In this chapter I look at some questions around the notion of experimentation in philosophy, science, and the arts, through the thought of Gaston Bachelard and Gilles Deleuze. My argument is articulated around three areas of enquiry – Bachelard’s work on the experimental sciences, Deleuze’s notion of philosophy as an experimental practice, and recent musicological debate around the practical and political stakes of the term ‘experimental music’. By drawing together these three senses of experimentation, I test (...) the possibilities of understanding experimentation as a transdisciplinary concept and/or method. I develop a notion of experimentation as open, fluid, and non-hierarchical, but also consider points where such an idea is short-circuited by the reassertion of disciplinary closure and more top-down forms of method. My frame for discussing this question is a commonly posited distinction between the experiment and the experimental. Here the experiment is something like a controlled and closed environment in which a privileged observer tests predefined hypotheses, while the experimental concerns attempts to relinquish such control and to produce contexts in which the unknown and the unexpected can arise. By turning to Bachelard’s studies of the practice of science, I will question the common conception of a disciplinary split between the experiments of science and experimental art, showing both how such a distinction cannot be so neat and how these terms are often not easily separable. Putting this notion into conjunction with recent critical discourse on experimentation in music, namely regarding the kinds of exclusions and closures that the term ‘experimental music’ has produced, and with Deleuze’s criticisms of scientific method as well as the apparent disciplinary closure of his transdisciplinary project that is present and his and Félix Guattari’s final work, What is Philosophy?, I argue that refining our understanding of experimentation as a pluralistic and fragile concept will help us engage with the difficulties raised in these fields. More generally I point towards a project of mapping out the diverse and divergent relations that a transdisciplinary understanding of experimentation may draw between philosophy, science, and art. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on the methodological challenges and practical implications of the experimental ontology of music. It offers an overview of the existing research, primarily focusing on how people judge whether two musical performances are of one and the same or two distinct musical works, followed by a discussion of the current methodological debates in this field and, finally, an exploration of its potential legal implications.

In what follows I offer some reflections on an ethics of listening, or perhaps more generally a philosophy of listening, that can be discerned in different forms in the experimental music that, since the 1950s, has challenged and radicalised how music is understood. I situate these reflections around three of my own concert experiences as an audience member.

When beginning to think about the relation between experimental music and the thought of Gilles Deleuze, this quotation seems to be a natural starting point. In Deleuze and Guattari’s affirmation of this phrase from John Cage they suggest a resonance between music and philosophy: in both fields the experimental approach entails a dismantling of predetermining codes and hierarchies, and with this arises the opportunity for an open-endedness that accommodates singular events and encounters. This understanding of experimentation, (...) however, is not as transparent as it seems. In the context of the uptake and critique of Deleuzian ideas in the theorisation of music and sound, as well as recent re-evaluations of the milieu of “experimental music,” critics have argued that a range of normative demands, ideological assumptions, and metaphysical reductions undermine the purported freedoms of both Cagean and Deleuzian experimentalism. -/- Here I can only deal with a small aspect of the wide historical and theoretical problem this involves; but in short my aim is to begin to construct a means through which Deleuze and Guattari’s thought can be used to help us examine some strategies that composers and performers in post-Cagean musical experimentalism developed to navigate around the demands, assumptions, and reductions of Cage’s thought. (shrink)

This article reviews some of the ways in which philosophical problems concerning music can be informed by approaches from the cognitive sciences (principally psychology and neuroscience). Focusing on the issues of musical expressiveness and the arousal of emotions by music, the key philosophical problems and their alternative solutions are outlined. There is room for optimism that while current experimental data does not always unambiguously satisfy philosophical scrutiny, it can potentially support one theory over another, and in some (...) cases allow us to synthesize or reject traditional philosophical differences. (shrink)

The dissertation discusses the relationship between two approaches to researching music: the empirical approach of experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience, and the speculative approach of philosophical aesthetics of music. The aim of the dissertation is to determine the relationship between problems, conceptual frameworks, and domains of inquiry of the two approaches. The dissertation should answer whether the philosophical and the empirical approach deal with the same, or at least relatable aspects of music. In particular, it should (...) answer whether the results of the empirical research contribute to the debates of philosophical aesthetics of music. Each of the three chapters of the dissertation deals with one particular problem in philosophy of music: meaning in music, value of music, and the relationship between music and the emotions. For each particular philosophical problem discussed in these chapters, it is demonstrated that the experimental results provide interesting insights for philosophy of music. It is concluded in the dissertation that philosophers can benefit from examining experimental studies, not only regarding the particular aesthetic theories, but also in regard to the methodological consideration, since the dissertation shows that this kind of interdisciplinary approach uncovers methods useful to philosophers, not commonly available to the armchair philosophical approach. (shrink)

The ancient Greeks already used to give ethnic names to their different scales, and observations on differences in music of the various nations always raised the interest of musicians and philosophers. Yet, it was only in the late nineteenth century that “comparative musicology” became an institutional science. An important role in this process was played by Carl Stumpf, a former pupil of Brentano’s who pioneered these researches in Berlin. Stumpf founded the Phonogrammarchiv to collect recordings of folk and extra-European (...) music and a dedicated journal, the Sammelbände für vergleichende Musikwissenschaft. Gifted in the field of science no less than in that of musicology, Stumpf developed an empirically-oriented approach to phenomenology, deeply divergent from Husserl’s and highly influential over the Berlin school of Gestalt psychology. A self-declared “outsider” among armchair philosophers, Stumpf experimentally investigated the perception of sounds and the origins of musical consonance. Developing the physiological studies of Ernst Weber on the sense of touch, Stumpf discovered that two sensations of tone, given at the same time, tend to mix in a certain degree. Musical consonance – he claimed – lays in this level of “tonal fusion”, not in the allegedly “natural” series of the harmonic partials of a vibrating chord, as suggested by the naturalists of all times from Pythagoras to Stumpf’s great contemporary Hermann Helmholtz. Accordingly, no musical system can claim for preponderance over the others: Stumpf’s researches in comparative musicology served to corroborate his theses on “tonal fusion” and the psychological foundations of consonance. Although Stumpf later revised and finally abandoned this theory, its permanent value lays in its opposition to dominant naturalistic approaches. The commitment for comparative musicology at the Berlin School is then no concession to a positivistic fashion for exoticism. The fundamentally Eurocentric stance of naturalistic theories of music is also fiercely contrasted by Stumpf’s pupil Erich Hornbostel, who suggests that music ought to be considered as culture, rather than as nature, and focuses attention on the eventually melting human cultures. The Berlin school flourished until the Nazis forced most of its exponents to emigration and, for tragically obvious reasons, heavily discouraged researches on these topics. (shrink)

