Coming to Terms with Sound: Carl Stumpf’s Discourse on Hearing Music and Language

This article examines the use of a concept—Einstellung, that is, technical setting or mental attitude—in Carl Stumpf’s study Die Sprachlaute. More specifically, it looks at a textual strategy of avoiding an explicit definition of the term, while building on it in the explanation for failure in his experiments. Three strands of negotiation are present in this discussion: (a) Stumpf’s positioning against Wilhelm Wundt and with respect to the emerging schools of phenomenology and Gestalt psychology in a transforming academic landscape; (b) his methodological approach, which is identified as a comparison of judgments, asking how judgments relate to various conditions such as predisposition, previous exposure, or simply previous information on the matter to be judged; (c) the epistemological question of how Stumpf relates the concrete materiality of the experimental setup to the functions and processes in the mind of the judging subject and how this mirrors the problem of relating empirical findings to conceptual consideration. The overall frame for this is construed along the term Einstellung, which provides a central theme throughout this article.