The 5 magnificent delusions regarding musical elitism

My Man Mahmoud said:
Because, after all, if you are cursed with ignorance, it logically follows that everyone else is too...:rolleyes:
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Considering the fact that I didn't claim anyone was ignorant, that seems like a silly response.

I could point out that the history of the world is absolutely chock full of examples of mass quantities of people believing something fully and completely that turns out to be false down the road. Examples that include very intelligent people. But I guess that would be too ignorant of me. So everyone can go on assuming that music can really be judged objectively despite the fact that the criteria would differ depending on culture, period in history, social climate, and so on.
 
Nothinggod said:
I completely agree with Sadguru, like that should be a suprise. I don't agree at all that you can rate a composer's ability objectively. Fizz nullified his example with the phrase "objectively good". There is no such thing in the first place. Knowing the context of a piece of music isn't the be all and end all of analysis either, as even context is skewed and abiguously interpreted through the 'audience' or 'listener'.
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How the hell did I nullify my example? Obviously when I presented the word "good" in quotation marks I was implying this point was of an ambiguous nature. I was merely trying to point out that if one composer is able to move forward and apply new ideas and another is stuck in a rut still recycling material then the one who moves forward musically can most likely can be considered a better composer.
 
fizz6207 said:
How the hell did I nullify my example? Obviously when I presented the word "good" in quotation marks I was implying this point was of an ambiguous nature. I was merely trying to point out that if one composer is able to move forward and apply new ideas and another is stuck in a rut still recycling material then the one who moves forward musically can most likely can be considered a better composer.
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That in itself is a subjective point of view. Once again there is no such thing as objectively good. Good and bad can intrinsically only be subjective observations. What is "moving forward" about anyway, and how can you measure musical progress objectively? The only objectivity in musical analysis comes with theoretical description. The terms "good," "better," "bad," etc are all subjective and therefore nullify any statement that is given to be ostensibly objective.
 
Nothinggod said:
That in itself is a subjective point of view. Once again there is no such thing as objectively good. Good and bad can intrinsically only be subjective observations. What is "moving forward" about anyway, and how can you measure musical progress objectively? The only objectivity in musical analysis comes with theoretical description. The terms "good," "better," "bad," etc are all subjective and therefore nullify any statement that is given to be ostensibly objective.
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If you had of interpreted my initial post correctly, you would have realised I was speaking in terms of IF it was possible to measure musical quality/progress objectively, not that it actually is. Sorry if that wasnt clear or anything but thats what I meant to imply.
 
derbeder said:
the status of judgments of taste (in general, not just concerning music) is a significant philosophical question that has been a subject of debate since the time of plato. today much attention is being paid to spelling out different possible positions and evaluating arguments for these positions. it has been almost everybody's experience teaching in college to see freshmen claim to hold some sort of position of relativism, subjectivism or social constructivism with respect to moral or aesthetic values (hence the label, "freshmen relativism"). what these labels really mean is difficult to articulate, as the ideas behind them seem rather half-baked. actually developing a coherent position from such claims is a difficult matter. some first passes might go as follows.
it is taken to be common ground that there are certain sentences which are not context-sensitive and are plainly true or false, eg. "John Lennon was killed in 1980" or "Water consists of two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom." sentences which are context-sensitive, such as "I am in Istanbul" or "It is hot here", are not simply true or false but true or false with respect to the context in which they are uttered (the first sentence is true if uttered by me, false as uttered by many of you, the second is true with respect to any context in which the environment of the speaker is hot). the context-sensitivity of these sentences is due to certain words present in them ("I", "here"). now, one might hold that sentences expressing judgments of taste, eg. "Mozart's music is excellent", "Rhubarb is disgusting", are context-sensitive as well. one position in the neighbourhood of what the freshmen are getting at might be what might call contextualism (about judgments of taste). the contextualist claims that "Mozart's music is excellent" is true as uttered by me but false as uttered by someone who doesn't like Mozart, because the adjective "excellent" is context-sensitive. perhaps one could try to state this generally as follows: for any speaker S, the sentence "x is excellent" is true with respect to context C just in case S is the speaker in the context C and S likes x to a significant degree. so when i utter "Mozart is excellent" and you utter "Mozart is not excellent", we could both be speaking the truth, since the speaker of my context (me!) likes Mozart but the speaker of you context (you!) doesn't. notice, however, that if these sentences really are context-sensitive, we are not saying the same thing (making the same claim) by uttering the same sentence. when we say "I", we mean different people, hence we are not disagreeing when I utter "I am in Istanbul" and you utter "I am not in Istanbul". the speakers of the contexts are different, so what is said by the sentence in those contexts are different as well. the same applies to any sentence with the word "excellent", if contextualism is correct. one might think that for contextualism doesn't really articulate the original half-baked idea well, since that idea seemed to require that there is some one thing that different speakers claim by uttering the same sentence "Mozart is excellent" and they can disagree about its truth and both be right. let us call truth-value relativism the thesis that a sentence such as the above is not context-sensitive and also is not true or false absolutely but true or false only with respect to people. this captures the spirit of the original idea better, but there are many problems with undertanding the notion of truth with respect to a person. let us not pursue those problems here, but finally note another position on the board: expressivism. according to the expressivist, sentences including words like "excellent" are not true or false at all but are expressions of certain emotions just like the exclamations "Ouch" or "Wow". as such, they do not have conditions for truth or falsity at all.

