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From: nash@su-russell.ARPA (Ron Nash)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: The nature of communication
Message-ID: <354@su-russell.ARPA>
Date: Wed, 23-Sep-87 12:47:58 EDT
Article-I.D.: su-russe.354
Posted: Wed Sep 23 12:47:58 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 26-Sep-87 03:06:54 EDT
References: <2374@mmintl.UUCP> <4750001@hpindda.HP.COM>
Reply-To: nash@su-russell.UUCP (Ron Nash)
Organization: Stanford University, CSLI
Lines: 18

In article <4750001@hpindda.HP.COM> seshadri@hpindda.HP.COM (Raghu Seshadri) 
writes:

>It seems to me that if music were made up of symbols (which,by definition
>merely stand for something else ) ...

I don't know where this idea got started, but it seems that, in some
cases at least, symbols refer not to something else, but to properties
they themselves possess. Consider Nelson Goodman's example of the
tailor's swatch: it refers to properties possessed by itself --
color, weave, texture, and so on (but not, of course, size, shape,
location, etc.). Goodman calls this "exemplification," and in
his book Languages of Art he applies the idea in an interesting
way to the question of symbolic meaning in music.

Ron Nash
Center for the Study of Language and Information
Stanford University