Expressiveness, Ineffability, and Nonconceptuality

JOHN SPACKMAN

Expressiveness, Ineffability, and Nonconceptuality

i. introduction

In much of the philosophical discussion of expres-sive qualities in the nineteenth and twentieth cen-turies, music and the arts were widely regarded ascapable of expressing emotions that are too fine-grained to be captured by language. This capacitywas, indeed, commonly viewed as one of the cen-tral sources of the value we attribute to music andartworks. In recent debates concerning expressivequalities, however, the question of whether thesequalities are ineffable has played a much less cen-tral role. While a few theorists have accepted theineffability claim, there has been a good deal ofskepticism both about this claim itself and aboutwhether, even if expressive qualities are ineffable,this ineffability could be a significant source of thevalue of music and the arts.

My aim here is primarily to assess this inef-fability claim, though I also touch on the claimabout value. The position for which I argue is amoderate one. According to this view, expressivequalities are not ultimately ineffable. They can,in fact, be adequately captured by certain con-cepts, namely, demonstrative concepts of the formthat expressive quality, and hence also by cor-responding demonstrative linguistic expressions.1

But nonetheless there is considerable truth inthe traditional ineffability claim, in that expres-sive qualities are descriptively ineffable—that is, atleast some expressive qualities cannot be capturedby any nondemonstrative descriptive expressions.Further, while the descriptive ineffability of ex-pressive qualities may not be as central to thevalue of music and the arts as the traditional theo-rists maintained, it nonetheless represents a signif-icant source of value in many musical and artisticworks.

In the sense I use the notion here, expressivequalities are to be distinguished from emotionalqualities that might be attributed to works of art,music, or literature on the basis of their represen-tational properties. The expressive qualities I amconcerned with are emotive qualities that workspossess in virtue of their possessing certain for-mal, nonrepresentational properties. Pure instru-mental music represents a paradigm of the kindof work that possesses expressive qualities in thissense, but I take it that other types of artworks,such as paintings and other visual artworks, maypossess them as well on the basis of their nonrep-resentational features.

In what follows, I first seek to characterize morecarefully what might be meant by the claim thatexpressive qualities are ineffable. Central to myoverall argument is the claim that expressive qual-ities are, as the traditional theorists maintained,fine-grained, and in Section II, I thus defend acertain version of this claim. In Sections III andIV, I turn to the question of whether the finenessof grain of expressive qualities entails their inef-fability. Finally, I offer more briefly some reasonswhy descriptive ineffability should be regarded asa source of value in the arts.

ii. the traditional ineffability claim

There is a remarkable unanimity among tradi-tional theorists about the reasons for the ineffa-bility of expressive qualities and about the role ofineffability as one of the main sources of the valueof art. Many of these early theorists were advo-cates of one or another version of the expressiontheory of art, so their focus was on the ineffabilityof the feelings the artist expresses in making an

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 70:3 Summer 2012c© 2012 The American Society for Aesthetics

304 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

artwork. However, according to the expressiontheory, the emotional quality expressed by the art-work is, ideally, the same as the emotion expressedby the artist.

For R. G. Collingwood, for instance, the rea-son why what he calls intellectual language can-not capture expressive qualities is that while themeaning of this language is general, what is ex-pressed in the artwork is particular:

The reason why description, so far from helping expres-sion, actually damages it, is that description generalizes.To describe a thing is to call it a thing of such and such akind: to bring it under a conception, to classify it. Expres-sion, on the contrary, individualizes. The anger which Ifeel here and now, with a certain person, for a certaincause . . . is a peculiar anger, not quite like any angerthat I ever felt before.2

We find a very similar view of the reasons forthe ineffability of expressive qualities in JohnDewey, who says that in contrast with the gen-erality of “statements,” “the meaning of an ex-pressive object . . . is individualized.”3 SuzanneLanger, though she rejects the expression the-ory of art, nonetheless retains a similar concep-tion of the source of the ineffability of expressivequalities:

because the forms of human feeling are much more con-gruent with musical forms than with the forms of lan-guage, music can reveal the nature of feelings with adetail and truth that language cannot approach.4

We also find in Langer a clear expression of theview that this ineffability is the paramount sourceof the value of music and the arts, a view that isprominent in all of the theorists we have consid-ered. As she puts it, “the real power of music liesin the fact that it can be ‘true’ to the life of feelingin a way that language cannot.”5

It is noteworthy that in addition to insisting thatexpressive qualities are ineffable, many of theseearly theorists connect this view to some version ofthe claim that these qualities cannot be grasped byconcepts. This is most explicit, as we saw above, inCollingwood, who in this respect follows Croce.6

That these two claims should be related, for thesethinkers, is not surprising, since for them the rea-son expressive qualities are ineffable has to dowith the generality of (intellectual) language, andthey regard concepts as general.

Let us consider more carefully the differentways in which these two claims might be made:that expressive qualities are ineffable and thatthey are nonconceptual. Note first that theclaim that expressive qualities are ineffable mightmean that they cannot be captured by literallanguage, or that they cannot be captured by anylanguage at all, literal or nonliteral. It seems plau-sible that the traditional theorists were concernedwith the latter, more general view, though I do notdefend this interpretation here; it is, at any rate,this view with which I am concerned. It is alsohelpful to distinguish between two different typesof ineffability claim, which I will call semanticineffability and communicative ineffability. Tosay that an experience or an item of knowledgeis semantically ineffable is to say that it is notcaptured by the meaning of any words. To say thatan experience or some knowledge is communica-tively ineffable is to say that it cannot be conveyedto others by means of words. These two notionsare often run together, but they seem in principledistinguishable. It is arguable that the theoristswe have considered have in mind principallysemantic ineffability, since their point in claimingthat expressive qualities are more individualizedthan any of our emotion words seems to be thatthey are not adequately captured by the meaningsof these words. But they likely have in mindcommunicative ineffability as well. It is, at anyrate, the claim that expressive qualities are bothsemantically and communicatively ineffable thatI am concerned to evaluate.

