indeed unpromising, the defender of E-singularity must argue for the
second option. In the following sections, I shall consider two ways in which such an
argument might go.
 MULTIPLE INSTANCES AND MULTIPLE ‘INSTANCES’ | 419

Consider the standard contextualist response to Goodman’s claim that identity of text
entails identity of literary work.15 The contextualist argues that factors other than the
manifest properties of their texts bear upon the individuation and appreciation of literary
works. She points to hypothetical examples such as Borges’ story about Pierre Menard
who authors a text that is word-for-word identical to a fragment of Cervantes’ Don Quixote.
Borges’ narrator argues that the two texts—Menard’s and the relevant fragment of
Cervantes’—instantiate distinct works in virtue of the different contexts in which the
texts were inscribed. But since ex hypothesi the two works share their text, then it surely
does not matter if, in trying to appreciate Menard’s work by reading a given text, the text
I am reading stands in a historical relationship to the writing activity of Cervantes or to that
of Menard. In other words, it does not matter whether it is a copy of the P-instance of the

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relevant fragment of Cervantes’ work or a copy of the P-instance of Menard’s work. All
that is necessary is that I locate the textual properties of what I am reading, whatever its
own history of making, in the context of Menard’s act of authorship. But to locate the text
in this context of authorship is to ask about the provenance of the P-instance of Menard’s
work. It is the provenance of the P-instance of Menard’s work that must be brought to bear
on the text in front of me if I am to appreciate Menard’s work in reading that text. All that
is required of the text before me, however, is that it be an E-instance of the work. The text
I am reading, whatever its own history of making, can qualify as an E-instance of both
Cervantes’ and Menard’s distinct literary works so long as we have a prior guarantee that
the works have identical texts.
The same line of reasoning can be applied to performable works of music. A performance
of a performable musical work makes available to us certain audible qualities bearing upon
the appreciation of the work performed. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that these
qualities include the timbral properties that would be generated in realizing the prescribed
sound sequence on the instruments specified by the composer. But a performance of a
given work on these instruments might, ex hypothesi, sound the same as an execution of the
work’s score on a perfect timbral synthesizer. In such a case, the same merely audible
properties bearing upon the appreciation of the musical work will be present in both per-
formances.16 So, in this respect at least, it will not matter which kind of instrumentation
has been used in generating the performance to which we listen. But this does not show
that the musical work is to be identified with the sonic properties that these performances
share, or with the class of performances having just these sonic properties. The context-
ualist may insist that it matters for the appreciation of the musical work what instrumen-
tation was intended, and in what musico-historical context the prescriptions with which
the performance complies were laid down. Appreciation of the musical work, then, may
require that we hear the audible properties common to the two performances as played on
the prescribed instruments and as composed in a particular musical-historical context.

15  The locus classicus for this Goodmanian thesis is Nelson Goodman and Catherine Elgin, Reconceptions in Philosophy and
Other Arts and Sciences (London: Routledge, 1988), ch. III.
16  Note that I have not ruled upon whether the execution of the work’s score on a perfect timbral synthesizer counts
as a performance of the work. Musical theorists disagree about this, but we do not need to take a stand on this issue.
420 | DAVID DAVIES

But both performances will serve equally well as sources of the relevant sound qualities
for the appreciation of the piece, if it is given that they are identical in their timbral sonic
properties. Given that we have defined E-instances in terms of the distinctive experiential
role that they play in appreciation, both performances will count as E-instances unless
there is some other salient difference between them bearing on their possession of this
status.
Jerrold Levinson, however, insists that there is such a salient difference.17 He argues that
the expressive qualities that we ascribe to a piece of music may depend in part upon the
physical nature of the activities that we take to be involved in producing the sounds we
hear. Suppose that a particular work, composed for performance by a string quartet, is
properly taken to possess such expressive properties. These qualities, however, might not

