Types, indicated and initiated

British Journal of Aesthetics

Volumn 42, Issue 2, 2002, Pages 105-127

  Howell, Robert ^a  

^a STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 61149275726     PISSN: 00070904     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/bjaesthetics/42.2.105     Document Type: Article

References (23)

1. I argue this point, for the case of literature, in 'Ontology and the Nature of the Literary Work', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 60 (2002), pp. 67-79.
2. The idea that distinct musical compositions may share the same sound structure has been stressed by Jerrold Levinson, Music, Art, and Metaphysics (Ithaca: Cornell U.P., 1990)
3. and Gregory Currie, An Ontology of Art (London: Macmillan, 1989).
4. For related examples, see Kendall Walton's 'Categories of Art', Philosophical Review, vol. 56 (1970), pp. 334-367
5. which has influenced these authors, and 'The Presentation and Portrayal of Sound Patterns', in Jonathan Dancy, J. M. E. Moravcsik, and C. C. W. Taylor (eds), Human Agency (Stanford: Stanford U.P., 1988), pp. 237-257.
6. Recall also Jorge Luis Borges's 'Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote', in Ficciones (New York: Grove Press, 1962).
7. Levinson, chs 4 and 10, focusing (as I will below) on the 'fully notated "classical" composition[s] of Western culture' (pp. 64-65). I ignore fine points in his treatment, such as p. 78 on 'performing-means structures' and the further ideas at pp. 261-262 and in his review of Currie in The Pleasures of Aesthetics (Ithaca: Cornell U.P., 1996), ch. 8.
8. Walton, who differs in places with Levinson, develops a subtle general approach that identifies a musical work (of any sort) with 'a set of sound patterns plus the circumstances that go into determining how its performances are to be heard' ('Presentation', p. 257).
9. Amie Thomasson in Fiction and Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1999) agrees that musical works are created abstracta dependent on the activities of their composers. Currie denies that musical works are created and are ontologically tethered to their particular composers. However, he still supposes that these works essentially involve, besides an abstract sound type, the specific type of historical process through which the composer discovered that abstract type.
10. Julian Dodd, 'Musical Works as Eternal Types', British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 40 (2000), pp. 424-440. Otherwise unspecified page references will be to this paper. I follow Dodd hereafter in focusing on Levinson's work, although Dodd's basic attack also might be extended to ideas such as Walton's and Thomasson's.
11. Peter Kivy, among others, maintains that musical works are pure, eternally existing sound structures. (See the references in Levinson, ch. 10.) Nelson Goodman and Catherine Elgin, Reconceptions in Philosophy (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988), ch. 3, reject the idea that Menard's text, although identical with Cervantes's, is a different work.
12. Wolterstorff, Works and Worlds of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), pp. 47, 50-51, and 88,
13. Were determinism true about a contingent, temporally initiated particular such as Lincoln, a causal chain would extend forward from any moment m at which Lincoln's existence is determined to Lincoln at his birth in 1809. The existence of that chain would, I think, imply that such properties as being a son of Lincoln (or simply being Lincoln) and its complement exist from m to 1809 as well as from 1809 until Lincoln's death in 1865. Yet the universe is apparently not deterministic in this way and those properties do not thus pre-exist Lincoln. However, once Lincoln exists there will in normal circumstances be causal chains - which need be only probabilistic - that begin with events involving Lincoln during 1809-1865 and extend past his death to any arbitrary future moment f. It seems moreover, that events are tied essentially to the events that cause them. Hence (given such a causal chain) it will be true at f that there is a link that begins at f and traces back to Lincoln in 1865 and earlier. Because that link exists at f, properties like those mentioned will themselves exist at f and at other moments after Lincoln's death. (The existence of the property being a son of Lincoln at f will be constituted by, roughly, the existence at f of a link that starts from events at f and runs back to Lincoln in 1865 and so makes Lincoln, who does not actually exist at f, available at f as a subject of predications involving the general relational property someone's being a son of someone. The property being a son of Lincoln thus begins in 1809 and persists as long as Lincoln is made available in this way. Using that property retrospectively, we in 2002 can then consider Socrates who died in 399 B.C., and note that he was not a son of Lincoln.) Similar observations apply to singular propositions involving Lincoln. For related views, see Robert Merrihew Adams, 'Time and Thisness', in Joseph Almog, John Perry, and Howard Wettstein (eds), Themes from Kaplan (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1989). pp. 23-42. Thanks to Julian Dodd for questions prompting these remarks.
14. and D. M. Armstrong, Universals (Boulder: Westview Press, 1989), ch. 5.
15. For questions about Armstrong's criterion besides those below, see Levinson's review, Philosophical Review, vol. 101 (1992), pp. 654-660.
16. However, surely the idea is that, although Beethoven does not create the (for Wolterstorff, eternal) type that is the Fifth Symphony, Beethoven brings it about that that type first satisfies the predicate 'is a work'. Such a position is close to Dodd's own. For more on Wolterstorff's view, see his 'The Work of Making a Work of Music', in Philip Alperson (ed.), Wliat is Music?, 2nd edn (University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 1994).
17. For theories of properties, see Philip Bricker, 'Properties', in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy Supplement (New York: Macmillan, 1996)
18. and Levinson's 'Attributes', in Handbook of Metaphysics and Ontology (Munich: Philosophia Verlag, 1991).
19. I ignore issues about, for instance, the existence, given the laws of physics, of the trans-uranium elements (einsteinium, meitnerium, and so on) as (type) elements even before they were synthesized beginning in the 1950s. (Compare also hen's teeth, a type apparently genetically set within the chicken, manifest in the bird's evolutionary past, and able to appear again given environmental changes.) Even if (as seems not clear) such types exist before their instantiation, they then still have definite causal relations through physical laws to what does actually exist. However, such is not the case with all the many other uninstantiated patterns that arbitrary properties specify. By speaking of patterns that have a place in causal chains, I have in mind the sort of higher-level property causation - here extended to the patterns that the properties specify - that is argued for by philosophers of science such as Ron McClamrock, Existential Cognition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), ch. 3,
20. and Elliott Sober, The Nature of Selection, 2nd edn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
21. In a clear-headed essay which appeared after I had completed the main body of this paper, Stefano Predelli notes the need for a new entity if, on 'structuralist' views like Levinson's or (apparently) mine, one is to allow for the creation of the musical work ('Musical Ontology and the Argument from Creation', British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 41 [2001], pp. 279-292; see p. 289). He concludes, however, that such views seem unable to meet the creation requirement satisfactorily. If my account in this paper is correct, that conclusion is premature.
22. Note also Levinson's qualifications in Music, Art, and Metaphysics, pp. 163-64 (and p. 145 of his review of Currie), which drop any requirement that indicated types must be tied essentially to particular times.
23. I thank Anthony Ungar and Ron McClamrock for helpful reactions and Jerrold Levinson for encouragement and suggestions. Final revision has benefited from Peter Lamarque's editorial attentions and from conversations with Amie Thomasson, Robert Stecker, and Kendall Walton. Email correspondence with Julian Dodd (who I am sure remains unconvinced) was also helpful. For another defence of indicated types, see Saam Trivedi, 'Against Musical Works as Eternal Types', British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 42 (2002), pp. 73-82.