music, language, and origins 61of picturing. Rorty would, in contrast, regard music as just another
communicative practice, albeit one which lacks the dimension that he
sees as the basis of how we can distinguish behaviour which is ‘properly
linguistic’ from what other organisms do when they produce signs. This
dimension – which involves much the same argument as Davidson’s
about belief cited above – is the use of ‘semantical metalanguage’ by
putting language in ‘intensional contexts’ which require notions like
meaning, in which we can ‘say things like, “It is also called ‘Y’, but for
your purposes you should describe it as ‘X’” (Rorty 1999 a: 65 ). Given
that language in Rorty’s view is a tool rather than a medium, this should
just mean that music is a tool for different purposes from those of verbal
language because it cannot achieve the sort of things that semantical
metalanguage can achieve.
Is there, though, a musical equivalent for the ‘properly linguistic’?
What, for example, differentiates bird-song or instinctive human rhyth-
mic cries from music? What constitutes the meta-level for music which
metalanguage provides for Rorty’s conception of language? One way
of thinking about this is via the idea that both verbal language and
music are forms of articulation in which ‘getting it right’ is essential
to the practice. The kind of difference between belief and truth that
Davidson demands for thought is related to right and wrong in non-
semantic forms of articulation: in the case of music, though, getting
it right may not always be adequately grasped in terms of what can be
said about what is right. Describing something as X or as Y for differ-
ing purposes, and playing or hearing something in the appropriate
way both belong in a ‘space of appropriateness’ in ways that instinctual
behaviour does not, even though such behaviour can also be successful
or unsuccessful. The differences between language and music depend
in this view on the appropriateness of each for different kinds of human
goal, but both are normatively constituted. The interesting questions
here therefore have to do with how human goals are understood and
evaluated.
Herder’s view relates to Rorty’s, because of his concern with the diver-
sity of human forms of expression, which he sees primarily in terms of
their contribution to human well-being, rather than in terms of rep-
resentational adequacy. This stance will, though, also be what leads to
his more questionable reflections on the development of languages. In
his remarks on the origin of language inOn Modern German Literature.
Fragments( 1766 – 8 )Herder insists that ‘no human invention is all there
at once, least of all the first and greatest of all inventions, language! It