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be graspable by the audience at an event which makes manifest the timbral sonic qualities
of the work but does so by means of a perfect timbral synthesizer. If we grasp the expres-
sive properties of the work through our experiential engagement with events that exhibit
the manifest properties bearing experientially on its proper appreciation, then the work
will not be properly appreciable through the performance on the PTS.The latter, then, will
not be an E-instance of the work. Even if we grant this point, however, it will not follow,
as Levinson maintains, that E-instances of a musical work must stand in a historical–
intentional relation to the compositional activity of the composer, mediated through a
copy of the score he produced and the intentions of the performers to perform the
work so scored. While such a historical–intentional relation is necessary for the work’s
P-instances, flawed or otherwise, no such constraints limit the work’s E-instances.
If we acknowledge the different contributions made by P-instances and E-instances to
the individuation and appreciation of musical works, the following picture recommends
itself. Performances of a work are to be identified in terms of the intentional-causal rela-
tion in which they stand to the composer’s act of initiating the work, taken together with
the requirement that they recognizably realize the work’s prescribed sound sequence. A
performable work’s performances are its P-instances, whether or not they contain some
flaws. Given that we require that an E-instance of a performable work contains no such flaws,
a work can have performances (P-instances) that are not among its E-instances. But a work
can also have E-instances that are not among its performances (P-instances). For a per-
formance—in the sense just characterized—of a different work can serve as an E-instance
of a performable musical work, just as a copy of the P-instance of Cervantes’ Don Quixote—
defined in term of its history of production—can serve as an E-instance of Menard’s work.
In fact, this should not surprise us. It is a possibility that arises because the notions of
performance (P-instance) and E-instance are doing different kinds of jobs. The notion of
performance (P-instance) helps us to keep track of which playings are playings of a given
work in a way that does not invest all authority in the score but accords a role to history of
production. It allows us to evade the radically revisionary implications for our ways of clas-
sifying performances if we accept the infamous ‘Goodman argument’ in Languages of Art.18

17  Jerrold Levinson, ‘Authentic Performance and Performance Means’, in Music, Art, and Metaphysics (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 393–408.
18  Goodman, Languages of Art, p. 187.
 MULTIPLE INSTANCES AND MULTIPLE ‘INSTANCES’ | 421

The notion of E-instance, on the other hand, picks out a particular role that something can
play in the appreciation of an artwork in virtue of its manifest properties alone. It is pos-
sible for a performable work to have E-instances that are not performances because an event
can play the relevant role in appreciation without standing in the relevant causal–intentional
relation to the composition of the work. Once we grasp the importance of this distinction,
it seems that it can obtain, at least in principle, in any art form. The super-copy can indeed
be an E-instance of a painting, without standing in the right causal–historical relation to the
painter’s activity to be a P-instance of the work. But it is the causal–historical relation in
which the painter stands to the original, qua P-instance, that determines, at least for con-
textualists, many of the kinds of considerations that need to be brought to bear in properly
appreciating the artwork on the basis of the manifest properties that, ex hypothesi, the

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original and the super-copy (and a hypothetical perfect forgery) share. Forgery matters, in
the case of paintings, for the reasons Goodman cites. We are unable, in practice, to know
whether a given entity is an E-instance of a work without referring to its history of making.
Only because this is guaranteed in Currie’s super-copier example is the copy an indisput-
able E-instance of the work.

5. Levinson on the IMH and the Link to Artistic Creativity

I noted above that the most promising option for one who wishes to argue for the E-singularity
of at least some artworks is to challenge the proposed extension of the analysis of the
E-multiplicity of literature to those arts traditionally viewed as singular, such as painting.
I shall consider two such challenges to be found in the literature generated by Currie’s de-
fense of the IMH.The first challenge is by Jerrold Levinson and the second by Noël Carroll.
I shall argue that neither challenge undermines the foregoing argument for the E-multiplicity
of painting. However, Carroll’s discussion allows us to clarify the conditions under which a
work might be E-singular, and see how at least some artworks might meet those condi-
tions. Thus the IMH may fail as a claim about the E-multiplicity of all artworks, even if it
succeeds for those works traditionally taken to be the paradigms of singularity.
Levinson argues19 that an original canvas, unlike its Curriean super-copy, puts us in dir-
ect connection with the creative activity of the artist. The brushstrokes on the original
painting issue from the artist’s hand, whereas the ‘brushstrokes’ on the molecule-for-molecule
copy do not. But, granting this to be true, how does it bear on the status of the super-copy
as an E-instance of the work? An E-instance of a work, we may recall, is something that can
provide us with the experiences required for the proper appreciation of the work. Is a
sense of being in direct connection with the artist’s creative activity a necessary element in
this experiential dimension of appreciation? If we answer this question positively for paint-
ing, why shouldn’t we (implausibly) hold literature accountable to the same standards? If
the sense of being in direct experiential contact with the artist’s creative activity is a neces-
sary element in the experiential engagement required to properly appreciate a painting,

