ABSTRACT
The wrong note paradox is clearly something to be avoided, rather than embraced. Consequently, few philosophers have opted for the same criterion of perfect compliance to the score as Goodman. Nevertheless, there have been some efforts to rescue the Goodmanian perspective from the paradox. One strategy for defending Goodman’s focus on notation rather than context or history is to subordinate performers to composers, such that the purpose of a performance of a work is to highlight the work’s aesthetic value and the composer’s artistic achievement. The wrong note paradox presents a particularly thorny problem for musical Platonists, who maintain that musical works are eternally-existing abstract entities individuated by their sound-structures. For the Platonist, people determine which performances are instances of a work by reference to their sound-structure: same sound-structure, same work. And since abstract entities are by definition causally inert, the only way people can ever access a musical work is by hearing one of its performances.