Consider now the claim that expressive qual-ities are nonconceptual. I here formulate thisposition in terms of the experience of expres-sive qualities, rather than the expressive qual-ities themselves, being nonconceptual. I followStephen Davies in viewing expressive quali-ties as response-dependent properties.7 Response-dependent properties are properties individuatedin part by the experiential responses that ob-jects possessing them typically evoke in suitablesubjects under appropriate circumstances, as, forinstance, is often claimed for the property of be-ing red. If expressive qualities are response de-pendent, the claim that they are nonconceptual isbest viewed as the claim that the contents of ourexperiences of them, the way those experiencesrepresent the world, are nonconceptual.

It will thus be helpful in clarifying this claim todraw on recent discussions of whether ordinary

Spackman Expressiveness, Ineffability, and Nonconceptuality 305

perceptual experience is nonconceptual. Thereare several ways in which the view that perceptualcontent is nonconceptual might be understood. Inearly discussions of the issue, it was common toformulate nonconceptualism as the modal claimthat it is not necessary, in order for a subject tobe in a given perceptual state, that she possessthe concepts used in a canonical account of itscontent.8 More recently, however, a number ofphilosophers on both sides of the debate have ar-gued that this formulation does not entail that per-ceptual content itself be nonconceptual, but onlythat the subject’s perceptual state be nonconcep-tual in a certain sense.9 The earlier formulationhas thus sometimes been termed state noncon-ceptualism, as opposed to content nonconceptu-alism, which would hold that perceptual contentitself is nonconceptual. I am concerned here, how-ever, only with the question of whether the experi-ence of expressive qualities is state nonconceptualsince, as will become apparent, it is primarily thissense of the notion that is relevant to whether theyare ineffable.

In sum, the claims I will consider here are thatexpressive qualities are semantically and commu-nicatively ineffable by language both literal andnonliteral, and that our experiences of them arestate nonconceptual.

iii. the fineness of grain of expressive qualities

One response to the traditional argument that ex-pressive qualities are ineffable because they arefine-grained would simply be to deny that they arefine-grained. There has indeed been a prominenttradition in thinking about expressive qualities ac-cording to which the emotions expressed by art-works are not fine-grained at all, but are restrictedto certain emotions that are the referents of quitegeneral emotion terms. I would argue, however,that, contrary to this view, we have good reasonsfor thinking that at least some expressive qualitiesare fine-grained.

It will be helpful at the outset to distinguishthree senses in which expressive qualities mightbe said to be fine-grained. First, to say that anexpressive quality is fine-grained might be to saythat there are at least some cases in which theemotional quality expressed by a work is morespecific than any one of our general emotion terms(‘sad,’ ‘hopeful,’ and so on), so that for any single

emotion term, there might be several expressivequalities correctly describable by it, which differin their specific characteristics. I refer to this asthe claim that expressive qualities are weakly fine-grained. A stronger claim would be that some ex-pressive qualities are more specific than any set ofemotion terms, that for any description compris-ing a set of emotion terms, there could be differ-ent types of expressive qualities correctly describ-able by that description. Let us call this the viewthat expressive qualities are strongly fine-grained.Finally, there is the even stronger claim that ex-pressive qualities are uniquely fine-grained, thatis, that the emotion expressed by each artwork isunique, that each work expresses a feeling slightlydifferent from that of any other work. What I willsuggest is that we have reason to think that someexpressive qualities are strongly fine-grained,though it is doubtful that they are all uniquelyfine-grained.

I here focus on one quite fully developed ver-sion of the view that art can express only a lim-ited range of coarse-grained emotions, that ofStephen Davies, which focuses on music in par-ticular. Davies advocates what he calls appear-ance emotionalism, which holds that expressivequalities are objective, response-dependent prop-erties that are literally possessed by music.10 Thehuman response that constitutes expressive qual-ities is an experience of resemblance between themusic and the behavioral expression of emotion,including both bodily behavior and the prosodiccontours of the voice. Expressive qualities are ob-jective, for Davies, in that there is considerableagreement about some putative examples of themamong qualified listeners. He holds that there isempirical evidence that there is little agreementabout expressive qualities at the level of fine dis-tinctions between emotions (for example, grief,misery, and despair), but that there is a good dealof agreement at the level of more general emo-tions (for example, sadness). Thus, on his view, mu-sic can express only general emotion types and, in-deed, only a limited range of them. Davies concurswith a long tradition of writers on the subject fromEduard Hanslick to Peter Kivy, who hold that pureinstrumental music cannot represent the cognitivecomponents of many emotions, that is, the judg-ments and evaluations that are often held to beinvolved in them. Such music can thus expressonly those emotion types that can be individu-ated solely by means of the behavior typically


associated with them, which might include sad-ness, happiness, timidity, anger, and a few oth-ers. Davies does allow, however, that there canbe great subtlety in the expressiveness of musi-cal works, by virtue of the different musical formsthey use to express the same general emotions.But these differences in form pertain only to howthese general emotions are expressed, not to theidentity of the emotions expressed themselves.11 Ihere consider two lines of thought in response tothis type of view. The first of these suggests thatexpressive qualities are not restricted in the wayDavies maintains and are sometimes weakly fine-grained; the second suggests that expressive qual-ities are in fact sometimes strongly fine-grained.