i do not wish to say that we should have a philosophical discussion on this board, but i do wish to say that there isn't much point to what has been said on this thread so far. what has been said so far has been completely unclear and impossible to evaluate (for truth - we can evaluate them for clarity). maybe we should not continue this thread much further.
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Hand in your contextualist based essay with the line "Mozart is excellent" and I can guarantee it will come back with a big fat F. I'm sure you would get a long way by arguing, "but that is truth to me." Also I would point out that you are incorrect to say that the statement "John Lennon was killed in 1980," is objective by your own logic.
 
It's such a good feeling to know you're alive.
It's such a happy feeling: You're growing inside.
And when you wake up ready to say,
"I think I'll make a snappy new day."
It's such a good feeling, a very good feeling,
The feeling you know that we're friends.
 
Sorry, what was the point again? Other than he was on an Ayn Rand based tirade about self truth being fundamental to all expression of opinion. Really what he is saying that empirical currency isn't important when you can justify anything you say as your own personal truth. Typical language of any first year psychology student really who can't really grasp the concept of empricism.
 
As far as I am concerned that rant is just taking the easy way out by saying "It doesn't matter whether what I say is based on my empirical knowledge I can justify anything with the phrase, 'It is my contextualist belief that this is truth'"
As for trolling I have never responded to that dipshit by saying "that is some of the most stupid shit I have ever read." The same can't be said of him. Furthermore it's not my fault if he takes any kind of critique or challenge as a personal attack. I am after all just expressing my own personal truth

[edit] By the way for the record, because I know it is probably beyond the capacity of logic for most people it is contradictory to say that it is an objective observance to say "John Lennon was killed in 1980." For one thing date is culture specific.
 
a. He was giving a brief exposition of a weak notion of Contextualism, not arguing for it. He dismissed it as an inadequate account for certain kinds of propositions as interlocutors could not have a common conversational subject by that account.
b. The Contextualism was constrained to aesthetics, or value-judgements and was not intended to account for statements of empirical fact. The John Lennon sentence was implicitly contrasted with the sentences that were offered as candidates for his Contextualist account.
c. The overall tenor of the post was one in which he was trying to dispute a view of truth as being relative to the individual subject, a vague notion he described as "Freshman relativism". In your follow-up post, you seem to accuse him of just such a position.

But I am sure you understood this from the outset, hence my comment. You would have to be a total undergrad not to pick that up on the first reading, so I will give you the respect of assuming that you are stirring for argument's sake. Name-dropping a few writers names and "isms" does not provide you with a critical foundation to contemptuously dismiss the guy's post. Get a life, I'm not playing.
 
Soilworker said:
i reckon martin lopez was the best bassist opeth ever have, they should have definitely got rid of peter lindgren
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If that is your personal truth, who am I to argue?
 
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