From: rhinoceros (rhinoceros@freemail.gr)
Date: Wed Oct 22 2003 - 08:29:40 MDT
Still, what Pinker said about music in 1997, in "How the Mind Works" shows that there was still room for improving his understanding of some social phenomena. In Joseph Carroll's reply mentioned by Fromm, among some compelling and some not so compelling arguments, we find this:
http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Abstracts/Carroll_C98.html
<quote from Carroll>
Now, art, music and literature are not merely the products of cognitive fluidity. They are important means by which we cultivate and regulate the complex cognitive machinery on which our more highly developed functions depend. Because he does not understand the necessity of such cultivation, Pinker believes that we could do without music and undergo no significant loss in our capacity to function. "Compared with language, vision, social reasoning, and physical know-how, music could vanish from our species and the rest of our lifestyle would be virtually unchanged. Music appears to be a pure pleasure technology, a cocktail of recreational drugs that we ingest through the ear to stimulate a mass of pleasure circuits at once" (p. 528).
<end quote>
These days, evolutionary psychology finds it a more compelling task to try to incorporate things like music or fiction into its framework. Of course, since EP explanations rely mostly on things that happened 100,000 years ago (a point which is also disputed in Carroll's piece), these EP explanations of art and music have mostly to do with tribal rituals and group cohesion.
Taking this view, one could try to make an argument that music, although it still has a strong effect, serves no purpose today and that it is only a leftover. Psychological and social studies could step in here and tell us whether this is true or not. Carroll's quote which I pasted argues that art and music still serve a purpose and I think he has good reasons to say so. One could still say that our biological mechanisms for art and music have been put to different uses today, but this is also something which happens with all our evolutionary traits.
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