1. Introduction: classical art music and ontological theorising

In this article I focus on the concept of the classical Western musical artwork.Footnote ¹ I advocate and develop a version of fictionalism about the ontological category specified by that concept. The idea is not that certain concrete particulars like a musical performance (or a composer’s manuscript, or the mental representation of a sound-event gleaned through reading a score-copy and imagining a performance, and so on) are thereby not salient art objects of some description, worthy of aesthetic evaluation and attention. But I suggest none of these things realise the elusive musical work concept. Sometimes we might speak of these concreta ‘as if’ they are musical works. But when competent wielders of the relevant concept seem to be speaking of some extra entity, ‘the musical work so-and-so’ – Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, for example – above and beyond particular performances, scores, imaginings, and so on, it is my contention that, strictly speaking, they fail to refer. Nonetheless I shall argue that, once reconceptualised as a useful fiction, we need not revise our concept of classical Western musical artworks – just the broader discursive context, philosophically speaking.

There are a bewildering number of theories about the ontology of classical Western musical artworks. Philosophers have argued that musical works are such things as compliance classes, abstract objects of various stripes, acts of composition, perduring existents, enduring existents, historical individuals, and mental entities. There is little consensus regarding this matter and debate continues unabated (see e.g. Kivy Reference Kivy2002; Rohrbaugh Reference Rohrbaugh, Gaut and Lopes2005; Dodd Reference Dodd2007, Reference Dodd2008; Livingston Reference Livingston and Zalta2011; Kania Reference Kania and Zalta2012b; Cray and Matheson Reference Cray and Matheson2017).

In my view, this debate reveals a tension between philosophical theorising and musical practice – how philosophers think we ought to conceive of musical works in order to acquiesce in a neat general theory, on the one hand, and how musical works are actually conceived within the Western art musical practice, on the other. This yields two broad philosophical methodologies for theorising about the work-concept at hand, loosely captured by the descriptive/normative metaphysics distinction (Strawson Reference Strawson1959; see also Kania Reference Kania2008).

Briefly, as I will draw the distinction, inquiry into descriptive metaphysics is concerned with the actual concepts under scrutiny (with perhaps a few minor revisionary concessions reached through reflective equilibrium). Normative metaphysical inquiry is concerned with producing the metaphysically ‘best’ theory, largely irrespective of our actual concepts, often requiring (sometimes massive) conceptual revision of the target(s) of inquiry.Footnote ² Of course, the notion of ‘best’ is elusive here; nonetheless, the two broad strategies reflect different underlying explanatory aims and commitments. Normative metaphysical theories are lauded by their authors for their theoretical virtues (e.g. neatness, simplicity, unification, generalisability), while coherent descriptive metaphysical theories are lauded by their authors for their success at cashing out a concept that is actually utilised by – and with any luck, actually matters to – the participants of the target practice or discourse.

This distinction is useful (descriptive metaphysics is about actual beliefs; normative metaphysics is about the beliefs one should have), but the distinction is not hard-and-fast and these approaches are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, in practice, metaphysical theories offered by most philosophers have descriptive and normative aspects, and few musical work theorists are of an exclusively descriptive or normative ilk (Kania Reference Kania2008). In my view, we may conceive of this distinction along a continuum: if theoretic considerations are allowed a prominent role in the analysis, we shift to the normative side; if conformity to the users’ practice is weighted heavily, we shift to the descriptive side. I will suggest that the current (realist) ontological accounts of classical musical works that lay on the normative side do not address the work-concept at hand: they ascribe properties to musical works that are not only counter-intuitive but contrary to how the concept is utilised in practice. That is not to say that therefore these theories do not describe something at all, but that the thing described (if it exists) is not what plays the role specified by the musical work concept under scrutiny. I will also suggest that the current (realist) ontological views on the side of descriptive metaphysics are sui generis, ad hoc, or metaphysically suspect – the categories specified have no place in a naturalistic ontological framework. So positing them is not independently motivated (assuming we are all good philosophical naturalists). Thus there is a stalemate. And it is not just that the jury is out. In my view, the development of an alternative theory is required. I examine the prospects for a fictionalist view of Western musical artworks (following a suggestion in Kania Reference Kania2008) and I explicate fictionalist interpretations of the relevant musical work concept and discourse. The descriptive element of my view retains the musical work concept as utilised in the target practice/discourse; the normative element does away with ontological commitment, but not in a way that is damaging to the practice/discourse.Footnote ³

