Text/Sound/Music.4

Definitions of words consist in other words. If you don't know what a given word means, you are likely to get pointed at other words, either in reference books or in conversation, to gain some clarity. If, on the other hand, you don't know what any words mean, you are shit out of luck. And if you want to know how words mean, you may not find that many clues in dictionaries (although one approach to this problem I haven't seen, and haven't taken up myself, is to do a social or behavioral psychology of dictionaries).

What do you consult if you want to know what a given note means? I think it is here where the analogy between words and notes seems most threadbare. But, if we are feeling generous, we might say, "you find out from the rest of the piece". Because certainly, if a note has any meaning, that meaning can only be found in the entirety of the piece of music in which it was sounded, and nowhere else. Poets might feel this way too about their usage of a word, that it can only be discovered throughout the whole poem- though in general we regard meaning, and language in general, to be portable.

Notice that in both cases, we appeal to the whole of the system, or at least large organizations of it, to explain the parts. We should like to disambiguate this word "system" here in order to check the analogy more closely, but I'm willing to query that we do similar things when we inquire into a poem or a piece of music at its individual moments. If we take this 'systems approach' (a term I'm borrowing from John Searle's critique of aritificial intelligence) to the semantics of music than it seems like it could be applied equally to poetry. The only problem being specifying just what it is one is doing when one determines "meaning" in this approach, and the meta-linguistic problem of defining a system (what "system" does that words definition then rest in).

But of course this approach misses out on a part of natural language that we often feel like defending or hanging on to- the ability of words to attach to object reality. When we say "Washington, D.C." we want, I think, to have a real place picked out in our saying. We want a kind of direct, unmediated touching of the real world with our talking about it, most especially in the case of nouns. There are, famously, many, many problems with this naive notion of reference, but nevertheless, we hold it to be the unique property of natural language, and the thing that makes the rest of what we call "languages" only analogously so. To put it in the common terms of the debate, the "systems approach" will offer you syntax (millenia worth) but no semantics.

But if you give up on reference, and satisfy yourself that all we are doing with words is putting them in relations with one another, as opposed to a real, objective world, than the disanalogy between musical language and natural language seems to break down. Indeed, the notion of an analogy starts being replaced with a notion of family resemblance. My question at this point becomes whether or not we can continue the investigation on those terms.