Semantics in music and language

As with our discussion of syntax, we will have to forestall complexity in the following discussion of semantics. What we need at this stage is to establish what semantics is, and how it could be discussed in terms of our current project. Semantics, in colloquial terms, deals with meaning, usually understood as a quality or characteristic of natural and artificial languages. However, we are trying to explain ‘meaning’ in music, so a similar definition will not serve our purposes. Looking beyond matters of definition, we can note that semantics is studied by a group of people who are of considerable interest to our endeavours: analytic philosophers of language. Let us consider the term ‘semantics’ as it pertains to this field. Semantics is a discipline within analytic philosophy that is primarily concerned with studying the conditions under which sentences in a natural or artificial language can be said to be true or false.39 Stated in simpler terms, semantics can be said to be the philosophical discipline that studies how meaning is facilitated by a language.

Consider the following definition, formulated by logician Alfred Tarski: “Semantics is a discipline which, speaking loosely, deals with certain relations between expressions of a language and the objects (or ‘states of affairs’) ‘referred to’ by those expressions” (Tarski, 1944:435; his emphasis). The ‘relations’ posited by Tarski can be expressed as the truth or falsity of those expressions. An example will suffice to provide the flavour of such philosophical pursuits. Consider an English expression like this:

(1) My cat is sitting on my bed.

We say that this expression is true if and only if there is a state of affairs in the world, such that the cat that belongs to me is sitting on the bed in question. This state of affairs is the expression’s truth condition. If there is no cat, or it is not on my bed, or it is standing on my bed, or any other violation of the truth conditions, we say that the expression is false. If it were somehow logically impossible that my cat could sit on my bed, then we would either deem the expression false, or claim that it is somehow meaningless (this is a fine distinction, that depends largely on one’s theoretical position regarding the manner in which terms refer to reality).

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Note that in linguistics, semantics is often construed as the study of the meaning of words or phrases, whereas in analytic philosophy it deals with the conditions under which propositions can be said to be true or false.

One should note, therefore, that in terms of semantics, expressions in two different languages that have identical truth conditions mean the same thing. Thus, (1) and the Afrikaans expression “My kat sit op my bed” mean the same thing, and the same state of affairs will render both true or false. (At any particular given time, the one cannot be true and the other false.) Therefore, it makes sense to say that whatever those two sentences mean, it is the meaning of the sentences that is true or false (if semantics alone is considered as the determinant of meaning). We call this meaning, this hypothetical ‘thing’, that is true or false, a proposition. Therefore, we can recast Tarski’s definition as a standard definition of ‘semantics’ (SDS):

(SDS): Semantics is a discipline which deals with certain relations between propositions and the objects or states of affairs referred to by those propositions.

This immediately leads us to the question of whether music can be said to boast semantic qualities, when ‘semantics’ is this narrowly construed. The reader is likely to recall that earlier, we noted that if various musical statements had agreed upon meanings, accepted within a community of listeners, and that it was used to refer to things, then music would simply be a sort of language (with a small ‘l’). When music is not used in this manner, it does not handle propositions and therefore cannot bear truth.40 Here, I am in agreement with philosopher of music Peter Kivy (1990). Music, if it is used in a manner where sounds have been arbitrarily agreed upon by a linguistic community to refer to things beyond music, is acting as a language (albeit an ineffectual and clumsy one). Music can easily be made to mean something by convention, just like the sounds in language mean by convention. But music does not always function like this. Therefore, it would seem that semantics, defined as in (SDS), is not a necessary feature of meaningful music per se. With a bit of effort and the co-operation of a community of listeners and utterers, music can be made to behave like language, in that it is a system of organised sound acting semantically. But this is a feature stemming from the fact that both music and language have been found to be communicative media. The fact that there is a thing called language that handles propositions, and a thing called music that does not, suggests that at a level of analysis less fundamental than that of communicative media, there is a point of disanalogy between music and language. Language

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Indeed, when one considers a view such as Stalnaker (1970), where semantics is defined as the study of propositions, it becomes clear that music has no semantics if it is unable to express propositions.

and music, at their extremes, differ in that the one handles propositional content and the other does not.41 We will see later that this difference can be explained in terms of the mechanisms by which music and language elicit mental states.

Let us take stock. Semantics is defined according to (SDS), whereby it is seen as dealing with the relations between propositions and relevant states of affairs in the world. These relations are expressed as truth conditions. Language, with its ability to express propositions, has semantic characteristics. However, music can only have similar semantic characteristics if we treat it as a language, by assigning referents to sounds that have been agreed upon by a linguistic community. This is a matter of definition. While we have said that both music and language can be thought of as communicative media affecting the mental states of competent listeners, the case of semantics and language’s position as the handler of propositions seems to mark a major difference between the two communicative behaviours. When we treat music like a language, by assigning conventional meanings to the elements that comprise it, we are more inclined to think of it as a sort of language, because we understand language as being the communicative medium that has semantics.42 What is the importance of this observation, that the case of music having or not having semantics is a matter of definition? The effect of these remarks is that the case of music not having semantics is the outcome of what would otherwise simply be a verbal dispute: that arguments where music has semantics must define semantics as something broader, usually an all-encompassing conception of ‘meaning’; or erroneously treat non-programmatic music as if it has its own semantic dimension. Conventional symbolism does not, per definition, function in non-programmatic music. It is meaning in non-programmatic music that we are trying to explain.