Thus my approach leans towards the side of descriptive metaphysics.Footnote ⁴ I endorse David Davies’s pragmatic constraint (Davies Reference Davies2004). That is, the view that I end up advocating should cohere at least conceptually with the target musical tradition, practice, or discourse. Of course, what counts as cohering is difficult to specify. But at the very least, it should not be hostage to a philosopher’s general metaphysical model. The account I develop will require some ‘philosophical’ revision, admittedly (this is the normative aspect), but this revision will do no damage to the conception of musical works at home in the Western art music tradition/practice/discourse. I will thus adopt the following concept-descriptivist position: ‘We may discover, through conceptual analysis, that there are and can be no things corresponding to our concept of ‘musical work, ’ but metaphysical inquiry cannot reveal that … ‘musical works’ are different from how we ordinarily take them to be’ (Davies Reference Davies2017, 125).Footnote ⁵

This article proceeds as follows. In Section 3 I advocate the Canberra Plan methodology for a descriptive metaphysics of musical works. I explicate this strategy, provide some examples, and apply it to the musical work concept. This leads me to fictionalism about musical works. Unlike the various realist theories that I round up in Section 4, fictionalism does not require positing unmotivated or metaphysically suspicious ontological categories, nor does it require conceptual revision (the revision required is of the wider conversational context, philosophically speaking; a small bullet to bite). In Section 5 I outline fictionalism, and in Section 6 I cash out my brand of fictionalism about musical works. Finally, I comment on two anticipated objections – the incredulous stare and Thomasson’s challenge – in Section 7. But first I must say a little more about the work concept at hand.

2. The musical work concept

Lydia Goehr (Reference Goehr2007) provides an historical narrative, supplemented by a wealth of historical data, of the emergence and influence of the work-concept throughout the classical musical period (c. 1750–1800), and its coming to fruition – as a regulative concept – around 1800.

The concept is regulative in the sense that it underwrites a social norm amongst classical musicians: in giving a serious performance, classical performers must ‘submit’ to the musical work; they must strive to be true to the work, strive to perfection in performing the work. The work is conceived as fixed; encoded in its score-copies (which, admittedly, can be more or less specific about various features), and exemplified in its performances (which, admittedly, can realise the performers’ score-copies more or less accurately). Despite the different aesthetically-relevant interpretations that performers and conductors bring to their musical performances, the musical work itself is conceived as unchanging and the same across these different performances.Footnote ⁶

But what, according to this concept, are musical works identified as? Goehr’s answer, which I shall take as my benchmark, is:

Yet this analysis does not straightforwardly specify an ontological category. Distinguishing works from displays will help here: ‘a work’s display is a structure that results from the artist’s creativity and that we apprehend in order to grasp a work’s meaning and aesthetic qualities’ (Lopes Reference Lopes2010, 4). Score-copies, performances, playings, recordings – these are all kinds of displays.Footnote ⁷ A performance of Beethoven’s Fifth one night is a distinct display from a performance another night. Displays are straightforward concreta, easily accounted for in a naturalistic ontological theory. Musical works, however, are ‘ghostly apparitions’ (Kivy Reference Kivy2002, 206). There are a number of competing ontological accounts of musical works, as I shall soon explain. But first, in the next section, I suggest that a methodology hitherto unapplied within this debate will assist progress: the Canberra Plan.

3. The Canberra Plan

The Canberra Plan (see Jackson and Pettit Reference Jackson and Pettit1995; Jackson Reference Jackson1998; Braddon-Mitchell and Nola Reference Braddon-Mitchell, Nola, Braddon-Mitchell and Nola2009) is a helpful framework for unpacking the musical work concept. It follows a general scientific method: with it, one defines the concept under scrutiny and generates a hypothesis which researchers attempt to validate by locating the target postulated in a plausible theory. If they can do so, metaphysical success! If not, failure (i.e. error theory).