The first argument is based on the idea thatto experience an expressive quality involvesexercising a certain imaginative capacity. One pro-ponent of such a view is Jenefer Robinson. Robin-son argues that music can express many cogni-tively complex and finely distinguished emotionsbecause it can capture the cognitive componentsof the emotions, and this it can do because, at leastin some cases, we hear a musical work as expres-sive in virtue of hearing it as expressing the men-tal states of an imaginary persona.12 The cognitivecontent of many complex emotions involves in-terrelations between or sequences of several cog-nitive components, but because music is a pro-cess, we can hear it as expressing a sequence ofmental states involving cognitive components andcan thus hear it as expressing complex emotion.Robinson and Gregory Karl argue, for example,that certain passages in Shostakovich’s Tenth Sym-phony conform to five central features of the cog-nitive content of hope, most importantly a positiveattitude toward the attainment of a state and a de-sire to bring that state about.13 Music can mirrora state like desire or striving in that, for instance,a theme may struggle for dominance, fail repeat-edly, but finally emerge triumphant. It can mirrorevaluations of the environment by presenting ei-ther sunny or dark musical motifs. By combiningthe cognitive elements from different emotions,music can in fact, for Robinson, express blendsof emotion, emotional ambiguities, and emotionalconflicts.14 The musical emotions are thus, in ourterminology, at least weakly fine-grained, morespecific than any single emotion term.15

The persona theory has met with some criti-cism, but I think a weak form of it is defensible

and can lend support to the claim that music canexpress fine-grained emotions. It has sometimesbeen objected that it is simply wrong that in ev-ery case in which a qualified listener attributes anexpressive quality to a musical work, she imag-ines a persona in the work.16 But while some, forexample, Jerrold Levinson, have advocated thisstrong version of the persona theory, we need notdo so in order to support the ability of music toexpress fine-grained emotions.17 We can allow, asRobinson does, that it is possible to hear certainsimple local expressive qualities such as sadnessand joy in music without imagining a persona asinhabiting it, while still maintaining that imagin-ing a persona allows one to hear a fuller and morefine-grained range of emotional qualities.18

Other worries about the persona theory con-cern the identity criteria for the imagined persona,whether, for instance, the listener must imagine asingle persona throughout a work or could imag-ine multiple personae.19 But it does not seem es-sential to the ability of the persona view to supportthe fineness of grain of expressive qualities thatthe personae in question be imagined in any verydeterminate way.20 What is essential is that thisimaginative process provide a foundation for theinterrelation of the cognitive components of com-plex emotions and that this is compatible with thepersonae being more indeterminate than a fullyimagined person.

What is perhaps the strongest objection to thepersona theory, however, is that what listenersimagine when they hear a musical work is too lit-tle constrained by the music to be attributed tothe music itself rather than their own fantasies.21

Persona theories need not say, however, that what-ever is imagined by a listener should be attributedto the work itself. They can hold that in orderfor the content of the listener’s imagination to berelevant to a work, it must be appropriately con-strained by features properly attributable to thework, including formal properties, local expres-sive qualities, and so on. As Robinson suggests,that ascriptions of expressive qualities can be soconstrained becomes more plausible if we think ofthem as interpretations along the lines of thematicinterpretations of literary and other art-works. Onsuch a view, ascriptions of expressiveness may beapt to varying degrees, where the degree of apt-ness is determined by the extent to which an as-cription can account for the evidence of the other


properties present in the music, along with, per-haps, evidence concerning the composer’s inten-tions. Such a view concedes that listeners’ imagina-tions are not so tightly constrained by the featuresof the music that all or most qualified listenerswill hear the work as expressing the same emo-tions. But from this perspective, contra Davies’sview, the agreement of qualified listeners is nei-ther necessary nor sufficient to establish that awork has a given expressive quality.

The second argument for the fineness of grainof expressive qualities I want to consider per-tains to the semantics of ascriptions of expressivequalities. When we call an artwork or passage ofmusic melancholy, we clearly do not mean to at-tribute a literal emotional state to it, and for thisreason, some have regarded such statements asmetaphorical.22 Others, like Davies, have viewedthem as literal but secondary. Davies holds, follow-ing Wittgenstein, that in addition to the primaryliteral use of terms like ‘sad,’ there are secondaryliteral uses that depend on but are distinct fromthe primary use.23 When we say, for instance, thata dog’s face “looks sad” because of its similarityto sad human facial expressions, even though thedog does not feel sad, this is a secondary use. Butwhether we view ascriptions of expressiveness asmetaphorical or as secondarily literal, it is impor-tant to recognize that they differ from most literalascriptions of properties in at least one importantrespect, in that their meaning or significance isoften highly context dependent.

It is widely accepted by many different theoriesof metaphor that the meaning or significance ofmost metaphors is context dependent. This is soeven for approaches inspired by the Davidsonianview that, strictly speaking, metaphors have nononliteral meaning, since on such views the cogni-tive significance of a metaphor, what it leads us tonotice or attend to, is still context dependent.24 Itmay seem less clear that if ascriptions of expres-siveness are secondary literal statements, they arecontext dependent. But recall that for Davies, as-criptions of expressiveness are equivalent to literalstatements of resemblance between music and theemotions. And literal resemblance statements areclearly context dependent in one aspect of theirmeaning or significance. It is true that one aspectof the meaning of a statement of the form “x re-sembles y” is context independent, in that on ev-ery occasion it states that there is a resemblancebetween x and y. But on the other hand, what I

mean when I say, “Anna’s personality is like Rose-mary’s” may be quite different from what I meanwhen I say, “Dan’s personality is like Jacob’s.”25 Itmight be argued, in a Davidsonian vein, that whatis context dependent in such cases is not an aspectof the meaning of the resemblance statement, butonly what such statements get us to notice, whatI have called their cognitive significance. But forthe present argument, it matters little whether wethink of the context-dependent element of suchstatements as an aspect of their meaning or theircognitive significance.

