Methodological Interlude

Abstract

Abstract This chapter presents two methodological challenges to Dodd’s dialectical strategy as outlined in the previous chapter. It then considers his more recent attempts to defend this strategy by invoking certain general meta-ontological principles. It is argued first that Dodd’s strategy in Works of Music fails to respect what I have termed the ‘pragmatic constraint’. This is apparent in Dodd’s assumption that we can answer the ontological question—what kind of thing is a (musical) work of art?—before addressing ‘epistemological’ questions about the proper appreciation and evaluation of works. Dodd treats the relevant epistemological issues later in his book, but this compounds the problem because (1) he uses the ontological conclusions of the first seven chapters of his book to discount claims about ‘proper appreciation’, and (2) the defence of ‘moderate empiricism’ is question-begging. Furthermore, Dodd’s dialectical strategy leads him to identify the question ‘how do we individuate musical works?’ with the question ‘how do we identify instances of musical works?’ Appeal is made to the ‘appreciation constraint’ in arguing that we shouldn’t identify these questions. Finally, there is consideration of Dodd’s claim that appeals to practice in defence of instrumentalist and contextualist views of musical works go against a meta-ontological principle governing work in applied ontology more generally, and fail to take seriously the properly explanatory goals of the ontology of art. In countering this claim, more general constraints on exercises in applied ontology are considered, and it is argued that artistic practice must be accorded the role in the ontology of art assigned to it by the pragmatic constraint.