The first step of the Canberra Plan is to collect the platitudes associated with the concept under scrutiny. A platitude, in this context, is a proposition about a concept that is understood by proficient representative users of that concept as uncontroversial. Relying on platitudes strikes me as particularly useful for determining the application conditions for a concept intertwined with a specific art practice/discourse and history, such as classical Western art music, setting the stage for questioning whether the explicated concept is satisfied in the world, and what its ontological status might be. Concepts acquire their application conditions via the constellation of concepts and terms with which they inter-relate in a given context or discourse. And in acquiring our concepts, we acquire sets of dispositions which interface between statements expressed in terms of some concept with statements of other things. These dispositions underwrite the platitudes about that concept. Take belief as an example. Following Papineau (Reference Papineau and Zalta2009), the belief platitudes might be ‘beliefs are caused by perceptions’, ‘beliefs combine with desires to generate actions’, ‘beliefs have causally significant internal structure’.

The second step is to systematise those platitudes as an implicit definition of the concept in question. Again, take belief as an example. This might look something like:

The third and final step: see if anything in the world plays the role specified by the concept. For belief, that means identifying the ‘internal states that play the causal role associated with the concept of belief’ (Papineau Reference Papineau and Zalta2009, Section 2.3).

So far, so good. But sometimes the search might turn out empty-handed. In this case one option is to seek a best-filler (Jackson Reference Jackson1998). That is, perhaps nothing plays the role specified by the concept, but some other thing comes so close that it can, for all intents and purposes, be conceived as the target of the concept. For example, if Van Inwagen’s (Reference Van Inwagen1990) compositional nihilism is right, then there are no tables and chairs, but rather simples arranged table-wise and simples arranged chair-wise. If that is the case, perhaps simples-arranged-table-wise is the best-filler for the concept table. It would probably make little or no difference, outside of the philosophy room at least, if we all were picking out simples-arranged-table-wise when utilising our table concept.

Alternatively, perhaps the concept under scrutiny is just an empty concept. A horse with a horn tied onto its head does not fill the role of unicorn: unicorns just do not exist – nothing comes close to playing the role specified by an implicit definition underwritten by the unicorn platitudes, something like ‘horned horse-like quadruped, aggressive though elegant, white in colour, docile only to virgins’. And substituting anything else in would be irrelevant or otherwise misguided. Of course, this is not to deny that unicorns appear within fictional stories – readers and listeners of these fictions have a shared concept of unicorns. But there are no such things as unicorns out in the world. Ideas or representations are not unicorns – ideas are not aggressive, horned quadrupeds docile only to virgins.

What about the musical work concept? I contend that competent wielders of the musical work concept representing the Western art music tradition/practice/discourse accept the following platitudes.Footnote ⁸

These platitudes reveal an implicit description of how the musical work concept is conceived and I take them to be consistent with Goehr’s historical narrative and entrenched in the target tradition/practice/discourse. That is, that a musical work is conceptualised as an entity that is created by its composer, completed around the time of the composer’s creative activity, encoded in its score-copies, exemplified in its performances, and so on. These platitudes thus describe the entities that an ontological theory must locate, in my view, if it is to locate musical works. I’ll next turn to the theories currently on offer.

4. Ontology of musical works: state of play

There are a bewildering number ontological accounts of musical works, and they have been extensively discussed and critiqued in the philosophy of music literature before (see e.g. Kivy Reference Kivy2002; Rohrbaugh Reference Rohrbaugh, Gaut and Lopes2005; Dodd Reference Dodd2007, Reference Dodd2008; Livingston Reference Livingston and Zalta2011; Kania Reference Kania and Zalta2012b). So it is not my intention to be exhaustive or excessively detailed in covering well-trodden, familiar ground. For my purposes, it will suffice to round them up and make a few general comments.Footnote ⁹

Philosophers have defended the following theories:

There are two general things to say about these accounts: these theories either (1) do not capture the target specified by the musical work concept – insofar as they describe anything at all, it is not what we are probing the world for, given our platitudes/implicit definition – or, (2) they point to a metaphysically dubious category. Debate continues about such categories (e.g. against musical works as abstract particulars, see Kania Reference Kania2008; against musical works as historical individuals, see Dodd Reference Dodd2007; esp. chapter 6; against musical works as sui generis abstract object structure-S-as-composed-by-C-at-t – see Predelli Reference Predelli2001; Kivy Reference Kivy2002; Dodd Reference Dodd2002; Rohrbaugh Reference Rohrbaugh2003).

