The Romantic Syndrome pp 43-103 | Cite as
Bias in the Arts and the Sciences
Abstract
So far I have merely introduced the set of seven methodological tools that I propose to employ for the analysis of style. I shall now begin their systematic exposition by indicating the wide variety of cultural products — both in the arts and in the sciences — to which, as I hold, these tools are applicable. I shall first show that our seven axes are reflected in non-verbal, as well as in verbal, media. For this purpose I shall cite some examples from the field of painting. Next I propose to show, by means of examples drawn from the social and physical sciences, that these same biases operate in empirical and factual types of inquiry as well as in the more expressive media of literature and the arts. Finally, since I want to show that the effect of bias is not confined to one particular time period, I shall draw my examples widely from different periods, including the present.
Keywords
Anchor Point Deep Space Vision Complex French Revolution Historical WritingPreview
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References
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- 2.Among the sciences, mathematics is perhaps the only exception. A mathematician like G. H. Hardy, for example, expresses an other-world bias in his assertion that the study of mathematics is the discovery of a transcendent, Platonic world of forms. (Compare A Mathematician’s Apology (Cambridge, 1940), pp. 63–64.) It is thus easy for a mathematician who has an other-world bias to express it, but it is of course not at all necessary that mathematicians have other-world bias. This-world bias, for instance, expres ses itself in mathematics characteristically in the belief that mathematics is analytic, that it is merely the manipulation of signs in accordance with arbitrarily chosen rules.Google Scholar