If a statement like “that music is melancholy” iscontext dependent in the way suggested, its mean-ing or significance on any occasion has the poten-tial to depend closely on the particular work ofwhich it is said. Now someone might accept thatthis is true in principle, but hold that in actual prac-tice the meaning of such statements on differentoccasions does not vary significantly depending onthe work in question. After all, the significance ofsome resemblance statements is pretty straightfor-ward. If I tell you my car is like yours in color, youwill be able to tell its color at least roughly withoutlooking at it. Davies, in likening ascriptions of ex-pressiveness to relatively straightforward implicitcomparisons like “that dog has a sad face,” effec-tively treats them as fairly simple comparisons ofthis kind. But often, if not always, such ascriptionsseem much richer in meaning. If someone calls anunfamiliar passage of music nostalgic, for instance,we may need to attend carefully to the features ofthe music to understand how it might be regardedas resembling or otherwise connected to nostalgia.Davies does, as we noted above, allow that theremay be subtle differences in the musical means bywhich different works express the same generalemotions. But if the meaning or significance of as-criptions of expressiveness is context dependent,these differences will not just pertain to the waygeneral emotions are expressed, but to the identityof the emotions expressed themselves. If these dif-ferences pertain to the meaning of the ascriptions,then “melancholy” can mean different things asapplied to different works and, assuming that itsmeaning on any occasion is the emotional qual-ity it ascribes, the emotional quality it attributesto different works may vary as well. If the dif-ferences pertain to what the ascriptions get us tonotice, since what the ascriptions get us to notice isarguably differences in emotional qualities, againthe emotional quality attributed to two different


works by calling them melancholy may be differ-ent. An example will help to clarify why this isthe case.

Consider two works that, to this listener’s ear,might aptly be described as expressing yearning.In the first movement of Johannes Brahms’s Sex-tet for Strings No. 2, in G Major (Op. 36), afteran opening dominated by the first violin’s pre-sentation of a melancholy, descending theme inG major, the violin reaches a crescendo of risingnotes culminating in repeated thrusts in the high-est reaches of the instrument, a crescendo that isrepeated multiple times over the course of the firstmovement. These crescendos might be read as ex-pressing a kind of yearning, as the rising seriesof notes and the repetitive thrusts in the heightsof the register recall the “straining of the nerves”when one is in the throes of an unfulfilled de-sire. And yet because, among other reasons, thecrescendos occur in the context of the melan-cholic opening theme that has the grave feelingof a loss, what they seem to express is a yearn-ing of a particular kind, what might be called ananguished yearning, a yearning for something ir-retrievably lost or something one cannot have.26

Compare this with a second work that might bedescribed as expressing yearning, the contempo-rary composer John Tavener’s The Protecting Veil.The opening sections of the work are dominatedby a sinuous, droning violin that, like the violin inthe Brahms sextet, strives repeatedly toward thehighest register and might be regarded similarlyas expressing a kind of yearning. But, in this case,there is no melancholic undertone. The strivingof the violin is rather surrounded by a series oflovely, spacious melodies, and one thus has thesense not of an anguished yearning, but ratherof a contemplative and perhaps almost hopefulyearning. In these cases, the particular musicalfeatures that distinguish the two works are notjust the means by which they express the general-ized emotion of yearning. They enable the worksto express more fine-grained modulations of thatemotion. The emotions expressed are thus weaklyfine-grained.

I would argue, however, that the account of as-criptions of expressiveness I have offered in factsupports viewing them as having the potential tobe strongly fine-grained, that is, more specific thanany description comprising a set of emotion terms.Given the context dependence of ascriptions of ex-

pressiveness, there is, in principle, no way to drawa sharp limit on the connections that might beheard as obtaining between a work’s formal qual-ities and various emotions. The formal qualities ofany artwork represent an endless source of possi-ble connections to the realm of emotion. In someworks, the connections may be relatively simple,but they may be more complex, and it is arguablethat they often are. We could, for instance, refineour earlier characterization of the Brahms sextetby noting that since the thrusting of the violins inthe crescendos is so high in the register, the yearn-ing in question seems an especially passionate one;that the repetition of the melancholic motif gives itthe nostalgic feel of someone returning frequentlyto their memories; and so on.

If this account is right, though, it becomes plau-sible that at least some expressive qualities will bestrongly fine-grained. If it is always possible, forsome works at any rate, for listeners to find new,well-grounded connections between the work andhuman emotions, the emotions expressed by thoseworks will be more specific than can be capturedby any description conjoining a number of emo-tion terms. For any list of emotions in a descrip-tion of such a work, it will always be possiblefor listeners to find plausible connections betweenthe work and emotions beyond those in the list.The potential emotional resonances of the workwill always outrun the emotions specified in thedescription.

I do not, I should emphasize, take these pointsto entail that expressive qualities are uniquelyfine-grained, that every artwork expresses a dif-ferent emotion. Indeed, I think there are goodreasons to be skeptical of such a claim. First, itis conceivable that there could be two percep-tually indistinguishable artworks, and these art-works might, on some views anyway, be held to ex-press the same emotional quality. Second, it seemsclear that there might be subtle differences in theforms and colors of two paintings or in the melodiccontours of two pieces of music that make no no-ticeable difference in the emotions those worksare heard to express. And third, if we take the in-tentions of the artist or composer to be relevant todetermining a work’s expressive quality, it may of-ten be that the work was not meant to express anyvery subtle emotion. Nonetheless, we have goodreason to think that expressive qualities are poten-tially strongly fine-grained. And it may thus be the


case that some works express nuances of emotionthat are different from the emotions expressed byany other actual works.

iv. ineffability and demonstrative concepts

If the ineffability claim cannot be countered bydenying that expressive qualities are fine-grained,though, there are nonetheless different considera-tions that I take to show that their fineness of graindoes not entail that they are ineffable. The idea Iwill propose is patterned on a response developedby John McDowell and others to an argument forthe nonconceptuality of perceptual content thatis in many ways quite similar to the traditionalargument for the ineffability of expressiveness.27

