54 Lost Chords tunes while others are left unmoved.

These are the considerations that prompt me to wonder whether, in the not too distant future, everyone might turn permanently sadness-deaf with respect to ddle musicthat no musical ears will remain able to detect such emotions within my favored music. In the same vein, I imagine that were we ever to hear again the lyres of Homers time, we might struggle mightily to discern in their cacophony the intoxicating stirrings described by the poet. The superior heft of competing paradigms for emotive expression in music can easily drive the active possibility of hearing ddle tunes as sad into oblivion. Indeed, we can easily see how such losses of apparent musical content might arise even within the narrow evolution of our own listening. For example, the probable effect of listening to an abundance of mid-twentieth century jazz and popular music is that one acquires what might be called a hunger for major seventh chords: music begins to sound empty if the tonic is not harmonically supported by a fuller chord like C-E-G-B or one of its extended cousins. Before such expectations take holdif we have been largely raised on a diet of folk music, for example, tonal assemblies of this type are apt to sound rather ugly; but once we have bitten rmly on the harmonic bait, we will begin to feel dgety if the extending tones are absent. And such an appetite for strong harmonization can, almost by itself, seriously weaken the old possibilities for expressiveness that the ddle tunes require. Once the question why dont we hear a Cmaj7 here? begins to loom large, the response how sad this sounds may recede into unrecoverable oblivion (in fact, the affective contours of Texas ddle music altered in much this way after World War II). There is a very real sense in which we can seem to lose a concept by doing nothing except learning something else (such forgetfulness through learning appears as well in the Druid case of 1,ix). This is a phenomenon that is hard to understand within a traditional approach to human understanding and it is an issue with which we will struggle throughout the book. With respect to those tape recordings I have made on behalf of future generations who, when their time comes around, may not be able to hear it properly, I can only say: I regret such changes, if indeed they occur, but I wouldnt fault anyone for them.

(iii)
Tropospheric complacency. What is most striking about our Darwin critic is that he has probably never considered tempering apologetics of this ilk, for he undoubtedly suffers from that form of parochial vision that Hume satirizes: His own pursuits are always, in his account, the most engaging, the objects of his passion the most valuable, and the road which he pursues the only one which leads to happiness.10 Im sure he presumes (without having thought much about it) that the Mozartian musical merits, melancholy and all, are clearly objectively present in the physical sound, although it
10

David Hume, The Skeptic in Selected Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 95.

Tropospheric Complacency 55

Clathrate hydrate

may require an individual of rened sensibility to perceive it properly. Of course, he grants this ability requires training; indeed, he undoubtedly prides himself in having manfully endured the mandatory drill. He will readily grant that he himself would require practice before he could spot a bird in the forest canopy as ably as Darwin. But some matters are more important than ora and fauna, he thinks, so the old naturalist can be fairly chastised for aesthetic obtuseness because the content required for proper ourishing is clearly out there, if only Darwin would seek the path towards it. In my diagnosis, our moralizing critic suffers from a common form of tunnel vision in which we all, to some degree or other, participate and which neednt, in itself, bear such obnoxious fruit. The attitude in question I call tropospheric complacencyit represents our native inclination to picture the distribution of properties everywhere across the multifarious universe as if they represented simple transfers of what we experience while roaming the comfortable connes of a temperate and pleasantly illuminated terrestrial crust. In such a vein, we readily fancy that we already know what it is like to be red or solid or icy everywhere, even in alien circumstances subject to violent gravitational tides or unimaginable temperatures, deep within the ground under extreme pressures, or at size scales much smaller or grander than our own, and so forth. But the substantive discoveries of those who have actually probed these environments quickly reveals how shallow and hapless our complacent expectations are likely to prove. For example, I think most of us are inclined to presume that we have a pretty good sense of what the property of being ice involves. Water, in fact, represents a notoriously eccentric substance, capable of forming into a wide range of peculiar structures that display admixtures of typical solid and liquid behaviors. For example, A chapter on crystalline water would be incomplete without some mention of a group of ice cousins, the clathrate hydrates, also known as gas hydrates. Like the ice polymorphs, they are crystalline solids, formed by water molecules, but hydrogen-bonded in such a way that polyhedral cavities of different sizes are created that are capable of accommodating certain kinds of guest molecules.11 The author doesnt regard the clathrate structure as true ice (because it is bonded in gauche rather than cis formation), but is it clear that our everyday conception of ice
11

Felix Franks, Water: A Matrix of Life (Cambridge: Royal Society of Chemistry, 2000), 39.

