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In Languages of Art, and more concisely in his chapter from Reconceptions, “How Buildings Mean,” Nelson Goodman proposed three ways that works of art might have meaning: namely, through denotation, exemplification, and expression. Within the arts, denotation and expression have both been exhaustingly (if inconclusively) discussed. But of the three, exemplification was the form of reference that Goodman himself identified as one of the “symptoms of the aesthetic”. Yet as far as I can see, the concept figures little in recent discussions. So what has happened to the notion of exemplification?

As Goodman defines it, exemplification is reference plus possession. In his words, “Such reference runs, not as denotation does, from symbol to what it applies to as label, but in the opposite direction, from symbol to certain labels that apply to it or to properties possessed by it.” If a fabric swatch exemplifies a certain color–yellow, say–then it both refers to the property yellow and itself possesses that property. Not all of the swatch’s properties are exemplified by it, however. As Goodman once wrote, “The lady who ordered dress material ‘exactly like the sample’ did not want it in two-inch square pieces with zigzag edges.”

So why is this concept so important for aesthetics? For one thing, because it allows works to mean without requiring that they refer to anything outside of themselves. It thus avoids a standard formalist prohibition on reference “outside the frame”. And yet it does so without sacrificing the notion that works of art might mean something.

I’d like to suggest that this is particularly true in music. Peter Kivy has offered forceful arguments for his belief that “music alone” has no semantic content. But his arguments have all been directed at opponents (Richard Kuhns, Arthur Danto, Jerrold Levinson, Schopenhauer) who treat music as representing something or other. Levinson, for example, has suggested that violently passionate music might characterize passion as violent. Kivy’s response is that some music certainly contains violence or passion. But as he says in Philosophies of Arts, “Surely it makes no sense to claim that that, ipso facto, commits one to saying that the music represents those things, or is about them, or that those things are its ‘content’ in the semantic sense of the word. They are merely its ‘content’ in that they are ‘in’ the music, as the colors are ‘in’ the painting: they are part of its ‘musical content.’”

I wonder if exemplification might answer Kivy’s concerns. After all, Kivy is right to say that violence–or passion, or joy–are ‘in’ the music. They are properties possessed by it. And that is one of the requirements of exemplification. The other, though, is reference, and this to me seems to be the element Kivy’s account is missing. We would somehow misunderstand a violently passionate work if we missed the fact that it had that property. The work refers to its passion; it shows it forth (like the swatch exhibits its yellowness). It doesn’t likewise refer to all of its properties–say, the fact that it is made up of 1,245 notes. Of course we could imagine another work that DID refer to the number of notes it is made up of, thereby exemplifying that number. In fact, I think that musical analysis does exactly this: it tries to determine which of the work’s properties are exemplified. That’s how we might answer the question parallel to Goodman’s: How does music mean?

These are just sketchy ideas, but perhaps they are enough to make us wonder why Goodman’s concept of examplification hasn’t been further pursued.

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