Constant Bonard 1 "Etoit-il étonnant que les premiers Grammairiens soumissent leur art à la Musique, & fussent à la fois professeurs de l'un & de l'autre?" Rousseau, Essai sur l'origine des langues 2 Can music be considered a language of the emotions? The most common view today is that this is nothing but a Romantic cliché. Mainstream philosophy seems to view the claim that 'Music is the language of the emotions' as a slogan that was once vaguely defended by Rousseau, Goethe, or Kant, but that cannot be understood literally when one takes into consideration last century's theories of language, such as Chomsky's on syntax or Tarski's on semantics (Scruton 1997: ch. 7, see also Davies 2003: ch. 8, and Kania 2012). In this chapter, I will show why this common view is unwarranted, and thus go against nowadays philosophical mainstream by defending what I call the musicalanguage hypothesis 3 .In Section 1, I will introduce the musicalanguage hypothesis and present, based on empirical evidence, some of the many similarities between language and music and explain why we should take them seriously. I will introduce a framework that aims to explain the communicative power of music using what we already know about linguistic communication 1 Thanks to K.G. Vijayakrishnan, Rajshri Sripathy, Ramani Narayanan, Lalitha Raghavan, and G.Ravindran, for helping me design and run the test in India, to Patrik Dasen for helping me run the test in Geneva, to the anonymous referee for helpful comments, and to Florian Cova for the last minute statistical analysis and helpful comments.2 Cited in Katz and Pesetsky (2011).3 A note for those interested in the philosophy of language: I agree with Davies' (2003: ch. 8) point that musical meaning is neither propositional (propositions understood as the primary bearers of truth and falsity), nor conceptual (concepts being understood as the essential constituents of propositions and as the arguments of logical structures). Music is thus, strictly speaking, unapt for a truth-conditional semantics, unlike verbal languages. This doesn't mean it is unapt for a 'super-semantics' (Schlenker, forthcoming). Compare: Most (if not all) non-human animal communication supposedly is neither propositional nor conceptual, but as Schlenker argues, something like a truth-conditional semantics can be developed to analyze their communication.
