The Music and Some Preliminary Considerations

Abstract

Every object has a name, or some identifiable label by which we may recognize that it is the object in question we are referring to and not to something else. This labeling is, of course, one of the functions of language, a function that is basic. No one could call both a book and a pen by the label “book” and expect to make himself intelligible. Of necessity, each label must possess the quality of exclusiveness, that is, it must belong to a particular object and preferably to none other. Thus, when we use the label “book” we know the object to which it refers. Our knowledge, furthermore, is not simply a nominative one, but also an analytic one. The label not only denotes the object, book, but simultaneously tells us that a book has pages and a cover. In a subtle, gradual process of language development, labeling terms have been set up definitionally. Each object-name that we use is an implicit definition, an unconscious analytic assertion.