In his article “The Ontology of Musical Versions: Introducing the Hypothesis of Nested Types,” Nemesio Puy raises a hypothesis that continuity of the purpose is both a necessary and a sufficient condition for musical work’s identity. Puy’s hypothesis is relevant to two topics in cognitive psychology and experimental philosophy. The first topic is the prevalence of teleological reasoning about various objects and its influence on persistence and categorization judgments. The second one is the importance of an artist’s intention in (...) the categorization of artworks. We tested the teleological hypothesis across three studies. Vignettes in these three studies describe a musical work being changed in some of these aspects: purpose either changed or retained; score either changed or retained; change is made either by the same or a different composer. The results suggest that teleological considerations impact judgments on the persistence of musical works, but this impact appears to be relatively weak. The results also suggest that persistence judgments strongly depend on whether acoustical properties were changed, while whether the change was made by the original composer seems to be relatively unimportant. (shrink)

The central aim of this quasi-experimental study was to investigate the efficacy of lyrical and instrumental music in developing the reading comprehension of grade 10 students of Davao City, Philippines using the descriptive statistics and inferential statistics, specifically t-Test significant differences were assessed among groups and scores. The findings revealed that all groups had similar level of reading comprehension at the outset of the experiment. The post experiment revealed that a significant increase of score was evident in the (...) control and experimental group, which utilized instrumental music. On the other hand, the experimental group using lyrical music, had no significant improvement in the reading comprehension scores. Implications for the educational practices and limitations of the study were provided. (shrink)

The central aim of this quasi-experimental study was to investigate the efficacy of lyrical and instrumental music in developing the reading comprehension of grade 10 students of Davao City, Philippines using the descriptive statistics and inferential statistics, specifically t-Test significant differences were assessed among groups and scores. The findings revealed that all groups had similar level of reading comprehension at the outset of the experiment. The post experiment revealed that a significant increase of score was evident in the (...) control and experimental group, which utilized instrumental music. On the other hand, the experimental group using lyrical music, had no significant improvement in the reading comprehension scores. Implications for the educational practices and limitations of the study were provided. (shrink)

This essay explores Wittgenstein’s encounter with Stumpf’s work in Tone Psychology during a rarely studied period in Wittgenstein’s early career when he worked as a researcher in Myers’s laboratory for experimental psychology in Cambridge. I argue that Stumpf’s emphasis on the notion of musicality as the ability to characterize what is ‘musical’ about music troubled Wittgenstein’s initial formulation of his career-long adherence to the comparison between language and music. In the Tractatus the importance of internal projective relations (...) far exceeds that of arbitrariness in language. This results in the curious elision of musicality in the Tractatus, as shown in his gramophone analogy. The acknowledgment of the enormous complexity pertaining to the facts of human life remained underdeveloped in Wittgenstein’s philosophy until the anthropological turn in his middle-period. Only then do we see the blooming of the language-as-music simile and its eventual impact on Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. (shrink)

Many people appear to attach great value to sad music. But why? One way to gain insight into this question is to turn away from music and look instead at why people value sad conversations. In the case of conversations, the answer seems to be that expressing sadness creates a sense of genuine connection. We propose that sad music can also have this type of value. Listening to a sad song can give one a sense of genuine (...) connection. We then explore the nature of this value in two experimental studies. The results suggest a striking relationship between music and conversation. People see something distinctively musical in works that express precisely those emotions that they think most create connection within conversation. (shrink)

The question of meaning in music has been discussed by numerous philosophers of music. On one end of the philosophical spectrum, the meaning in music is understood as “specifically musical” meaning, i.e. the meaning exhausted by the musical ideas. The other end of the spectrum is occupied by the view that the meaning in music is emotional, consisting of the ex-pression or representation of emotions by music, i.e. that the meaning in music is emotional (...) meaning. The paper will demonstrate that the results of psychological research support a more complex view, which ac-knowledges different types of meaning. The main aim of the paper is to examine the contribution of experimental psychological research for the philosophical debates on musical meaning. Certain studies of behavioral and neurological reactions to musical stimuli have revealed interesting relationships between the processing of syntax, semantics, and emotion in mu-sic. After presenting three main philosophical views on musical meaning, the paper discusses the results and implications of three experimental psychological studies, and their relevance for the philosophical views. It is argued in the paper that the experimental results enrich the classical philosophical debate on meaning in music. The original contribution of the paper con-sists in suggesting a way to connect the philosophical debates on musical meaning with the experimental psychological research. The implications of the paper will reveal higher complexity of the issue of musical meaning than is implicitly supposed in the theoretical debates. The second important implication is the suggestion of a way in which philosophical questions concerning music can be approached with the help of experimental psychology in future research. (shrink)

Can music be considered a language of the emotions? The most common view today is that this is nothing but a Romantic cliché. Mainstream philosophy seems to view the claim that 'Music is the language of the emotions' as a slogan that was once vaguely defended by Rousseau, Goethe, or Kant, but that cannot be understood literally when one takes into consideration last century’s theories of language, such as Chomsky's on syntax or Tarski's on semantics (Scruton 1997: ch. (...) 7, see also Davies 2003: ch. 8, and Kania 2012). In this chapter, I will show why this common view is unwarranted, and thus go against nowadays philosophical mainstream by defending what I call the musicalanguage hypothesis. In Section 1, I will introduce the musicalanguage hypothesis and present, based on empirical evidence, some of the many similarities between language and music and explain why we should take them seriously. I will introduce a framework that aims to explain the communicative power of music using what we already know about linguistic communication (1.1). I will then outline several working hypotheses about musical grammar, musical meaning, and affective meaning (1.2), and thus defend that music is indeed very close to literally be a language of the emotions. In Section 2, I will detail some of the methodology, expectations, and preliminary results of a cross-cultural study on musical grammar that I am presently conducting between South India (Chennai) and Switzerland (Geneva and Lausanne)4. This empirical study focuses on two musical idioms and their grammatical features: Western classical music of the Common Period (ca. 1600-1900) and South Indian classical music (also know as Carnatic music). The main hypothesis of this study is that you need to master the grammar of a musical idiom in order to properly understand its musical meanings. (shrink)

