Text/Sound/Music.5

I wonder if I actually think about anything else than this. Apparently not.

So, there's this self-contained notion of meaning, where it all cashes out in the same system as the symbols exist and there's no "reference" or problem of reference. Some people say this is what Wittgenstein earned for us in the Investigations. I still don't know where I stand on it, but here's a possibly related problem that starts to get at it:

Suppose you still believe in a real world that persists and changes independently of our way of talking or otherwise signing/singing about it. One of the features you might notice about this world is its endless variety. Instead of a finite number of symbols rolling about in changing combinations, you get an infinite number of distinct objects and phenomena (or, if you prefer, a single phenomenon that is constantly changing). There might be the appearance of patterning or family resemblance, but it's hard to hold up a pair of apples, one with a 2" diameter and a worm in it, and the other with a 4" diameter and a lovely blush color, and be convinced that they are as similar as the application of that noun "apple", equally to both, would suggest.

As I eluded to earlier, I think most of us take language to be portable- the same word uttered in different circumstances, different registers, different intonations, different typefaces, means the same or at least carries a stamp of sameness across all these cases. You might actually disagree with this, and think that there is no resemblance between my use of the word "apple" and yours (coming from your unique mouth or typewriter in your unique context, etc), and I wouldn't know what to say. But it would seem to be essential to its common utility that this property of "portability" apply to language. However unique the context of each utterance, we want the word to maintain an identity across all instances. Is this more or less illusory than the notion that we ourselves maintain an identity across every instance, when each molecule of our body will have been replaced seven years from now?

Do notes have an identity? There's "middle C", so named for its position on a piano, but playable, in theory, on just about any instrument. Play that middle C on a piano and compare it to an oboe, however, and you get a sound that is obviously different. Even more interesting, two oboe players, and two piano players if you're really listening, get completely different sounding C's. This is because the name "C' applies only to the fundamental, the frequency which is vibrating with the greatest amplitude (usually) in the spectrum of complex frequencies that make up a standing wave in an acoustic instrument (what we pick out when we use the word 'note'). Is this level of variation greater than what we might notice about individual word utterances (used here very broadly to include instances in print as well)? Is there more difference between, say, Mark Mothersbaugh and John Coltrane playing middle C than Gertrude Stein and Bob Grenier hand-writing the word 'fall' in their notebooks.

A while ago, we arrived at the problem of more signs in natural language than notes in a musical system. Here you could almost arrange a hierarchy: there is infinite variety of phenomena in the real world, finite signs in natural language, even fewer finite notes in musical language. Whatever relation shaky relation natural language has to manifold reality, music must be even worse off. But that hierarchy doesn't illuminate much, except for the fact that representation is itself a limiting framework in which to work with language.