About the first point, consider that Goodman’s view (for example) must reject the platitude that composers complete their musical works, since as a compliance class, any given musical work would be completed with its last ever performance, by those performers, and not with the completion of the composers’ creative act (or her forming of a completion disposition, etc.). Scored but unperformed/unrealised compositions would all be identical – the same musical work – because their compliance classes are all empty, an unacceptable result. And the wrong note objection: at least as Goodman renders the account, it excludes imperfect (non-compliant) performances, no matter how minor the imperfection may be. But almost every performance will contain at least the slightest deviation from the score, and in practice these are still conceptualised as performances of the relevant musical work. More generally, the account is motivated by considerations of Goodman’s extensionalist theory of symbols in a ‘languages of art’ framework. It is divorced from considerations of musical artistic practice. About the disconnection, Goodman pines ‘one hardly expects chemical purity outside the laboratory’ (Reference Goodman1976, 186). Yet outside the ‘laboratory’ there is hardly a ‘chemical’ of the kind at all: the target of inquiry must be entirely reconceptualised.

Of course, while it may be useful to talk of (the physical counterparts of) musical works in the language of, say, compliance classes, perduring entities, or enduring entities for the purpose of philosophical theorising (which also it may not be; this remains to be demonstrated), this requires revision of the musical work concept. The ontological category specified by the musical work concept under scrutiny remains unaccounted for. And about the second point – the categories identified by some of these theories – frustratingly we can only speculate. Perhaps some of these theories capture something: perhaps the (Platonic) abstract structures of musical works, if such things exist, or their (Aristotelian) essences. Or perhaps some of these theories capture the generative act of musical works (Davies Reference Davies2004), or the completed idea for a musical manifestation (Cray and Matheson Reference Cray and Matheson2017) – but to consider these things as musical works is to require unmotivated revision of the musical work concept under scrutiny.

Admittedly, some of the more revisionary theories introduce a new concept to ‘pick up’ what is usually captured by the ordinary musical work concept. For example, David Davies’ works-as-action-tokens account (i.e. the musical work is the actual act token of the composer’s creative/generative process) revises the target of inquiry from the creative output of the composer’s labour to the actual labour token itself. On this account, people cannot experience a musical work by attending a concert (Kania Reference Kania2005), contrary to our platitude. And familiarity with a musical work would be familiarity with the ins and outs of the relevant actions of the composer: you couldn’t glean it from reading a score-copy. However, Davies introduces the concept of the work-focus to specify the output of composers’ creative acts. Yet, even if we were to follow Davies’ lead on this, the ontological status of the work-focus remains elusive, and after all, it is now that concept that I am explicating here (in the context of Davies’ framework/terminology) by explicating the target of the musical work platitudes.

So aside from specific objections to each account, discussed extensively in the philosophical literature, the theories on offer either necessitate unwarranted conceptual revision (indeed some of them change the target of analysis completely), or acquiesce in suspicious or unmotivated metaphysical commitments. Is there a theory that can account for how musical works are conceived – that is, plays the role specified by the musical work platitudes – without positing questionable ontological categories? Moreover, is there such a theory that is plainly compatible with a philosophically naturalistic perspective? A theory that does not conjecture into existence entities that cannot in principle be empirically confirmed? Kania (Reference Kania2008) puts one such account on the table: fictionalism.Footnote ¹⁰

Interpreting the musical work concept in a fictionalistic light is one underexplored and underappreciated option.Footnote ¹¹ On this view, talk of musical works should be, in David Davies’ words, something like ‘a useful fiction that allows us to talk about those ways of grouping performances that interest us’ (Davies Reference Davies2009, 745).Footnote ¹² The idea is that although we all recognise the concept of musical works, and that we conceptualise musical works as being created by their composers, exemplified in their performances, and so on – and, moreover, that that’s because there is a shared, intersubjective system of representations of musical works – we need not posit them into existence. Thus the musical work case, on my view, is like the unicorn case. We should think of musical works, as conceptualised within the target tradition/practice, as populating a useful ‘fiction’, so to say, so we need not drop our thought and talk about them.