When it became uncool to speak of beauty with respect to pieces of art, physicists started claiming that their results are beautiful. They say, for example, that a theory's beauty speaks in favour of its truth, and that they strive to perform beautiful experiments. What does that mean? The notion cannot be defined. (It cannot be defined in the arts either). Therefore, I elucidate it with examples of optical experimentation. Desaguliers' white synthesis, for example, is more beautiful than Newton's, and (...) the many colourful syntheses done by Viennese painter Ingo Nussbaumer exemplify even greater beauty. Here are some criteria (which, of course, do not implement a decision procedure concerning beauty in experiments): cleanliness, simplicity, intellectual clarity, symmetry. Similar criteria are relevant to our aesthetical judgements about some pieces of music. So we can assume that our notion of beauty conserning art is related to the one conserning scientific experiments. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that composer John Cage’s so-called ‘silent piece’, 4’33”, is music. I first defend it against the charge that it does not involve the organization of sound, which has been taken to be a necessary feature of music. I then argue that 4’33” satisfies the only other condition that must be met for it to be music: it bears the right socio-historical connections to its predecessors within its tradition (Western art music). I (...) argue further that one cannot understand the organized sound condition and the socio-historical condition separately and that understanding their interaction has theoretical benefits—not least of which is providing a groundwork for a more culturally inclusive philosophy of music. Finally, I consider a number of outstanding questions concerning the content of the organized sound condition for Western art music in the wake of 4’33”. (shrink)

In this essay we will take the American experimental composer John Cage’s understanding of sound as the starting point for an evaluation of that term in the field of sound studies. Drawing together two of the most influential figures in the field, Cage’s thought and work will serve as a lens through which to engage with recent debate concerning the uptake in sound studies of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. In so doing we will attempt to develop a path (...) between conflicting sides of sound studies, putting forward an understanding of sound that presents it not as an uninterrogated ontological essence, nor as only a term in a discursive web, but as a problem which must be repeatedly posed anew. We will consider points where this may yet be pushed towards a reified, essentialized understanding of the nature of sound, but move to offset this by emphasizing the production of a practical process of learning and experimentation. (shrink)

There is increasing appreciation for the role that location plays in the experience of a musical event. This paper seeks to understand this role in terms of our habitual relationships to place, asking whether and how being musical somewhere can expand and transform our habituated comportment there, and with what consequences. This inquiry is anchored in a series of site-specific improvised performances by Jen Reimer and Max Stein, and the theory and practice of the late experimental music pioneer (...) Pauline Oliveros. The argument made interpreting these performances is grounded in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment, and Alia Al-Saji’s reception of it. This paper claims that such site-specific improvised performances can elicit a sort of hesitation in our everyday style of sensory-motor conditioning, and, concomitantly, awaken a layer of sensory living amenable to radically new sonic and behavioural configurations. (shrink)

The aim in this chapter is to explore the similarities and differences between the city symphony film genre of the 1920s and 1930s and the contemporary virtual city walking tours that are popular on YouTube these days, eventually discussing the change in representation of the individual in daily life over a century. The city symphony was born with modernism in the early 20th century initially to present an interpretation of the city with daily activities, human beings, their interaction with industrial (...) technology and the urban environment. A significant and pioneering film of the genre is by Walter Ruttmann titled Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis (1927) which I will try to analyze its filmic elements in order to draft a summary of the style and vision of the director and his contemporaries. On the other hand, the virtual city walking tours on YouTube represent a very different representation of urban exploration. These videos show various cities through the act of simple walking recorded in a long one-take POV shot with a gimbal-camera. Despite minor differences in terms of commentary and music use, these videos are quite similar to each other when compared to city symphony films in general. The methodological approach for analyzing and interpreting these films and videos is guided by the neoformalist approach proposed by Bordwell and Thompson in the 1980s, along with Noël Carroll’s view on critical evaluation. Since this post-theoretical approach is non-formulaic in terms of its methodology, it fits the two examples I will provide that are stylistically very distant. After establishing the form and style of the works, I will try to follow Carroll’s suggestions in order to critically interpret, analyze and evaluate the works. The comparison between the city symphony film and virtual city walking tour reveals a complex interplay between continuity and change in regards to the individual. While both share a rather common goal of capturing the essence of urban life their differences are to be found in their stylistic choices and their interpretations of the goal itself. The city films of the 1920s and 30s were avant-garde expressions that combined artistic innovation with socio-political commentary. They were often experimental, using montage sequences, juxtaposition and abstract imagery to convey the ever changing industrialized modern city life. Ruttmann’s Berlin is emblematic of this approach, offering a poetic and critical reflection on urban existence. In contrast, the virtual city walking tours on YouTube are more accessible and immediate. They provide a first-person perspective that allows viewers to virtually traverse different cities, experiencing sights and sounds without the mediation of artistic abstraction. The similarity in these videos suggests a standardized format that prioritizes immersion over critique. This article offers a valuable contribution to the understanding of urban representation of the individual in film and digital media. By comparing the city symphony film with virtual city walking tours, I try to illuminate the evolving relationship between art, technology and urban life. I argue that not only is there a completely different representation of the individual within the frame, but there is also ethical considerations to be put forth regarding the one that makes the frame, or the camera. In the end I argue that the human-ness of a work of art or any type of video is more important than immersiveness. (shrink)

In the last twenty years, a large number of studies have investigated judgments of the identity of various objects (e.g., persons, material objects, institutions) over time. One influential strand of research has found that identity judgments are shaped by normative considerations. People tend to believe that moral improvement is more compatible with the continuity of identity of a person than moral deterioration, suggesting that persons are taken to be essentially morally good. This asymmetry is often referred to as the “Phineas (...) Gage effect”. However, normativity extends beyond morality. In particular, it is unknown whether changes in aesthetic value have a similar impact on identity judgments. We investigate whether works of art would be analogously seen as essentially aesthetically valuable. We ran four studies (N=1264) to explore whether aesthetic considerations have a similar influence on judgments of the identity of artworks. We presented the participants with stories describing either a painting or a musical work which undergoes changes and becomes either more or less aesthetically valuable. Overall, we found only mixed evidence for the Phineas Gage effect in relation to the aesthetic value of artworks. Other factors, such as moral value, seem to have a bigger impact on judgments of persistence. (shrink)

