I accidentally hit the send button. I started to re-write it but I'm out
of time now. I won't be able to clean this up, or re-write it, until
tonight. But I did clean up the last sentence so hopefully you know
where I was going with this response.
Matt
On 12/8/15 2:16 PM, Matt Faunce wrote:
Clark,
Are you saying that we should judge music like we judge medicine—e.g., just
because certain music works for me doesn't mean music that doesn't work for me
is bad? Similarly, should we judge music like we judge mathematics relative to
their applications?
Just like I can recognize that a class of certain medicine doesn't work for me
but does for others, I can recognize that certain subsets of that class are
more effective. This recognition is by analogy. By analogy I can recognize that
that the surprise in Haydn's Surprise Symphony was invigorating to people in
the Classical Period, even though its not invigorating to me because I can
relate to more modern musical surprises.
Are you saying that we'll always have a way to properly judge music from other
times? That there will always be an over-riding category to adjudicate the
objects being compared?
Matt
On Dec 8, 2015, at 1:41 PM, Clark Goble <cl...@lextek.com> wrote:
Is the quality of music determined by the final opinion of that music?
My first response is that "in the long run" for Peirce is a normative idea in
science and does not apply necessarily--maybe only very little, or not at all--to the
fine arts.
It is true that Bach and Mozart, for example, after hundreds of years, still
have considerable appeal. In my opinion, some of this is the result of (or at
least involves) acoustical phenemona which they
exploit--harmonies,counterpoints, etc.--which really do have a visceral effect
on the human nervous system. But I do not think that it is at all certain that
even they will be appreciated in several hundred or so years.
Aren’t we making a category error here?
Peirce’s regulatory notion of final opinion seems tied towards representations
and their truth values. This isn’t to deny we can talk about final
interpretants, but more that certain representation are finalized. So the claim
“this music is of high quality” meaning aesthetic value seems something we can
determinate and thus sensible for consideration as a final interpretant.
My sense though is that we need to unpack what we’re actually analyzing. After
all as Gary notes just because something is held as true today need not imply
it will in the future. This is both due to the nature of inquiry but also I
think because we’re conflating two issues. The first whether something is
appealing to some finite group. Obviously just because something appeals to one
group it need not appeal to an other group. The second issue is whether
something is universally aesthetical. These are two very different questions.
One can answer differently for each.
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