Intentionality, Food and Music -
A Fictionalist Approach
Cynthia M. Grund(1)
In this article, it is suggested that theories of metaphor be
augmented with the notion of fiction so as to provide the sort of
premetaphorical counterfactuality which is required for the direct
understanding of certain concepts. Vaihinger's treatment of fictions
is presented in detail and the relevance of fictions to the metaphor
theories of Lakoff, Turner, Johnson, Levin and Hausman is
discussed. The article concludes with an examination of the
suggestion that the "sound-food" fiction be entertained as
constitutive of our concept of music.
Introductory remarks
The role played by metaphor in the elaboration and exploration of
concepts has been widely discussed, as is indicated throughout the
course of this essay. If one chooses to express a given metaphor in the
canonical form "A is B," the usual tack is to say that "A" is either
directly understood, by which is meant "on its own terms," free of
metaphorical mediation, or that the understanding of "A" which has
relied on metaphorical mediation can be scaled away by a deconstructive
recursion which identifies these anterior metaphors. If we envision this
as an n-step process, it will end with some first member. Call it "An is
Bn" in canonical form. "An" is thus the component of "A" which is
directly understood, viz. is understood "on its own terms" and is free of
metaphorical mediation. This can of course, be achieved with many
concepts. (Later on in this essay we will see how Lakoff and Johnson
regard the understanding of "light" and "death" in this fashion.) There
is thus either direct understanding, or metaphorical mediation.
Are there not, however, concepts which require for even the most
direct, nuance-free kind of comprehension a component which involves
the understanding of one domain in terms of another? With regard to
such concepts, it seems paradoxical to maintain that they are inherently
metaphorical, or something along those lines, because the concept itself
is not available for metaphorical reconfiguration until the interdomainal
understanding indicated in the above has been achieved. To capture such
a concept at all, to grasp it at its most basic level, requires the sort of
counterfactual transfer from one domain to the other which is
characteristic of metaphor, but for which it is simply too early to
introduce metaphor onto the scene.
At least one such group of concepts can be strongly suspected to be
of this sort: those for which even direct, nuance-free understanding
requires a relationship between an agent and some constitutive part of
the concept, i.e., where the concept itself is not determined until an
interpretive act upon its constitutive part(s) has been carried out by an
agent and where this interpretation involves some form of
counterfactual transfer from one domain to another. These postulated
concepts are thus highly intentional in nature; that is to say, any attempts
to delineate them without attention to features of the mental states of an
agent who is somehow placed in an interpretative relationship with some
of their constitutive parts will result in an underdetermination of the
concepts themselves which is of such a magnitude as to render them
unintelligible.
Many examples from the area of aesthetics are of this sort. It is patently
clear that to understand what dance, painting, or music are requires some
transformational, intentional component at the most basic, direct level
of understanding. There is no level of understanding of these terms
which is truly a level of understanding, of even knowing what they are,
without this component. It must be present at the level of basic
conceptual comprehension before any metaphorical attribution can take
place. One could put it this way, that the level of intentionality required
for comprehension-as (e.g., seeing-as or hearing-as) which underpins
virtually all concept formation and understanding, requires a
supplementary level of intentionality in which comprehension-as-if (e.g.,
seeing-as-if and hearing-as-if) are central components.
How should we then characterize this transformational, intentional
component of direct understanding? The suggestion which will be
examined is that the supply of tools employed in the analysis of concepts
within the context of metaphor theory needs to be expanded to include
fictions. By fiction here is meant the technical philosophical device
expounded by Vaihinger (and, in an earlier form, by Bentham). By using
music as an example of the sort of intentional concept indicated in the
preceding, we will examine the role of fictions as opposed to the role of
metaphors in the constitution of at least some intentional concepts. The
temptation to conflate fictions with the results of metaphorical activity
will be explained by examining the role which counterfactual
conditionals play in the analysis of both fictions and metaphors. We also
will see how the importation of some of the analytical tools employed in
recasting metaphors as counterfactuals into the understanding of fictions
in terms of counterfactual conditionals can help in the framing of the
sorts of fictions which can be useful for capturing the intentionality
inherent in some concepts.
In this paper, I put forth and elaborate upon the suggestion that
interesting perspectives may be provided upon music and music
aesthetics by means of seriously entertaining the highly implausible
counterfactual statement (C) about a given sonic sequence u:
(C) If foodstuffs were sonic sequences, then u would be food.
The roles which (C) might play within theorizing about music and the
aesthetics of music are discussed. One such - admittedly controversial -
role is that the set U consisting of all such sequences u would be -
music! (C) would thus be the main constituent in a proposed definition
of what music is, where suitable relativizations regarding hearers and
their background assumptions are taken into account by the underlying
semantics for statements like (C).
Lakoff-Johnson-Turner
(C) represents a concrete suggestion for the characterization of music as
sound heard as if it were something else, namely, foodstuffs. Readers
who have embraced Lakoff and Johnson's well known ideas about
cognitive metaphor in Metaphors We Live By (1980) and Women, Fire
and Dangerous Things (1987) and Lakoff and Turner's treatment of it
in More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (1989)
might already at this point feel compelled to interject: Let's look at the
way music is talked about in our culture and others, and see if it is
characterized in food-terms. If we find enough such examples, then we
may conclude that the conceptual - and if we're lucky, even the
functional - embodiment of the concept 'music' is structured by the
'Music is food' metaphor (2).
An extremely important, but subtle move is almost ignored in all of
this. As seductive as all of this is, in the hypothesized basic conceptual
metaphor "Music is food," it is already implicit that there is a sonic
category - music - which is already a conceptually staked-out domain
previous to its employment in the metaphor. Lakoff and Turner
acknowledge this with regard to basic conceptual metaphors when they
remark:
In the case of profoundly conventionalized conceptual metaphors,
such as the basic metaphors we discuss in this book, aspects of one
concept, the target, are understood in terms of nonmetaphoric
aspects of another concept, the source. A metaphor with the name
A is B is a mapping of part of the structure of our knowledge of
source domain B onto target domain A (Lakoff and Turner
1989:58).
For the purposes of much of my investigation, which is simply to get a
grip on how that delineation occurs, the level at which "Music is food"
is located is simply too high, having overshot the whole question of
discriminating music from sound by taking for granted that we already
have a working concept of "music" at hand. Of course, we will be
challenged to think more about what this concept is like when we are
confronted with "music is food," and, if we agree that there is something
"true" about this metaphor, then we will have augmented our insight into
the nature of music as a concept which we already have available, it can
eventually steer the criteria according to which we judge and enjoy
music, accept new pieces into the canon, etc., etc. The upshot of all this
is "Music is food" relies on some more basic characterization of what
music is in order for "Music is food" to make any sense as a metaphor (3).
Let's look once again at
(C) If foodstuffs were sonic sequences, then u would be food.
Recall that u denotes some sonic sequence or other. Therefore, "u is
food" is arguably at the level of poetic metaphor for Lakoff and Turner,
self-conscious and non-automatic as it is: ". . . poets lead us beyond the
bounds of ordinary modes of thought and guide us beyond the automatic
and unconscious everyday use of metaphor. What makes poetic
metaphor noticeable and memorable is thus the special, nonautomatic
use to which ordinary, automatic modes of thought are put" (Lakoff and
Turner 1989:72). It is Lakoff and Turner's view that the reason we are
able to understand poetic metaphor is that it builds, by means of various
devices, upon a tacit understanding of a myriad of basic conceptual
metaphors, the presence of which may be unearthed in a culture by
empirical study of the way concepts are talked about.
