Tomasz Szubart
Affiliation: University of Szczecin, Institute of Philosophy and Cognitive Science
Category: Philosophy
Keywords: music, emotion, representation, teleosemantics
Date: Thursday 4th of September
Time: 14:30
Location: Room 232 (232)
View the full session: Content Determination
How does instrumental music, devoid of explicit propositional content, reliably evoke emotion? This question continues to captivate both philosophers of music and researchers in cognitive science. In this paper, I propose a teleosemantic (Millikan’s 1984; Shea’s 2018) framework that integrates the notion of proper function with an account of cultural mapping, illustrating how musical emotions can emerge and persist as cultural–biological functions. Specifically, tonal structures gain emotional significance by performing stable and systematic roles in socially valued contexts—for example, lamentation or celebration—where they fulfill communal needs for affective communication. From an evolutionary perspective, early forms of music can be plausibly linked to vocal and gestural signals naturally associated with emotional expression (Huron, 2001; Panksepp, 1998). By exaggerating or elaborating these signals, musical practices amplified their affective impact, making them highly effective in ritual and communal settings. Concurrently, Langer’s (1942) idea of presentational symbolism clarifies how musical forms can become “iconic” of emotional processes. Slow, descending lines, for instance, represent (iconically) the slump of sadness or grief, while higher-pitched, brisk motifs convey excitement or joy. Such iconic resemblance renders these melodic patterns innately evocative, priming them for cultural uptake. Building on this foundation, teleosemantics could be employed to explain how these evocative forms become stabilized over time through their repeated functional success. Rather than positing that emotion is contained inherently within a melodic figure, this view holds that such patterns come to represent or signal more or less specific (including particularly musical) emotions because they historically and repeatedly served communicative or affective roles—mourning, celebration, or communal bonding. Thus, a descending minor melody does not intrinsically “possess” sadness; rather, it attains that function by demonstrating, across generations, its consistent effectiveness in eliciting or reinforcing a sorrowful ambiance. Through cultural mapping communities keep reproducing these associations, ensuring that listeners learn to expect certain emotional states when encountering specific musical cues. This framework accounts for the historical stability of musical–emotional correlations while also accommodating cultural variation. In line with Barrett’s (2006) and Griffiths’s (1997) critiques of emotional essentialism, the model rejects the idea that emotions form universal “natural kinds.” Emotional meanings, on this account, emerge from ongoing social practices rather than from the inherent properties of the sound alone. Furthermore, research in affective neuroscience provides convergent evidence for a biological grounding of musical affect that intertwines with learned cultural expectations. Neuroimaging studies have shown that certain melodic passages can elicit consistent activation in limbic and reward-related areas of the brain (Blood & Zatorre, 2001; Koelsch, 2010), suggesting an underlying predisposition to respond affectively to particular acoustic cues. Simultaneously, cultural exposure shapes how listeners classify and experience these cues (e.g., the “sadness” of a minor key in Western contexts), underscoring the link between innate proclivities and social learning.
By bridging philosophical and scientific insights, this teleosemantic perspective clarifies how instrumental music can evoke and sustain robust emotional experiences without explicit linguistic or referential content. This perspective suggests that while affective responses to music may have originally emerged from signaling mechanisms, its enduring “emotional power” has evolved through historical usage and cultural transmission, and became representational. These insights contribute to ongoing debates in cognitive science, music theory, and the philosophy of emotion, hopefully offering new perspective for interdisciplinary research into how music acquires meaning and continues to move us.
References
Barrett, L. F. (2006) Are emotions natural kinds? Perspectives on Psychological Science, 1(1), 28–58. Blood, A. J., & Zatorre, R. J. (2001) Intensely pleasurable responses to music correlate with activity in brain regions implicated in reward and emotion. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 98(20), 11818–11823. Griffiths, P. (1997) What Emotions Really Are: The Problem of Psychological Categories. University of Chicago Press. Huron, D. (2001) Is music an evolutionary adaptation? Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 930(1), 43–61. Koelsch, S. (2010) Towards a neural basis of music-evoked emotions. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 14(3), 131–137. Langer, S. K. (1942) Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art. Harvard University Press. Millikan, R. G. (1984) Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories: New Foundations for Realism. MIT Press. Panksepp, J. (1998) Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions. Oxford University Press. Shea, N. (2018) Representation in Cognitive Science. Oxford University Press.