Nested Types, Modal Claims and Musical Works. Another Go

• Published in: The Journal of aesthetics and art criticism Vol. 81; no. 3; pp. 400 - 403
• Main Author: Puy, Nemesio García-Carril
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: UK Oxford University Press 16.12.2023
• Subjects: Aesthetics; Compositional styles; Music; Ontology
• ISSN: 0021-8529; 1540-6245
• DOI: 10.1093/jaac/kpad021

I have recently defended two ideas (Puy 2022a). The first is that our modal claims about musical works do not imply that they are modally flexible entities, i.e., that they could have had different intrinsic properties. The second idea is that the nested types theory (NTT) can offer a satisfactory explanation of this fact, capturing the truth of our modal claims. Peter Alward (2023) thoroughly discusses these two ideas. I want to express my most sincere gratitude to Alward (2023) for the careful and fine discussion of my paper. However, I argue next that none of his criticisms are strong enough to undermine my view. In §I, I acknowledge a correct point in Alward’s objections to my argument, but this allows me to present a reconstruction of the argument that leads to the same conclusion. In §II, I illustrate that Alward’s objections about the alleged vagueness of NTT are unmotivated because they rest on a mischaracterization of the theory. And in §III, I identify four problems that prevent HLA from being an appealing view in the ontology of music.