Now, to get back to the "u is food" in (C), its assertion is conditional
upon the antecedent "Foodstuffs are sonic sequences." I think that it is
far-fetched, to say the least, that "Foodstuffs are sonic sequences" is a
basic conceptual metaphor, at least within any cultural contexts with
which this writer is familiar. Let's say it's a poetic metaphor. On what
basic conceptual metaphor is it based? Isn't it simply an invitation to
enter into a highly deviant world, where food is sound, and then to use
whatever intuitions we can muster from our attempts to wrap our minds
around "sound-food" to decide whether or not the sound we now are
confronted with is food on this implausible hypothesis? It is clear that
we must use imagination to transfer the grid we usually have laid down
within the food realm upon the sonic one.
Counterfactuals, metaphors and Tormey
We do, indeed, seem to be in real metaphor territory here. It does not,
however, seem to be territory for which Lakoff-Johnson-Turner
(hereafter abbreviated as LJT) provide us with any readily useful map.
We are, however, within a realm in which analyses of counterfactual
thinking do. Indeed, as I have indicated elsewhere (4) and will reiterate
within the course of this essay, thinking about counterfactual thinking
can, in fact, be extremely illuminating with regard to a host of issues
regarding metaphor, and as has been adumbrated, matters of musical
ontology and interpretation as well. By examining the way in which
counterfactual thinking expressed in terms of counterfactual conditionals
also provides a context for understanding the creation of fictions and
their use in the constitution of concepts, we will see more clearly how
fictions play a role which is misleadingly like that of metaphor on the
LJT program, but which is actually on the level of non-metaphorical
concept constitution, on the level of understanding a concept on its own
terms. The fact that implausible counterfactuals also underlie metaphors
on our analysis explains how and why this confusion may occur:
Metaphors are analyzed as implausible counterfactual conditionals. Alan
Tormey has introduced this approach into the literature dealing with the
philosophical analysis of metaphor (see Tormey 1983). He analyzes
"Juliet is the sun" as
If Juliet were a celestial object, she would be the sun.
Tormey pointedly refers to this as the "counterfactual parsing" (Tormey
1983:240) which "recasts" (Tormey 1983:237) the original metaphor.
He does this in order to highlight the fact that he is not paraphrasing the
metaphor when he recasts it as an implausible counterfactual. What is
commonly understood as the attempt to paraphrase a metaphor is, for
Tormey, better reconstrued as an attempt to provide supportive
grounding for it (Tormey 1983:242). The relocation of attempted
paraphrases as attempts at providing supportive grounding is an
important and helpful aspect of Tormey's approach, and we will look at
its bearing upon the themes of the present essay a bit later on (5).
Let's now look more carefully at the suggestion which I made earlier
that fictionalism supplies a missing link in the LTJ theory of
metaphorical v. non-metaphorical understanding of concepts. In short,
the creation of fictions, we will see, can be analyzed as a form of
counterfactual thinking which is expressed by counterfactual
conditionals highly remininiscent of the ones which underlie metaphors.
We will examine this in terms of the example of the "sound-food" fiction
which was suggested earlier as a means of infusing the concept of music
with intentionality at the level at which, as Lakoff and Turner often say
in More Than Cool Reason, the concept is understood "on its own
terms."
Fictionalism and Vaihinger
We begin with a discussion of Vaihinger's brand of fictionalism (6).
There are five cardinal points:
- The practical value of thought ranks above knowledge.
- Artifices of thought are distinguished from rules of thought and
the former are allocated a very important role.
- The artifice which Vaihinger wishes to examine further is that of
fiction.
- Fictions are divided into two kinds: real fictions and semi-fictions.
- Fictions must be distinguished from hypotheses.
(1) underscores some of the similarities which fictionalism has with
pragmatism (7). Vaihinger's position regarding "objective reality" is
interesting, in that it underscores (1) and discloses some attitudes which
are shared by LJT when they criticize "the objectivist paradigm" (8)
.
Since, however, we do not know objective reality absolutely but
only infer it (and this is also an ordinary scientific view) we must
revise our statement and say that thought has fulfilled its purpose
when it has elaborated the given sensation-complexes into valid
concepts, general judgments, and cogent conclusions, and has
produced such a world that objective happenings can be calculated
and our behaviour successfully carried out in relation to phenomena.
We lay most stress on the practical corroboration, on the
experimental test of the utility of the logical structures that are the
product of the organic function of thought. It is not the
correspondence with an assumed "objective reality" that can never
be directly accessible to us, it is not the theoretical representation of
an outer world in the mirror of consciousness nor the theoretical
comparison of logical products with objective things which, in our
view, guarantees that thought has filled its purpose; it is rather the
practical test as to whether it is possible with the help of those
logical products to calculate events that occur without our
intervention and to realize our impulses appropriately in accordance
with the direction of the logical structures (Vaihinger 1935:3).
The mention of "the organic function of thought" in the above is
interesting, in light of LJT as well, since it bears striking resemblance to
LJT's ideas about the "automatic and unconscious everyday use of
poetic metaphor" (Lakoff and Turner 1989:72). Compare with the
following remark by Lakoff and Johnson
Basic conceptual metaphors are part of the common conceptual
apparatus shared by members of a culture. They are systematic in
that there is a fixed correspondence between the structure of the
domain to be understood (e.g. death) and the structure of the domain
in terms of which we are understanding it (e.g. departure). We
usually understand them in terms of common experiences. They are
largely unconscious, though attention may be drawn to them. Their
operation in cognition is mostly automatic. And they are widely
conventionalized in a language, that is, there are a great number of
words and idiomatic expressions in our language whose
interpretations depend upon those conceptual metaphors. But there
are no words or idiomatic expressions in our language whose
meanings depend upon a conceptual connection between death and
a banana (Lakoff and Turner 1989:51).
The issue at hand here is the automatic use of LJT's basic conceptual
metaphors and the conceptual embodiment which they structure, and to
compare and contrast this with Vaihinger's ideas about the organic
function of thought. The following passage by Vaihinger is indicative of
a point which will reoccur in our discussion, namely, the relatively free
nature of the use of fictions in conceptual formation, since the only
constraint which is to be observed is that of "useful organic elaboration
of the material of sensation." If death-as-a-banana were to serve this end,
that would be all well and good. Degree of linguistic
conventionalization, which is extremely important for LJT's theory of
basic conceptual metaphors, is largely irrelevant to theoretical (and
practical!) employment of fictions. Vaihinger writes:
The psyche then is an organic formative force, which independently
changes what has been appropriated, and can adapt foreign elements
to its own requirements as easily as it adapts itself to what is new.
The mind is not merely appropriative, it is also assimilative and
constructive. In the course of its growth, it creates its organs of its
own accord in virtue of its adaptable constitution, but only when
stimulated from without, and adapts them to external
circumstances. Such organs, created by the psyche for itself in
response to external stimuli, are, for example, forms of perception
and thought, and certain concepts and other logical constructs.
Logical thought, with which we are especially concerned here, is an
active appropriation of the outer world, a useful organic elaboration
of the material of sensation. Logical thought is therefore an organic
function of the psyche (Vaihinger 1935:2).
The references to logic in the above may seem to be leading us astray
from the metaphor theme of LJT, but shortly, Vaihinger comes to the
distinction which was labelled (2) a few pages back; namely, the
distinction between rules and artifices of thought:
We make a distinction between rules and artifices of thought. In
other functions also this distinction is of value; the rules are the
totality of all those technical operations in virtue of which an acitvity
is able to attain its object directly, even when more or less
complicated. In logic too we call such operations, and in particular
those of induction, "rules of thinking". The artifices, on the other
hand, are those operations, of an almost mysterious character, which
run counter to ordinary procedure in a more or less paradoxical way.
They are methods which give an onlooker the impression of magic
if he be not himself initiated or equally skilled in the mechanism,
and are able indirectly to overcome the difficulties which the
material in question opposes to the activity. Thought also has such
artifices; they are strikingly purposive expressions of the organic
function of thought (Vaihinger 1935:11) (9).
