Klarinet Archive - Posting 000224.txt from 2003/07

From: Tony@-----.uk (Tony Pay)
Subj: RE: [kl] Truth and the Philosophy of Music
Date: Mon, 7 Jul 2003 16:56:46 -0400

On Sat, 5 Jul 2003 11:35:48 -0700, kevinfay.home@-----.net said:

> Tony Pay posted:
>
> > There is a very clear intellectual distinction between what is
> > *true*, and can be asserted independently of the authority of the
> > person asserting it, and what is *opinion*, no matter whose opinion.
>
> . . . unless one dabbles in deconstructionist hermeneutics and all
> that. A Google search on "Hermeneutics and the Philosophy of Science"
> takes you to worlds where it's impossible to know that anything is
> true.

I think, though, that that's the conclusion of the scientific world-view
too, even though it's used in a very different way. Popper, whose
characterisation of science is probably the most widely accepted in the
profession, quotes Xenophanes as follows:

"But as for certain truth, no man has known it,
Nor will he know it; neither of the gods,
Nor yet of all the things of which I speak.
And even if by chance he were to utter
The final truth, he would himself not know it:
For all is but a woven web of guesses."

Both our sensory systems and our science are just approximations, as
visual illusions demonstrate; the conculsions of science constitute a
steadily improving approximation to the truth, but not ever demonstrably
the truth itself.

> . . . but taking the concept [of Platonic form] to playing the
> clarinet, I think it most certainly rings true. Once of the keys to
> teaching someone how to play, I think, is to get the correct idea in
> their head of how they're supposed to sound. Until that happens,
> practice tends to be a waste of time.

Yes, you can't enter into a process of error-correction until you know
what an error *is*, for you.

That fits in with Popper's notion of the process of science as
consisting of 'conjectures' that have to come *before* empirical
testing, leading to corrections that give rise to better conjectures.

Until you commit to having a particular sound, you can't improve.

> The imperfection thing I relate to as well. I know how I want to
> sound while playing, but never get entirely there, even on the best
> night.

Perhaps a part of that is that 'how you want to sound' -- or 'your
sound', for short -- needs to change from moment to moment according to
the context, and that's hard to achieve. But another part is probably
that your standards are high, so you notice where you fall short.

> Does anyone?

Probably some not very good players do:-)

That seeming paradox -- that good players may never be satisfied, but
bad players may be -- reminds me of something I read once about
consciousness and selfhood.

It *seems* to us that we are in possession of a 'self' that is
unchanging over time -- 'I' did that last week, 'I' do this this week;
and it's the same 'I' -- even though, clearly, we do change very
radically as we grow and develop, and sometimes we can even be aware of
such change in ourselves.

As the book I was reading put it, that happens because there is a
'ringmaster' that creates the illusion -- note, not the reality -- of an
unchanging 'I', derived from all the subsystems, both existing and
developing, that constitute us. (The metaphor of the 'ringmaster'
reflects the fact that, although it seems that the ringmaster controls
the circus acts he's presiding over, very often his job is to
'interpret' what happens, and give the circus audience the impression
that it was intentional.)

In fact, this continuous impression of 'self', once created, is what
allows us, by language and culture, to change ourselves very radically.

On the other hand, lower animals who don't possess such a 'ringmaster'
never change fundamentally, though of course they do learn from
experience.

Hence the paradox -- animals that have the experience of an unchanging
self, *don't* actually have an unchanging self; animals that don't have
the experience of an unchanging self, *do* actually have an unchanging
self.

Tony
--
_________ Tony Pay
|ony:-) 79 Southmoor Rd Tony@-----.uk
| |ay Oxford OX2 6RE http://classicalplus.gmn.com/artists
tel/fax 01865 553339

..... I got two words for Van Gogh..'Say what?'.

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