Autobiography & Understanding: a Few Idle Thoughts on a Sunday Afternoon

[Richard Barrett]

Is it maintained that, if they hold diametrically opposed views, both views can be equally "valid" or, inconceivable that, having the same contextual knowledge, they could possibly hold such divergent views, that they could ever disagree?

This reminds me, tangentially, to say something about the music/language question as cited earlier on by Teamsaint...

To take two profound compositional thinkers of the 20th century, Boulez and Xenakis, the first claims that music is indeed a language - "I tried to find out how a musical language could be built from scratch" - while the second says (in what I think is a beautiful formulation): "Music is not a language. Any musical piece is akin to a boulder with complex forms, with striations and engraved designs atop and within, which men can decipher in a thousand different ways without ever finding the right answer or the best one..."

What interests me is that this diametrical disagreement seems to indicate that the wrong question ("is music a language?") is being asked. Maybe there's a way of rephrasing it... the palaeoanthropologist Steven Mithen has written about the common origin of (what became) music and language in what I think is quite a convincing way, leading me to think that maybe language could be considered a specialised subset of music rather than the other way around (bearing in mind that we speak of "birdsong" rather than "birdspeech").