Several philosophers have argued that percep-tion commonly presents us with color and shapeproperties more fine-grained than any terms orconcepts we possess.28 To take an example fromChristopher Peacocke, the shape you perceive amountain on the horizon to have may be far morespecific than any shape terms you possess, suchas ‘rounded’ or ’jagged.’29 But Peacocke and oth-ers maintain that subjects do not have the abil-ity to type-identify such fine-grained shapes afterseeing them, and if such an ability is required inorder to have a concept of the shape, then theycan perceive shapes for which they have no con-cepts. Perceptual experience is thus, on this view,nonconceptual, at least in the sense of state non-conceptualism. McDowell’s response to this lineof thought is that, in fact, subjects do possess con-cepts adequate to capture their perceptual contentin its full fineness of grain—namely, demonstrativeconcepts such as that shape or that shade. Ac-cording to this “demonstrative strategy,” the con-cepts in question are not necessarily held by sub-jects antecedently, but will typically be acquired inthe course of having the experiences in question.The full specificity of your experience of the shapeof the mountain can be captured by the conceptthat shape that you acquire while looking at themountain.

In the case of expressive qualities, the analo-gous proposal would be that even if these qualitiesare strongly fine-grained, it does not follow thatthey are ineffable, for subjects can capture them bymeans of demonstrative concepts of the form thatexpressive quality, or that melancholy expres-sive quality, and hence by corresponding verbal

expressions. I will refer to such concepts as EQ-demonstrative concepts. On this proposal, expres-sive qualities would be semantically effable, sincethey can be captured in the meaning of expressionslike “that expressive quality.” This might not seemlike a very substantial form of effability, for severalreasons. First, it might be pointed out that an ex-pression like “that expressive quality” would con-vey information to another subject about whichexpressive quality was indicated, and allow herto think about it, only if she had experienced orcould experience that quality directly. This is true.But what it entails is only that there is a restric-tion on the communicative effability of expressivequalities by demonstratives. These qualities wouldstill be semantically effable and communicativelyeffable in a restricted way. Second, it might be ob-jected that demonstrative expressions do not tellus much about the nature of the expressive quali-ties in question. Again, this is true and significant;in the following section I consider the implicationsof this point. But the fact that expressive qualitiescan be captured by demonstrative concepts andwords is still important, since this makes it possi-ble for a subject to grasp them in thought and toconvey thoughts about them to others who haveexperienced them.

One significant challenge to this proposal mightbe derived from Diana Raffman’s argument forthe ineffability of a different type of musical prop-erty, musical nuances.30 Nuances are fine-grainedvariations within basic musical categories such asthe twelve chromatic pitch types and the chro-matic intervals. Raffman argues that subjects com-monly have an experience of, and knowledge of,various nuance pitches and intervals without be-ing able to report which pitches and intervals theyare. There is evidence, she suggests, that the abilityto report on the chromatic pitches in any stimu-lus depends on schemas—complex knowledge rep-resentations—of the chromatic intervals. But shepoints to studies suggesting that it is highly un-likely that humans possess interval schemas asfine-grained as the nuance pitches and intervalsthey can discriminate. Trained listeners are notgenerally able to consistently categorize intervalsmore fine-grained than chromatic semitones, pre-sumably in part because they cannot store so manyintervals in long-term memory.31 What this in-dicates, for Raffman, is that they cannot type-identify the fine-grained intervals in question, andso it is unlikely that they possess fine-grained


interval schemas. She would thus presumably denyas well that listeners possess demonstrative con-cepts of these intervals (that interval).

I will not try to assess here whether this argu-ment is successful against the demonstrative strat-egy for musical nuances. But, in a similar vein,it might be argued that in order to possess ademonstrative concept of a given expressive qual-ity, subjects must have the capacity to recognizedistinct instantiations of that property as beingof the same type, but that in fact subjects do nothave this capacity for some or all expressive qual-ities. However, even if we accept the specifiedpossession conditions for EQ-demonstrative con-cepts, it is arguable that subjects do satisfy theseconditions for all of the expressive qualities theyperceive.

It seems more plausible that qualified sub-jects satisfy the proposed possession conditionsfor demonstrative concepts in the case of expres-sive qualities than in the case of nuance pitchesand intervals, because expressive qualities seemless subject to restrictions of memory. This is sowhether the emotions expressed by artworks areviewed as quite general, as strongly fine-grained,or even as uniquely fine-grained. In defending hisview that expressive qualities are general, Daviesspeaks of the funeral march in Beethoven’s ThirdSymphony as expressing just the same general sad-ness as the slow movement of Mahler’s Fifth.32 Itseems qualified listeners generally have no troublerecognizing the emotional qualities of two worksas being of the same general type. Even if ex-pressive qualities are regarded as uniquely fine-grained, though, so that each artwork expressesa different emotion, it is plausible that listenerscan re-identify the expressive quality of a givenwork on repeated listenings. It might be ques-tioned whether any listener hears precisely thesame expressive quality on multiple listenings to agiven musical work. But while there may be somevariation in our response to a work over time, itseems phenomenologically plausible that our re-sponse remains fairly consistent. Indeed, it seemswe often go back to a work precisely because weremember its emotional quality and want to hearit again.

Another worry might be that if each artwork ex-presses a different emotional quality, it will thusnot be possible for subjects to apply a putative EQ-demonstrative concept to more than one item, andif genuine concepts must be applicable to more

than a single item, EQ-demonstrative conceptscannot count as genuine concepts. This argumentimposes, however, an illegitimate requirement onthe possession of demonstrative concepts. Thereseems to be no reason to require that a subjectmust be able to correctly apply a demonstrativeconcept to more than one item; all that is requiredis that she be able to correctly apply it on morethan one occasion, whether to a different item orto the same item at a later time.