Auditory perception is traditionally conceived as the perception of sounds — a friend’s voice, a clap of thunder, a minor chord. However, daily life also seems to present us with experiences characterized by the absence of sound — a moment of silence, a gap between thunderclaps, the hush after a musical performance. In these cases, do we positively hear silence? Or do we just fail to hear, and merely judge or infer that it is silent? This longstanding question remains controversial (...) in both the philosophy and science of perception, with prominent theories holding that sounds are the only objects of auditory experience and thus that our encounter with silence is cognitive, not perceptual. However, this debate has largely remained theoretical, without a key empirical test. Here, we introduce a novel empirical approach, presenting experimental evidence that silence can be genuinely perceived (not just cognitively inferred). We ask whether silences can ‘substitute’ for sounds in event-based auditory illusions — empirical signatures of auditory event representation in which auditory events distort perceived duration. Seven experiments introduce three new ‘silence illusions’ — the one-silence-is-more illusion, silence-based warping, and the oddball-silence illusion — each adapted from a prominent perceptual illusion previously thought to arise only from sounds. Subjects were immersed in ambient noise interrupted by silences structurally identical to the sounds in the original illusions. In all cases, silences elicited temporal distortions perfectly analogous to the illusions produced by sounds. Our results suggest that silence is truly heard, not merely inferred, introducing a general approach for studying absence perception. (shrink)

Psychological and neuroscientific inquiry pointed out the value of attention for auditory perception. Recent studies have identified that the problem is not one of finding a location for a given task, but of identifying how and what one wants to do with a given stimulus. This radicalises the problem of attention in perception. In this paper I try bring experimental research into dialogue with social role of emotions and attention in sonorous and musical field from the point of view (...) of anthropology and ethnomusicology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Scrutinizing the Art of TheaterAaron Meskin (bio)IntroductionIn his 1992 address to the American Society for Aesthetics, Peter Kivy suggested that philosophers of art might do best by giving up on “grand theorizing” (that is, pursuing the definition of art).1 In its place he proposed that they pursue the “careful and imaginative philosophical scrutiny of the individual arts and their individual problems.”2 Of course John Passmore and others had said (...) similar things at earlier points,3 but philosophical aesthetics has, it seems to me, finally and robustly taken the turn toward the philosophies of the arts. Much of the best work in philosophical aesthetics over the last fifteen years or so has pursued the route Kivy suggested. James Hamilton’s The Art of Theater is part of this turn—it is careful and imaginative scrutiny of the art of theater done at the very highest level, and I am delighted to have this opportunity to comment on it.4In what follows I shall address a number of issues raised by Hamilton’s work: the definition of theatrical enactment; the place of pretending and imagining in theatrical performance; the nature of Hamilton’s “ingredients model” and its relation to more traditional accounts of the work/performance relation; the account of theatrical style on offer; and the question of what we have learned from experimental theater.But before I move on to address those aspects of the book’s content in detail, let me say something about the pedagogical significance of this work. Although there are a number of legitimate ways to teach introductory courses on aesthetics and the philosophy of art (for example, by following a historical progression or by structuring it around certain key issues), one increasingly attractive option is to teach a course that focuses on those aforementioned individual arts and their individual problems. So, for example, I used to regularly teach graduate seminars in aesthetics to students enrolled [End Page 51] in a fine arts doctoral program. These students studied music, art education, the visual arts, theater, and dance; the seminars were designed to provide them with a broad foundation in philosophical aesthetics. Since they typically had no background in philosophy, I made the effort to assign readings and topics relevant to their own artistic practices and interests. Providing them with contemporary cutting-edge philosophical material on music and the visual arts was not hard. Kivy’s work, as well as that by Jerrold Levinson, Arthur Danto, Richard Wollheim, and others, makes that fairly easy. And intriguingly—since philosophers are commonly said to have ignored the art of dance—there’s even a decent amount of recent philosophical work on that art form by such authors as Graham McFee, Frances Sparshott, and Noël Carroll and Sally Banes.5 But where to turn to for the theater students? I would often read some of Aristotle’s Poetics with them, but I have to admit that the serious students of the theater that I encountered in those seminars typically knew that text much better than I did. (Still, I hope I challenged their breezy assumptions about catharsis!) We would read Hume on tragedy together—fun, but not really so much about the theater—and sometimes a bit of Nietzsche. But there was never much to give them from contemporary philosophers on the subject—a few articles here and there, of course, but nothing that clearly laid out the big and distinctive issues that the art form of theater raises. Nothing, to put the point a bit differently, that would provide any evidence that there really was a lively and extant philosophy of theater out there, as there are lively and extant philosophies of film, music, literature, and photography. In short, for those attracted to the prospect of teaching aesthetics as the philosophies of arts, the dearth of good work on theater by contemporary philosophers has been a significant source of frustration and even a bit of an embarrassment.The book in question is not the only recent philosophical work on theater. There are fine articles on the topic by David Osipovich, David Saltz, and Paul Woodruff, among others. Hamilton himself has a string of... (shrink)