It might seem tempting to draw a direct comparison between the rules to
which Vaihinger refers and to whatever cognitive operations we employ
in understanding a concept on its own terms and to continue by
comparing artifices with the use of metaphor in understanding a concept
more fully. This is, however, misleading, since the case which I am
making here is that both rules and artifices - for us and for Vaihinger,
the latter are most interestingly represented by fictions - are on the level
at which a concept is understood on its own terms. The fact that fictions
might have the aura of metaphoricity about them, once again, is due to
the contrafacticity inherent in them. We will look more closely at this
with regard to our discussion of (4) below.
As stated in (3) above, the artifice which Vaihinger wishes to
examine further is that of fiction:
We are therefore dealing with a peculiar kind of logical product, a
special manifestation of the logical function. We have already seen
that this peculiar activity is expressed in what we call artifices, that
its products are artificial concepts. We would here, anticipating the
outcome, substitute other terms for these expressions: our subject is
the fictive activity of the logical function; the products of this
activity - fictions.
The fictive activity of the mind is an expression of the fundamental
psychical forces; fictions are mental structures. The psyche weaves
this aid to thought out of itself; for the mind is inventive; under the
compulsion of necessity, stimulated by the outer world, it discovers
the store of contrivances that lie hidden within itself. . . .
Meanwhile, in the interests of greater clearness an intelligibility we
may premise the following remark:
By fictive activity in logical thought is to be understood the
production and use of logical methods, which, with the help of
accessory concepts - where the improbability of any corresponding
objective is fairly obvious - seek to attain the objects of thought.
Instead of remaining content with the material given, the logical
function introduces these hybrid and ambiguous thought-structures,
in order with their help to attain its purpose indirectly, if the material
which it encounters resists a direct procedure. With an instinctive,
almost cunning ingenuity, the logical function succeeds in
overcoming these difficulties with the aid of its accessory structures.
The special methods, the by-paths, of which thought makes use
when it can no longer advance directly along the main road, are of
many different kinds, and their explanation is our problem. They
often lead through thorny undergrowth, but logical thought is not
deterred thereby, even though it may lose something of its clearness
and purity. It is relevant also to remark here that the logical function,
in its purposeful instinctive ingenuity, can carry this fictive activity
from the most innocent and unpretentious beginnings on through
ever finer and subtler developments right up to the most difficult and
complicated methods (Vaihinger 1935:13).
This idea that the fictive activity can be carried from "the most innocent
and unpretentious beginnings on through ever finer and subtler
developments right up to the most difficult and complicated methods" (10)
echoes some of the considerations to which Lakoff and Turner give
voice regarding the extensions enabled by "the mode of metaphorical
thought that poets use and invoke in their readers" and which carries us
"beyond ordinary metaphoric thought" (Lakoff and Turner 1989:71).
Note, however, that in Lakoff and Johnson, these extensions are, once
again, on the level of metaphoric rather than non-metaphoric
understanding of a concept, whereas my point is that fictions are on the
level of our nonmetaphorical understanding of at least some concepts,
among which music is one.
With regard to (4) in the above, Vaihinger's comments are important
in recognizing the sort of contradictory nature which he means that
fictions should have. Needless to say, this is useful from the point of
view of our analysis, since, as the following passage suggests, fictions
are tailormade objects for analysis with the help of implausible
counterfactual conditionals:
Before entering on our task it is necessary to make a distinction that
will subsequently assume considerable importance. Ideational
constructs are in the strict sense of the term real fictions when they
are not only in contradiction with reality but self-contradictory in
themselves; the concept of the atom, for example, or the "Ding an
sich." To be distinguished from these are constructs which only
contradict reality as given, or deviate from it, but are not in
themselves self-contradictory (e.g. artificial classes). The latter
might be called half-fictions or semi-fictions. These types are not
sharply divided from one another but are connected by transitions.
Thought begins with slight initial deviations from reality (half-fictions), and, becoming bolder and bolder, ends by operation with
constructs that are not only opposed to the facts but are self-contradictory (Vaihinger 1935:16).
It is here we can begin to see the sort of role which fictions can play
above and beyond the sort of role which metaphor plays in LJT, whether
it be of the basic conceptual or the poetic kind: they create in a more
radical fashion.
This brings us back to the whole discussion which was started with
regard to (C) above: in LJT, as in many other theories of metaphor, the
"creating" done by the metaphor is of the nature of the structuring or
restructuring of one conceptual realm in terms of the structuring found
in another. In LJT, the objects of thought, to use Vaihinger's term, are
at hand. The metaphors can help to flesh out our intuitions about them,
make them more three-dimensional, and, in general, serve to bring them
into focus. This is where fictions go one step beyond - they serve to
create objects of thought, which then serve as linchpins in the creation
of our world view:
Logical processes are a part of the cosmic process and have as their
more immediate object the preservation and enrichment of the life
of organisms: they should serve as instruments for enabling them to
attain a more complete life; they serve as intermediaries between
living beings. The world of ideas is an edifice well calculated to
fulfil this purpose; but to regard it for this reason as a copy is to
indulge in a hasty and unjustifiable comparison. Not even
elementary sensations are copies of reality; they are rather mere
guages for measuring the changes in reality (Vaihinger 1935:16).
Lakoff and Turner do, indeed, point out that: "To understand what is
metaphorical, we must begin with what is not metaphorical. In brief, to
the extent that a concept is understood and structured on its own terms -
without making use of structure imported from a completely different
conceptual domain - we will say that it is not metaphorical" (Lakoff and
Turner 1989:57). They present both death and light as examples of
concepts that are, at least in part, understood directly. Regarding death,
they remark: ". . . death is in part understood directly as well: when one
is alive, one is functioning; when one is dead, one is not functioning.
This is a nonmetaphorical aspect of our understanding of death. As such.
it can be used as the source domain for other metaphors" (Lakoff and
Turner 1989:58). In the case of light: "We perceive light, react to it
emotionally, and know that it allows us to see things. . . . The life as
light metaphor depends . . . on certain nonmetaphorical knowledge about
light: that it promotes growth, that it makes us happy for the most part,
that it allows us to see and gain the knowledge necessary for our
survival, and so on" (Lakoff and Turner 1989:58). With respect to light,
they do also comment that our scientific understanding of light employs
"two common scientific metaphors for light: as waves and as particles
that move faster than anything else in the universe." Thus, the common
sense understanding of light is direct, whereas the scientific one employs
metaphor.
This last point is a crucial one. Note that the scientific understanding
of light is an understanding of something which was understood and
structured on its own terms in a direct, non-metaphorical way. The
cardinal point which I am making with respect to our concept of music
is that, on the most direct understanding of what it is, an intentional
component is required, a component which builds in, at the most basic
level, a relationship between hearer and heard. My suggestion for this
relationship is counterfactual hearing. On this proposal, counterfactual
hearing becomes part and parcel of the understanding and structuring of
music on its own terms, of our non-metaphorical understanding of it. Of
course there are acoustic, rhythmic and dynamic properties which are
essential to music, but they are also essential to a host of other sonic
phenomena as well, and I have argued in detail elsewhere that they are
not enough to capture the direct, non-metaphoric understanding of
music. So, how to articulate this intentional component? The
explanation which we will advocate is that something related to
metaphor is being done in (C) in that (C) is an implausible
counterfactual which looks very much like the implausible
counterfactuals which underlie metaphors. Note, however, that what (C)
is doing is to create a fiction, that of sound-food. It cannot be proven
that music is sound-food; recall (5) above - fictions are not hypotheses.
One can, however, provide reasons for the employment of one fiction
rather than another, to explain why one fiction is truer as a criterion for
music than another. Here we may borrow something related to the notion
of grounding which Tormey discusses as part of his proposal for the
recasting of metaphors in terms of implausible counterfactuals. The
notion of the grounding for such a counterfactual is a presentation of
what it is that sustains the counterfactual. What we need in the case of
the creation of a fiction, such as sound-food in (C) we shall call fictional
grounding, because what we are interested in is what justifies the
entertainment of (C). Can such a justification, for example, sustain the
definition-like statement
(M)u is music iff (C).
