conclusion 377cannot be assimilated to each other because the second makes no sense
if one does not take intentionality into account. How would Pinker wish
to account for the crises and revolutions of modern music in his terms?
Are Mahler, Schoenberg, Coltrane, and others, who create music which
sometimes cannot be regarded primarily in terms of pleasure, to realise
that they have simply mistaken the essential nature of music? If music
were not about the world there would be no reason for such music to
exist. Even though music does not relate to the intentional realm in
exactly the same way as novels or other texts do, it does absorb issues
which are intentionally constituted. The real question iswhypleasure
in modern music should have become a problem, to the point where
sounds that are ugly to many are regarded by some, like Adorno, as the
most appropriate response to the horrors to which modernity has given
rise.^1
Before one even gets to such historical issues, a philosophical point
concerning intentionality is decisive in this context. Merleau-Ponty’s
comment, cited in chapter 1 , makes the point clear: ‘Because percep-
tion gives us faith in a world, in a system of rigorously connected and
continuous natural facts, we believed that this system could incorporate
everything into itself, including the perception which initiated us into
it’ (Merleau-Ponty 1964 : 46 – 7 ). Once perception is seen as inherently
bound up with meaning, this belief has to give way to the realisation
that resources for understanding the world are not exhausted by the
causal explanations that we use to account for natural phenomena. This
is obvious in the case of music: what musiciscannot be said to remain
the same across history, and coming to terms with this fact involves the
ability to understand how cultural norms are transformed and assimi-
lated in social contexts. There is, though, more to this objection than
this – in some quarters – still too often ignored fact.
Pinker’s assumptions correspond to those of the kind of analytical
philosophy which uses terms like ‘folk psychology’ to characterise what
others think of as intentionality. The assumption is that whatever it is
that the term intentionality designates will eventually be explained by
a scientific theory, revealing it to be another natural fact like any other.
This assumption might make sense if we had an agreed sense of just
what it is that an explanation of intentionality would be explaining,
but this is simply not the case, for the reason suggested in Merleau-
Ponty’s remark: the explanation itself depends on what it is supposed
1 Dada’s revolt against beauty in the visual arts poses similar questions. See Danto 2003.