Lawrence Kramer
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780520273955
- eISBN:
- 9780520953840
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520273955.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, Theory, Analysis, Composition
Expression and truth are traditional opposites in Western thought: expression supposedly refers to states of mind, truth to states of affairs. Expression and Truth rejects this opposition and ...
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Expression and truth are traditional opposites in Western thought: expression supposedly refers to states of mind, truth to states of affairs. Expression and Truth rejects this opposition and proposes fluid new models of expression, truth, and knowledge with broad application for the humanities. The models derive from five theses that connect expression to description, cognition, the presence and absence of speech, and the conjunction of address and reply. The theses are linked by a concentration on musical expression, regarded as the ideal case of expression in general, and by fresh readings of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s scattered but important remarks about music. The result is a new conception of expression as a primary means of knowing, acting on, and forming the world.Less
Expression and truth are traditional opposites in Western thought: expression supposedly refers to states of mind, truth to states of affairs. Expression and Truth rejects this opposition and proposes fluid new models of expression, truth, and knowledge with broad application for the humanities. The models derive from five theses that connect expression to description, cognition, the presence and absence of speech, and the conjunction of address and reply. The theses are linked by a concentration on musical expression, regarded as the ideal case of expression in general, and by fresh readings of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s scattered but important remarks about music. The result is a new conception of expression as a primary means of knowing, acting on, and forming the world.
Lawrence Kramer
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780520273955
- eISBN:
- 9780520953840
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520273955.003.0003
- Subject:
- Music, Theory, Analysis, Composition
This chapter develops the thesis that expression is cognition. It connects expression, via music, to a model of truth based on conditional judgments of neither/nor and as if rather than on the ...
More
This chapter develops the thesis that expression is cognition. It connects expression, via music, to a model of truth based on conditional judgments of neither/nor and as if rather than on the traditional categories of correspondence and disclosure. It develops the concept of a creative mode of cognition embodied in “numinous particles” of meaning—nubs of perception that find their most familiar form in music but that extend throughout the sphere of everyday life where, as Wittgenstein shows, they embed cognition in expressive acts.Less
This chapter develops the thesis that expression is cognition. It connects expression, via music, to a model of truth based on conditional judgments of neither/nor and as if rather than on the traditional categories of correspondence and disclosure. It develops the concept of a creative mode of cognition embodied in “numinous particles” of meaning—nubs of perception that find their most familiar form in music but that extend throughout the sphere of everyday life where, as Wittgenstein shows, they embed cognition in expressive acts.
