ABSTRACT
At the end of his essay ‘Aesthetic Value, Objectivity, and the Fabric of the World’ John McDowell asks ‘how can a mere feeling constitute an experience in which the world reveals itself to us?’ (McDowell, 1998, p. 130), and suggests that any philosophical approach which would prevent this question being asked may for that reason be regarded as at least questionable. McDowell puts into question a view which has tended, directly or indirectly, to inform many of the dominant ways of discussing the philosophy of music in the English-speaking world. In this view philosophy’s concern is to establish the Archimedean point from which the essential truth about reality can be established: once this point is established one would have ‘a framework within which any philosophical reflection on the remainder of our view of reality must take place’ (ibid., p. 129). This framework is, of course, the framework of the natural sciences which aim, in Bernard Williams’ phrase, for an ‘absolute conception’ of reality, a conception in which feeling is pretty unlikely to play a decisive role. The sciences are seen in terms of their articulating the truth about the world in propositions and it is philosophy’s job to clarify and articulate the nature of the languages in which these propositions are couched. In their extreme forms such approaches to language have incoherently attempted to exclude most forms of actual language-use as ‘meaningless’ because what they convey is not amenable to the kind of verification procedures required for scientific inquiry. As such, the result of quite a lot of philosophical reflection in this tradition has been to restrict more or less severely what can count as ‘meaning’, excluding much of what most people find – using the word in a deliberately rather indeterminate sense – ‘meaningful’.