5. Towards fictionalism about musical works

Fictionalism is a theory always applied to some subject matter, according to which thought and talk about that subject matter is, or should be considered as, a useful fiction. Philosophers have developed a number of fictionalist theories, such as fictionalism about fictional characters (Brock Reference Brock2002, Reference Brock2016), fictionalism about mathematical entities (Field Reference Field1980, Reference Field1989; Balaguer Reference Balaguer2009), and fictionalism about possible worlds (Rosen Reference Rosen1990). Each case for fictionalism is to be assessed on its own merits. Here I develop fictionalism about musical works.Footnote ¹³

Fictionalism resolves an ontological puzzle; it is a way out of the infamous Quinean trilemma, according to which there are just three ways to deal with statements that seem to commit speakers to the existence of an unwanted entity (see Quine Reference Quine1960). First option: change one’s linguistic expressions – paraphrase the apparent commitment away (for instance, instead of saying ‘unicorns have horns’, explicitly say ‘according to the myths, unicorns have horns’ or ‘I think of unicorns as horned’). Second option: stop talking about those things completely. Third option: give up and accept the existence of the controversial entity. Sometimes none of these options appeal, and it is my contention that sometimes this is the case for musical works. Fictionalism is a fourth option unidentified by Quine. It is a theory by which one can disclaim unwanted ontological commitments to suspicious or dubious entities, whilst reaping some of the benefits of those very commitments, not through paraphrase but by putting forward statements in a fictionalistic light. So as long as the fictionalist has a claim to the fiction’s utility, fictionalism is having one’s cake and eating it too.Footnote ¹⁴

The advantages of a fictionalist rendering of the subject matter are thus considerable. Although the fictionalist is not committed to the existence of some controversial ontological category, the fictionalist can continue to reason with respect to it about salient empirical matters, can continue to generate predictions/generalisations, and can continue to make critical/evaluative claims. I begin my fictionalist proposal by suggesting that there is no good reason to posit the existence of musical works. In what follows, my strategy will be to develop and defend my view through a critical discussion of the surrounding philosophical research.

Now of course, people think and talk about musical works. That is, the logical status of musical works as (mere) objects of intentionality is not what is at stake – after all, we can straightforwardly think and talk about things that do not exist: our mental states and our utterances can be directed at the non-existent (see Crane Reference Crane2014) – we can think and talk about phlogiston, unicorns, or miasmic vapours yet these things are not real.Footnote ¹⁵ Kania (Reference Kania2008) asks whether thought and talk about musical works is along these lines. According to this proposal about musical works:

Kania’s idea is that those of us who wield the musical work concept acquiesce in a fiction. It can be true that a person is thinking about Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony even though, on this view, there is no such entity. It is an error theory of musical works. Kania (Reference Kania2008) leaves fictionalism about musical works underdeveloped – and Letts (Reference Letts2015) points out that Kania’s account is found wanting. (Although Letts is critical of Kania’s specific approach, he thinks that a ‘material fictionalist’ approach might be plausible. I take my account to be generally compatible with Letts’ preferred variant – in ways that should become clear along the way – but I do not cash it out in his terms, and I will be unconcerned here with Letts’ critique of Kania’s specific contentions.)

I think that by developing a fictionalist account of musical works I can save the musical work concept platitudes. It makes no difference to ordinary discourse, nor to artistic practice, if there are no musical works, provided we all continue to act and talk in the same way, thinking and speaking as if there were such things. We do not have to revise our concept of musical works. A person newly-converted to my view can still apply the musical work concept in the same manner and continue to speak in the same way (though in a ‘fictional spirit’), since doing so will satisfy all of her conversational aims.

