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Inquiry in the Arts and Sciences
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2009
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In his 1836 lectures to the Royal Institute, the great landscape painter John Constable stated that ‘Painting is a science, and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature.’ Landscape, he went on to say, should ‘be considered a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but the experiments.’1 Constable makes two claims in this striking passage. The first is that painting is a form of inquiry. This is, by itself, a bold claim, but Constable goes on to state that painters and scientists inquire in the same way. As controversial as these views are, both of them have been sympathetically entertained in recent years by several philosophers. In particular, Nelson Goodman and Catherine Elgin have maintained that painting, and the other arts, are forms of inquiry, and that they are akin to the sciences in important respects.2 I think, however, that Constable is only half right. Although I agree that the arts are forms of inquiry, I will argue that the arts and the sciences employ radically different methods. That the arts and the sciences are very different forms of inquiry might seem to be a point so obvious as to be scarcely worth making. We can, however, appreciate more clearly how the arts can contribute to our knowledge by contrasting its methods with those of science.
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References
1 Constable, John, Discourses, Beckett, R. B. (ed.) (Ipswich, Suffolk: Suffolk Records Society, 1970), 69.Google Scholar
2 See, for example, Goodman, Nelson, Language of Art (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976), especially Chapter 6Google Scholar, and Elgin, Catherine, ‘Understanding: Art and Science’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 16 (1991), 196–208.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3 The failure to appreciate that art and science demonstrate in very different ways often leads to scepticism about the cognitive value of art. This failure seems to be the cause of the ridicule Nozick, Robert heaps on the suggestion that art can contribute to our knowledge. See, ‘Goodman, Nelson, on Merit, Aesthetic’, Journal of Philosophy, 69 (1972), 783–785.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
4 The use of this example was suggested by Robinson, Jenefer, ‘Sparshott on Art and Expression,’ American Society for Aesthetics Pacific Division Meeting, Asilomar, 12 April, 1995.Google Scholar
5 Diderot, Denis, Thoughts on Art and Style, trans. Tollemache, Beatrix L. (New York: Burt Franklin, 1971), 274.Google Scholar
6 I am trying to make precise the concept of resonance as it is employed, for example, in Zwicky, Jan, Lyric Philosophy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992).Google Scholar
7 See, for example, Kivy, Peter, Music Alone (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990).Google Scholar
8 The suggestion that the arts can perform a cognitive function is always controversial, but it is particularly controversial in the case of music. Peter Kivy, probably the leading contemporary philosopher of music, has become increasingly suspicious of the view that listening to music contributes to our understanding of anything (except music). See Music Alone. Davies, Stephen argues that music is sui geneis in ‘General Theories of Art Versus Music’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 34 (1994), 315–325.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Even someone who is sympathetic to the suggestion that art hasa cognitive function, such as Graham, Gordon (see his ‘Learning From Art’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 35 (1995), 26–37), believes that music is valuable primarily because we take delight in sound (see ‘The Value of Music,’ Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 53 (1995), 139–153). In the present context I cannot fully argue that music is able to perform a cognitive function, but this paper should contribute to our appreciation of how art could contribute to our knowledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
9 The claim that artworks can only represent individual objects, might seem to be controversial. Such artists as Piet Mondrian and Sir Joshua Reynolds have claimed that art can represent, for example, beauty in general. An old argument suffices to refute such a view: Berkeley showed, in the Introduction to the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) that we can form no abstract general ideas. A similar argument will show that an artistic representation is always a representation of some particular object, although such a representation can be used to stand for a class of objects.
10 For a careful review of the arguments against the suggestion that music is a language, see Davies, Stephen, Musical Meaning and Expression (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994), Chapter 1. Many of Davies' arguments apply equally to the suggestion that there are languages in the visual arts.Google Scholar
11 Goodman notes, Languages of Art, 229f., that artistic representations are ‘replete’ in a way that scientific representations are not. These comments are designed to explain why this is the case.
12 Languages of Art, 251.
13 In the course of writing this essay I profited from the criticisms of Duncan Macintosh, Karen Shirley, Lana Simpson and Jan Zwicky.
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