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    Wollheim's and Davies's work shows that embodiment and ph... — Carmelics
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    Challenges→Dance is ill-suited for analysis under a Platonic ontology of art

    Wollheim's and Davies's work shows that embodiment and physical instantiation are compatible with type-token Platonism, since the type remains distinct from any particular performance token.

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    1 reason for
    1 reason against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
    ?
    • 1.Musical works persist through multiple performances; the type-token distinction explains this constancy without requiring abstract existence.
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    • 2.Physical instantiations (performances) can fully embody a work while the work itself remains ontologically distinct from any single token.
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    • 3.Type-token Platonism avoids the problem of abstract objects causally affecting the physical world since tokens are concrete particulars.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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    • 1.If types are abstract and non-physical, they cannot causally interact with physical performances, making instantiation relation explanatorily mysterious.
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    • 2.The identity criteria for what counts as 'the same type' across tokens remains unclear without invoking substantive abstract properties.
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    • 3.Nominalist alternatives (structural patterns, conventions) explain our performance practices equally well without positing abstract types.
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    Key Terms

    Compatible with(as used in logic and philosophy generally)
    Able to exist or be true at the same time without contradicting each other. Two ideas are compatible if one doesn't rule out the other.
    Physical instantiation(what the statement says mathematical entities don't depend on)
    When an abstract concept becomes real in a concrete, physical form—like how the number 5 might be instantiated by five actual apples sitting on a table.
    Type-token Platonism(as the main theory being discussed)
    A philosophical view that abstract things (like a song or mathematical shape) are real and exist separately from any specific physical performance or object—the 'type' is the abstract ideal, while 'tokens' are the individual physical copies or performances of it.
    Wollheim and Davies(as philosophers whose research is being cited)
    Richard Wollheim and Stephen Davies are philosophers who wrote influential work on art and music, specifically studying how abstract artworks and musical pieces can exist as types (general categories) while also being performed as tokens (specific instances).
    distinct from(Modal metaphysics; recombination principle (Premise 4))
    A relation that must mean something stronger than 'not identical to' in the context of the recombination principle, so as to exclude co-obtaining incompatible states of affairs
    embodiment(Rohrbaugh's example: a photograph's embodiments include its negative and subsequent prints)
    A physical object in the causal-historical series on which a historical individual (artwork) is ontologically dependent
    token(Philosophy of language; type-token distinction)
    An actual physical thing located at a specific place in spacetime; a concrete instantiation such as a pile of ink on a page, a sound wave, or a collection of pixels on a computer screen
    type(Epistemic type spaces in multi-agent belief systems)
    A structured object of the form ⟨f₀, f₁, …⟩ containing some fₙ for every natural number n, used to represent an agent's full hierarchy of informational attitudes.

    Connections

    2 topics

    Modality & Possibility1 linkedAesthetics1 linked

    Related

    Dance is ill-suited for analysis under a Platonic ontology of artIf types are abstract and non-physical, they cannot causally interact with physi...

    Details

    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    2 (1 for, 1 against)
    Edits
    1 edit
    Musical works persist through multiple performances; the type-token distinction ...
    Nominalist alternatives (structural patterns, conventions) explain our performan...
    +3 moreShow less
    Physical instantiations (performances) can fully embody a work while the work it...The identity criteria for what counts as 'the same type' across tokens remains u...Type-token Platonism avoids the problem of abstract objects causally affecting t...