 This suggestion raises the specter of an “error theory” of music’s expressiveness, that is, a theory that all claims of emotional expressiveness in music are strictly false. A major burden of such a theory is to explain away the widespread tendency to describe music in emotional terms. This has been attempted by arguing that such descriptions are shorthand or metaphor for purely sonic features (Urmson 1973), basic dynamic features (Hanslick 1854), purely musical features (Sharpe 1982), or aesthetic properties (Zangwill 2007). There are many problems with such views. For one thing, they seem committed to some sort of scheme for reduction of expressive predicates to other terms, such as sonic or musical ones, and such a scheme is difficult to imagine (Budd 1985a: 31–6). For another, anyone not drawn to this theory is likely to reject the claim that the paraphrase captures all that is of interest and value about the passage described, precisely because it omits the expressive predicates (Davies 1994: 153–4). Perhaps Levinson, Davies, et al., are right that most people hear most music as emotionally expressive. It is a nice question, however, whether, if our musical culture fell into the grip of anti-expressivist formalism—in the future or the past—it would be appropriate to exclude ourselves from the reference class of listeners appealed to by such theories as those of Davies and Levinson. If so, this would point to a kind of high-level contextualism or cultural relativity about the expressiveness of music, making it a more contingent matter than most theorists imply. On the other hand, such an occurrence may be unlikely if our tendency to “animate” non-sentient objects is deeply rooted in our biology.