56 Lost Chords requiresas opposed to acceptsthis distinction? (I, for one, had never thought about such matters at all). Likewise, our text indicates that in theory it should be possible to supercool liquid water until it vitries into a non-crystalline substance of very high viscosity structurally resembling normal glassware (in fact, many scientists regard glasses as different states of matter than normal crystalline solids). Should this glasslike stuff qualify as a novel form of ice or not? Our chemist will presumably say no because the stuff is not crystalline but many of us would perhaps put a higher premium on its apparent solidity. There is a popular school of contemporary philosophy (characterized by their blithe appeals to the worlds alleged natural kinds) that severely overestimates the degree to which any of usour societal experts or notare presently prepared to classify the universes abundance of strange materials adequately. Or consider the matter of high pressure. Common materials display a remarkable ability to assume all sorts of radically different organizational structures (chemists call them phases) under diverse pressures (and temperatures). Indeed, gauche-bonded ice displays seven or eight known phases. Typically, such high pressure forms quickly revert to familiar ice when brought to atmospheric pressure. But occasionally the chemical bonds in certain high pressure phases are so strong that a material cannot easily rearrange itself back into its preferred low pressure form. A striking illustration of this type is the diamond, which truly represents an anomalous visitor to our milder dominions from the high pressure realm (the preferred, normal atmospheric pressure form of carbon is graphite; diamonds form only under extreme compression). Properly speaking, diamonds shouldnt be found near the earths surface at all, but once volcanic forces have churned them upwards from their dens of subterranean nurture, their unstable bondings relax to greasy graphite so extraordinarily slowly that they qualify as permanent by any reasonable clock. If some analogously rugged solid form of high pressure (and room temperature) water could be formedwould it qualify as being ice? I do not know. As we witnessed in the Druid case, the manner of introduction of a novel object can easily make it seem as if we have been fully prepared to classify it as an X all alongif we rst learn about the clathrate hydrates from our textbook, it may never occur to us that anyone else might have reasonably considered them as ices. It is easy to build up an exaggerated estimate of our conceptual preparedness from this basis alone. Few of us have probably thought much about such matters, which, as a matter of biological mercy, is fortunate because our poor cluttered brains can only bear a certain amount of information (having devoted much gray matter already to childhood memories of inconsequential television shows). What practical difference should it make to most of us that were not presently fully prepared for a clathrate hydrate? Indeed, it is well appreciated that, in certain subjects, we do best to trafc primarily in inaccurate generalizationsAll birds yand leave the penguins and kiwis to the footnotes or special occasions. Allied to these sources of tropospheric complacency is our instinctive tendency to respond to queries about the classication of unfamiliar objects in a procrastinating vein, Well, I cant determine from your description whether your substance is

