Musical meaning and logical inference from the perspective of Peircean pragmatism

Background in music theory. Music theory has established a large amount of work characterizing musical structure. Nevertheless, recently some efforts have been made to investigate musical function, especially regarding its perception and understanding. Beyond the precise and objective description of musical structure, e.g. concerning the various types of tonal cadences in Western music, music theory has great difficulties to investigate how a listener will deal with such structures. If we consider that a broader picture of musical structure is necessary for a deeper understanding and characterization of music, we believe that interdisciplinary musicology is worth doing, making it possible to go beyond a purely structural description, allying music theory with cognitive and philosophic studies. Background in philosophy. Recently, especially in the area of logic of discovery, there is a renewed interest in the philosophy of Charles S. Peirce. The main assumption is that creative processes are driven by logical inferences, and that they can be investigated objectively. Peirce postulated that there are three species of logical inference forming the basis on which one deals with the world: abduction, induction and deduction. While induction and deduction are traditionally investigated thoroughly in philosophy, abduction seems to be less scrutinized, despite being one of the most important contributions of Peirce’s Pragmatism. Basically, abduction is the kind of inference that generates explanatory hypotheses when anomalous facts are perceived. It is related to the presence of surprising or unexpected events. Peirce (CP 5.171) claims that abduction is the only way to increase knowledge about the world, creating hypotheses from which deduction can generate predictions while induction can verify their pertinence. Gonzalez & Haselager (2005) analyzed the role of abductive reasoning in the creative process specifically in relation to commonsense knowledge, furnishing the ground for the present proposal. Aims. We aim at describing the process of signification in music, showing how such a process is constrained both by the listener’s habits and musical structure. From a pragmatist, Peircean, perspective, we characterize musical meaning as a self-organized emergent process that operates mainly by means of three kinds of logical inference during the listening process