This essay will conclude with a suggestion for a fictional grounding for
(C), and an associated discussion of (M)'s suitability, which, given that
we are using it to define when a sound sequence is or is not music for
some given group of agents along with the background assumptions
which they share, is tantamount to a definition of music relativized to
that group and those assumptions. (11)
We have noted that, since fictions are not hypotheses, they cannot be
subject to proof. Another interesting feature of fictions which Vaihinger
points out is the type of provisional nature which they have and the
manner in which they may be discarded:
The function of an hypothesis is, of course, only provisional - but
the goal which it has ultimately in view is to be theoretically tested
and established by the facts of experience. The hypothesis has also
to be discarded, but this is because the hypothetical idea has become
fully qualified for admission into the circle of what is accepted as
real. The provisional object of the fiction is quite different; for the
fiction, in so far as we have termed it a provisional auxilliary
construct, ought to drop out in the course of time and make way for
its real function; but in so far as it is a pure fiction, it ought, at any
rate logically, to disappear as soon as it has done its duty (Vaihinger
1935:87).
I think there are two ways in which this comment applies to the
suggestion that counterfactual hearing and its attendent use of fictions,
such as sound-food, be incorporated as an inextricable, intentional
component in our characterization of music at the non-metaphorical
level. One is one which does not have anything much to do with its
nature as a fiction nor with the deeper meaning of the remark, the other
one does. The first one is that the 'sound-food' need not be present as a
conscious criterion for the presence of music everytime on listens to a
piece of music. The concept of music is one that we will borrow and
learn how to use from the linguistic group of which we are a member,
without subjecting ourselves to the sound-food test every time. This is
no more or less remarkable than the fact that, although "being able to
support some agent's weight" is more or less uncontroversially a basic
feature of chairs, we do not present ourselves with this everytime we
identify something as a chair.
The second point is more interesting. In the sense that 'sound-food'
is being proposed in order to capture some inextricably intentional
feature of music, its presence at the level of non-metaphorical
understanding of the concept of music can provide a location in our
theory for addressing the perception of a paradoxical sort of permanent
novelty in works of music, at least in good ones. If, indeed, a case can
be made for the pretense of a constituting component in our concept of
music which is of a nature such as the "unreachable" concept of sound-food - please see the discussion of Levin and Hausman which
immediately follows - there will be a sort of built-in openendedness in
music.
We have taken pains to distinguish between the role played by fictions
in the process of concept construction and the role played by metaphors
in concept enrichment or exploration. Two metaphor theorists who
contribute to the conflation of these two endeavors are Samuel Levin and
Carl Hausman. It is of interest to examine their work in this context,
since I believe that the drawing of the fiction-metaphor distinction will
prove to be useful in reconfiguring some of their theories, which upon
reconfiguration, have some things to say which are directly relevant to
the themes of this essay.
Levin
Samuel Levin has the following to say about Lakoff and Johnson:
Among the examples that they adduce are "wasting time,"
"attacking positions," "going our separate ways." These
expressions, they say are 'reflections of systematic metaphorical
concepts that structure our actions and thoughts. They are 'alive' in
the most fundamental sense: they are metaphors we live by. The fact
that they are conventionally fixed within the lexicon of English
makes them no less alive'([Lakoff and Johnson] 1980:55).
This last statement has about it an air of paradox, if not indeed
inconsistency. One normally assumes that to the extent items are
conventionally fixed within the lexicon their meanings are
normalized, and thus rendered stable. . .
These conclusions highlight the strongly conceptual nature of Lakoff
and Johnson's theory of metaphor. For them the "vitality" of a
linguistic expression is not determined by the status of its elements
in the lexicon and the role played by those elements in grammatical
arrangements; it is determined, rather, by the role those elements
play in our conceptual system and by the significance of their
function in the conduct of and talk about our daily lives (Levin
1993:120-121).
Levin contrasts this approach with his own view of literary metaphor.
Literary metaphor is, of course, explicitly expressed, and not, like the
above metaphors which we presumably are living by, buried among the
conceptual foundations of our world view. As such, literary metaphors
are invitations to contemplate states of affairs at deviant worlds by
means of the production of a "progressively lapsing impression" which
he terms a conception. In contrasting acts of imagination with acts of
conception, Levin remarks: ". . . even for 'farfetched' imaginative acts
the presentation can take the form of a clear image, whereas in acts of
conception (in my terms) this does not occur. Entertained instead is a
progressively lapsing impression which the conceiver, bent on its
realization in consciousness, impels and urges to attainment. Although
attainment is not reached, that is, no definite presentation is achieved,
there stands behind and activates the process what may be regarded as
a schema of the representation" (Levin 1988:53). Levin succinctly
contrasts his view with that of Lakoff and Johnson by remarking: "A
series of fundamental differences between our respective theories derives
from the fact that whereas the conceptual metaphors of Lakoff and
Johnson express concepts, mine express conceptions" (Levin 1988:6).
It might, at first glance, seem as if Lakoff and Johnson have already
anticipated Levin's comment in the following passage from More Than
Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor: "Poets can appeal to
the ordinary metaphors we live by in order to take us beyond them, in
order to make us more insightful than we would be if we thought only
in standard ways. Because they lead us to new ways of conceiving of
[my italics, CMG] our world, poets are artists of the mind" (Lakoff and
Turner 1989:215). Conceiving of is precisely the phrase which Levin
reserves for the cognitive stance one takes toward conceptions, which
are of such a character that the mental space which is prepared by them
is of such a nature that it cannot be filled, but the best one can hope for
is a "progressively lapsing impression" of what would be the case at the
deviant world which must be construed in order to accomodate the state
of affairs indicated by metaphors which express conceptions. For Levin,
it would be overkill to conceive of anything which properly belongs to
our world, rather than to a world which is so deviant as to only allow of
cognitive approximation. In this context, Levin employs ". . . 'concept'
to designate the mental image produced by a linguistic expression and
'conception' to designate a mental function performed preparatory to the
formation of such an image" (Levin 1988:70). Since Levin allows that
"The terms concept and conception (like the terms meaning, sense,
reality, and so forth) figure at several theoretical intersections . . . "
(Levin 1988:70-71), he also accepts that concepts may be spoken of "as
the constituent senses of a dictionary entry (in this concurring with Katz)
and conceptions as the set of general beliefs held by individuals in
respect to an object." He describes the latter characterizations as being
"drawn against a background that was primarily linguistic" (Levin
1988:72), whereas he sees the former characterization as a
phenomenological approach "where concepts and conceptions are
considered not as static counters in some theoretical framework but
aspects of dynamic and individuated mental functions" (Levin 1988:72).
The following passage is helpful here:
Thus, to continue with our own line of investigation and try to draw
more sharply the phenomenological difference between concepts
and conceptions, we shall say that to conceive something, say x, is
to have a clear and distinct image or idea of that x, whereas to
conceive of x is as it were to prepare a mental space into which that
x might have been placed. If x is a flying horse then to conceive it
means to have before one a clear and distinct image of a flying
horse; to conceive of it means to allow for the possibility that such
an image might be produced. In the same way, to conceive a golden
mountain means to have before one a clear and distinct image of a
golden mountain; to conceive of a golden mountain means to allow
for the possibility that such an image might be produced. In both our
examples, where x is either a flying horse or a golden mountain, the
mental space prepared by the concept can in fact be filled - that is,
both objects can be conceived. A flying horse and a golden
mountain can be conceived because, even though neither exists, the
elements out of which they are composed are physical
characteristics, and those elements can be combined, both in a
conception and as the components of a concept.
