Abstract
In his first monograph, Grundprobleme der Logik, Pirmin Stekeler offered a version of "immediacy critique" according to which, to sum up the book's central thesis, logic does not describe or explain natural language but only constructs synoptic models to be compared with and projected onto it. The roots of this claim are deeply Wittgensteinian, Stekeler's "models of language" being, in fact, nothing other than Wittgenstein's "perspicuous representations" of linguistic practices where, by these practices or "language games," what is meant is something rule-governed and thus normatively charged but not necessarily discursive in a way in which Sellar's and Brandom's game of giving and asking for reasons is.
In my paper, I want to draw on some points of Stekeler's and Wittgenstein's approach to language by extending their repertoire of perspicuous representations - coming mainly from purely logical or visually controlled spaces (see, e.g., Stekeler's reconstructions of Aristotle's picture semantics and Frege's truth-functional logic or Wittgenstein's ab-notation and color-octahedron) - in an acoustical direction. The more modest part of this endeavor considers acoustical space phenomenally, aiming, basically, at the simple comparison of the traditional Newton/Goethe/Wittgenstein circle of colors with the circle of fifths of the Western tradition of tonal music, thus indicating what the musical pendant to Wittgenstein's grammar of colors would look like.
The more ambitious part, which will only be briefly sketched here, concerns the continuous transformation of the acoustical space into the musical one with a prospective goal to show that there is a much stronger connection between the "languages of art" and "the game of giving and asking for reasons" than mere family resemblances of using words such as "expression," "meaning," "thought" or "sentence" would suggest.