326 music, philosophy, and modernity
concerning the score. The position advanced by Wellmer makes Apel’s
and Habermas’ idea of truth as a regulative idea invalid because ‘the
expectation that truth and justification (or truth and consensus) will
coincide, not here and now but rather under ideal conditions’ fails to
take account of the aforementioned asymmetry, in which ‘Truth and jus-
tification coincide with reference to the making of judgements and the
holding of beliefs, but not in reference to the ascription of judgements
and beliefs to others’ (ibid.: 108 ). The notion of truth as ‘interper-
spectival and context-transcending’ (ibid.) is necessary to explain the
meaningof the internal connection of truth and justification. I do not
think things are just true for me, because I would then have no way
of understanding truth, even though my sense of truth is inextricably
linked to what I think is justified. However, invoking truth as an ever-
receding goal or as that which would result under ideal intersubjective
conditions makes it, Wellmer thinks, into a metaphysical fiction. Such
a fiction can play no substantive role in cashing out the notion of truth,
because it would be, as Derrida suggests, endlessly ‘deferred’, rather
than playing the role in communication which the understanding of
truth manifestly does.
For Wellmer there is consequently nothing but the contingent game
of giving reasons, of trying to fulfil normative demands without the
back-up of a metaphysical final answer. This seems plausible, and it
can also be linked to what actually happens in the history of musi-
cal performance. The fiction of the final answer is here, though, in
one important sense at least, not completely empty, because, following
Rorty, it can play a motivating role. The search for better conditions of
inquiry which will maximise consensus and establish maximum justifi-
cation is perennial in many domains. This kind of motivation, which
is part of what makes many norms effective, is also an ineliminable
aspect of music making. A key difference between the aesthetic and
the scientific realm is, however, that, whereas in the sciences the search
for truth can also be construed in pragmatic terms, as problem-solving,
which does not require regulative ideas as part of the practice, ‘problem-
solving’ in music – Adorno often talks of music in such terms – does
not have an aim beyond success immanent to the practice. Music can
therefore be said in some circumstances still to involve a regulative idea,
of the kind suggested by Murdoch’s notion of that which is ‘endlessly
perfectible’.
Think for a moment, then, about employing the notion of a regu-
lative idea – in the sense of that which, as Adorno puts it below, is ‘in