On several current views, including those of Matthew Kieran, Gary Iseminger, Jerrold Levinson, and Noël Carroll, aesthetic appreciation or experience involves second-order awareness of one’s own mental processes. But what if it turns out that we don’t have introspective access to the processes by which our aesthetic responses are produced? I summarize several problems for introspective accounts that emerge from the psychological literature: aesthetic responses are affected by irrelevant conditions; they fail to be affected by relevant conditions; we are ignorant (...) of their causes and thus confabulate in explaining them; our attempts to offer explanations change our preferences; and the preferences we form after explanation are lower in quality. I suggest that by distinguishing introspective awareness of mental processes from introspective awareness of mental states, we can safeguard a worthwhile concept of aesthetic experience. In addition, we should recognize that theoretical, rather than introspective, understanding of our mental processes may play a valuable role in aesthetic appreciation. (shrink)

A philosophical position may be characterized in different ways. Here we try to say how the naturalist answers certain . The questions come from very different areas; the spectrum of subjects is therefore quite mixed. There are, however, aspects of order: We start with (questions about) abstract subjects like logic, mathematics, metaphysics, then turn to problems of realism. And since in general naturalists are realists, the following questions on truth, laws of nature, origin of the universe, cosmology, evolution, body-mind-problem, freedom (...) of the will, religion, moral, and pseudoscience, are answered against a realistic background. German Eine philosophische Haltung kann man auf verschiedene Weisen charakterisieren. Hier versuchen wir zu sagen, wie der Naturalist auf bestimmte Kernfragen antwortet. Die Fragen stammen aus sehr verschiedenen Gebieten; das Themenspektrum ist deshalb recht bunt. Es gibt aber durchaus Ordnungsgesichtspunkte: Wir beginnen mit (Fragen zu) eher abstrakten Gegenständen wie Logik, Mathematik, Metaphysik, kommen dann zu Problemen des Realismus. Und da Naturalisten im Allgemeinen Realisten sind, werden die anschließenden Fragen über Wahrheit, Naturgesetze, Weltentstehung, Kosmologie, Evolution, Leib-Seele-Problem, Willensfreiheit, Religion, Moral und Pseudowissenschaften vor einem realistischen Hintergrund beantwortet. (shrink)

This article argues for an epistemology of music, stating that dealing with music can be considered as a process of knowledge acquisition. What really matters is not the representation of an ontological musical reality, but the generation of music knowledge as a tool for adaptation to the sonic world. Three major positions are brought together: the epistemological claims of Jean Piaget, the biological methodology of Jakob von Uexküll, and the constructivistic conceptions of Ernst von Glasersfeld, each ingstress the role of (...) the music user rather than the music. Dealing with music, in this view, is not a matter of representation, but a process of semiotization of the sonorous environment as the outcome of interactions with the sound. Hence the role of enactive cognition and perceptual-motor interaction with the sonic environment. What is considered a central issue is the way how listeners as subjects experience their own phenomenal world or Umwelt, and how they can make sense out of their sonic environment. Umwelt-research, therefore, is highly relevant for music education in stressing the role of the listener and his/her listening strategies. (shrink)

I present an argument for the existence of nonconceptual representational content. The argument is compatible with McDowell's defence of conceptualism against those arguments for nonconceptual content that draw upon claims about the fine‐grainedness of experience. I present a case for nonconceptual content that concentrates on the idea that experience can possess representational content that cannot perform the function of conceptual content, namely figure in the subject's reasons for belief and action. This sort of argument for nonconceptual content is best achieved (...) with examples from auditory perception, especially our perception of music. (shrink)

In this paper I show how the way experience presents things to us can be treated without attributing a representational content to experience. The basic claim that experience can present us with more things than the range of things available to us in thought is neutral with respect to the choice between a content account of experience and a naïve content-free account. I show how Meyer's theory of expectations in accounting for our experience of music supports the naïve account. Expectations (...) provide an account of the conditions that enable things to be salient in experience as targets for attention. Expectations do not provide a content to experience. (shrink)

