CHAPTER 5

HYPOTHETICO-DEDUCTIVE METHOD

INTRODUCTION The activities most often identified as characteristics of science are systematic observation and experimentation, inductive and deductive reasoning, and the formation and testing of hypotheses and theories. In many settings, these features have been looked to as a way of demarcating science from non-science. The debate that is more recent has questioned whether there is anything like a fixed toolkit of methods common to science and only science. The reorganising of higher education during the last decades, where music academies and music conservatories (as well as other artistic, educational institutions) became part of universities, heightens the discussion on what is scientific knowledge. In the traditional divide between humanities and science (Geistwissenschaft und Naturwissenschaft)1 the arts institutions promoted artistic research where the artist is the researcher as an alternative method acquiring knowledge. In history, Aristotle is recognised as providing the earliest systematic treatise on the nature of scientific inquiry in the Western tradition, one which embraced observation and reasoning about the natural world.2 He divided reasoning primarily into two forms as deductive versus inductive method. The basic idea is to proceed with our inquiry; one direction is away from what is observed to the more fundamental, general and encompassing principles (induction). The other leads from the fundamental and general principles to other possible specific instantiations of those principles (deduction). Reading text/sheet music by spelling each element until you identify a style is an inductive method. Reading a new text/sheet music knowing some principles of style (based on information about the composer) and applying your knowledge to your practice is a deductive approach. During the scientific revolutions in the 16th-18th century, The Book of Nature, a metaphor used by Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) and Francis Bacon (1561-1626),3 was written in the language of mathematics, of geometry and number. This motivated an emphasis in a mathematical description and mechanical explanation as important aspects of the scientific method. It also had an impact on the choice of topics relevant to scientific inquiry enhancing music theory at the sacrifice of musical practice. A method of which the true laws of nature could be discovered should then consist of three phases: (1) Clarification of fundamental concepts, (2) Clever inventions of explanations, and (3) Careful testing. These three phases

–––––––––––––– 1 (Scott & Marshall, 2005) 2 (Aristoteles, Ross, & Adler, 1990) 3 (Bacon, Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, & Adler, 1990)

51 CHAPTER 5 could be recognised in a performer’s practice as well: (1) Clarification of the context of this music. Today the process would include the search for critical editions and ur-texts. (2) Invention of explanations is applying knowledge of style and musical imagination to develop an interpretation. (3) Careful testing is equivalent to practice, practice, practice. The reason why playing music never reached the level of true laws of nature is mainly connected to points (1) and (3). There has never been a total agreement about what concepts are fundamental in music, and even if the practice can be seen as a kind of trial and error activity, it is very seldom done in a careful (scientific) way. The most significant development in methodology in the 19th century was positivism. The proximate roots of positivism lie in the French Enlightenment, which stressed the clear light of reason and in 18th-century British empiricism, particularly that of David Hume (1711-1776)4 and George Berkeley (1685-1753), which stressed the role of sense experience.5 Information derived from sensory experience interpreted through reason and logic functions as the exclusive source of all authoritative (universal) knowledge. This makes positivism a difficult approach to the musical experience. We do have many sensory experiences, and our interpretations might be reasonable, but the logic does not support an authoritative kind of knowledge. The modern approach was formulated by the philosopher Auguste Comte (1798-1857) in his Course de philosophie positive (1830-1842). He saw a parallel between the evolution of thought patterns in the entire history of humankind and the history of an individual’s development from infancy to adulthood. In the first of three phases, the theological stage, natural phenomena are explained as the results of supernatural or divine powers. Such explanations are rejected as primitive projections of unverifiable entities. The second phase, called metaphysical, is in some cases merely a depersonalised theology: the observable processes of nature are assumed to arise from impersonal powers, occult qualities, vital forces or entelechies (that which realises or makes actual what is otherwise merely potential). Again, Comte charged that no genuine explanations result; questions concerning ultimate reality, first causes, or absolute beginnings are thus declared to be absolutely unanswerable. I think we have to admit that most of the discourse in music can be placed within these two approaches. According to Comte the sort of fruitfulness that this method lacks can only be achieved in the third phase, the scientific, or positive phase because it claims to be concerned only with positive facts. The task of the sciences and knowledge in general is to study facts and regularities of nature and society and to formulate the regularities as (descriptive) laws. Explanations of phenomena can consist of no more than the subsuming of special cases under general laws. The development of statistical analysis made tremendous progress using testing procedures carefully organising the empirical consequences. However, the inventions of explanations interpreting the results can never be taken as confirming –––––––––––––– 4 (Hume, 1739) 5 The English noun positivism was re-imported in the nineteenth century from the French word positivisme, derived from positif in its philosophical sense of “imposed in the mind by experience.”

52