To see my point, imagine that I want to talk to you about happiness, and I want to convey to you my observation that my friend (the man standing over there with a glass of clear liquid) is happy. So I say ‘The man holding a glass of water is happy’. When you retort that he is holding a glass that actually contains vodka, I will become impatient (Eklund Reference Eklund2005). It’s the man’s happiness I want to talk about; whether his glass contains water or vodka is beside the point. So likewise, I might say, for example, ‘Last night’s performance of Mozart’s Jupiter was beautiful’. I will become impatient when you reply that on my view there is no such thing as The Jupiter; that the way I spoke involves failed reference to some entity The Jupiter, by my own lights.Footnote ¹⁶ It was that performance or that occurrence of music that I wanted to talk about. And that exists. I just needed, somehow, to make it obvious to you which musical occurrence I was talking about. Saying it the way that I did is a convenience. The ontological commitments entailed by the proposition semantically expressed by my utterance are – for present purposes – beside the point.

So I do not think that the musical work concept needs to be revised. We just do not need to count musical works in our ontology, as we do not count unicorns. And although I suggest we need not count musical works in our ontology, I nevertheless suggest we can continue to speak of them by way of a kind of useful fiction.

6. Revolutionary fictionalism about musical works

In my view, musical works are fictional. More specifically: postulating them into existence seems to me unmotivated and unnecessary. This is based, in part, upon the state of play: accepting a realist theory either means positing a metaphysically suspicious category or a revisionary conception of the concept under scrutiny. As I have argued above, neither option in that stalemate appears to have much to recommend it.

Yet we think and talk as if musical works do exist. The plausibility of thinking that there are musical works is explained by the fact that there really are displays, and some of what we say or think about musical works is true, or approximately true, of displays. But not all. The remainder can be coherently covered by the fictionalist account that I develop herein. That is, some of the advantages that we would hope to get from talking or thinking about musical works do not genuinely depend on musical works being real things, or even on our believing that they are real things. They are convenient fictions. It is time now to unpack fictionalism.

There are two theses associated with fictionalism – a linguistic thesis, and an ontological thesis. The linguistic thesis maintains that ‘utterances of sentences of the discourse are best seen not as efforts to say what is literally true, but as useful fictions of some sort’ (Eklund Reference Eklund and Zalta2011, Section 2.1). The ontological thesis is anti-realist, rejecting the existence of the entities associated with the concept at hand, or at least claiming there is no reason to positively posit them.

Following a distinction made by Burgess and Rosen (Reference Burgess and Rosen1997), philosophers distinguish hermeneutic fictionalism from revolutionary fictionalism. Hermeneutic fictionalism has been advocated about fictional characters. It is plausible that people are already fictionalists about fictional characters: they do not believe that Sherlock Holmes exists, but continue to say things like ‘Sherlock Holmes lives on Baker Street’. Two proposals about such statements have been given: that people either engage in make-believe in fictional character discourse (pretence hermeneutic fictionalism – see Walton Reference Walton1990) or short-hand speak which contains tacit constituents (prefix hermeneutic fictionalism – see Brock Reference Brock2002).

On the other hand, revolutionary fictionalism prescribes a reform, not about the target concept, but the wider conversational context as analysed philosophically. Revolutionary fictionalism has been advanced with respect to moral theory (Joyce Reference Joyce and Kalderon2005) and mathematics (Field Reference Field1980). I do not think it plausible that people are already fictionalists about musical works so I will advance a revolutionary fictionalism.

Notice that revolutionary fictionalism is compatible with a descriptive-leaning metaphysics and the Canberra Plan methodology: the revolutionary fictionalist need not revise the musical work concept. The ‘revolution’ is purely one of ontological commitment and wider philosophical context, not in one’s beliefs about the role played by the target, if it exists, of the concept.