There are good reasons, then, for holding thatsubjects possess demonstrative concepts that cancapture the expressive qualities they experienceand hence for saying that expressive qualities aresemantically and, in a restricted sense, commu-nicatively effable. Notice that if this is true, expe-riences of expressive qualities are conceptual inthe sense of state conceptualism described ear-lier. I noted in Section II that even if subjectspossess demonstrative concepts sufficient to grasptheir experiences of expressive qualities, contentnonconceptualists might argue that this is com-patible with the contents of these experiencesbeing by nature nonconceptual. I will, however,not consider this worry further here. My mainconcern is with the ineffability claim, and evenif the contents of experiences of expressivenessare in this sense nonconceptual, if subjects pos-sess EQ-demonstrative concepts, this nonconcep-tuality will not entail that expressive qualities beineffable.

v. descriptive ineffability

One understandable reaction that a proponent ofineffability might have to the claim that expres-sive qualities can be captured by demonstrativeexpressions might be something like this: “well,perhaps they are effable in this sense—but that isnot what I meant. Demonstrative expressions donot really convey anything about the experiencesthey express—so there is still a deeper sense inwhich expressive qualities are ineffable.” I thinkthere is some truth in this reaction, and I want nowto try to unpack what this is.

Even if an expression like “that expressive qual-ity” can adequately capture the emotion con-veyed by the Brahms sextet discussed earlier, itis nonetheless clear that these words do not of-fer us any descriptive purchase on the expres-sive quality we perceive. I would argue, in fact,


that the nature of many expressive qualities can-not be adequately captured by any descriptionor set of descriptions, literal or metaphorical.In this sense, even if expressive qualities canbe captured demonstratively, they nonethelessremain descriptively ineffable. In the present con-text, by a “description” I simply mean any pred-icative expression not explicitly involving demon-stratives such as ‘this,’ ‘that,’ ‘now,’ ‘here,’ ‘there,’and so on.33

One natural suggestion, of course, is that evenif not all expressive qualities could be capturedby means of a single emotion term, nonethe-less they could all be captured by means of de-scriptions comprising larger collections of emo-tion terms. The emotional quality of the openingof the Brahms sextet, on this view, might perhapsbe captured by describing it as “anguished, yearn-ing, melancholy, passionate, and nostalgic.” Butthis proposal is undermined by our discussion ofthe semantics of ascriptions of expressiveness. Iargued that, given the context dependence of themeaning or significance of such ascriptions, onecannot draw a limit to the emotional resonancesthat can aptly be perceived in a work and that, forthis reason, many expressive qualities have thepotential to be more specific than any descriptioncomposed of a list of emotion terms. There mightbe many quite different expressive qualities cor-rectly describable as “anguished, yearning, melan-choly, passionate, and nostalgic.” The differencesbetween these qualities thus cannot be capturedby the description.

There are, however, different kinds of de-scriptive mechanisms that have sometimes beenproposed in order to render various aestheticproperties effable. Tiger Roholt has recently dis-cussed several of these in an article that criti-cizes Raffman’s claim that musical nuances areineffable.34 One suggestion he considers, but ulti-mately rejects, is that nuances might be adequatelygrasped by “indirect descriptions” of the kind dis-cussed by W. E. Kennick, that is, highly specific(and potentially metaphorical) descriptions of themusical context of the nuance in question.35 As anexample, he cites a description by Raffman herselfof a case in which “a flutist ever so slightly raises(‘sharpens’) an F-sharp sustained over a D-naturalacross a modulation from B-minor to D-major. . . .The flutist’s objective is to widen (‘brighten’)the major third between D-natural and F-sharp.”

Roholt concludes, rightly I think, that such con-textual descriptions are too general to capturefine-grained variations in the degree to which theF-sharp in such a situation might be raised.

In a similar way, it is arguable that context-based descriptions of emotional qualities in musicand art would often remain too general to capturedifferences between strongly fine-grained expres-sive qualities. Such contextual description mightseek to specify a work’s expressive quality by de-scribing the formal qualities that are responsiblefor that feeling. On such a view, the expressivequality of the opening of the Brahms sextet, forinstance, might be described by pointing to thedescending G-major motif, the high crescendos ofthe violin, and so on. Such a description might,of course, have to mention a great many featuresof the score. Even then it seems that few wouldbe able, on the basis of this type of description,to reconstruct precisely which emotional qualitythe work would possess. But might such a descrip-tion capture the expressive quality for a few well-trained listeners? It is implausible that it would, inmany cases, for even a complete description of thescore would not capture the musical nuances in-troduced in any performance. And such nuancesare often introduced precisely in order to regis-ter subtle emotional effects. In many cases, then,a description of the formal qualities of the workwill remain too general to specify the emotion itexpresses.

Roholt does argue, however, that a differenttype of description can render musical nuances“effable enough for practical purposes.”36 The de-scriptions he has in mind are comparisons, oftenthemselves involving metaphor, to the nuances inother works and performances, as when a musiciansays, “The brightness I have in mind is a bright-ness just like the one so-and-so achieved on therecording of that song.”37 Such descriptions makenuances practically effable in the sense that theyallow musicians to effectively communicate aboutthem. In a similar way, it might be suggested thatwe could capture the expressive quality of the be-ginning of the Brahms sextet by saying it is thesame kind of yearning as that expressed by, say,a passage from a certain Schubert quartet. If notall expressive qualities are uniquely fine-grained,it is theoretically possible that in some cases wecould specify the expressive quality of a work bypointing to another instance of the same quality


