Reply to comment

Anne, a very interesting post on the talk. I had a somewhat different reaction. I thought that the way she highlighted some similarities between art and science helped bring out how both are part of the overall endeavor of expanding and creating human understanding. As she said in response to the student’s comment you mention, I don’t think she meant to say that art is good because it is like science. Rather, I think what she is saying is that art and science have some similarities which help highlight how understanding in a more general way functions. I doubt she thinks of either art or science as in any way privileged, or that they are not different in many ways. This also doesn’t mean that she thinks that there is one way some uber thing called understanding works. Understanding can be taken as getting things a little less wrong.

You say that “works of art actually seek not to align themselves with what has been done, but rather to diverge from past works, to be unique, and original.” This seems right to me. But I don’t think there is a difference here with science. If a scientist is working within a paradigm, does that mean that she accepts the basic scientific theory (past works) and is not trying to be unique or original? Certainly a scientist could be like that, just as an artist could be broadly conforming to a paradigm. But it doesn’t mean that the scientist has to be like that. Rather, the scientist could be seeking to be unique and original as well and to rethink fundamental assumptions. I think to deny this is to hold too strongly to the distinction between normal science and revolutionary science. I would say that there is no sharp distinction between the two, and that good science, like good thinking, is trying not just to discover new facts but new modes of understanding. Here I think there is quite a bit of convergence between Elgin’s view and Paul’s (and perhaps yours, as I understand it so far from discussions).

The same point can also be put this way. Does every work of art seek to not align itself with what has gone on before? Could any work of art do that? I would be suspicious of the master genius creation from nothing picture of an artist’s motivation or working process. And I would be also doubtful of the idea that an artist necessarily seeks to be different from everyone. How then could we make sense of the miniature artists in the Islamic tradition who sought to recapture the definitive depiction mastered by the past artists? Or even of movements such as impressionism or realism or cubism, etc? True, an artist might never be really satisfied long enough with even her own creation such that she would fully identify with some framework. Perhaps good artists keep transcending or trying to transcend their own creations. But here too I see no difference from good scientists.

I think “the arts function cognitively” is similar to “science is a story”. I take it that in the latter “story” is being used more broadly than we normally use it. One might say that science isn’t a story because it doesn’t characters, it is objective, it builds on the past, etc. But that doesn’t take away from the main point of the claim, which might be that science is perspectival just as all understanding is perspectival, and that science is not a locus of universal truths simply being handed over. Similarly, I think Elgin is using “cognitive” and “understanding” in a broad sense to mean human self-conceptualizations which are constantly being amended and transformed and created anew, all against a background which is taken for granted at certain moments but might be called into question at other moments. Understanding here is not the brute depiction of facts, but the general human encounter with the world in an attempt to make sense of it.

This point especially resonated with me in terms of the Jane Austen example and the idea that a novel can be seen as a thought experiment. Austen said, “three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on.” What does this mean? Elgin’s interpretation is that this gives the author enough diversity to play with without making it unmanageable. It helps bring out how ten or fifteen people interact with each other in five or ten contexts, and to thereby see how people with certain backgrounds will interact with other people with other backgrounds in certain contexts. It is a way of isolating things so as to understand them a little better. In this way, it is similar to how one might isolate some cells to understand their interactions. But there is more. The novelist isn’t simply bringing out these situations to just depict facts. Often the novelist (and the really good artists) put the thought experiment together in such a way that it enables the audience to see certain patterns in the artistic work, patterns which the audience isn’t normally attuned to and which through the reading they can thereby see in the world itself.

The Don Quixote example was an excellent example of this. Cervantes created in the story an archetype which we could understand and identify with given the context of the story. But the archetype is so powerful for us that we then take that archetype out of the context of the story, and start using it to make sense of the world around us; we start seeing some people as quixotic. The novel has thereby enhanced our perceptions of the world. The same it seems to me is true of Hamlet, Lear, the Godfather, Beethoven’s fifth symphony, one's favorite songs and many other works of art. In these cases the characters or the experiences LEAP OUT, as it were, out of the context of the novel or the movie or music and we carry it around with us in categorizing and making sense of the people and events around us. It is in this broad sense of cognitive that arts are cognitive. They can function like lenses through which we categorize and make sense of the world. And in this they are no different from other categories we might pick up in science textbooks, philosophy essays or through learning new languages.