Closed Systems

Cognitive Closure as the Condition for Cognitive Opening

From a systems-theoretical perspective, cognition is the unity of the difference of informational closure and opening. In order to obtain information, as understood by Gregory Bateson as a “difference which makes a difference,” a system (organic, neuronal, psychic, social) needs to be open toward its environment. Only there can it find events with the power of making a difference, which means that they can irritate the system and possibly increase its level of adaptability. Leaving all epistemological issues aside, this seems to be simply a matter of adaption and accommodation. The system—that is, the mind—adjusts its cognitive opening in a way that a processible spectrum of the environment can be focused on. This implies that closure is the necessary (epistemologically, psychologically, philosophically) condition for perception. In order to perceive something specific, the perceiver needs to close herself or himself almost completely.

This closure does not only refer to the physical bandwidth or spatial and temporal limitation of the infinite horizon of the world. Any actualization of meaning depends on an exclusion of other potential meaning, or in the famous words of Baruch Spinoza, omnis determination est negatio (we can only know and communicate the meaning of something by distinguishing it from something else). If a certain vocal sound is understood musically as an intentional selection out of a musical medium (e.g. scale, style, dynamics), it is not understood as a part of everyday communication. Musical meaning can only be constituted within a communicative frame (or symbolic form) that excludes all other kinds of communicative behavior. Furthermore, with the increasing specificity of musical meaning, this frame or window must become narrow. An aria of an opera cannot be understood inside the wide frame of diatonic music but depends on a listening focus that entails genre-specific knowledge and expectations that co-create its musical meaning. A completely open listening attitude is not only impossible (outside of a phenomenological experiment) but in principle inadequate for musical understanding. The quality and degree of cognitive closure determines the quality and intensity of cognitive opening, albeit not the cognitive process that constructs the actual musical meaning on this basis.

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