Philosophy has long either dismissed or paid only minimal attention to creativity, and even with the rise of research on imagination, the creative imagination has largely been ignored as well. The aim of this volume is to correct this neglect. By bringing together existing research in various sub-disciplines, we also aim to open up new avenues of research. The chapters in Part I provide some framing and history on the philosophical study of imagination and creativity, along with an overview of (...) the empirical literature. Part II explores imagination and creativity as they manifest in, and in turn shape, the individual. Part III surveys the role of imagination and creativity across a wide variety of artistic domains, and the chapters of Part IV turn to societal domains. Part V focuses on the interplay of imagination and creativity with regard to particular features of creative subjects and different kinds of creative subjects. *** -/- Part I: Theories and Approaches 1. Theories of Imagination (Peter Kung) 2. Theories of Creativity (Julia Langkau) 3. Historical Treatments of Imagination in the Western Tradition (Lucia Oliveri) 4. Historical Treatments of Creativity in the Western Tradition (Elliot Paul) 5. Non-Western Treatments of Imagination (Reza Hadisi and Jing Iris Hu) 6. Non-Western Treatments of Creativity (Nicolas B. Verger and Vlad Glăveanu) 7. Empirical Treatments of Imagination and Creativity (Dustin Stokes) 8. Experimental Philosophy of Imagination and Creativity (Michael T. Stuart) 9. The Relationship between Imagination and Creativity (Margherita Arcangeli) -/- Part II: Imagination and Creativity in Mind and Action 10. Imagination, Creativity, and Skill (Amy Kind) 11. Imagination, Creativity, and Attention (Bence Nanay) 12. Imagination, Creativity, and Agency (Caterina Moruzzi) 13. Imagination, Creativity, and Emotion (Julien Deonna and Fabrice Teroni) 14. Imagination, Creativity, and Embodiment (Adriana Clavel-Vázquez and María Jimena Clavel Vázquez) 15. Imagination, Creativity, and Gender (Luke Roelofs) 16. Imagination, Creativity, and Race (Nicholas Whittaker) 17. Imagination, Creativity, and Child Development (Thalia Goldstein, Anna Sofia Caruso, Darian Stapleton, and Lamin Fatty) -/- Part III: Imagination and Creativity in the Arts 18. Imagination, Creativity, and the Visual Arts (Claire Anscomb) 19. Imagination, Creativity, and Music (Matteo Ravasio) 20. Imagination, Creativity, and Fiction (Hannah H. Kim) 21. Imagination, Creativity, and Dance (David Davies and Anna Pakes) 22. Imagination, Creativity, and the Culinary Arts (Patrik Engisch) 23. Imagination, Creativity, and Film (Murray Smith) 24. Imagination, Creativity, and Acting (Tzachi Zamir) 25. Imagination, creativity, and fashion (Laura T. Di Summa) -/- Part IV: Imagination and Creativity in Society 26. Imagination and Creativity in the Scientific Realm (Alice Murphy) 27. Imagination and Creativity in the Moral Realm (Tim Mulgan) 28. Imagination and Creativity in the Political Realm (Avshalom Schwartz) 29. Imagination and Creativity in the Law (Maksymilian Del Mar) 30. Imagination and Creativity in the Religious Realm (Neil Van Leeuwen) 31. Imagination and Creativity in Business (Eric Peterson) 32. Imagination and Creativity in Times of Crisis (Jennifer Fraser and Noah Stemeroff) Part V: Emerging Issues in Imagination and Creativity Research 33. Imagination, Creativity, and Aphantasia (Andrea Blomkvist) 34. Imagination, Creativity, and Neurodivergence (Sofia Ortiz-Hinojosa) 35. Imagination, Creativity, and Non-Human Animals (Henry Shevlin) 36. Imagination, Creativity, and Artificial Intelligence (Peter Langland-Hassan) 37. Collective Imagination and Collective Creativity (Nick Wiltsher) . (shrink)

People often reason about omissions. One line of research shows that people can distinguish between the semantics of omissive causes and omissive enabling conditions: for instance, not flunking out of college enabled you (but didn’t cause you) to graduate. Another line of work shows that people rely on the normative status of omissive events in inferring their causal role: if the outcome came about because the omission violated some norm, reasoners are more likely to select that omission as a cause. (...) We designed a novel paradigm that tests how norms interact with the semantics of omissive enabling conditions. The paradigm concerns the circuitry of a mechanical device that plays music. Two experiments used the paradigm to stipulate norms and present a distinct set of possibilities to participants. Participants chose which causal verb best described the operations of the machine. The studies revealed that participants’ responses are best predicted by their tendency to consider the semantics of omissive relations. In contrast, norms had little to no effect in participants’ responses. We conclude by marshaling the evidence and considering what role norms may play in people’s understanding of omissions. (shrink)

In two experiments (N=888), we explore to what extent the folk concept of art is compatible with the leading philosophical definitions of art, and whether it is an essentialist or a non-essentialist concept. We manipulate three factors: whether an object is created intentionally, whether it has aesthetic value, and whether it is institutionally recognized. In addition, we also manipulate the artistic domain (visual art or music). The results suggest that none of the three properties is seen by the folk (...) as necessary for an object to be considered art, which suggests that the folk concept of art might be a cluster concept. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Going Beyond Nature in Order to Explain it Technē, epistēmē and alēthēs doxa Mathematics, pure and applied Observation and Experimental Verification Bibliography.

The punishment of social misconduct is a powerful mechanism for stabilizing high levels of cooperation among unrelated individuals. It is regularly assumed that humans have a universal disposition to punish social norm violators, which is sometimes labelled “universal structure of human morality” or “pure aversion to social betrayal”. Here we present evidence that, contrary to this hypothesis, the propensity to punish a moral norm violator varies among participants with different career trajectories. In anonymous real-life conditions, future teachers punished a talented (...) but immoral young violinist: they voted against her in an important music competition when they had been informed of her previous blatant misconduct toward fellow violin students. In contrast, future police officers and high school students did not punish. This variation among socio-professional categories indicates that the punishment of norm violators is not entirely explained by an aversion to social betrayal. We suggest that context specificity plays an important role in normative behaviour; people seem inclined to enforce social norms only in situations that are familiar, relevant for their social category, and possibly strategically advantageous. (shrink)