In the two examples thus far considered, the distinction between
conceiving and conceiving of (and the correlative one between a
concept and a conception) has had no operative role to play; the
objects in both of our examples (and the types that they represent)
can both be conceived of and conceived. The utility of the
distinction emerges, however, when we consider examples in whose
composition there figures an attribute of affection or emotion.
Earlier we asked whether we can conceive a tree as sad or the sea
as laughing. I would now say that we can conceive of such 'objects'
but we cannot conceive them. In terms of our distinction we can
focus on an area in our minds such that it delimits the space into
which the concept of a sad tree would fit, but we are unable to fill
the space with a concept. In the process of focusing on that area,
however, we project a schema, an abstract model or framework
which, given the purpose of our exercise, we take to be an implicit
or potential representation of that 'object'. This schema or model
conveys the sense in which I am using the notion of conception
(Levin 1988:69-70).
It should be clear by now that the use of conceived of in the quote from
More Than Cool Reason is not carried out in the same spirit as that
preferred by Levin, since poets are credited with leading us to "new ways
of conceiving of our world," and that which is properly conceived of,
according to Levin, belongs to a deviant world. There is no proper
distinction between conceiving and conceiving of in the Lakoff and
Johnson program, at least as it is laid out in Metaphors We Live By;
Women, Fire and Dangerous Things; and More Than Cool Reason. In
More Than Cool Reason, Lakoff and Johnson do submit that:
[Poetic metaphors] allow the use of ordinary conceptual resources
in extraordinary ways. It is by these means that poets lead us
beyond the bounds of ordinary modes of thought and guide us
beyond the automatic and unconscious everyday use of metaphor.
What makes poetic metaphor noticeable and memorable is thus the
special, nonautomatic use to which ordinary, automatic modes of
thought are put (Lakoff and Johnson 1989:72).
It might seem as if we should somehow relate Levin's
concept/conception distinction to Lakoff and Johnson's automatic-mode-of-thought/nonautomatic-use-of-automatic-mode-of- thought
distinction. I think this is questionable for two reasons: First, it is part
and parcel of Lakoff and Johnson's program to make poetic metaphor
a sort of self-conscious variant of their metaphors we live by, which, it
is fair to say, do, indeed express concepts, as concepts are delineated by
Levin. Secondly, and very importantly, another reason one feels reluctant
to draw the concept-conception distinction in the Lakoff-Johnson
context, is that, for all their merits, in none of the three books referred to
here - Metaphors We Live By; Women, Fire and Dangerous Things; and
More Than Cool Reason - do Lakoff and Johnson define what a concept
is! Some important points are, to be sure, made: We are told, for
example, in More Than Cool Reason that "Concepts are cognitive in
nature; that is, they are part of human cognition. On this view, it is
contents, not words or phrases, that have meaning" (Lakoff and Turner
1989:111). Also, a myriad of combination terms in which the word
"conceptual" appears are defined, and the word is subject to constant
use. Neither "concept" nor "conceptual" however, are ever singled out
and defined. The attitude seems to be that there is enough intuitive
understanding of what a concept, so that corrective comments, such as
the previous one about being part of human cognition, are sufficient for
circumscribing what is meant.
All of this leads me to suspect that, even after More Than Cool
Reason, the aims of the Lakoff-Johnson and Levin programs are still
sufficiently different as to matter. Perhaps one could choose to regard
"Music is food" as a poetic metaphor á la Lakoff and Johnson and then
proceed to see which basis conceptual metaphors (those ones we live by)
serve to support it. Returning also to my remarks at the beginning of the
article, interesting things would certainly turn up on a study of
metaphors used to talk about music, or even as the result of an empirical
search for the "Music is food" metaphor in our linguistic habits. I would,
however, like to place myself between the Lakoff-Johnson and Levin
chairs by advancing the view that Levin's outlook on metaphor can be
combined with what he calls Lakoff and Johnson's metaphysical
argument, so that, indeed, metaphors which express conceptions in his
sense can also accorded a role in which they too "define an outlook on
'truth' and reality" (Levin 1979:120). The means of doing this, I submit,
is by shifting the discussion so as to deal with fictions and not
metaphors: I believe that Levin's conceptions - "progressively lapsing
impressions" - are often best understood as fictions. We will take a
closer look at this after examining Hausman's position on creative
metaphor.
Hausman
Carl Hausman is a philosopher whose approach to metaphor is largely
directed by concerns connected with the philosophy of creativity.
Metaphors are often viewed as suffusing our discourse with novelty and
as being creative in some sense. Hausman observes ". . . metaphors are
sometimes creative and at the same time appropriate or adequate to
something in 'the world' " (Hausman 1983:181). He views creative
metaphors ". . . as naming or reference-fixing expressions that give birth
to the referents they fix" (Hausman 1983:181). In honing in on what he
means by the "referent" of a creative metaphor, Hausman applies a
narrow use of "reference" to creative metaphors as follows: "A
metaphorical expression functions so as that it is creative of its
significance, thus providing new insight, through designating a unique,
extra-linguistic and extra-conceptual referent that had no place in the
intelligible world before the metaphor was articulated. There are three
key terms in the proposal, 'creative,' 'unique,' and 'extra-linguistic' or
'extra-conceptual' (I use the last two expressions interchangeably here).
These key terms indicate that in being creative, a metaphor must meet
two considerations: uniqueness and extra-linguisticality" (Hausman
1983:186). The criterion of uniqueness is mandatory in order to insure
that the referent of a creative metaphor is new. Hausman feels that extralinguisticality is necessary ". . . to justify saying that a creative metaphor
is 'appropriate,' 'faithful,' or 'fits the world.' " (Hausman 1983:186).
Hausman observes that in this sense, such metaphors are "true"
(Hausman puts the word in quotation marks) in a manner similar to the
manner in which literal expressions are true, but that the combination of
the uniqueness and extra-linguisticality conditions are what is special in
the metaphor case: "There is something to which the expression is
appropriate, some resistant or restraining condition; yet this condition
is new" (Hausman 1983:186). Using our old friend, "Juliet is the sun"
as an example, Hausman illustrates his view as follows:
What then is the referent or object that uniquely satisfies the
sentence as it is understood within its poetic context? It should be
clear that this question cannot be answered by offering a description
of the referent, unless the description is the metaphor itself. For if
the referent is new, a description would have only previously
established linquistic means, that is, antecedent senses, to rely on.
At best, then we might say that the new referent is Juliet-the-sun. As
with metaphors that establish themselves in language or theory,
insofar as the metaphor makes a lasting impact on our understanding
of human beings and nature, the names 'Juliet' or 'the sun' or both
might come to be used for this new referent without recurrent
recognition that it first occurred as an expression with a
metaphorical function (Hausman 1983:189-190).
Hausman understands Juliet-the-sun as an individual. In discussing the
ontology which results from this, Hausman, while recognizing the
problematic nature of some of Peirce's view of individuality, and
"although proposing something Peirce might not have intended"
(Hausman 1983:192) chooses to
. . . pursue his suggestion that individuals are real in a way other
than as spatially determinate entities. An individual is something
singular in experience that reacts - that acts to some extent against
our will, that acts so that just any interpretation of it is not
necessarily faithful or fitting. Thus, as said earlier, an individual
manifests its reality as a confluence of insistent contraints, as a
unique focal point of resistance in experience. And as new, referents
of creative metaphors are centers or cores of possibilities. They are
focal points of relevance for qualities (e.g., Juliet-the-sun), and in
turn newly created senses that would give absolute determinateness
to the focal center if they were fully actualized (Hausman
1983:192).