Take Field’s mathematical fictionalism. Despite philosophers like Quine and Putnam famously maintaining that mathematics is indispensable to science (for review, see Colyvan Reference Colyvan and Zalta2015), Field does not think that the entities postulated by mathematical theory, such as numbers, exist at all. But he agrees that the conventions and discourse of mathematics allow people to realise important information about things that do exist, so it is a valuable discipline. Field acknowledges mathematics, then, as a useful kind of fiction, but not as a domain of truth, strictly speaking, at least insofar as mathematical statements are interpreted at face-value. His fictionalism is revolutionary: a kind of error theory about numbers, but without abandoning the discourse. And notice that it does not require conceptual revision: our concept of number, for instance, is not modified in the process.

However, philosophical analysis of statements about the targets of a fictionalist account is somewhat modified in light of fictionalism, since an ordinary interpretation of those statements ignores the fictionalist’s linguistic thesis. There is a typical tripartite distinction between such statement kinds (following Brock Reference Brock2002). First, there are fictional statements internal to the relevant fiction. For example, a fictionalist about musical works might utter:

Second, there are fictional statements external to the relevant fiction, although analysed in virtue of a fictional context. These include critical and evaluative claims. For example, a fictionalist about musical works might utter:

Third, there are non-fictional statements that express one’s ontological commitments. For example, a fictionalist about musical works might utter:

I’ll consider the last of these first. As an ontological statement, (OS) can be straightforwardly interpreted, at face value, in line with the fictionalist’s ontological commitments. We deal with these non-fictional statements as we deal with ordinary non-existence claims such as ‘There are no unicorns’ and ‘phlogiston does not exist’. The fictionalist uttering (OS) does not intend their utterance to be, nor should it be analysed as, indexed to a fictional context; it is a statement put forward that is divorced from any relevant fiction. On the other hand, (IS) and (ES) statements require further analysis. I’ll consider these next, in turn.

7. The incredulous stare and Thomasson’s challenge

Time to take stock. My proposal is as follows. Explicit ontological statements concerning musical works are to be treated literally, at face value. Internal statements concerning musical works should be put forward as fictional statements that purport to cohere with how the world is, given that it contains the Western art music tradition, and that from this tradition a kind of community-based ‘fiction’ has emerged, according to which it can be said that thus-and-so. External statements concerning musical works should be about displays, whenever possible, but when this strategy reaches its limit – when statements are not put forward in a plausibly nominalist rendering, or eliminated for the purposes of clearer critical/evaluative talk of concreta – they should be put forward as if musical works existed: that is, put forward according to the brute-realist’s hypothesis; they should be treated as fictional statements about the musical-work posits of the brute-realist.

Of course, as with any philosophical theory, there is going to be dissent about my revolutionary fictionalism. I will comment on two possible responses to my view. First, according to John Burgess, revolutionary fictionalism is laughable – ’comically immodest’ (Burgess Reference Burgess2004, 30).Footnote ²² Burgess’s incredulous stare was originally directed at mathematical fictionalism, but it can be seen how it might be applied to the case of musical works.

The objection, then, is that the professional participants of the Western art music practice are the experts when it comes to musical works (just as mathematicians are in the case of mathematics), so why is a philosopher trying to butt in and tell them that, ‘technically speaking’, some of their sentences are face-value wrong and their utterances are best put forward in a fictional spirit?

This worry can be easily mitigated. My fictionalist revolution is artistically/creatively (and perhaps even musicologically) uninteresting and unimportant. It matters not for the participants of the practice if musical works are the fictional characters of the Western art music fiction. It is not something that participants in the practice think or care about (except philosophically – it is not relevant, musically, to the practice), and the philosophical merits of fictionalism (or any other ontological theories about musical works for that matter) is something that philosophers are the experts in, not the participants of the practice (except insofar as they don their philosopher’s hats). To be sure, the point that the revolutionary fictionalist is making ‘is a paradigmatically philosophical point’ (Balaguer Reference Balaguer2009, 154). As Mary Leng notes, ‘Revolutionary fictionalism need not advocate a revolution in practice, only in our understanding of that practice’ (Leng Reference Leng2005, 278).