19  Jerrold Levinson, The Pleasures of Aesthetics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. 141–144.
422 | DAVID DAVIES

why do we not require, for the proper appreciation of a literary work, an experiential
engagement with the original manuscript? For, as argued above, the latter, like the original
painting, is the work’s unique P-instance. And it is the only manifestation of the work that
issues directly from the creative activity of the artist.
Levinson suggests two kinds of disanalogies between painting and literature that might
counter this response. First, he maintains that the expressiveness of a painting derives in
part from gestural qualities of the actions whereby the painter marked the canvas,
whereas none of the expressiveness of a literary work depends upon similar qualities of
the actions whereby the author inscribes the manuscript. Furthermore, Levinson claims,
‘we can more transparently and vividly imagine the artist’s gestural action in creating the
painting . . . when we know the object in front of us was actually and directly the result

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of such action.’ This seems to give insufficient credit to our imaginative powers, however.
If I know that the original bears exactly the same types of markings as the super-copy, it
is surely no more difficult to imagine the kinds of gestural actions that would be required
to produce such markings if I know I am looking at the super-copy than it would be if
I knew I was looking at the original.
A second kind of disanalogy between painting and literature might also be relevant here,
however.20 If we attempt to appreciate the painting through an experiential engagement
with the super-copy, Levinson maintains, we fail to honour and acknowledge the artist’s
intentions as to the nature of the work. For the artist intended the work to be a physically
incarnate unique image. The painter’s intentions here contrast with those of the novelist.
Even if only one manifestation of the literary work—its P-instance—stands in an unmedi-
ated relation to the creative activity of the author, we assume the author intended her work
to be appreciable through the multiple copies generated from its P-instance. So, while we
can honour the author’s intentions as to the nature of her work by reading copies gener-
ated from the original manuscript, we cannot honour the painter’s parallel intentions by
experientially engaging with the super-copy.
Perhaps some painters would happily embrace the possibility that their works be more
widely appreciated by means of a super-copy. But let us grant, for the sake of argument,
Levinson’s claims about the different intentions of the author and the painter. The salient
question is how this difference translates into a difference in the status of ‘copies’ of their
P-instances as E-instances of those works. We have not rehabilitated the idea that experien-
tial engagement with the work requires the sense of engaging directly with the artist’s
creative activity. For if this feeling is relevant for the appreciation of the painting, then it
should be relevant for the appreciation of the novel, whatever the author’s intentions. And,
even if the painter intended that the work be appreciated through engagement with the
original, it is not clear why this prevents the super-copy from furnishing the receiver with
the necessary experiential engagement with the work. For the super-copy possesses all the
properties required in an E-instance save the capacity to generate the ‘sense of being in
touch with the creator’.

20  Levinson suggested such a disanalogy in a commentary on an earlier version of this paper presented at a symposium
on ‘Multiple Artworks’ at the 2009 meetings of the American Society for Aesthetics, Denver, Colorado.
 MULTIPLE INSTANCES AND MULTIPLE ‘INSTANCES’ | 423

More significantly, the difference in intentions to which Levinson alludes can indeed
enter into our appreciation of the painting and the novel, even if we count the super-copy
of the painting as an E-instance of the work. For knowledge of the respective intentions of
author and painter concerning the P-instances of their works will be part of the knowledge
of provenance that we bring to our engagement with the super-copy and the copy of the
novel, and thus part of our sense of what the work is, if contextualism is correct. It is un-
clear why the bearing of these intentions on the proper appreciation of the work requires
that the intentions constrain what counts as an E-instance of the work, rather than supple-
menting the knowledge of provenance that we bring to our engagement with the work’s
E-instances.

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6. Carroll on the IMH and the Temporality of the Artwork
Noël Carroll argues21 that the Curriean account cannot accommodate the manner in which
visual artworks change over time. Nor can it accommodate works that may be intended to
change over time, such as the ‘earthworks’ of artists such as Robert Smithson. I shall con-
sider each kind of case in turn and argue that the works in question are indeed E-multiple,
as the IMH requires. I shall then turn to another related kind of case that proves more prob-
lematic.
Consider the ways in which a visual artwork such as The View of Delft can change over
time. Carroll claims that the original painting and its Curriean super-copy will almost cer-
tainly undergo different such changes and thereby come to have different manifest proper-
ties. The assumption is that, for this reason, the super-copy cannot be an E-instance of the
work and the work must be taken to be E-singular. We can meet this objection, however, if
we attend to the role that the original painting, as P-instance, plays in determining the
properties required in E-instances of the work. There are, I think, two possibilities, each of
which might, but need not, be grounded in intentions of the artist.
(I) It might be held that E-instances of a work must possess the manifest properties of
the original at the time when it was completed. In this case, as the original painting changes
over time, it will itself cease to be an E-instance of the work, although, as the unique
P-instance, it provides us with evidence that bears upon the properties an E-instance of the
work would have to possess. We might view in this way some of Turner’s watercolours
which were deliberately painted using ‘fugitive’ pigments.The latter offer much richer and
brighter visual possibilities when the works are painted, but the cost of these heightened
visual properties is that the colours fade more quickly. To appreciate such works properly,
it might be argued, we must experientially engage with something possessing the same
manifest features as the original did at the time it was painted. But then the work will be
E-multiple in virtue of the possibility of making a super-copy of the original at the time of
its creation. The original or the super-copy (or both) may alter over time and cease to be
E-instances. This does not affect the E-multiplicity of the work, however, given the modal
nature of the multiple/singular distinction.