in another work. But notice, as is revealed inRoholt’s formulation above, that descriptions ofthis kind are implicitly demonstrative: they say,in effect, “this expressive quality is the same asthat expressive quality.” For this reason, such ex-pressions are not actually descriptive alternativesto the demonstratives that I have argued cancapture expressive qualities; they are actuallyequivalent in meaning to these demonstratives.In fact, however, I think there will be many ex-pressive qualities that cannot be exactly capturedby any such comparative descriptions. As we haveseen, the expressive qualities of different workshave at least the potential to depend quite closelyon the different formal features of those works. Asa result, I suspect it would be difficult to find, formany expressive qualities, another musical pas-sage that has exactly the same set of emotionalresonances. Roholt may in fact concede an anal-ogous point about nuances by saying only thatcomparative descriptions render nuances “effableenough.”38

vi. ineffability and the value of expressivequalities

I have suggested that while, contrary to the claimsof the traditional theorists, expressive qualities arenot strictly ineffable since they can be graspedby demonstratives, they are nonetheless descrip-tively ineffable, and this admission may indeedpreserve a good deal of the spirit of the tradi-tional claims. Even if this view is accepted, how-ever, it might be held that the traditional thinkerswere wrong to maintain that this ineffability wasan important source of the value of art. I wantto conclude by suggesting why this charge seemsmistaken.

Davies is one author who has expressed skepti-cism about the idea that the ability of art and musicto express emotion beyond the scope of languageis a significant source of the value of even someworks. Davies questions whether, even if we con-ceded that music sometimes expresses emotionstoo fine-grained to be captured in language, theknowledge of emotion thus conveyed would haveany special importance.39 For quite mundane per-ceptual experiences—of the color of an apple, forinstance—are ineffable in this sense as well, andwe do not regard the extralinguistic knowledge

thus conveyed by perception as having any spe-cial importance. Thus, for him, the ineffability ofthe emotions expressed by music cannot be thesource of the importance of its expressive power.Malcolm Budd expresses a similar skepticism:“would the function of communicating an other-wise incommunicable shade of emotion have anygreater aesthetic importance than the communi-cation, by means of a sample, of a shade of colorotherwise incommunicable precisely?”40

The central point these objections miss, I think,is that we simply do not care about particularshades of color in the same way that we careabout particular shades of emotion and the rolethey can play in our lives. The emotions have acentral role in our ethical lives, as offering possi-ble attitudes toward different situations and hencepossible ways of responding to them. Representa-tions of different types of emotion are thus of greatvalue, as they allow us to imagine and potentiallyadopt new attitudes and responses. If music andthe arts can represent emotions that language can-not, that is thus one possible source of the valuewe place in them.

There is, however, another reason why the in-effability of expressive qualities might be a sourceof value. Wassily Kandinsky begins Concerningthe Spiritual in Art with the words, “every workof art is the child of its time, and in many cases,the mother of our emotions.”41 The idea seemsto be that art can be a source of novel emotions,emotions not previously known to the audience;in particular, Kandinsky seems to suggest that itcan be the source of new emotions particularly ap-propriate to each era. Whether this is exactly whatKandinsky has in mind or not, it is arguable thatexpressive qualities often provide us with novelemotions—hence, new potential attitudes and re-sponses—because they are descriptively ineffable.The emotions with which we are familiar at anytime, apart from those we discover in artworks, arepresumably those we have experienced and thosewe have been told about by others. But the rangeof our emotional experience is of course limited.And if art and music often express shades of emo-tion not capturable by descriptive language, otherswill not have been able to tell us about them. Itis thus plausible that many of the emotions ex-pressed in art and music will be novel shades ofemotion, and this itself might be viewed as some-thing of great value, especially if, as Kandinsky


maintains, every age needs to find its own peculiaremotions.42

JOHN SPACKMAN

Department of PhilosophyMiddlebury CollegeMiddlebury, Vermont 05753

internet: [email protected]

1. In what follows, terms in small capitals refer toconcepts.

2. R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (OxfordUniversity Press, 1938), pp. 112–113.

3. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigee,1980), p. 90.

4. Suzanne Langer, Philosophy in a New Key: A Study inthe Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art (Harvard UniversityPress, 1942), p. 235.

5. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, p. 243.6. Benedetto Croce, The Aesthetic as the Science of Ex-

pression and of the Linguistic in General, trans. Colin Lyas(Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 1. Langer is some-thing of an exception to this point, since she regards allsymbols, including those involved in the arts, as conceptual.See Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, pp. 61–62, 71–72.

7. Stephen Davies, “Artistic Expression and the HardCase of Pure Music,” in Contemporary Debates in Aestheticsand the Philosophy of Art, ed. Matthew Kieran (Oxford:Blackwell, 2006), p. 180.

8. See, for instance, Gareth Evans, The Varieties of Ref-erence, ed. John McDowell (Oxford University Press, 1982),and Adrian Cussins, “Content, Conceptual Content, andNonconceptual Content,” in The Philosophy of ArtificialIntelligence, ed. Margaret Boden (Oxford University Press,1990).

9. See, for instance, Richard Heck, “NonconceptualContent and the ‘Space of Reasons’,” Philosophical Review109 (2000): 483–523, and Jeff Speaks, “Is There a Problemabout Nonconceptual Content?” Philosophical Review 114(2005): 359–398.

10. Davies, “Artistic Expression and the Hard Case ofPure Music.” For an earlier version of his view, see StephenDavies, Musical Meaning and Expression (Cornell Univer-sity Press, 1994), chap. 5.

11. Davies, “Artistic Expression and the Hard Case ofPure Music,” pp. 185–186.

12. Jenefer Robinson, Deeper Than Reason: Emotionand Its Role in Literature, Music, and Art (Oxford: Claren-don Press, 2005).

13. Gregory Karl and Jenefer Robinson,“Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony and the Musical Expres-sion of Cognitively Complex Emotions,” The Journal ofAesthetics and Art Criticism 53 (1995): 401–415.

