Related:

But allow me to recall Michael Scriven's words: "If we want to know why things are as they are..., then the only sense in which there are alternatives to the methods of science is the sense in which we can if we wish abandon our interest in correct answers." As theorists, scholars, teachers, and informed humans, we do want "'to know why things are as they are," and we are interested "'in correct answers". And although I have no wish to confuse "knowing that'" with "knowing how" or the "context of justification" with "the context of discovery," neither am I so timorous or conciliatory or presumptuous as to pronounce that such knowledge will not, can not, or should not "feed back" into [musical] composition.

-- Milton Babbitt (from "Contemporary Music Composition and Music Theory as Contemporary Intellectual History", 1972)