The year 2009 has been a year of numerous commemorations of both scientific and non-scientific achievements that contributed to the advancement of human kind. Protestants celebrated the 500th anniversary of the birth of Calvin; literary critics celebrated the 200th anniversary of the poet Edgar Allan Poe; and the musical genius Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy was also born 200 years ago. 2009 further marked the bicentennial of the birth of Louis Braille, the inventor of Braille; and Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the (...) United States, who founded the National Academy of Sciences. Pierre Curie, famous for his work on radioactivity that he conducted together with his wife Marie Curie, was born 150 ago; as was John Dewey, a philosopher and psychologist who is recognized as one of the founding fathers of both pragmatism as well as functional psychology. UNESCO and the International Astronomical Union dubbed 2009 the International Year of Astronomy. By doing so, astronomers celebrated the 400th anniversary of Galileo Galilei’s telescopic observations as well as the publication of Johannes Kepler’s Astronomia nova wherein he formulated the first two laws of planetary motion. 2009 also marked the last of a 3-year-long celebration of Planet Earth, another UNESCO-governed initiative. However, for evolutionary biologists and philosophers of science, 2009 will be largely remembered for its worldwide commemorations of the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his magnum opus On the origin of species by means of natural selection. Footnote1 In order to pay tribute to Darwin’s major contribution to the advancement of evolutionary science, the International Union of Biological Sciences and the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science have called the year 2009 the Darwin Year. Given that so many scientific discoveries were commemorated, COPUS, the Coalition on the Public Understanding on Science, called out 2009 as the Year of Science, in the hope to pay equal tribute to both the field of biology as well as astronomy. 2009 was indeed a year of biology. Somewhat overshadowed by the big Darwin celebrations, smaller-scaled events were held to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the publication of Lamarck’s Philosophie Zoologique; and the 150th anniversary of the death of Alexander von Humboldt, the father of biogeography. In 1910, Constantin Mereschkowsky wrote his article on symbiogenesis entitled ‘The Theory of Two Plasmas as the Basis of Symbiogenesis, a New Study for the Origins of Organisms’. The article was published in the German Biologisches Zentralblatt, the journal that would later evolve into the current Theory in Biosciences. Somewhat forgotten, but equally important for the field of symbiogenesis, was the 200th anniversary of the birth of Pierre-Joseph Van Beneden, a Belgian paleontologist and zoologist famous for distinguishing parasitism from commensalism. Finally, Henry Bergson, known for inventing the currently rejected notion of élan vital, was born 150 years ago. In order to memorialize the important role these biologists played in the advancement of our understanding of the evolutionary process, a 2-day international conference was organized entitled: Evolution today and tomorrow, Darwin evaluated by contemporary evolutionary and philosophical theories. The conference was organized by The Centre for Philosophy of Science of the University of Lisbon (Portugal), in collaboration with the Centre for Environmental Biology of the same university, and the Lisbon Centre for Applied Psychology. The articles presented here are a spin-off of this conference. The current volumes contain the peer-reviewed articles of a selection of the plenary and invited speakers, as well as those of scholars who were additionally invited to contribute to the volumes. (shrink)

Wittgenstein’s experiments on rhythm (1912-13) were based on Charles Myers’s 1911 written protocols for laboratory exercises. The experiments provided an early onset for Wittgenstein’s career-long exploration of the philosophically pervasive implications of aspects. Years before the Tractatus, Wittgenstein already got a glimpse of a philosophical angle, which was bound to become very important to him not only in aesthetics, but also for his overarching philosophical development. He became interested in the possibilities of aesthetic conversation, in what we actually do when (...) we re-phrase, compare, come up with good similes in order to illuminate something definite within the space of possibility. These initial insights were bound to recede into the background for a while by the mounting demands of the Tractatus framework, only to fully bloom in Wittgenstein’s later work. (shrink)

Experimental philosophy of language uses experimental methods developed in the cognitive sciences to investigate topics of interest to philosophers of language. This article describes the methodological background for the development of experimental approaches to topics in philosophy of language, distinguishes negative and positive projects in experimental philosophy of language, and evaluates experimental work on the reference of proper names and natural kind terms. The reliability of expert judgments vs. the judgments of ordinary speakers, the role (...) that ambiguity plays in influencing responses to experiments, and the reliability of metalinguistic judgments are also assessed. (shrink)

For 4E cognitive science, minds are embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended. Proponents observe that we regularly ‘offload’ our thinking onto body and world: we use gestures and calculators to augment mathematical reasoning, and smartphones and search engines as memory aids. I argue that music is a beyond-the-head resource that affords offloading. Via this offloading, music scaffolds access to new forms of thought, experience, and behaviour. I focus on music’s capacity to scaffold emotional consciousness, including the self-regulative processes (...) constitutive of emotional consciousness. In developing this idea, I consider the ‘material’ and ‘worldmaking’ character music, and I apply these considerations to two case studies: music as a tool for religious worship, and music as a weapon for torture. (shrink)

Basic Emotion theory has had a tremendous influence on the affective sciences, including music psychology, where most researchers have assumed that music expressivity is constrained to a limited set of basic emotions. Several scholars suggested that these constrains to musical expressivity are explained by the existence of a shared acoustic code to the expression of emotions in music and speech prosody. In this article we advocate for a shift from this focus on basic emotions to a constructionist (...) account. This approach proposes that the phenomenon of perception of emotions in music arises from the interaction of music’s ability to express core affects and the influence of top-down and contextual information in the listener’s mind. We start by reviewing the problems with the concept of Basic Emotions, and the inconsistent evidence that supports it. We also demonstrate how decades of developmental and cross-cultural research on music and emotional speech have failed to produce convincing findings to conclude that music expressivity is built upon a set of biologically pre-determined basic emotions. We then examine the cue-emotion consistencies between music and speech, and show how they support a parsimonious explanation, where musical expressivity is grounded on two dimensions of core affect (arousal and valence). Next, we explain how the fact that listeners reliably identify basic emotions in music does not arise from the existence of categorical boundaries in the stimuli, but from processes that facilitate categorical perception, such as using stereotyped stimuli and close-ended response formats, psychological processes of construction of mental prototypes, and contextual information. Finally, we outline our proposal of a constructionist account of perception of emotions in music, and spell out the ways in which this approach is able to make solve past conflicting findings. We conclude by providing explicit pointers about the methodological choices that will be vital to move beyond the popular Basic Emotion paradigm and start untangling the emergence of emotional experiences with music in the actual contexts in which they occur. -/- . (shrink)

In the small but growing literature on the philosophy of country music, the question of how we ought to understand the genre’s notion of authenticity has emerged as one of the central questions. Many country music scholars argue that authenticity claims track attributions of cultural standing or artistic self-expression. However, careful attention to the history of the genre reveals that these claims are simply factually wrong. On the basis of this, we have grounds for dismissing these attributions. Here, (...) I argue for an alternative model of authenticity in which we take claims about the relative authenticity of country music to be evidence of ‘country’ being a dual character concept in the same way that it has been suggested of punk rock and hip-hop. Authentic country music is country music that embodies the core value commitments of the genre. These values form the basis of country artists’ and audiences’ practical identities. Part of country music’s aesthetic practice is that audiences reconnect with, reify, and revise this common practical identity through identification with artists and works that manifest these values. We should then think of authenticity discourse within country music as a kind of game within the genre’s practice of shaping and maintaining this practical identity. (shrink)