21  N. Carroll, Mass Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 219–222.
424 | DAVID DAVIES

(II) Alternatively, we might hold that the standard against which E-instances are to be
measured itself changes over time in tandem with changes in the manifest properties of the
P-instance of the work. In this case, a super-copy of the work made at t may no longer be
an E-instance of the work at t+1. But at t+1 we can make another super-copy of the paint-
ing which will be an E-instance of the work at t+1, again demonstrating the E-multiplicity
of the work.
Works that are intended to change over time present a more interesting challenge to the
idea that all works are E-multiple, but it is a challenge that can be met. Carroll begins with
examples of ‘site-specific’ art, where works owe at least part of their artistic character to
their environments. This in itself does not pose a problem for the proponent of the E-
multiplicity of all artworks. Consider, for example, certain Renaissance religious images

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that depend for some of their formal and expressive qualities on architectural features and
ambient lighting in the locations where they were intended to be viewed. Works such as
Piero’s Legend of the True Cross cycle, for example, can arguably only be properly appreci-
ated if viewed under the conditions that obtain when they are viewed in situ, in the church
of San Francesco in Arezzo. But while the original location is singular, the conditions that
obtain in that location are at least in principle replicable elsewhere. Thus ‘site-specific’
works can have multiple E-instances as long as the conditions under which the works are
presented for appreciation in situ can themselves be duplicated. Some site-specific works,
however, depend not upon the conditions in place at a particular site, abstractly conceived,
but upon the site’s history. Helen Chadwick’s Blood Hyphen (1988), for example, was cre-
ated for the Woodbridge chapel in Clerkenwell, and its content draws in a number of ways
upon the history of the chapel (which served as a medical mission after the Second World
War) and its unique architecture (a false ceiling installed in the 1970s which created the
hidden upper chamber in which Chadwick staged her work). But such a work may still have
multiple E-instances in virtue of there being functional equivalents for the other elements
making up the installation.22
The more interesting cases, however, are ones where the intended site of the work plays
a more dynamic role, so that elements in the original constitution of the piece ‘are altered
over time by the conditions of the surrounding environment in ways that are intended to
constitute parts of what viewers are to take as their objects of appreciation’. Carroll cites
as an example Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. This was constructed on a site notable for its
unique possession of a certain strain of algae that guaranteed the reddish hue that he was
after, and the shape of the jetty was a response to the formation of the surrounding site.
Moreover part of what was to be appreciated in the work was the differing appearances of
the jetty as the water levels altered.23
The significance of such works, according to Carroll, lies in the fact that ‘the very vicis-
situdes these works undergo as they interact with their actual environments are part of
what these works are about. These works are involved with processes, not merely with
products.’ Such works, he maintains, cannot plausibly be dealt with by the ‘super-copier’

22  I am grateful to Robert Hopkins for raising this kind of possibility.

23  Carroll Mass Art, p. 220.
 MULTIPLE INSTANCES AND MULTIPLE ‘INSTANCES’ | 425

strategy, because ‘it is hard to imagine that, in the known physical universe, one could
regularly replicate the exact processes undergone by the original site-specific works by
means of Currie’s super-xerox machine’. Even if we could replicate the initial site-specific
situation, it is difficult to imagine that we could also replicate the transformative events in
the subsequent history of the piece. But, in the absence of such replication, Carroll claims,
the works will be different.
Suppose we grant that we cannot replicate the temporal evolution of a work such as
Spiral Jetty. How does this bear upon whether the work is E-singular or E-multiple? To an-
swer this question we must ask what conditions must be met by an E-instance of such a
work, and whether more than one entity can meet these conditions. What kind of experi-
ential engagement is required if we are to properly appreciate Smithson’s work? For