Tropospheric Complacency 57 ice or not, but if you could just show me some of the stuff, I bet I could answer you, as if a high pressure phase of water could easily be laid out on the kitchen table. Indeed, our manifestly unwise trust that a visual presentation offers the surest key to reliable classication is rather remarkable. Consider all of those science-ction moviesThe Incredible Shrinking Man providing the great paradigmwhere some human protagonist gets reduced to sub-millimeter level (and is thereby forced into battle with surly arthropods). We happily drink all this in as clearly possible, never mind the fact that human eyes shouldnt be able to focus light at that scale or that our hero cant expect to move as he does within our own gravity-dominated regime. In themselves, such fantasies of possibility are probably harmless enough, but they can sometimes cloud our appreciation of our universes surprising range of real variation. Indeed, there is a passage in this vein from Nathaniel Hawthornes The Snow Image that has long irked me and reminds me of the blinkered superiority of our Darwin critic: But, after all, there is no teaching anything to wise good men of good Mr. Lindseys stamp. They know everythingoh, to be sure!everything that has been, and everything that is, and everything that, by any future possibility, can be. And, should some phenomenon of nature or providence transcend their system, they will not recognize it, even if come to pass under their very noses.12 Although ostensibly condemning complacency of all kinds, I feel this quotation reveals a rather disagreeable vein of smugness ingrained within Hawthornes own thinking, as he patronizes the limitations of the scientic intellect personied in the story by the clueless Mr. Lindsey. The Hawthornian possibility that Lindsey overlooks is that of an inanimate objectan ice statuethat becomes mysteriously invigorated by a humanlike spirit. But the most striking feature of this transcendent possibility is its utter banality. Contrary to Hawthorne, musings of this stripe scarcely pass unrecognized they are the very stuff of fairy tales (think of poor Sylvester the donkey encased in stone!) As such, they undoubtedly spring from conceptions of mind and soul coeval with the earliest animist religions. But excessive emphasis on these soul-like varieties of possibility runs the risk, I believe, of obscuring from our attention the genuinely surprising eventualities that often emerge in the course of clinical work with brain-damaged individuals, where our normal expectations with respect to psychology become confounded by astonishing disassociations in expected patterns of human behavior. I dare say that we are more likely to confront unexpected futures of this sort than any that involve supernaturally animated snow children. Such real world discoveries may leave us totally at a loss as to how our familiar psychological terminology should properly apply within their startling circumstances. If only a soul could jump into blocks of ice!for in such a world the mind would indubitably possess that blessed indivisible unity upon which Descartes always insisted.
12

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Snow Image in Twice-Told Tales (Norwalk, Conn.: Heritage, 1966), 20.

58 Lost Chords

In certain modes of formal philosophy, great conclusions are sometimes reached by dwelling upon alleged possibilities of this kind (for example, the writings of a philosopher like David Hume are rife with what we can anachronistically dub a cinematic conception of possibility: if one can imagine a coherent movie of X occurring, then X must be clearly possible in some important sense). In the previous chapter, we noted the manner in which an essentially irrelevant possibility can be carried forward in the humble case of rainbow, in the sense that the fact that fairies can climb rainbows in story books tells us little about the terms proper usage within a real life context. In fact, the irrelevant prospect emphasized unwisely will prove an important theme throughout this book. Through fancying themselves masters of armchair possibility, the arrogant and cramped often convince themselves that they entertain the broadest of outlooks. In a less extreme way, the notion that philosophys proper dominion is the realm of conceptual possibility is fed by these same ur-philosophical streams. In general terms, we are interested in this book in what occurs when a given domain of linguistic application enlarges into neighboring territory (as occurs with Druid bird with respect to airplanes or ice with respect to the clathrate hydrates). Several natural questions arise in cases like these: To what extent are the applications in B genuinely determined by the applications already active in A? If some indeterminacy in preparation exists, what are the leading principles (to borrow a term from Charles Peirce) that determine how the movement from region A into B actually occurs? To what extent do the agents involved understand the true nature of the enlargement from A to B? In the story as I have told it, the Druid population itself views its own linguistic activities in an overly simplied manner: they simply presume, We are merely using birdin the oldfashioned way, as if the encounter with the airplane were no different in underlying character than some uncovering of a novel parrot (claims like Oh, this simply has to be called a bird often issue from what might be called an excess of conceptual inertia). It is this books contention that we frequently form pictures of linguistic development that follow this improperly simplied pattern (a disposition from which the classical theory of concepts draws much of its intuitive sustenance). In most cases, no harm is occasioned thereby, but every once in a while these proclivities represent the rst steps along an ur-philosophical road to trouble, when our native tendencies towards tropospheric complacency load poor attributes or concepts with greater burdens of conceptual content than they can reasonably bear. As well eventually see (7,x), we cant properly understand what goes wrong in our musical case unless we are prepared to accept more complicated models of what can occur under linguistic enlargement.