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Conceptual and Nonconceptual Modes of Music Perception

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Conceptual and Nonconceptual Modes of Music Perception Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 2, No. 2, August 2005 CONCEPTUAL AND NONCONCEPTUAL MODES OF MUSIC PERCEPTION MARK DEBELLIS COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY Understanding and enjoying a Bach fugue or a Brahms sonata does not involve knowing about—conceptualizing—cadences, contrapuntal devices, bridge passages, and the like…. —Leonard B. Meyer1 To experience music with musical understanding a listener must perceive various kinds of musical processes, structures and relationships. But to perceive phrasing, cadences and harmonic progressions, for example, does not require the listener to conceptualise them in musical terms. —Malcolm Budd2 What does it mean to say that music perception is nonconceptual? As the passages from Meyer and Budd illustrate, one frequently encounters claims of this kind: it is often suggested that there is a level of perceptual contact with, or understanding or enjoyment of, music—one in which listeners typically engage—that does not require conceptualization. But just what does a claim of this sort amount to, and what arguments may be adduced for it? And is all musical hearing nonconceptual, or are there ways of enjoying fugues and sonatas that do involve conceptualizing cadences and contrapuntal devices? If the latter, how are we to conceive of the relationship between conceptual and nonconceptual ways of hearing? Questions such as these point to the possibility of a reciprocal relationship between music 1 Meyer (1973), p. 16. 2 Budd (1985), p. 247. 45 MARK DEBELLIS theory and philosophy, where each contributes to and illuminates the other. The philosophical study of perception, language, concepts, and intentionality can help to refine and enrich our music-theoretical conceptions of hearing and our understanding of what music theory tells us about it. Conversely, an examination of musical phenomena can challenge received philosophical precepts about the nature of perception and its relation to concepts and language, and broaden our understanding. In this article, I shall approach such issues from within the analytic tradition rooted in the work of Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein, and represented more recently by such writers as David Armstrong, Gilbert Harman, and Christopher Peacocke. What I shall do is, first, to sketch a certain widely-held view about the nature of perception, which I shall call the ‘cognitivist’ view, on which perception essentially involves beliefs and concepts; then I shall argue that a certain level of music perception—specifically, that described by the ‘scale-degree hypothesis’ in the cognitive psychology of music—is nonconceptual in two distinct senses, which I shall call weak and strong, respectively. Nonconceptuality in each of these senses forces departure from, or revision of, the cognitivist view as sketched here. I shall then, briefly, contrast nonconceptual hearing with conceptual. * * * What is sense perception? In recent years many philosophers have taken the view that perceptual states—those of visual experiences, auditory experiences, and the like—are beliefs.3 On this view, if I have, for example, a visual experience of the kind one normally has in seeing a red apple—or, as I shall put it, a visual experience as of a red apple—that visual experience is an instance of the belief that a red apple is before me. (More precisely, on the version I favor, the view is that perceptual states normally function as beliefs: though I may have a visual experience of the red-apple sort, I may not take my experience at face value because I think the light may be abnormal or because I know I am under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs. In cases like these my visual experience will not function as a belief; but such cases are to be 3 For a classic statement of this view, see Armstrong (1968). 46 MARK DEBELLIS understood as deviations from the normal case.)4 Of course, perceptual states are not just any old beliefs; not every belief that there is a red apple before me is a visual experience. Perceptual states are a species of beliefs, constituting a subclass within the larger genus. To have a perceptual belief that a red apple is before me is one way, though not the only way, of believing that a red apple is before me. Beliefs have content, which is to say they involve a relation to a proposition: a belief is always a belief that such and such is the case. But in virtue of what does a perceptual belief—a state in someone’s head—have the content that it has? The answer is provided by a functionalistic account. Perceptual beliefs are to be conceived of and individuated in terms of their causal role in certain sorts of behavior, the most important of which, for present