14. Robinson, Deeper Than Reason, pp. 312, 300.15. Robinson, in fact, appears to hold that expressive

qualities are strongly fine-grained as well, since apparentlyon the basis of their fineness of grain she says that often“what is expressed cannot be named in words” (p. 300). But

at present I focus on the claim that they are weakly fine-grained.

16. Davies, “Contra the Hypothetical Persona in Mu-sic,” in Emotion and the Arts, eds. Mette Hjort and Sue Laver(Oxford University Press, 1997). See also Davies, “ArtisticExpression and the Hard Case of Pure Music,” p. 190.

17. Jerrold Levinson, “Musical Expressiveness asHearability-as-Expression,” in Contemporary Debates inAesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, ed. Matthew Kieran(Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 192–204.

18. Robinson, Deeper Than Reason, pp. 332–337.19. See, for instance, Kendall Walton, “Listening with

Imagination: Is Music Representational?” The Journal ofAesthetics and Art Criticism 52 (1994): 47–61.

20. Levinson makes this point in his “Musical Expres-siveness as Hearability-as-Expression,” p. 204.

21. See, for instance, Davies, “Contra the HypotheticalPersona in Music,” and Davies, “Artistic Expression and theHard Case of Pure Music,” p. 190.

22. One prominent account of ascriptions of expressive-ness as metaphorical, for instance, is that of Nelson Good-man. See Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory ofSymbols (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968).

23. See Davies, “Artistic Expression and the HardCase of Pure Music,” p. 183. For Wittgenstein’s commentson secondary sense, see especially Ludwig Wittgenstein,Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe(New York: McMillan, 1953), §282 and p. 216. It is ar-guable, though I cannot consider the matter here, thatWittgenstein’s treatment of secondary sense is importantlydifferent from Davies’s, since Wittgenstein is arguably con-cerned to emphasize that secondary uses are grammaticallyvery different from primary literal ascriptions of proper-ties. For more on Wittgenstein’s view of secondary sense,see my “Metaphor, Secondary Sense, and Nonsense inWittgenstein’s Later Philosophy,” in The Role of Prag-matics in Contemporary Philosophy: Contributions of theAustrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society, vol. VI, eds. PaulWeingartner, Gerhard Schurz, and Georg Dorn (Kirch-berg, Austria: Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society, 1997),pp. 910–915.

24. Donald Davidson, “What Metaphors Mean,” in OnMetaphor, ed. Sheldon Sacks (University of Chicago Press,1979).

25. In having both a context-independent and acontext-dependent component, resemblance statements arein some ways akin to demonstratives such as ‘that’ and‘there.’ For an account of demonstratives that takes theirmeaning to have a context-independent and a context-dependent component, see David Kaplan, “Demonstra-tives: An Essay on the Semantics, Logic, Metaphysics, andEpistemology of Demonstratives and Other Indexicals,” inThemes from Kaplan, eds. Joseph Almog, John Perry, andHoward Wettstein (Oxford University Press, 1989). It isnoteworthy that some have viewed metaphors as having ananalogous two-level structure in their meaning and hence asbeing akin to demonstratives. See Josef Stern, “Metaphoras Demonstrative,” Journal of Philosophy 82 (1985):677–710.

26. It may support this interpretation—though perhapsit is not necessary for it—to know that several of thecrescendos I have described end with the notes A-G-A-D/H-E (H, the German notation for B-natural, is sounded


simultaneously with D), which is widely accepted to be a ref-erence to Agathe von Siebold, a woman to whom Brahmswas briefly engaged but with whom he broke off the re-lationship. See Peter Clive, Brahms and His World: A Bio-graphical Dictionary (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2006),pp. 416–420.

27. See especially John McDowell, Mind and World(Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 46–66, and BillBrewer, Perception and Reason (Oxford University Press,1999), pp. 170–174.

28. See, for instance, Evans, Varieties of Reference,p. 229, and Christopher Peacocke, A Study of Concepts (MITPress, 1992), p. 67.

29. Peacocke, A Study of Concepts, p. 67.30. Diana Raffman, Language, Music, and Mind (MIT

Press, 1993).31. Raffman, Language, Music, and Mind, pp. 83–85.

In support of this view, Raffman cites in particular thestudies reported in E. M. Burns and W. D. Ward, “Inter-vals, Scales, and Tuning,” in The Psychology of Music, ed.Diana Deutsch (New York: Academic Press, 1982), pp. 241–269.

32. Davies, “Artistic Expression and the Hard Case ofPure Music,” p. 186.

33. On this account, even if metaphors and secondaryliteral uses are regarded as having a covert demonstrativecomponent, they would count as descriptions.

34. Tiger Roholt, “Musical Musical Nuance,” The Jour-nal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68 (2010): 1–10.

35. Roholt, “Musical Musical Nuance,” pp. 2–4.36. Roholt, “Musical Musical Nuance,” p. 8.37. Roholt, “Musical Musical Nuance,” p. 6.38. Roholt, “Musical Musical Nuance,” p. 6.39. Davies, Musical Meaning and Expression, p. 161.40. Malcolm Budd, “Music and the Communication of

Emotion,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 47(1989): 129–138, at p. 131.

41. Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art,trans. M. T. H. Sadler (New York: Dover, 1977).

42. For helpful comments on an earlier draft of thisarticle I would like to thank members of an audience atthe meeting of the Eastern Division of the American Soci-ety for Aesthetics (Philadelphia, April 2009) and especiallymy commentator, Margaret Moore. For help with earlierversions of this material, I am very grateful to NicholasWolterstorff, Karsten Harries, and Carol Rovane. I am alsograteful to Darrell Berg and James Berg for lending me theirmusical expertise.

Expressiveness, Ineffability, and Nonconceptuality

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