Second, on Amie Thomasson’s deflationary minimalist realist view (Reference Thomasson2013, Reference Thomasson, Brock and Everett2015), since the classical Western art music tradition to which I refer exists, so, ipso facto, would musical works.Footnote ²³ On her view, they are abstract artefacts – abstract cultural creations. The idea: an existence claim like ‘The Jupiter exists’ is trivially true as a consequence of the truth of other sentences (that we ordinarily accept); that is all it takes for there to be such an abstract artefact, The Jupiter. Her challenge to the fictionalist is thus to ‘articulate what more it would take for the serious existence claim to be true. What more are you supposing it would really take for there to be fictional characters (say) than for authors to write stories that use names in certain ways?’ (Reference Thomasson, Brock and Everett2015, 269). The challenge is intended for theorists advocating varieties of hermeneutic fictionalism, not revolutionary fictionalism, but it can be construed as a general task for any anti-realist theory of fictional characters, musical works, and so on.

Replying to Thomasson’s challenge and her branch of simple realism about musical works decisively will not be possible in the remaining space, however I aim in the following to push back a bit. There seems to be a crucial disanalogy between the paradigm examples of ‘abstract artefacts’ that Thomasson has in mind (laws of state, marriages, contracts) and musical works. Consider: ‘We normally accept that … if the legislature and president act in the proper sorts of ways, a law is created: nothing more is required; that is all it is to create a law’ (Thomasson Reference Thomasson, Brock and Everett2015, 259). Similarly, ‘provided the truth of apparently non-committal sentences like ‘two qualified citizens sincerely undertook the following vows and paperwork, ’ we can infer ‘A marriage came into existence’’ (Reference Thomasson, Brock and Everett2015, 260). Let’s consider talk of marriages. After the vows and paperwork, indeed we say that a marriage has come into existence; that is, we say that two people are now married – we can now call their relationship/union one of ‘marriage’ – and they are jointly afforded a different legal status than before. But this is loose talk: it is not that some new thing has come into existence. To say ‘a marriage now exists’ sincerely, it seems to me, is to adopt the adjectival thesis about marriages. Same goes for positive existence claims about contracts and laws of state. Consider an example a little closer to our subject matter. I endorse the adjectival thesis about antiques – that is, ‘antique’ is a modifier, not a kind sortal (Curtis and Baines Reference Curtis and Baines2016; Killin Reference Killin2017). That any particular antique exists is grounded in the fact that a particular object (a particular desk, Footnote ²⁴ say) exists that meets the requirements for antique status, whatever they may be. When the desk comes to meet those requirements (having not met them until now), we might say that an antique has come into existence. But no new thing has come into existence: the desk was there before it met the requirements for antique status. Same goes, mutatis mutandis, for marriage (contracts, laws, etc.): that any particular marriage exists is grounded in the fact that particular people, having done what it takes to meet the legal requirements for married status, exist. They existed before their union; their union is not some distinct entity (as Quine reminds us, turning up in a sentence as a noun does not guarantee that the word in question refers to some entity in its own right). And notice that the musical work concept does not easily accommodate this adjectival thesis scenario: ‘musical work’ is a kind sortal, not a modifier. So, to answer Thomasson’s challenge, what would it take for a musical work, qua abstracta, to be real, on my view? It would be for it to have independent existence from that which already existed before the creation/completion of the work: some distinct entity would have to come to exist. And yet, contra Thomasson’s simple realism, such abstracta would not be worth positing, says the philosophical naturalist, if they are already superfluous to our explanatory aims. I have argued herein that this is plausibly the case. Indeed Kania (Reference Kania2008) suggests that Thomasson simply fails to refer when she speaks of a musical work.

I conclude we should be fictionalists about musical works. This does not require revising artistic practice, or the musical work concept. It hardly requires revision of musical discourse at all; just the wider conversational context, philosophically speaking. And this is a small concession to make for an otherwise conceptually descriptive, naturalistically compatible, and ontologically au courant theory.

Notes on contributor

Anton Killin is a postdoctoral research fellow in the School of Philosophy and the Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language at the Australian National University. Anton's research interests include philosophy of the arts and philosophy of the sciences, evolution of the arts, and connections between evolution of music and language.