Philosophy of the Performing Arts

appreciating performable works in performance 55
Sibelius’s Second Symphony can possess those structural, timbral, and
expressive properties characteristic of its correct performances that Day
identifies in his commentary. Multiple artworks, then, simply inherit the
expressive properties of their realizations through the standard relation of
transmission between types and their tokens.
Unfortunately, however, things are not this simple. Reflect again on the
word-type example. The word-token of “sheep” in this sentence has the prop-
erty of containing five occurrences of letters, including two occurrences of the
letter e , and these occurrences are particular strings of code in a computer
file, or combinations of pixels on a computer screen, or (had I used a pen)
particular characters inscribed in ink on a page. But this property cannot be
a property of the word-type “sheep,” since, qua type, it cannot contain such
particular occurrences as parts. So, when we say that the word-type “sheep”
contains five letters, we must be ascribing to the word-type a property dif-
ferent from the one that we ascribe, by means of the same predicate, to a
token of the word-type. This insight is developed by Nicholas Wolterstorff in
terms of what he terms “analogical predication” (1975, 326–328).
Wolterstorff argues that it is crucial to distinguish between the sharing
of predicates and the sharing of properties. A and B share a predicate “ p ” just in
case “ p ” is truly predicated of both A and B. On the other hand, A and B share
a property p just in case they both have p. Usually, when we have a sharing
of predicates, this is in virtue of a sharing of properties. For example, if
Berthold and Magda share the predicate “lives in London,” this is because
they share the corresponding property of living in London. In such cases, we
can say that the predicate is used univocally. On the other hand, it may be that
Berthold and William share the predicate “lives near a bank” in virtue of pos-
sessing different and unrelated properties. Berthold may live near a financial
institution while William lives near a river. Here the predicate is used equivo-
cally. The interesting case, however, is where a predicate is shared in virtue
of the possession of different properties, but there is a systematic relation
between these properties such that one entity possesses one property because
the other entity possesses the other. Here we can say that the predicate is
used analogically. It is analogical predication, Wolterstorff claims, rather than
the sharing of properties, that is really going on in the cases that Wollheim
describes in terms of transmitted properties.
Consider, for example, what is going on when we truly predicate some-
thing like “contains a G sharp in the seventh measure” of both Bartok’s First
String Quartet and a performance of Bartok’s First String Quartet. This,
Wolterstorff would say, is a case of analogical predication, because different
but related properties are being predicated in the two cases. What we are
predicating of the performance is the property of containing an occurrence
of a particular pitch at a given place in its temporal progression. But the