Hausman sums up by saying:
The implied ontology is a realism, patterned in part on suggestions
by C.S. Peirce, that leaves room for unique individuals that are
centers or foci of relevance. These resist and constrain the
appropriateness of qualities and properties to one another, as these
are apprehended in terms of senses. Individuals sustain clusters of
properties and, in turn, of senses. Thus, the significance of creative
metaphors is not reducible to one or more systems of senses. And
their significance is not limited to linguistic or conceptual
conventions. They can be creative in interacting with an independent
reality which they create - with individuals that constitute a dynamic
evolving world (Hausman 1983:194) (12).
Levin, Hausman and fictionalism
Staying with "Juliet is the sun" as our example, I think it is now possible
to say the following with respect to Levin's and Hausman's approaches:
For Levin Juliet-the-sun represents a conception, a schema which
initiates a cognitive process which might be characterized as striving for
convergence at a sort of asymptote - Juliet-the-sun - which it never can
reach, since Juliet-the-sun resides at a world which is very deviant with
respect to our own. The ontological status of Juliet-the-sun is not at issue
for Levin, other than as a schema. Hausman, on the other hand, posits
the existence of this Juliet-the-sun asymptote, but as a Peirce-inspired
dynamic individual. I think that Juliet-the-sun is most interestingly
understood as a sort of Vaihingerian fiction, which, in the manner
discussed in the above presentation of Vaihinger's view, helps us to
indirectly reach an object of thought by means of the artifice of fiction.
Even though Vaihinger is concerned with scientific theorizing in the
following passage, I think that the definition of the purpose of thought
supports this interpretation of Levin and Hausman and nicely captures
some of their salient intentions with their respective theories:
If sensations are the starting-point of all logical activity and at the
same time the terminus to which they must run, if only to render
control possible (and as we remarked above, it must remain
undecided whether we must regard the logical functions between
these two points as having some inherent purpose), then the purpose
of thought may be defined as the elaboration and adjustment of the
material of sensation for the attainment of a richer and fuller
sensational life of experience (Vaihinger 1935:6).
Vaihinger sees fictions as important artifices for the "elaboration and
adjustment of the material of sensation for the attainment of a richer and
fuller sensational life of experience." As was pointed out in the
presentation of Vaihinger's thought earlier on, Vaihinger sees fictions
(1) as mental structures, a view which connects with Levin's schema
notions; (2) as organic creations of an organic psyche, a view which
coalesces with the LJT view of meaning as embodied; and (3) as tools
for indirectly obtaining objects of thought, a view which takes into
account much of the matter which concerns Hausman, but with, it seems
to me, fewer and less problematic ontological commitments.
Note that the preceding passage from Vaihinger provides a sort of
criterion for deciding whether or not (C) is worth adopting: the extent to
which it allows us to elaborate and adjust "the material of sensation for
the attainment of a richer and fuller sensational life of experience."
Relativized to the discussion at hand, three questions are relevant: (1)
Does (C), indeed, provide us with an object of thought which aids us in
the elaboration and adjustment of the material of audio sensation, so as
to attain a richer and fuller sensational life of experience?; and (2) Does
the sonic material so chosen coincide intuitively with what we usually
regard as music? (This is essentially the question of whether or not (M)
is a good definition of music.); and (3) Does (C) help us to reorient and
direct our thinking about music in such a way as to understand this
concept better?
Notice that each of the above questions can be addressed
independently of the other two. It is possible that (1) receives a positive
answer, while (2) and (3) receive negative ones. It may be so that the
counterfactual hearing suggested by (1) strikes at least some readers as
an interesting way to try to stucture audio experiences "for the heck of
it," but that no connection to music is perceived. It may also be the case
that it is acknowledged that (C) does, indeed, pick out music in a
manner which coincides with our intuitions about what music is, but
does it in such an ad hoc, irrelevant way that it does not teach us
anything about what music really is (13) and neither does it boost our
sensational experience. Lastly, it may do something to direct our
thinking about what music is so as to give us some insights into the
concept which are neither sufficient for defining it, nor of such a nature
as to boost the quality of our audio experience to yield richer or fuller
experiences of this kind. (I think that it is more difficult to maintain the
independence of (3) from both (2) and (1) than the independence of (1)
from (2) and (3), or the independence of (2) from (1) and (3), but it is,
nevertheless, plausible.)
Grounding , fictions and sound-food
Although I think it is arguable that a positive answer to any one of (1),
(2) or (3) would justify entertainment of (C), it is my belief that (1), (2)
and (3) all are answered in the positive. We shall now embark upon the
enterprise of looking for reasons for entertaining (C). Note that this is a
project quite different from that of going on a hunt for basic conceptual
metaphors which support (C). This is rather an enterprise which is
closely related to what Alan Tormey calls the supportive grounding for
a metaphor, when the metaphor has been recast as an implausible
counterfactual. Tormey remarks that "what distinguishes metaphors
from other subspecies of counterfactual will be found largely in the
difference in their grounding" (Tormey 1983:242). He points out that
Thoroughly plausible counterfactuals - for example, "If this piece of
platinum had been heated, it would have expanded" - are reasonably
supposed to be sustained or supported by relevant causal laws or
nomological relations. Metaphors, as implausible counterfactuals,
can expect no support from this quarter. . . . Lawlike relations are
usually irrelevant to the probity or aptness of metaphor - namely,
providing a "paraphrase" - is actually a procedure for grounding or
sustaining the metaphor (Tormey 1983:242).
Tormey submits that paraphrases do not translate metaphors any more
than the enumeration of inductive evidence translates the causal laws
which are sustained by it:
We can understand a metaphor without knowing what sustains it,
just as we can grasp the meaning of the conditional statement 'If you
drink the water in Naples, you'll become ill' without knowing its
grounds (namely, that the water contains, among other things, high
levels of sodium trioxide).
What have been commonly mislabeled as paraphrases of
metaphor are not crude and misguided efforts at translation, but
serious attempts to support or sustain the metaphor by citing, inter
alia, shared properties and analogical resemblances. We have been
victimized by a sort of logical dislocation in our readines to
promote the evidence or grounds for the aptness of metaphors
to the position of a semantic surrogate for the metaphor. But
metaphors do not mean whatever it is that sustains them. (My
bolding, CMG.) 'Man is a wolf' does not translate: 'Man is
voracious, cunning, crafty, or cruel' (and so on), though these
supposedly shared properties may be good reason for advancing the
metaphor in the first place. Thus, on the view that metaphors are
elliptical counterfactuals, there is no danger of commiting the dread
'heresy of paraphrase,' for there is no paraphrase. To the extent that
it is amenable to analysis, the meaning of a metaphor may be
brought out by recasting it in counterfactual form, and purported
paraphrases may be relocated where they belong, providing grounds
for the metaphor and supplying arguments for its appropriateness
(Tormey 1983:242-243) (14).
Earlier we pointed out that in order to distinguish the sort of grounding
given for metaphors which have been recast as counterfactuals from the
grounding provided for fictions understood as counterfactual constructs,
we would refer to the latter procedure as fictional grounding. We return
to (C) and the matter of whether or not (1) - (3) receive positive answers.
Recall that (1) - (3) were as follows:
(1)Does (C), indeed, provide us with an object of thought which
aids us in the elaboration and adjustment of the material of audio
sensation, so as to attain a richer and fuller sensational life of
experience?
(2)Does the sonic material so chosen coincide intuitively with what
we usually regard as music? (This is essentially the question of
whether or not (M) is a good definition of music.)
(3)Does (C) help us to reorient and direct our thinking about music
in such a way as to understand this concept better?
The fictional grounding for (C)
Let us now look at at least some of the points which should be included
in a fictional grounding for (C):
- The suggestion that the sound-food fiction yields a characterization of
music accounts for universality which is always rearing its head among
our intuitions about music, while allowing for enormous variation
among practitioners with respect to both taste and practice.