Philosophers of mind have recently sought to establish a theoret- ical use for nonconceptual content. Although there is disagreement about what nonconceptual content is supposed to be, this much is clear. A state with nonconceptual content is mental. Hence, while one may deny that refrigerators and messy rooms have conceptual capacities, their states, as physical and not mental, do not have nonconceptual content. A state with nonconceptual content is also intentional, which is to say that it represents a feature of (...) the world for a subject. It may be tempting to think of qualitative states as having nonconceptual content since they can be experienced by indi- viduals independently of their possession of the requisite concepts, e.g. someone could experience pains, itches or tingles without possessing the concept pain, itch or tingle. But on such a view, one would have to assume that qualitative states are representational since mental states cannot be candidates for nonconceptuality unless they have intentional properties.2. (shrink)

This study tested to what extent young listeners metaphorically conceptualize basic musical relations. Ninety children aged 11 (30 attending a music school and 30 Serbian and 30 Romani children with no musical education) were played 5 stimuli with mutually opposed musical elements and asked to respond what the first and what the second one was like. Their answers were classified into metaphors according to the tenets of the conceptual metaphor theory. The results suggest an overwhelming dominance of metaphorical replies, in (...) which most mappings were based on image schemas within a predominantly visual–spatial modality. There were some differences in conceptualizations, however, with “high and low” tones also perceived as “big and small,” or “upward” musical motion seen as “forward.” This article analyzes the possibility of finding a common denominator for seemingly disparate replies, where the study of musical conceptualization might be instrumental in the cognitive semantic quest for metaphorical universals. (shrink)

This is an overview of analytic philosophy of music. It is in five sections, as follows: 1. What Is Music? 2. Musical Ontology 3. Music and the Emotions 4. Understanding Music 5. Music and Value.

This chapter provides a critical overview of ten central arguments that philosophers have given in support of a distinction between the conceptual and the nonconceptual. We use these arguments to examine the question of whether (and in what sense) perceptual states might be deemed nonconceptual and also whether (and in what sense) animals and infants might be deemed to lack concepts. We argue that philosophers have implicitly relied on a wide variety of different ways to draw the conceptual/nonconceptual distinction and (...) that all ten of the arguments we discuss face considerable difficulties. (shrink)

Disagreeing with Jerrold Levinson's claim that being conscious of broad-span musical form is not essential to understanding music, I will argue that our awareness of musical architecture is significant to achieve comprehension. I will show that the experiential model is not incompatible with the analytic model. My main goal is to show that these two models can be reconciled through the identification of a broader notion of understanding. After accomplishing this reconciliation by means of my new conception, I will close (...) the paper by discussing some reasons to accept an enhancing notion of musical understanding that includes levels and degrees of understanding. /// En desacuerdo con la afirmación de Jerrold Levinson: que ser consciente de la forma musical a gran escala no es esencial para comprender la música, sostendré que nuestra conciencia de la estructura musical es significante para alcanzar comprensión. Mostraré que el modelo experiencial no es incompatible con el modelo analítico y que ambos pueden ser reconciliados mediante una noción de comprensión más amplia. Después de llevar a cabo está reconciliación mediante la nueva concepción que propongo, concluiré discutiendo algunas razones para aceptar una noción de comprensión musical enriquecida que incluye niveles y grados de comprensión. (shrink)

The central claim of this thesis is that concepts, the components from which cognitively significant truth evaluable content (thought) is composed, are unstructured entities an account of whose individuation makes no essential reference to other concepts in the possession of the thinking subject or to any particular means by which the reference of the concept is identified by the thinking subject. This position is called Conceptual Atomism and contrasts with Inferential Role Semantics, according to which concepts are individuated by their (...) inferential roles or their conditions of warranted application. The structure of the argument is as follows. Firstly, a principle called the Transparency Principle is developed. This places constraints on the individuation of concepts across differing contexts. The Transparency Principle is then used to show that Inferential Role Semantics is false because it cannot provide a satisfactory account of cognitive dynamics; that is, of the conditions under which a concept is retained through changes in the epistemic state of the subject over a period of time. A version of Conceptual Atomism is then defended and it is shown that this theory yields the correct individuation of concepts. According to this theory the concepts of an individual subject are individuated in terms of referential episodes, episodes of ongoing reference to an object or property during which it is diachronically transparent to the subject that the same thing is being referred to. The more general notion of a referential practice is then used to account for the sharing of concepts by more than one person. Finally, a novel account of the thoughts expressed using indexical terms is defended in order to show that indexicals present no counterexample to Conceptual Atomism. This account of indexical thoughts is of some consequence in its own right. (shrink)