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Music Pluralism, Music Realism, and Music Archaeology

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Abstract

According to pluralism about some concept, there are multiple non-equivalent, legitimate concepts pertaining to the (alleged) ontological category in question. It is an open question whether conceptual pluralism implies anti-realism about that category. In this article, I argue that at least for the case of music, it does not. To undermine the application of an influential move from pluralism (about music concepts) to anti-realism (about the music category), then, I provide an argument in support of indifference realism about music, by appeal to music archaeological research, via an analogy with Adrian Currie’s indifference realism about species licensed by paleobiological research.

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Fig. 1

(Figure from Longrich and Field (2012); reproduced here under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence. Source = https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0032623.g001. Accessed 2 May 2019.)

Fig. 2

(Figure from Adler (2009); reproduced here with permission of Springer Nature. Image: H. Jensen/Univ. Tübingen.)

Fig. 3

(Figure freely distributable and adaptable under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic licence. Source = https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3f/Flauta_paleol%C3%ADtica.jpg. Accessed 2 May 2019. Image: José-Manuel Benito Álvarez.)

Fig. 4

(Figure is reproducible under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License; Source = https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7c/Fl%C3%BBte_pal%C3%A9olithique_%28mus%C3%A9e_national_de_Slov%C3%A9nie%2C_Ljubljana%29_%289420310527%29.jpg. Accessed 17 April 2018. Image: Jean-Pierre Dalbéra.)

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Notes

  1. See Maconie (1990) for the idea that what counts as music is subjectively determined by each individual.

  2. In this article, ‘monism’ and ‘pluralism’ are theses about concepts; ‘realism’ and ‘anti-realism’ are theses about ontological categories. I use ‘anti-realism (about x)’ and ‘ontological eliminativism (about x)’ interchangeably. (This is a stylistic matter; other philosophers might distinguish anti-realism from ontological eliminativism, say, as a claim about dependence rather than existence.) One could also subscribe to linguistic eliminativism, and argue that the term ‘music’ should be eliminated from discourse. This is a logically independent position from ontological eliminativism and I do not address it in this article.

  3. For an erudite discussion of the rise of conceptual pluralism in philosophy of science, see Taylor and Vickers (2017).

  4. They might not be, if, for example, classical Mendelian genetics has been ‘superseded’ by molecular genetics, or if molecular genetics turns out to be wrongheaded.

  5. For example, Barker (2018) illustrates how four moth populations and two liverwort populations are grouped differently according to different species concepts.

  6. There are, of course, other approaches to defending anti-realism about species (see, e.g., Mishler 1999) and to eliminativism about a pluralistic concept more generally (e.g., Taylor and Vickers 2017). Needless to say, a full exposition of the species debate is beyond the scope of this article, as is a survey of strategies for defending eliminativism-given-pluralism. The present article is concerned with the kind of move made by Ereshefsky; other approaches require other treatments best left for another time. I thank an anonymous referee for pushing me on this.

  7. Thus ‘indifference realism’, as it used in this article, is independent of the indifference realism of Medieval philosopher William of Champeaux, a theory of universals according to which distinct individuals may be ‘the same’ in certain respects despite there being no ‘shared essences’ (see Guilfoy 2012).

  8. This is so even if paleobiologists operate with a specific notion of species, idiosyncratic or otherwise. As an anonymous referee points out, many paleobiologists operate with a notion of species as independently evolving lineages.

  9. Here I add that vindicatory indifference excludes debunking cases. Assuming for the moment that there is a plurality of concepts of such (alleged) categories as, e.g., gods, ghosts and spirits, legitimate scientific research into these categories that is conceptually indifferent does not licence realism about them. I thank [name redacted] for pushing me on this point.

  10. To determine ‘what is true in a venially impossible fiction such as the Holmes stories’, Lewis (1978) suggests shifting one’s analysis ‘from the original impossible fiction to the several possible revised versions that stay closest to the original’ (1978, p. 46). Lewis’s idea, then, is that what is true in the Holmes stories is what is true in all of these closest possible fictions (and he provides two analyses for determining truth in those fictions). Needless to say, whether Lewis’s framework for determining truth in fiction is a good one or not is not our concern here.

  11. For discussion, see e.g., Both (2009), Morley (2013), and Killin (2018).

  12. Mithen even goes so far as to claim that ‘all modern humans are relatively limited in their musical abilities when compared with the Neanderthals. This is partly because the Neanderthals evolved neural networks for the musical features of ‘Hmmmmm’ that did not evolve in the Homo sapiens lineage, and partly because the evolution of language has inhibited the musical abilities inherited from the common ancestor we share with Homo neanderthalensis’ (2005, p. 245). Unsurprisingly, such comments have been criticised for being wildly speculative.

  13. See e.g., Mithen (2005), Tuniz et al. (2012), Morley (2013), and Killin (2016, 2017, 2018).

  14. See http://www.nms.si/en. Accessed 2 May 2019. In particular, see http://www.nms.si/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2089%3Aneandertaleva-pial-pial-iz-divjih-bab&catid=18%3Aznameniti-predmeti&Itemid=33&lang=en.

  15. This example has received attention from various philosophers of music, e.g., Dodd (2018), Kania (2010), Davies (2004), and Levinson (1990).

  16. This discussion expands upon the point Currie (2016) mentions in passing.

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Acknowledgements

For comments on previous versions of the material I thank Adrian Currie, Marilynn Johnson, Brandon Polite, Jason Waller, Ellen Clarke and anonymous referees. I thank audiences at the 2018 Joint Conference of the South Carolina Society for Philosophy and North Carolina Philosophical Society at Winthrop University, the 2018 Joint Conference of the Australasian Association of Philosophy and New Zealand Association of Philosophers at Victoria University of Wellington, the 2018 workshop on Art, Evolution and Cognition at Macquarie University, Sydney, the 2019 American Society for Aesthetics Eastern Division Conference in Philadelphia, and the 2019 Ohio Philosophical Association Conference at Wittenberg University.

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  1. School of Philosophy and Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, Australian National University, Acton, ACT, 2601, Australia

    Anton Killin

  2. Department of Philosophy, Mount Allison University, Sackville, NB, E4L 1G9, Canada

    Anton Killin

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Correspondence to Anton Killin.

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Killin, A. Music Pluralism, Music Realism, and Music Archaeology. Topoi 40, 261–272 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-019-09676-z

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