An Outline of Key Claims in
Diana Raffman's Language, Music, and Mind

Cognitive Science and Aesthetics

Raffman quotes (and criticizes) well-known aesthetician George Dickie's statement of doubt about the role of any contributions that can be made by empirical studies to the field of aesthetics: "I am convinced that the problem of the description of the nature of aesthetic experience is not a task to which the techniques of empirical science are relevant." (George Dickie, "Is psychology relevant to aesthetics?," The Philosophical Review 76 (1961), p. 302.

Raffman disagrees and wants to show that "cognitive science is rich in implications for the philosophy of art." In particular, she lauds cognitive science as providing empirical bases for understanding phenomena such as musical perception and musical experience. Still, Raffman does believe that there is a proper role in aesthetic theory for more traditional "conceptual analysis": namely, to address certain kinds of questions of value. She also emphasizes that studies in the field of aesthetics may have very significant impact on cognitive science because they may help us better define and understand vexed questions in the philosophy of mind, such as whether there are "qualia" and whether all conscious experience is propositional in nature.

Music and Modularity

Raffman follows Fodor's serial computational theory of mind. On this theory, roughly, she says, there is a musical "module" of the mind; we can describe musical understanding as involving "unconscious processing of increasingly abstract mental representations of an acoustic signal."

This means that there are various mental computations or inferences performed, as the mind processes acoustic inputs and produces musical understanding. Perception begins only after the operations of a hardwired level of input processing or "transducing" of acoustic features like frequency and intensity of tones. The steps occur roughly as follows:

Input System
Proximal stimulations --> Transducers --> Central Processor

Output System
Central Processor --> Cognitive System --> Mental Representations of the perceptual system

There are also connectionist theories of music; the most developed accounts are by Bharucha (see Music Listings in the Bibliography).

Music and Language

There are many similarities between music and ordinary language. Description and analysis of these similarities fall into two main areas, syntax and semantics.

Syntax

Here Raffman relies largely on F. Lerdahl and R. Jackendoff's A Generative theory of Tonal Music (MIT, 1983). They develop an account of "M-grammar" or musical grammar, the rules for assigning analyses ("structural descriptions") for incoming musical strings. They describe various basic analytical rules of four main types: metrical, grouping, time-span, and prolongational. The theory has a good deal of complexity, as it also involves ways in which the rules interact and various ways of ordering musical representations according to their level of abstraction.

A key part of the generative theory of musical grammar is that there are certain schemas of pitch relationships that define the western tonal system. In essence, you must have these schemas "in your head" in order to be able to process and understand tonal music. Schemas are employed in actual music perception, that is, we hypothesize schemas to remember and anticipate meaning. A schema can be described as "a general large, complex unit of knowledge... a template, network, or list... something that helps us chunk information."

Semantics
Here Raffman focuses on two key analogies:
The grasp of meaning is the explanandum for a semantics of either natural language or music: The structural explanation of music is supposed to explain our "musical understanding"--the way music sounds to an experienced listener. This is the musics' "meaning" to us and the underlying structural account should explain why we have such experience.
The postulation of grammatical structures is guided by an appeal to semantic considerations. That is, the account of structures in musical "grammar" ultimately aims to account for our experiences of meaning in certain of our "feelings" about music, such as our feeling of beat strength in 4/4 time or of certain "tensions" and "relaxations" in the music.

Because of these analogies, we can provide a more precise account of music's resemblance to natural language: (a) listeners with the relevant knowledge can't help but understand incoming strings; (b) listeners can be mistaken about what certain phrases mean; and (c) the work communicates a meaning. (see pp. 57-9)

Musical Processing and Musical Experience

We thus get an improved or more detailed picture than we saw just above (see p. 67):

The "shallow" level
Proximal stimulations-->Auditory transducers-->Transduced Representations-->The "N-level" (Nuance level of nuance pitches and nuance intervals-->inference of the "mental score"-->

The structural level
Rules of musical grammar ("M-grammar") go into effect-->a structural description is assigned

OR:
Acoustic signals -->Chromatic pitch events-->rules of Musical Grammar-->a mental score (mental recovery of the score)

Musical Ineffability

Many philosophers, and especially Susanne Langer and Stanely Cavell, have written on the topic of musical ineffability. (See especially Cavell's "Music Discomposed" in Art, Mind, and Religion, ed. W.H. Capitan and D. D. Merrill (Pittsburgh, 1967).) The basic idea is that there are some things in art that can only be known by immediate sensing and feeling. In music, to describe these you must simply try to point or direct someone's attention to aspects of the work as it is in progress. Langer writes, "Music articulates the forms that language cannot set forth."

Raffman describes and defends three types of musical ineffability:

Of these, Raffman is most interested in and spends the most time on type (3), nuance ineffability. This is the type she believes poses the most serious problem and challenge for a propositionalist account of the mind like Daniel Dennett's.

Musical Ineffability Challenges Dennett

Raffman argues that "some sensory perceptual states have contents--and I mean legitimate representational contents--that are consciously accessible but not reportable." It is important to see that this challenge is based not any argument in favor of ineffable "qualia," but rather on bona fide representational contents of "musical nuances" which we do experience but which we cannot remember, name, or label. The existence of such ineffable musical knowledge is something that any adequate theory of the mind must account for and explain.


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