- It allows for the "inheritance" by music of a great many qualities which
we take for granted in the food model, but which seem to be highly
problematic on other theories of music and its ontology:
- its naturalness;
- the nature of our need for it, which often seems to be
appropriately conceptualized in terms of hunger and satiation;
- the feeling that some is more natural than others within and
across style types;
- its importance and immediacy;
- freedom to describe it in terms which we see fit. The conflicts
about what is the proper way to talk about music assume an
appropriately silly character when we reflect on the enormous
freedom allowed in the verbal expression of gustatory
experience. To be sure, both areas are possessed of a
professional, technical vocabulary, but no one would dream of
discrediting a person's ability to appreciate a gustatory
experience, simply because he or she could not describe it in
technical terms or rewrite the recipe.
- We are given an intuitive model for distinguishing music from "sonic
art," which can be theoretically and practical useful. Traditionally, we
have had recourse to the distinctions broadly provided by speech, music
and noise, where music has been a sort of catch-all for sonic phenomena
which were somehow created and somehow structured, but were neither
speech nor noise. On the suggestion presented in this paper, interesting
formal and creative things may be done with sounds, so that they may
comprise a form of sonic art, but if the proper sort of counterfactual
hearing is not involved, what is at issue is not music, simply by the
default of being neither speech nor noise.
- "Sound-feeling" would be the fiction of choice for many, based on the
work, for example, of Susanne Langer, and the nature of Western
musical aesthetics ever since the Baroque period's fascination with
music and rhetoric. Some afterthought, however, reveals that the sound-food fiction provides a more direct model of an experience of something
external which is internalized. "Direct" is a key word here: one of the
problematic qualities of feelings is that they themselves are most often
about or caused by something else. There is not space to pursue this
here, but it could be an interesting avenue of inquiry to examine to what
extent the reformulation of our fixation with sound and feeling in terms
of counterfactually hearing music as "sound-feeling" could account for
the persistent notion that music is about something, rather than tending
to see this as a sign of music's inherently linguistic nature.
- The old and tired debates about scores get put into new perspective.
With some luck, the notion of score-as-recipe could have a healthy effect
on the preoccupation with scores as identifiers of musical works or as
their essential component.
- The serious entertainment of the sound-food fiction highlights the
intentionality of both food and music and can reorient our attitudes
toward the intentions of composers and artists in a more fruitful
direction. Not all stuctured non-speech and non-noise is music in a
culture, and neither is all prepared nourishment food there.
- We are provided with a possible candidate for a generalized theory of
music for sentient, intelligent beings. The discussion of what music
might be for aliens and androids takes on an added dimension, as long
as they have to engage in activities which we can understand as akin to
eating and as long as they have organs which can process soundwaves (15).
Note that since the creation of a fiction is involved, this approach posits
language as prior to music.
- Serious eating (tasting) provides a useful model for serious listening.
- The aesthetic of disinterestedness, which has come down to us from the
eighteenth century, is currently being questioned. For example, Arnold
Berleant writes: "Disinterestedness is historically important for having
helped us recognize the distinctiveness of aesthetic experience, but it is
misleading in claiming its separateness, not just from the other areas of
experience, but from the very person of the observer" (Berleant
1992:158). When the sound-food fiction is taken seriously, two
important things occur: distinctiveness is assured, due to the inherent
counterfactuality of the enterprise, yet disinterestedness is out of place,
except as a pathological condition, since disinterest as an attitude toward
food is usually a sign of ill health.
Conclusion
In a recent article, Peter Kivy laments the "crypto-linguistic" model of
musical understanding as it has been applied ad nauseum to absolute
music:
But the question we should be asking is not: "How does absolute
music, appearances to the contrary, manage to represent?" That is
the evasion. Rather, we should be asking: "What is it about us, and
about our world, that has made the pure contentless art of musical
design so important for our lives in the past one-hundred-and-fifty
years, but not before? What needs of ours does it serve? And why
have other peoples not felt these needs, or we until so recently in
our history? What distinguishes sonic from visual design, that seems
to make the former play so different a role in our lives from the
latter? What does it all mean - but not in the semantic sense?..."
I think this is a great challenge, and will spare us another dreary
round of philosophical books and papers trying to understand
absolute music as a representational or linguistic art. The books and
papers get more and more clever, more and more philosophically
sophisticated, and, for me at least, less and less plausible. The lady
doth protest too much, methinks. I believe that, until we meet this
challenge head on, and try philosophically to understand pure music
on its own terms - which is to say as a pure decorative art - we will
remain with an important and, to date, mysterious aspect of our
artistic natures unexplained and, worse still, unexamined (Kivy
1991:553-554).
The sound-food fiction can help to solve many of the problems posed in
this passage. The way in which this fiction puts distance between itself
and any form of crypto-linguistic model for musical understanding is
beautifully underscored in the following remarks by Susanne Langer:
Another recommendation for words is that they have no value
except as symbols (or signs); in themselves they are completely
trivial. This is a greater advantage than philosophers of language
generally realize. A symbol which interests us also as an object is
distracting. It does not convey its meaning without obstruction. For
instance, if the word "plenty" were replaced by a succulent, ripe,
real peach, few people could attend entirely to the mere concept of
quite enough when confronted with such a symbol. The more barren
and indifferent the symbol, the greater is its semantic power.
Peaches are too good to act as words; we are too much interested in
peaches themselves. But little noises are ideal conveyors of
concepts, for they give us nothing but their meaning. That is the
source of the "transparency" of language, on which several scholars
have remarked. Vocables in themselves are so worthless that we
cease to be aware of their physical presence at all, and become
conscious only of their connotations, denotations, or other meanings.
Our conceptual activity seems to flow through them, rather than
merely accompany them, as it accompanies other experiences that
we endow with significance. They fail to impress us as
"experiences" in their own right, unless we have difficulty in using
them as words, as we do with a foreign language or a technical
jargon until we have mastered it.
But the greatest virtue of verbal symbols is, probably, their
tremendous readiness to enter into combinations. There is
practically no limit to the selections and arrangements we can make
of them. This is largely due to the economy Lord Russell remarked,
the speed with which each word is produced and presented and
finished, making way for another word. This makes it possible for
us to grasp whole groups of meanings at a time, and make a new,
total, complex concept out of the separate combinations of rapidly
passing words (Langer 1957:75-76).
It is interesting note that Suzanne Langer, a well-known proponent of the
music and emotions linkup - she regarded music as a "graph of the
emotions" - unwittingly supports the notion of food as an ontogenetic
fiction for music which will free music from being misunderstood as a
literary art. Note how well what she says in the above serves to
underscore the kind of attention that would need to be paid to sound in
order to hear it as if it, were, say, a ripe, succulent peach, and how
different this attention is to that which is paid to an essentially linguistic
construct. One point on which she is mistaken, however, is her low
estimation of the way in which musical sounds could combine in order
to function as language. I have given an example, in the guise of a
thought experiment, of a culture which uses what we call music
exclusively for the encoding of and communication of propositional
thought, i.e. as language. That this example may seem strange to people
is, I suggest, due to considerations along Langerian lines, not to any a
priori impossibility or even implausibility. (16)
* * * * *
The suggestion that sound-food should act as the fiction which
appropriately intentionalizes our concept of music is, to be sure, a
controversial one, and it has been the modest aim of this article to try to
point out that there are enough reasons for integrating this approach to
intentional concepts within the philosophical discussion of metaphor and
of aesthetics in general. In this case, the proof of the pudding is in the
hearing. As with any meal, this discussion will now come to an end,
since there is no point in serving more once the level of satiation has
been reached, regardless of the number of dishes remaining, so further
discussion will be saved for future occasions.
Acknowledgements
I wish to express my gratitude to Veikko Rantala and Finn Collin for
valuable comments and criticism with regard to the present paper and to
Anders Engstrøm for the same with regard to an earlier version.
