114 music, philosophy, and modernity
and he cites Davidson as distinguishing between ‘what one copes with
by interpreting it and what one copes with only by manipulating it’
(ibid.). This distinction is too rigid, even if it is not one to which Bran-
dom attaches any ontological significance – his view is that both the
human sciences (texts) and the natural sciences (things) are capable
of objectivity because of their shared relation to practices of justifi-
cation. How, then, does this distinction between interpretation and
description or explanation apply to music, which one both interprets
and manipulates? In a discussion of ‘rationality as interpretability’ Bran-
dom claims that ‘what makes something have or express the content it
does is what makes it interpretable in one way rather than another. And
that is a matter of its connections to other things, the role it plays in the
overall behavioural economy of the one being interpreted’ (Brandom
2002 : 5 ). This claim actually offers a route to understanding musical
meaning and musical practice in the sense suggested by David Cooper,
for whom meaning is attributable to anything which connects to some-
thing ‘something outside or larger than itself’. However, Brandom does
not consider the content of non-verbal forms, content being for him
what is inferentially articulated in claims. Noises with intentional con-
tent which are not verbal and cannot simply be converted into facts
about which claims can justifiably be made can play no serious role in
Brandom. If we are restricted to a view of communicative action which
seems to have no explicit place for dimensions like tone and rhythm,
how are we to grasp much that is essential to real communication?
These dimensions can give such action its specific performative force
in real social contexts, and this can be part of its semantic content (see
the discussion of Cavell in the Conclusion).
I will consider the following remark by Wittgenstein in more detail
in chapter 8 , but its relevance to Brandom’s claims, even down to the
concern with inference, should be apparent:
Understanding a sentence in language is much more related to under-
standing a theme in music than one thinks... Why should the strength
and tempo move in justthisline? One wants to say: ‘Because I know what
that all means.’ But what does it mean? I couldn’t say. In ‘explanation’ I
could compare it with something else that has the same rhythm (I mean
the same line). (One says: ‘Can’t you see, that is as if an inference were
being made’ or ‘That is, so to speak, a parenthesis’ etc. How does one
ground such comparisons? – There are different kinds of groundings.)
(Wittgenstein 1984 : 440 )