ORIGINAL PAPER IN PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE Musical pluralism and the science of music Adrian Currie 1 & Anton Killin 2 Received: 11 December 2014 /Accepted: 4 August 2015 /Published online: 27 August 2015 # Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015 Abstract The scientific investigation of music requires contributions from a diverse array of disciplines (e.g. anthropology, musicology, neuroscience, psychology, music theory, music therapy, sociology, computer science, evolutionary biology, archaeology, acoustics and philosophy). Given the diverse methodologies, inter- ests and research targets of the disciplines involved, we argue that there is a plurality of legitimate research questions about music, necessitating a focus on integration. In light of this we recommend a pluralistic conception of music— that there is no unitary definition divorced from some discipline, research question or context. This has important implications for how the scientific study of music ought to proceed: we show that some definitions are comple- mentary , that is, they reflect different research interests and ought to be retained and, where possible, integrated, while others are antagonistic, they represent real empirical disagreement about music’ s nature and how to account for it. We illustrate this in discussion of two related issues: questions about the evolution- ary function (if any) of music, and questions of the innateness (or otherwise) of music. These debates have been, in light of pluralism, misconceived. We suggest that, in both cases, scientists ought to proceed by constructing integrat- ed models which take into account the dynamic interaction between different aspects of music. Keywords Definitions of music . Musicality . Pluralism . Musical cognition . Evolution of music Euro Jnl Phil Sci (2016) 6:9–30 DOI 10.1007/s13194-015-0123-z * Anton Killin anton.killin@vuw.ac.nz Adrian Currie adrian.currie@ucalgary.ca 1 Department of Philosophy, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada 2 Department of Philosophy, Victoria University of Wellington, PO Box 600, Wellington, New Zealand