Georg Henrik von Wright was not only the first interpreter of Wittgenstein, who argued that Spengler’s work had reinforced and helped Wittgenstein to articulate his view of life, but also the first to consider seriously that Wittgenstein’s attitude to his times makes him unique among the great philosophers, that the philosophical problems which Wittgenstein was struggling, indeed his view of the nature of philosophy, were somehow connected with features of our culture or civilization. -/- In this paper I draw inspiration (...) and courage from Von Wright’s insistence that trying to understand Wittgenstein in relation to his times is a philosophic task in its own right in order to probe into a relatively obscure region in Wittgenstein’s thought: his relation to the music of his times. It is a topic, on which Von Wright, and most other prominent Wittgenstein scholars, have said very little, but it is also one, which Wittgenstein himself attested was so important to him that he felt without it he was sure to be misunderstood. -/- I offer textual and historical evidence in support of my claim that, parallel to Wittgenstein’s exposure to Spengler’s Decline of the West in 1930, he was also introduced to the music theory of Heinrich Schenker, which helped him to articulate, partly by way of critique, a complex and unique position concerning the modern music of his times, which exhibits his rejection of what Von Wright later dubbed ‘the myth of progress’. As Von Wright observed in other regions of Wittgenstein’s work, he believed also with regards to the arts and to music in particular, neither in a brilliant future nor in the good old days. -/- I argue that Wittgenstein actually made a distinction between three kinds of modern music: (a) bad modern music, which is clearly a case of confusing means for ends, the hallmark of the myth of progress, as Von Wright observed; (b) vacuous modern music, which embodies some sort of diffidence, a difficulty to see through the omnipresence of what Von Wright called (following Habermas) a ‘colonialization’ of reified measures of progress; (c) good modern music, a paradoxical notion for Wittgenstein, which betokens the unlikely yet possible striving to penetrate through what appears as dissolution of the resemblances which unite this culture’s ways of life by rendering this condition as expressible and intransitively understandable. In the context of this third category, I offer an interpretation of Wittgenstein’s complex remarks on the music of Gustav Mahler, which palpably show that the problem of good modern music and the problem of philosophizing in the time of civilization were one and the same in Wittgenstein’s mind. -/- I conclude that, with regards to Von Wright’s own critical view of the modern myth of progress, we can learn from Wittgenstein that progress in the realm of art is closely aligned with the ideal of the perfection of man, yet transcending a social or political context. It is the ideal of cultural cohesion: affinity that the arts show to other human practices and cultural artifacts of its period. Wittgenstein’s tentative notion of good modern music (and its circumscription by his notion of the music of the future) may show its true colors when viewed in the context of Von Wright’s plea not to abandon work for progress as a critical task. (shrink)

This paper provides new tools for philosophical argument analysis and fresh empirical foundations for ‘critical’ ordinary language philosophy. Language comprehension routinely involves stereotypical inferences with contextual defeaters. J.L. Austin’s Sense and Sensibilia first mooted the idea that contextually inappropriate stereotypical inferences from verbal case-descriptions drive some philosophical paradoxes; these engender philosophical problems that can be resolved by exposing the underlying fallacies. We build on psycholinguistic research on salience effects to explain when and why even perfectly competent speakers cannot help making (...) stereotypical inferences which are contextually inappropriate. We analyse a classical paradox about perception, suggest it relies on contextually inappropriate stereotypical inferences from appearance-verbs, and show that the conditions we identified as leading to contextually inappropriate stereotypical inferences are met in formulations of the paradox. Three experiments use a forced-choice plausibility-ranking task to document the predicted inappropriate inferences, in English, German, and Japanese. The cross-linguistic study allows us to assess the wider relevance of the proposed analysis. Our findings open up new perspectives for ‘evidential’ experimental philosophy. (shrink)

The tears of Odysseus -- History : music gives voice to the ineffable -- Tears, chills, and broken bones -- The music itself -- Explaining strong emotional responses to music I -- Explaining strong emotional responses to music II -- The sublime, revisited -- Conclusion : values.

“Experimental jurisprudence” draws on empirical data to inform questions typically associated with jurisprudence or legal theory. Scholars in this flourishing movement conduct empirical studies about a variety of legal language and concepts. Despite the movement’s growth, its justification is still opaque. Jurisprudence is the study of deep and longstanding theoretical questions about law’s nature, but “experimental jurisprudence,” it might seem, simply surveys laypeople. This Article elaborates and defends experimental jurisprudence. Experimental jurisprudence, appropriately understood, is not only (...) consistent with traditional jurisprudence; it is an essential branch of it. (shrink)

Music impinges upon the body and the brain and has inductive power, relying on both innate dispositions and acquired mechanisms for coping with the sounds. This process is partly autonomous and partly deliberate, but multiple interrelations between several levels of processing can be shown. There is, further, a tradition in neuroscience that divides the organization of the brain into lower and higher functions. The latter have received a lot of attention in music and brain studies during the last (...) decades. Recent developments in neuroimaging techniques, however, have broadened the field by encompassing the study of both cortical and subcortical processing of the sounds. Much is still to be investigated but some major observations seem already to emerge. The domain of music and emotions is a typical example with a major focus on the pleasure that can be derived from listening to music. Pleasure, however, is not the only emotion that music can induce and the mechanisms behind its elicitation are far from understood. There are also mechanisms related to arousal and activation that are both less differentiated and at the same time more complex than the assumed mechanisms triggering basic emotions. It is tempting, therefore, to bring together contributions from neuroscience studies with a view to cover the possible range of answers to the question of what pleasurable or mood-modifying effects music can have on human beings in real-time listening situations. (shrink)

I develop Schopenhauerian musical formalism. First, I present a Schopenhauerian account of music with a background of his metaphysical framework. Then, I define meaningfulness as an analog to a Kantian notion of purposiveness and argue that, in light of Schopenhauer, music is meaningful as a direct manifestation of the universal will. Given the ineffable nature of what music points to, its form lacks any representation of meaning. Music is therefore the mere form of meaningfulness, and it (...) is precisely this mere form that gives rise to the infinite possibilities to ascribe it with a variety of musical meaning. (shrink)

