Abstract
Science and art are traditionally considered incommensurable fields of knowledge. The ways scientific knowledge is produced seem to have nothing at all in common with artistic activity. They are generally acknowledged to be two distinct and separate cultures.
This chapter is a revised version of Viale, R. (1995). Le molte culture in Italia. Alcune considerazioni epistemologiche e cognitive sul rapporto tra arte e scienza. In D.Galva, E.E. Müller. F. Terragni (a cura di). La formazione tra cultura scientifica e cultura umanistica. Ricerca scientifica ed educazione permanente, supplemento n. 102, Università degli studi di Milano.
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Notes
- 1.
When discussing art, I will refer principally to figurative art (as in the English use of the term “art” or the German “Kunst”). The first reason for this choice will be illustrated in note (3), supposing a possible philosophical and cultural parallelism with science in the various periods of history. The second reason is cognitive. Figurative art is based on the manipulation of mental images, unlike music which adopts a propositional code. Even science seems to be based on the construction of mental models, whose structure corresponds to the way we conceive the world, and whose code is often based on mental images. Both these reasons tend to bring science and art very close.
- 2.
However, one could also, in a counter-intuitive way, suppose a parallelism between the dynamics of science and of figurative art, identifying five stages of development:
-
a)
magical stage (up to Egyptian art): religious and magical apriorisms are prevalent; art is seen on the basis of its utility as religious and magical symbolism, respecting very precise schemes; nature is interpreted according to religious and magical meanings;
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b)
naturalistic stage (Greek-Roman period): people try to represent nature by idealising and universalising its essence; in a work of art they try to idealise the object depicted by glorifying beauty and the balance between the forms; in science, nature is an object to study in order to identify the universal elements that underpin it;
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c)
empiricist stage (from the Renaissance to the 19th century): nature is represented by human observation of its multiplicity and variety; in art, the ideal of beauty is achieved a posteriori through minute observation of the real world. Galileo’s experimentalism, Bacon’s inductivism and Newton’s “hypotheses non fingo” take hold in science. Man is the collector and processor of the sensory impressions that he receives from nature;
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d)
romantic stage (19th century): the world is inhabited and dominated by an infinite force that constitutes its substance; the infinite is outside the reach of rationality, but only sentiment can grasp it; so art is superior to science because it is an expression of sentiment; the world is a sort of poem and a work of art, whose author is the absolute; science must grasp the absolute speculatively in the unity of phenomena; the unity of organic forms corresponds to the unity of physical forces and of matter;
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e)
subjectivist stage (20th century): the subject determines the real world that we are unable to grasp in its objectivity and universality; in art it is the artist who constructs the world, moulding it through the filters of his subconscious and his subjectiveness; the world is deconstructed and reconstructed by the artist “faber mundi”; objective universals do not exist, only subjective; in science universalism is abandoned and Heisenberg’s indeterminacy considers the subject as co-producer of the natural phenomenon, while quantum mechanics seem to make God play dice with nature; after having reduced science to a language with neopositivism, epistemology takes it prisoner, relating it to the cultural and social “frames” in which it is generated.
This parallelism, which is not without numerous exceptions, seems to indicate the importance of the culture of time in synchronically directing the methodological procedures, inferential styles, ontological apriorisms and cognitive values that underpin the production of a given fact.
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a)
- 3.
For example we can look at Italian history, and consider the differences in the 19th century between the communities of analytical and organic chemists and their different relationships with society: the former was decentralised in practice and disseminated in society (Cerruti and Rei 1989, p. 190); the latter was centred around structural theory and focused on industrial development. We should remember the peculiar nature of selection and career standards in chemistry compared to other disciplines like mathematics or biology: in chemistry a scientist’s value was decided by the number and quality of his patents (Cerruti and Rei 1989, p. 117); and the differences between chemistry in Italy and in other European communities ranged from a lack of strict meritocratic selection criteria in Italy, to the incompleteness of patent legislation rights, and to differences in the “culture of mourning” for the death of a colleague (memorial lectures, obituaries, collections of works, etc.), which is a sign of social cohesion and maturity in a scientific community, but fragmentary and weak in Italy. And no less important differences can be seen in the 19th century, or today, among other disciplines, for example between experimental physics and mathematical physics, or between scientific and humanistic psychology. Awareness of this pluralism was very present in one of the most important 19th century examples of the interaction between the humanist and scientific culture: Carlo Cattaneo and “Il Politecnico”. Cattaneo wrote: “The proportions and order of the various sciences in relation to each other, the succession in which they are created, common or special procedures and common or special errors, make up an archive of sublime experience and mark the nature, the course and the limits of human thought, considered in the sum of its powers” (1972, II, p. 80). This passage reminds us of an important anticipation of today’s discoveries in the fields of sociology and the philosophy of science: the methodological and sociological pluralism of scientific disciplines. A federalist conception of the various sciences is predominant in Cattaneo, in which they are related but independent and free to develop autonomously and to mutually cross-fertilise. In his opinion, every science follows a method, and the principle to accept is one of proliferation.
- 4.
