Music, Emotions, and Truth

In this article Elina Packalen considers the notion of truth in connection with music. Her starting-point is the question of how music can be expressive of emotions; therefore she first summarizes some recent philosophical ideas of this issue. These ideas naturally raise the question of whether describing music in emotive terms has an epistemic end of being true. There is also another way for expressive music to be epistemically valuable, namely being a source of the kind of knowledge that is related to our emotional inner states. Accordingly, in the latter part of this article she presents the concept of truth about music and the concept of truthful music . Her conclusion is that strict objective truths about the emotional nature of music may not be attainable, but despite this outcome it is still possible that music yields some kind of ineffable knowledge about the experience of emotions.