The Relationship Between Musical Meaning And Language Meaning

As a vital form of art, Music has been one of the topics of philosophy since ancient Greece. People can not help wondering why the properties of music are invisible, it can still arouse aesthetic, emotion, even as a means of governing the country. After a preliminary observation we'll find out the reason why music possesses "functionality" is that it has closed relationship with natural language. With the development of the philosophy of language in 19th century and 20th century, music philosophers found a new direction to explore, and focused on the relationship between music and language.I narrowed the range of the topic down to " the relationship between musical meaning and language meaning". About this topic, many western philosophers have had abundant achievement. If we abandon some differences in terminology properly, about the philosophers'attitude to the relationship between musical meaning and language meaning, we can generally distinguish "two positions and three approach". Two positions are:incommensurability theory and the commensurability theory. Among incommensurable theory, there are "strong incommensurable theory" and "weak incommensurable theory". That is to say, in the academic history of the exploration of the musical meaning and language meaning, on the logical level, there are three approach:1. Strong incommensurability theory (incommensurable and incomparable); 2. Weak incommensurability theory (incommensurable and comparable); 3. commensurability theory.Among three approach, which one is more convincing? I found that some philosophers made a distinction between intrinsic musical meaning and extrinsic musical meaning. I think it's an insightful distinction. So in this article, I will use the way of making this distinction, and try to distinguish the intrinsic/extrinsic language meaning as well. Then I will contrast intrinsic musical meaning with intrinsic language meaning, and do the same thing between extrinsic musical meaning and extrinsic language meaning. At last, I will try to argue that "weak incommensurability theory" is the most reasonable approach.