music, language, and origins 63language to understand a part of language, the understanding of words
got underway in the first place. Underlying this problem is the question
of how thinking relates to identification: the inferentialist approach to
meaning relies on x not being y; but x also has to be x on different
occasions for it to become something that can be designated at all. Its
being x at all in turn relies on a repeatable sign for it to be distinct
from other things, but the recognition of the sign itself as a repeated
sign relies on that to which it is repeated. There must consequently be
something identical between cases of x if they are to be apprehended
as the same. This is what leads Kant to the idea of the transcendental
unity of apperception, which assumes that the ‘I think’ must be able to
be identical between differing experiences.
Importantly, the inferentialist approach to words is echoed in
relation to notes in music, because each note gains its function or sig-
nificance via its relationships to the other notes in a piece, and to a
musical system. Descartes thought that the memory of the subject was
essential to constituting something as music: the question is how this
is to be interpreted. Inferentialism with regard to music functions at
a level which need not become conceptually articulated: the relations
between notes can be felt, in the form, for example, of the effect occa-
sioned by the movement of a piece. Children are able to apprehend
in this way before they can speak, responding to melodic consonance
differently from unmelodically constituted dissonances or to random
noise. Phenomena like these can help make sense of Herder’s often
confused and confusing claims.
Herder portrays the development of language in terms of moves from
the experience of an initial endless empirical particularity to an order-
ing of this particularity into forms of identity, and he interprets these
moves in terms of what is lost and gained. In one of his accounts of the
development of language he analogises ‘a person in their childhood’
to ‘a people in their childhood’. The basic point of this is the move
from immediacy to mediation: both the child and the primitive people
are frightened, then amazed, by ‘new, strange, unseen things’ (Herder
1985 : 561 ). This pattern is reflected in the noises they produce, namely
screams which develop into ‘rough, monosyllabic words’ to express the
‘most powerful passions and stirring objects’. This produces a language
of ‘gesturesandtones’ (ibid.: 562 ). The oldest languages ‘were drawn
immediately by a sensuous imitation from sounding nature; modern
languages, in contrast, are formed more according to intentional ideas’
(ibid.: 563 ). In the same way as children ‘pronounce their words in