From a sociological viewpoint, one scientific community differs from another for a number of variables: deontological code and standards of “voice”, “loyalty” and “exit”, methodological principles, products, forms of communication and transmission, and externality in relation to the external environment. Setting the methodological analysis aside for a moment, it is clear from a great deal of empirical works in this field, that scientific culture is characterised by a great variety of social configurations. In recent years, the sociology of science has highlighted the social differences between industrial research and basic research, or research within the latter between collectivised sciences, like those known as Big Science (for example high energy physics) and sciences that in part still maintain an academic configuration, like theoretical physics. To underline the social characteristics of the various types of research activity, a number of acronyms have been coined: from Merton’s CUDOS (1973), which identifies the properties of communalism, humility, disinterestedness, originality, scepticism, universalism, and the recognition of priorities, typical of the ideals of academic science, to Ziman’s PLACE (1987), which defines the norms of industrial science as proprietary, local, authoritarian, commissioned and expert, and Broesterhuizen and Rip’s SHIPS (1984) for which research should be strategic, founded on hybrid and interdisciplinary communities, able to stimulate innovative critique, public and based on scepticism. All these types and others besides are proof of both how difficult it is to identify constant characteristics that are common to the various forms of scientific research, and of the great pluralism present in the scientific world.
- 5.
There are numerous studies in sociology, and in the philosophy of science, that demonstrate this phenomenon. One of the most important is Collins’ study (1974) of the social interaction within the group of scientists involved in the construction of a special type of laser known as the “Tea laser”. It underlines how, occasionally, scientific knowledge cannot be rendered explicit. It has a tacit component (Polanyi 1958) which cannot be evaluated by formal criteria and which can therefore only be transmitted by direct contact between the researchers. Collins observes that even the scientists who had constructed a functioning laser were unable to render the knowledge required to construct it fully explicit. No group of researchers managed to produce a functioning laser only on the basis of the formal information present in the publications. The development of the laser was only achieved by repetition of the direct contacts between researchers. In another study of the discovery of gravitational waves, Collins (1975) pointed out that even in clearly formulated sectors of scientific knowledge there is always a large margin for the interpretation of theories, models and experimental techniques.
- 6.
As Gombrich told us (1950, It. trans. 1989, pp. 42–51), Egyptian artists resembled geographical cartographers rather than painters in the way they precisely followed the dictates of the time. Because the head was most easily in profile, they drew it sideways. But if we imagine the human eye we think of it as seen from the front. Accordingly, a full-face eye was planted into the side view of the face. The top half of the body, the shoulders and chest, are best seen from the front, for then we see how the arms are hinged to the body. But arms and legs in movement are much more clearly seen sideways. They found it hard to visualise either foot seen from outside. They preferred the clear outline from the big toe upwards. So both feet are seen from the inside, and the man looks as if he had two left feet. The Egyptian style comprised a set of very strict rules: seated statues had to have their hands on their knees; men had to be painted with darker skin than women; Horus, the sky god, had to be shown as a falcon or with a falcon’s head; Anubis, the god of funeral rites, as a jackal or with a jackal’s head, etc.
- 7.
It is not easy to identify important progress achieved in science using concepts borrowed from the humanist culture. It is worth mentioning Goethe’s theory of colours, for its extraordinary importance and relevance today. This relevance is not connected so much to the physics of colours, which is not accepted by contemporary physics, but on one hand to the physiology of the perception of colour and the psychology of colour, of which Goethe was an original precursor, and on the other to a few epistemological intuitions.
His poetical sensitivity and sharp eye, which was never invasive of nature, enabled him to refute any epistemological violence, whether it was to confine phenomena to the a-priori prisons of mathematics or, at the other extreme, to attack it with experimentalism or technological domination. Instead he proposed a “dedicated empiricism” that respects the phenomenon, is conscious of the hypothetical and theoretical nature of much of our observation, grasps the holistic dimension of the meaning of the empirical fact like one link in a long chain of experience, and positions the epistemological centre of gravity in the subject of the perception and the knowledge. In other words, as Quine said, in the subject that transforms a miserly perceptive input into a torrential cognitive output. In Goethe it was his aesthetic sense and his love of nature, derived from his artistic sensitivity, which enabled him to develop radically innovative intuitions in science.
- 8.
“Man is a great miracle”
- 9.
The book of Stephen Kosslyn and G. Wayne Miller (2013) criticizes the difference between an analytical left hemisphere and a creative right hemisphere. They propose a model of the brain as an integrated system with a top-bottom dynamics. For example the creative mind seems to be characterized by an intense activity of the top brain.
- 10.
By contrast, regressions to earlier, more primitive psychological functioning, that occur in psychotic episodes, are involuntary.
- 11.
Even though we could maintain that processing an experiment or drafting a scientific paper is also guided by empathetic elements. For example, we identify with the person who will read the publication, whether a friend, colleague or impersonal public. We identify with the colleague or teacher who first attempted the experiment. All this shapes and influences the choices we make when drafting the publication, focusing it on the understanding of our hypothetical readers and on the fine-tuning and conduction of the experiment, unconsciously imitating the style of our mental references.
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Viale, R. (2013). Art and Science: Some Neurocognitive Remarks on Creativity . In: Methodological Cognitivism. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40216-6_8
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