Abstract
There is growing debate about what is the correct methodology for research in the ontology of artworks. In the first part of this essay, I introduce my view: I argue that semantic descriptivism is a semantic approach that has an impact on meta-ontological views and can be linked with a hermeneutic fictionalist proposal on the meta-ontology of artworks such as works of music. In the second part, I offer a synthetic presentation of the four main positive meta-ontological views that have been defended in philosophical literature about artworks and of some criticisms that can be lodged against them: Amie Thomasson’s global descriptivism, Andrew Kania’s local descriptivism, Julian Dodd’s folk-theoretic modesty, and David Davies’ rational accountability view. In the conclusion, I show the advantages of my view.
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Notes
- 1.
Similar considerations apply also to other kinds of works, such as works of performance art and of installation art, whose metaphysics and ontology is often discussed by drawing analogies with works of music (see e.g. Irvin 2012).
- 2.
On the other hand, Aaron Ridley has argued that “a serious philosophical engagement with music is orthogonal to, and may well in fact be impeded by, the pursuit of ontological issues, and, in particular, that any attempt to specify the conditions of a work’s identity must, from the perspective of musical aesthetics, be absolutely worthless” (Ridley 2003: 203. For a reply see Kania 2008a).
- 3.
See Yablo 2001: 102.
- 4.
- 5.
- 6.
E.g. Caplan and Matheson 2006.
- 7.
Artifactualists about artworks argue that artworks are created artifacts. Some artifactualists about works of music argue that they are created abstract artifacts. For instance, Jerrold Levinson argues that if an author selects and writes down or plays certain notes in a certain order, with the intention that they have a normative role, i.e. the role of “establishing a rule to reproduce the sounds [referred to by such notes] in a certain way following the indications of a particular, historically-situated musical mind [i.e. her own mind]” (2012: 54), then a tonal-instrumental structure is created in the real world – i.e. a work of music (a generic entity that can have instantiations) begins to exist.
- 8.
Thomasson opts for the view of reference-fixing just described because it offers a solution to the so-called ‘qua problem’ (see Devitt 1981), which arises for those who hold that reference-fixing is a purely causal matter, that has no descriptive aspect: “in order to succeed in naming a certain dog ‘Spot’, I must at least know what kind of thing the nominatum-to-be is: I must at least know that he is (say) an animal. If I think he is merely an inanimate spot in my field of vision, I will not have succeeded in naming him. Now, to know what kind of object one is naming is to conceptualize that object, to think of it as an object of a certain sort, as (in other words), satisfying a certain predicate. It is thus to think of it qua such-and-such. Thus, if an act of reference-fixing is to be successful, the reference-fixer must think of the referent-to-be under a certain description – one that that object or individual actually satisfies. If this is right, however, then the event of reference-fixing cannot be conceived of in purely causal terms” (Reimer and Michaelson 2017). For Thomasson’s discussion of the qua problem see e.g. Thomasson (2007b).
- 9.
See e.g. Levinson 2012.
- 10.
- 11.
Compare also what David Liggins says about “languages or conventions”: “Even if such things depend for their existence on human activity, [...] the dependence claim is not ‘Whatever we believe about these things, it is true because we believe it’: a sensible account of languages or conventions should allow that we are sometimes mistaken” (Liggins 2010: 75).
- 12.
Recall that metaontological realism is the view that “the correct answers to first-order art-ontological questions – questions concerning the respective ontological categories the various artwork kinds belong to, their identity conditions, their persistence conditions, and so on – are objective […] [in the sense that] their correctness is in no way determined by what we say or think about these questions” (Dodd 2013: 1048–1049).
- 13.
I am deeply thankful to David Davies, Jerrold Levinson and Matteo Plebani for their comments on previous versions of this paper and to audiences at the “Abstract Objects” Workshop at the University of Santiago de Compostela (2016), the Conference of the Italian Society for Analytic Philosophy (Pistoia 2016), the Conference of the European Society for Analytic Philosophy (Munich 2017), and the Annual Conference of the American Society for Aesthetics (Toronto 2018) for their valuable feedback on previous versions of this paper.
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Caldarola, E. (2020). Methodology in the Ontology of Artworks: Exploring Hermeneutic Fictionalism. In: Falguera, J.L., Martínez-Vidal, C. (eds) Abstract Objects. Synthese Library, vol 422. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38242-1_16
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