Normative Pragmatism and the Language Game of Music

This article extends the scope of Brandom's normative pragmatism and its linguistically-oriented concept of sapience to cover the problems of sapience or understanding in art, with particular focus on music. To achieve this, the transition from the "acoustical space" to the "musical space" is portrayed as a matter of seeing the acoustical norms, such as the circle of fifths, as norms participating in the formation of expectations and emotions based on them along the lines suggested by Meyer and Huron.