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example, does one have to observe the actual site from time to time through its changes,
or even observe it continuously throughout its entire evolution? If so, then presumably few,
if any, people can claim to properly appreciate such a work. But surely Smithson did not
intend that his work only be appreciable by receivers who spent a large portion of their
lives camped out in the proximity of the site. Rather, his intention was presumably that we
have access to the relevant processes and changes through the documentation to be found in
galleries that present the work—documentation comprising texts, photographs and videos.
Insofar as the work is about the processes that occur, our experiential engagement with
these processes is mediated by such documentation. But the documentation itself is
multiply reproducible —we can have the necessary experiential engagement with such a
work wherever a copy of the relevant documentation is provided.We then appreciate the work
by relating the experiences elicited in us to our knowledge of the provenance of the work’s
P-instance, the event that took place in the site selected by the artist. The work therefore
has multiple E-instances—namely, all those copies of the relevant texts, photographs, and
videos that one finds in different galleries.
Granting that one could not replicate the actual process that occurred in Spiral Jetty,
Carroll claims that one cannot argue for the E-multiplicity of such works by appeal to an
analogue of a Curriean super-copier. But, as we can now see, this would only bear on the
E-multiplicity of such works if we wrongly required that their E-instances replicate their
singular P-instance in the fulness of its properties.
In the case of ‘earthworks’, I have argued, our appreciation of the element of process in
the work does not call for a direct experiential engagement with that process as it unfolds,
and thus is compatible with the claim that such works are E-multiple. But other artworks
that contain an essential element of process arguably do call for such a direct experiential
engagement. Where these works are P-multiple, as in the case of performable works of
music, this fits easily with the E-multiplicity of the works. But what if, in such a case, the
work is P-singular?
The relevant cases here will be individual performances, either performances of
performable works or improvisations, that we wish to classify as artworks. Take, for example,
Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert. We have here a wholly improvised performance that is widely
regarded as being an artwork. There is no pre-existing performable work of which the Köln
Concert is a performance, nor a performable work brought into existence by the performance.
The work then is obviously P-singular. But what should we say about its E-instances?
426 | DAVID DAVIES

Again, we must ask what conditions must be met its E-instances, and whether more than
one entity can meet these conditions. What kind of experiential engagement is required if
we are to properly appreciate the Köln Concert? One option is to say that one is able to
properly appreciate the piece only if one was present at the Opera House in Köln on 25
January 1974. ‘You had to be there’, it might be said, to appreciate such a work properly:
only someone present at the concert could properly appreciate the spontaneous nature of
the composition. On this approach, it will turn out that there are indeed some works that
are E-singular. But this is because the appreciation of these works requires that we experi-
entially engage with the very history of making that confers upon a particular event the
status of P-instance.
Alternatively, we might hold that the work can be properly appreciated through experi-

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ential engagement with a recording of the performance, either audiovisual or audio, as long
as this engagement is suitably informed by knowledge of the performance’s history. Such
an engagement, it might be argued, will allow the listener to hear the recorded sounds as
a spontaneously generated sound sequence, and thus to appreciate the work as an impro-
visation even though there is no direct engagement with the work’s singular P-instance.
On this approach, it turns out that even a work such as the Köln Concert is E-multiple.
In light of these reflections, we can now propose the following modified version of
Currie’s ‘Instance Multiplicity Hypothesis’. A work is E-multiple unless (a) it is P-singular,
and (b) the conditions that must be met by an E-instance of the work include direct experi-
ential engagement with the provenance of the singular P-instance. Whether improvised
performances meet these two conditions is a matter for dispute. If they do not, then, as
Currie claimed, all artworks are E-multiple.24

David Davies
McGill University
david.davies@mcgill.ca

24  Earlier versions of this paper were presented at a symposium on ‘Multiple Artworks’, at the 2009 meetings of the
American Society for Aesthetics in Denver, Colorado, and at the University of Sheffield. I am grateful to members of
the audience on both occasions for challenging and very helpful criticisms. I would particularly like to thank Stephen
Davies, Saul Fisher, Robert Hopkins, John Hyman, Jerrold Levinson, Jennifer Saul, Robert Stecker, and Fiona
Woollard for extended discussions of these issues. Finally, I would like to thank the SSHRC of Canada, a research
grant from whom facilitated research on this paper.