form, feeling, metaphysics, and music 17Although many of the same points concerning the contextuality of
the understanding of form can be made about the dependence of ver-
bal meaning on context, this is not a reason simply to equate ‘music’
and ‘language’. It is precisely the kind of thinking which draws conse-
quences in this manner that I am concerned to question. Either/or
approaches, of the kind present in the familiar question ‘Is music
a language?’, repeat a problem suggested in the Introduction: they
assume that we already know what a language is, and can just apply the
theory of language to music. Given that Donald Davidson has famously
claimed that ‘there is no such thing as a language’ (Lepore 1986 : 446 ),
this could well be a mistaken short-cut. Davidson elucidates his remark
by adding ‘if a language is anything like what many philosophers and
linguists have supposed’ (ibid.). What they have supposed is that a lan-
guage is something of which a philosophical description can be given, in
terms of functions, rules, etc., rather than a series of ever-changing prac-
tices bound up with other human activities and affected by interaction
with the world. One just needs to ask the question of when something
begins to be language and when it ceases to be language to see the rea-
sons for being careful here. Davidson regards understanding language
as beginning with the mapping of someone else’s noise onto the sort of
noises one makes oneself to see if they can correlate with anything one
is familiar with in the world, and even this characterisation may be too
restrictive in some respects. David Cooper suggests, for example, that
understanding is already in play if something in the world is related
to a context in some manner: ‘to explain an item’s meaning... is to
connect the item to something outside or larger than itself’ (Cooper
2003 : 29 – 30 ). The key issue is the appropriateness of the connection
and the effects of that connection on the practice of life.
Instead, then, of working with the assumption that the best thing
to do here is draw a line between language and music, the idea is to
develop a conception in which these terms are not even assumed to
require any kind of definitive explanation. If there is no such thing as a
language, there need also be no such thing as music either. This might
seem to be leading towards a completely implausible position. However,
all I am claiming is that the idea that the distinction between language
and music involves some generalised match between these terms, and
language and music as entities in the world, is likely to lead in unhelpful
directions. Of course we employ the distinction in many situations, but
that does not mean it needs to be underpinned by a philosophical
theory based on the drawing of a specific line. The problem with such a