•  167
    Confessions of an unrepentant timbral sonicist
    British Journal of Aesthetics 50 (1): 33-52. 2010.
    Simplifying somewhat, sonicists believe that works of music are individuated purely in terms of how they sound. For them, exact sound-alikes are identical. Stephen Davies, in his ‘Musical Works and Orchestral Colour’ ( BJA 48 (2008), pp. 363–375) took me to task for defending a version of sonicism. In this paper I seek to explain why Davies's objections miss their mark. In the course of the discussion, I make some methodological remarks about the ontology of music
  •  52
    John R. Searle claims that P.F. Strawson's well known objections to correspondence theories of truth can be side‐stepped, if we regard the correspondence theorist's facts as ‘conditions in the world’ rather than as complex objects. In response, I claim both that Searle's notion of a ‘condition in the world’ is obscure, and that such conditions cannot be the facts of a correspondence theorist on account of their being unsuited for truthmaking.The failure of Searle's attempt to come up with a corr…Read more
  •  2
    Introduction
    In Helen Beebee & Julian Dodd (eds.), Truthmakers: The Contemporary Debate, Clarendon Press. 2005.
  •  216
    Types, continuants, and the ontology of music
    British Journal of Aesthetics 44 (4): 342-360. 2004.
    Are works of music types of performance or are they continuants? Types are unchanging entities that could not have been otherwise; continuants can undergo change through time and could have been different. Picking up on this distinction, Guy Rohrbaugh has recently argued that musical works are continuants rather than performance-types. This paper replies to his arguments and, in the course of so doing, elaborates and defends the conception of musical works as types of performance. I end the arti…Read more