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My research interests primarily lie within aesthetics and philosophy of perception with particular interest in the philosophy of music—the ontology of musical works, musical understanding, the relationship (or lack thereof) between music and language, and the philosophical problems surrounding the perception of music. I am also interested in the nature of aesthetic experience, aesthetic properties, definitions of art and the relationship (or lack thereof) between aesthetic judgments and ethical judgments. Within the field of perception, I am particularly interested in examining the nature of auditory experience and developing an account of the representation of the contents of auditory experience. Perhaps controversially, I do not see a sharp distinction between my work in aesthetics and my work in perception. In fact, I view these as basically the same field, but each having a focus on different (closely related) issues.
My Ph.D. dissertation was on the perception of music, the mental representation of musical content, and the possibility of demonstrating an empirical theory of musical understanding using contemporary research in the cognitive science of music and auditory perception. It was jointly supervised by Anthony Savile and Keith Hossack at King's College London.
Works in Progress
In this essay, I defend the claim that hypocrisy is not a distinct moral category, rather all instances of hypocrisy can either be described as cases of deception or cases of akrasia. I begin by offering an minimal account of hypocrisy. Then, insofar as an act of hypocrisy involves deception, I argue that this act is morally troubling because it is an act of deception—describing the act as "hypocrisy" does not add anything to the moral outrage that one might feel about this act that goes over and above the charge of "deception". However, I also claim that it is not true that all cases of hypocrisy involve deception. Insofar as non-deceptive acts still fit the minimal definition of hypocrisy, these cases form a distinct kind—akratic hypocrisy. My claim is that, when we describe an act as being an instance of akratic hypocrisy, we are doing nothing more than criticizing that act for its being epistemically unsound. In either case, the claim that a particular act is "hypocrisy" does not add anything to our disapprobation of those acts.
In a recent pair of articles, Aaron Ridley and Andrew Kania have debated the merits of the study of musical ontology. Ridley contends that the study of musical ontology is orthogonal to more pressing concerns over the value of music. Kania rejects this arguing that a theory of the value of music must begin with an understanding of the ontology of music. While Kania offers very insightful criticisms of Ridley’s argument, I must admit some sympathy for Ridley’s disparagement of musical ontology. My sympathy for Ridley’s view is not based on any feeling that the work that musical ontologists have done has been poor or valueless or uninteresting. Rather my thought, pessimistic as it may be to ontologists, is that much of the past debate over the ontology of musical works, while being of great importance to ontology, is irrelevant to a theory of the value of music. Instead a rather minimal account of the ontology of musical works would suffice to provide the required basis to address those evaluative concerns. In this essay, I will briefly examine the debate between Ridley and Kania, and will then attempt to identify the most basic ontological questions that would be relevant to a theory of the value of music.
One often hears criticisms of works of fiction of the following sort: "X is a film that is well directed and has some excellent performances from the actors, however X is set in an historical period and X gets the historical facts wrong. Therefore, X is a disappointing film." Why should we think that a work of fiction is any worse as a work of fiction simply because it is historically inaccurate? Are there any grounds for the belief that historical inaccuracies may negatively impact the value of the fiction qua work of fiction? Such criticisms seem to miss the point that the work is a work of fiction. By examining the possible attempts to motivate the justification for historical criticism, I will suggest that no such justification is forthcoming and that historical criticism is based on a confusion.
Auditory experience represents certain mind-independent acoustical properties such as frequency, intensity and duration. Additionally, auditory experience may also represent tonality. I will argue that, while our experience of tonality is of course dependent upon frequency, tonality cannot be reduced to this acoustical property, or any other mind-independent acoustical phenomenon for that matter. A proper account of the experience of tonality must make room for the contextual nature of tonality, and “acoustical reductivist” accounts fail to do this. Rather, tonality is a subjective property of experience that is dependent upon the listener’s possession of a particular cognitive ability to represent sounds in a particular way—a “tonal schema”. There is some empirical evidence in support of this, which I will review—specifically Shepard and Jordan’s experiments with the perception of distorted scales. The findings presented in these experiments lend credit to the claim that tonality is a mind-dependent property of experience, and thus that we ought to be antirealists about tonality.
In the debate over the ontology of musical works, R. G. Collingwood is famously remembered for suggesting that a musical work is just an "idea in the mind of the composer". Unfortunately, Collingwood's treatment of this topic only takes up five pages of his The Principles of Art, and has been widely derided as an untenable thesis. While many criticisms have been launched against Collingwood's idealist ontology of music, the one I am most interested in is the objection that idealism is too mysterious to be of much use. What could it possibly mean for a musical work to be an "idea in the mind of the composer". In this essay, I intend to offer a possible explanation of what this could mean -- specifically, I will argue that a musical idealist like Collingwood could think of musical works as complex representational states of auditory events that psychologists refer to as "event hierarchies".