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1. Cynthia M. Grund, FD, (b. 1956) is an ekstern lektor (adjunct associate
professor) in philosophy in the Department of Education, Philosophy and Rhetoric
at the University of Copenhagen and a forskningsadjunkt (researcher) in the same
department on a three-year NOS-H (Joint Committee of the Nordic Research
Councils for the Humanities) grant. This article is the last chapter in her doctoral
dissertation in philosophy for Tampere University, Tampere, Finland, entitled
Constitutive Counterfactuality: The Logic of Interpretation in Metaphor and
Music. Tilbage
2. Of late, much stress has been put upon the extent to which linguistic meaning is
embodied. By this is meant that the ways in which we form concepts and then
interpret the world conceptually is a direct function of the fact that the "I" which is
involved is an "I" which is in a human body, and which is obliged to interact, in all
its characteristic physicality, with the world. Lakoff provides the following
definitions:
Conceptual embodiment
The idea that the properties of certain categories are a consequence of the
nature of human biological capacities and of the experience of functioning in a
physical and social environment. It is contrasted with the idea that concepts
exist independently of the bodily nature of any thinking beings and independent
of their experience.
Functional embodiment
The idea that certain concepts are not merely understood intellectually; rather,
they are used automatically, unconciously, and without noticeable effort as part
of normal functioning. Concepts used in this way have a different, and more
important, psychological status than those that are only thought about
consciously (Lakoff 1987:12-13).
In addition, the connection between counterfactual conditionals like (C) and
metaphors is something about which I have a good deal to say elsewhere - see
Grund 1988 and Grund 1995. Tilbage
3. Within musical semiotics, related problems arise regarding the nature of the
musical sign. See Grund 1996b. Tilbage
4. See Grund 1988 and Grund 1995. Tilbage
5. Actually, the counterfactual analysis addresses many of the issues raised by
Lakoff and Johnson in More than Cool Reason. See, for example, p. 5 ff. in More
than Cool Reason: "If a lifetime is a day, then the setting sun is old age." Tilbage
6. For more background on both Vaihinger's and Bentham's treatments of
fictionalism, see Grund 1996b and Grund 1996a. Tilbage
7. See Grund 1996b:7-8. Tilbage
8. See, for example, Lakoff 1987:269 ff. Tilbage
9. Of course, the fact that this discussion is couched in terms of logic is only
gratifying for this writer, since the treatments which I have suggested for analyzing
metaphors do, indeed, rely on a form of intensional, possible-worlds semantics. Tilbage
10. This is also foreshadowed in Bentham's writings. See Grund 1996a.
Given that the present paper is concerned with both comparing and contrasting the
ways in which metaphors and fictions function, the following remarks by I.A.
Richards are of interest:
Throughout the history of Rhetoric, metaphor has been treated
as a sort of happy extra trick with words, an opportunity to exploit
the accidents of their versatility, something in place occasionally
but requiring unusual skill and caution. In brief, a grace or ornament
or added power of language, not its constitutive form. Sometimes,
it is true, a writer will venture on speculations that go deeper. I
have just been echoing Shelley's observation that "Language is
vitally metaphorical; that it, it marks the before unapprehended
relations of things and perpetuates their apprehension, until words,
which represent them, become, through time, signs for portions or
classes of thought instead of pictures of integral thoughts: and then,
if no new poets should arise to create afresh the associations which
have thus been disorganised, language will be dead to all the nobler
purposes of human intercourse." But that is an exceptional
utterance and its implications have not been taken account of by
rhetoricians. Nor have philosophers, as a body, done much better,
though historians of language have long taught that we can find no
word or description for any of the intellectual operations which, if
its history is known, is not seen to have been taken, by metaphor,
from a description of some physical happening. Only Jeremy
Bentham, as successor to Bacon and Hobbes, insisted - with his
technique of archetypation and phraseoplerosis - upon one inference that might be drawn; namely, that the mind and all its doings are
fictions. He left it to Coleridge, F.H. Bradley and Vaihinger to point
to the further inference; namely, that matter and its adventures, and
all the derivative objects of contemplation, are fictions too, of
varied rank because of varied service (Richards 1936:90-91).
Although I sense that this quote displays the sort of tendency towards the conflation
of fictions and metaphors against which I warn in the present paper, it reveals
interesting insights into the importance of paying attention to the work of Bentham
and Vaihinger when dealing with the constitutive aspects of language. Tilbage
11. An important aspect of Tormey's treatment is that truth and grounding are in
many ways independent of one another. I think that this is a good thing. Whereas
Tormey is very pessimistic about providing truth conditions for the sorts of
implausible counterfactuals which underlie metaphors on his view, however, I
propose truth conditions in terms of an intensional, possible worlds semantics in
Grund 1988. A provocative upshot of all of this that if we regard the acceptance on
the part of an agent of the counterfactual underlying a given metaphor as a belief,
allow that that counterfactual may be true or false, and moreover regard its
grounding as justification for the belief, we have that a metaphor can, indeed,
represent justified, true belief, and thus, at least in the Socratic tradition, can be said
to represent knowledge which the agent possesses. Tilbage
12. Hausman (1983) has been the source for quotations in the present essay, since
the presentation there is succinctly relevant to the matters being dealt with here.
Readers who would like more insight into the broader context of Hausman's
program are referred to Hausman (1989). Tilbage
13. Sometimes such procedures are, in fact, valuable. During the seminar Metaforer
i kultur og samfund, held October 24-25 in Copenhagen and sponsored by the
Danish Network for Metaphor, Culture and Cognition, a presentation was given by
Carsten Hansen and Peter Widell in which they presented a fascinating ad hoc way
of identifying metaphors within open, machine-readable text corpora, which in
essence exploited only syntactic and frequential properties of words in the texts. The
frequency of correct "hits" when identifying metaphors was astoundingly high, even
though it was clear nothing about what metaphors really are was involved. Tilbage
14. The Grounding Hypothesis in More Than Cool Reason must from the outset be
distinguished from what Alan Tormey means when he writes of the grounding for
a metaphor, which has been recast as a counterfactual conditional. Lakoff and
Turner advocate the Grounding Hypothesis as a correct alternative to what they dub
the Literal Meaning Theory, which they believe "not only is incorrect but also leads
to many other fallacies" (Lakoff and Turner 1989:114). They sum up the Literal
Meaning Theory as follows:
Now, for Lakoff and Johnson, the Grounding Hypothesis
addresses the question of how metaphorical understanding is possible at all.
Generally, it states that metaphorical understanding is grounded in nonmetaphorical understanding. But, because of the complexity of metaphorical
understanding, it must be stated more precisely than that.
The Grounding Hypothesis
-
Many conventional concepts are semantically autonomous or have aspects
that are semantically autonomous.
-
Semantically autonomous concepts (or aspects of concepts) are grounded
in the habitual or routine bodily and social patterns we experience,
and in what we learn of the experience of others.
-
Semantically autonomous concepts (or aspects of concepts) are not
mind-free. They are not somehow given to us directly by the objective world.
They are instead grounded in the patterns of experience that we routinely
live.
-
The source domain of the metaphor is characterized in terms of concepts
(or aspects of concepts) that are semantically autonomous.
-
In this sense, metaphorical understanding is grounded in semantically autonomous
conceptual structure (Lakoff and Johnson 1989:113).
Lakoff and Johnson define semantic autonomy as follows: "An expression in a
language is semantically autonomous if it is meaningful completely on its own terms.
It follows that any expression that is semantically autonomous does not derive any
of its meaning from metaphor. Nor does it derive its meaning through other
conceptual relationships that stand outside of classical logic, such as metonymy,
irony, conversational principles, and so on" (Lakoff and Johnson 1982:111). Tilbage
15. Some thoughts about aliens and music appear in Grund 1995, but it is interesting
to note that they have also made their entrance into the forum of debate over the
definition of works of art in Currie 1993 and Stecker 1996. Tilbage
16. See Grund 1995. Tilbage
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