I explain a tension between musical creationism (the view that musical works are abstract artifacts) and the view that there is no vague existence. I then suggest ways to reconcile these views. My central conclusion is that, although some versions of musical creationism imply vague existence, others do not. I discuss versions of musical creationism held by Jerrold Levinson, Simon Evnine, and Kit Fine. I also present two new versions. I close by considering whether the tension is merely an instance (...) of a general problem raised by artifacts, both abstract and concrete. I argue that on at least one defensible account of music the tension is especially problematic for abstracta. I focus on musical works, but much of the paper straightforwardly applies to other kinds of abstract artifacts. (shrink)

In the ontology of music the Aristotelian theory of musical works is the view that musical works are immanent universals. The Aristotelian theory (hereafter Musical Aristotelianism) is an attractive and serviceable hypothesis. However, it is overlooked as a genuine competitor to the more well-known theories of Musical Platonism and nominalism. Worse still, there is no detailed account in the literature of the nature of the universals that the Aristotelian identifies musical works with. In this paper, I argue that the (...) best version of Musical Aristotelianism identifies musical works with structural universals. I first motivate the view by outlining its explanatory benefits. I then argue that Musical Aristotelianism is preferable to Musical Platonism and present a novel account of musical works as structural universals by developing D. M. Armstrong’s theory of structural universals. I discuss the consequences of Musical Aristotelianism with respect to on-going issues in debates about musical works and defend the view against an influential objection, concluding that Musical Aristotelianism is a genuine competitor in debates about the nature of musical works. (shrink)

Realism about musical works is often tied to some type of Platonism. Nominalism, which posits that musical works exist and that they are concrete objects, goes with ontological realism much less often than Platonism: there is a long tradition which holds human-created objects (artifacts) to be mind-dependent. Musical Platonism leads to the well-known paradox of the impossibility of creating abstract objects, and so it has been suggested that only some form of nominalism becoming dominant in the ontology of art could (...) cause a great change in the field and open up new possibilities. This paper aims to develop a new metaontological view starting from the widely accepted claim that musical works are created. It contends that musical works must be concrete and created objects of some sort, but, nevertheless, they are mind-independent, and we should take the revisionary methodological stance. Although musical works are artifacts, what people think about them does not determine what musical works are. Musical works are similar to natural objects in the following sense: semantic externalism applies to the term ‘musical work’ because, firstly, they possess a shared nature, and, secondly, we can be mistaken about what they are. (shrink)

Dance, Music and Dramaturgy: collaboration plan and dramaturgical apparatus – The unfolding of the concept of dramaturgy and the problematics of contemporary choreography are, today, a vast and diverse field of research, bearing numerous disclosures that lead to their reciprocal implication. Apart from that, dance and music share significant complementary ties allowing for the consideration of a common compositional inquiry. Reflecting on the compositional processes of dance and music, this article cross-examines the collaboration between choreographers and composers, (...) integrating the incidence of dramaturgy in the strategies of choreographic and musical composition. (shrink)

Music is a universal human activity. Its evolution and its value as a cognitive resource are starting to come into focus. This chapter endeavors to give readers a clearer sense of the adaptive aspects of music, as well as the underlying cognitive and neural structures. Special attention is given to the important emotional dimensions of music, and an evolutionary argument is made for thinking of music as a prelinguistic embodied form of cognition—a form that is still (...) available to us as contemporary music creators and consumers. (shrink)

I argue for an enactive account of musical experience — that is, the experience of listening ‘deeply’(i.e., sensitively and understandingly) to a piece of music. The guiding question is: what do we do when we listen ‘deeply’to music? I argue that these music listening episodes are, in fact, doings. They are instances of active perceiving, robust sensorimotor engagements with and manipulations of sonic structures within musical pieces. Music is thus experiential art, and in Nietzsche’s words, ‘we (...) listen to music with our muscles’. This paper attempts to explicate and defend this claim. First, I discuss enactive approaches to consciousness and cognition generally. Next, I apply an enactive model of perceptual consciousness to the experience of listening to music. To clarify what is at stake, I use Peter Kivy’s ‘enhanced formalism’ as a philosophical foil. I then look at how the animate body shapes musical experience. (shrink)

Since language provides the most typical paradigm of meaning, when we ask what meanings music may communicate, it will certainly be illuminative to compare these meanings with those conveyed by language. In particular we would want to ask an even more specific question: how, in general, the respective meanings of music and words are related in a vocal composition.

Many philosophers and music theorists have claimed that music is a language, though whether this is meant metaphorically or literally is often unclear. If the claim is meant literally, then it faces serious difficulty—many find it compelling to think that music cannot be a language because it lacks any semantic value. On the other hand, if it is meant metaphorically, then it is not clear what is gained by the metaphor—it is not clear what the metaphor is (...) meant to illuminate. Considering the claim as a metaphor, I take it that what a theorist who speaks in this way is trying to draw our attention to is that there are interesting and illuminating parallels between music and language that might be philosophicallysignificant. Ifthisistheirpoint,thenthequestionis:whatinteresting parallel is it that could be so philosophically significant? (shrink)

Experimental philosophy is a relatively recent discipline that employs experimental methods to investigate the intuitions, concepts, and assumptions behind traditional philosophical arguments, problems, and theories. While experimental philosophy initially served to interrogate the role that intuitions play in philosophy, it has since branched out to bring empirical methods to bear on problems within a variety of traditional areas of philosophy—including metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and epistemology. To date, no connection has been made between developments (...) in experimental philosophy and philosophy of technology. In this paper, I develop and defend a research program for an experimental philosophy of technology. (shrink)

Experimental design is one aspect of a scientific method. A well-designed, properly conducted experiment aims to control variables in order to isolate and manipulate causal effects and thereby maximize internal validity, support causal inferences, and guarantee reliable results. Traditionally employed in the natural sciences, experimental design has become an important part of research in the social and behavioral sciences. Experimental methods are also endorsed as the most reliable guides to policy effectiveness. Through a discussion of some of (...) the central concepts associated with experimental design, including controlled variation and randomization, this chapter will provide a summary of key ethical issues that tend to arise in experimental contexts. In addition, by exploring assumptions about the nature of causation and by analyzing features of causal relationships, systems, and inferences in social contexts, this chapter will summarize the ways in which experimental design can undermine the integrity of not only social and behavioral research but policies implemented on the basis of such research. (shrink)