purposes, is discrimination. I can have a perceptual belief that this rose is yellow only if I can reliably discriminate yellow from non-yellow things; a perceptual state of mine will count as a visual experience as of something yellow only if it is of a kind that plays an appropriate causal role in discriminative behavior.5 By this I mean selective behavior, treating yellow things differently than non-yellow things: treating yellow things in one way, non-yellow things in another way. A causal role in selective behavior is one determinant of the content of perceptual beliefs; other causal roles are relevant as well. Perceptual beliefs have a role in judgments of phenomenal similarity: what makes my visual experiences, of this rose and that, instances of the perceptual belief that there is something yellow here, is that the roses are apt to look the same to me in a certain salient respect, and that I am disposed to judge them to be the same in that respect. With beliefs come concepts. Concepts are to be thought of as constituents of propositional contents, so, for example, the propositional content There is a yellow lemon here contains as constituent concepts yellow and lemon.6 Possessing a concept is a matter of being able to enter into an appropriate range of beliefs or other attitudes containing that concept as a 4 Harman (1973), p. 182. 5 Armstrong (1968), pp. 246-55. 6 Here I follow Peacocke (1992), p. 2. 47 MARK DEBELLIS constituent.7 Hence, I have a perceptual concept of yellow only if I am able to acquire the perceptual belief that an object is yellow, for an appropriate range of objects, in appropriate circumstances such as having my eyes open, looking at the object in good light. To possess a perceptual concept is thus to possess an ability to enter appropriately into any of a certain repertoire of perceptual beliefs, as circumstances warrant. Someone who possesses a perceptual concept of yellow will normally be capable of sorting objects into two piles, yellow and non-yellow.8 And he will be capable of recognizing repeated instances of the property over time: he will welcome a later instance as the same as an earlier instance. This view of perception as belief, as the exercise of conceptual abilities, which I shall call the ‘cognitivist’ view of perception, is part of a larger attitude that construes perception not as passive receptivity but as always a matter of classifying, organizing, and theorizing. In the words of Nelson Goodman, [T]here is no innocent eye…. Not only how but what it sees is regulated by need and prejudice. It selects, rejects, organizes, discriminates, associates, classifies, analyzes, constructs. It does not so much mirror as take and make; and what it takes and makes it sees not bare … but as things, as food, as people, as enemies, as stars, as weapons. Nothing is seen nakedly or naked.9 Or, as Norwood Russell Hanson puts it, ‘Seeing is a ‘theory-laden’ undertaking,’10 which is in turn an updated version of Kant’s dictum that ‘intuitions without concepts are blind.’11 It is necessary at this point to state more precisely several important assumptions behind the cognitivist conception. The first is actually a non-assumption: it is not assumed that someone to whom a perceptual state is correctly ascribed need understand the language in which that ascription is couched, or indeed any language. It is entirely consistent with the cognitivist view that animals can have perceptual beliefs. For a creature to perceive something as food it is necessary that the creature have the appropriate discriminative capacities, and for it to be 7 Peacocke (1992), p. 5. 8 Armstrong (1968), p. 246. 9 Goodman (1976), pp. 7-8. 10 Hanson (1958), p. 19. 11 Kant (1929), A 51/B 75. 48 MARK DEBELLIS disposed to treat the thing as food, i.e., to eat it, but it need not understand the word ‘food’ or indeed have any linguistic mastery at all.12 The second assumption is that propositions are individuated in such a way as to meet the following constraint: one cannot, if one is rational, simultaneously believe and doubt the same proposition. If one believes that p but doubts that q, then p and q must be different propositions, different objects of thought. Essentially, this constraint makes propositions out to be something very much like what Frege called Thoughts.13 An equivalent way of putting this is to say that propositions are distinct if they have different information value: if I believe that p, and the thought that q is informative to me, then p and q must be different propositions. Suppose, to adapt a famous example from Frege, I believe that the Morning Star is a planet, and it is informative to me that the Evening Star is a planet. It follows that—even though ‘The Evening Star’ and ‘The Morning Star’ are names for the same object—the proposition that the Morning Star is a planet is distinct from the proposition that the Evening Star is a planet.
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