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There definitely are parallels between studying either the process or the "content" of a scientific field and studying what I would refer to as "technique" in the art world. Musical composition is one example, and as a visual artist I can add things like color theory, semiotics, visual composition, and the handling of various mediums. These are phenomena that can and have been taught and written about. They can be as objectively addressed as any scientific subject in that you can say "if you follow procedure X, you'll get Y result".

But these things are supplemental to the primary goals of art/artists which are profoundly different from the goals of science/scientists. The goals of artists are generally personal and/or subconscious. They don't (normally/consciously) involve a hypothesis to be proven or disproven (and artist statements are typically written after the work is complete, not beforehand).

There are formal studies of what groups of artists may be trying to achieve (surrealists, cubists, expressionists, etc), but the cultural and biographical details are usually very relevant. I guess I'd say that your test is one possible measure of a more general question: "Is the endeavor more focused on making a statement, or on answering a question?". The more it emphasizes the former the more likely it is to be art (or politics, or lunatic raving. Or all three, depending on how entertaining, persuasive, or coherent it is), the more it emphasizes the latter the more likely it is to be something deserving of the name science (even if it may also deserve to be preceded by the words "sloppy" or "pseudo").

8

Art vs. science

1st Mar 2012

1 min read

8

It struck me this morning that a key feature that distinguishes art from science is that art is studied in the context of the artist, while science is not. When you learn calculus, mechanics, or optics, you don't read Newton. Science has content that can be abstracted out of one context - including the context of its creation - and studied and used in other contexts. This is a defining characteristic. Whereas art can't be easily removed from its context - one could argue art is context. When we study art, we study the original work by a single artist, to get that artist's vision.

(This isn't a defining characteristic of art - it wasn't true until the twelfth century, when writers and artists began signing their works. In ancient Greece, through the Middle Ages in Europe, the content, subject, or purpose of art was considered primary, in the same way that the content of science is today. "Homer's" Iliad was a collaborative project, in which many authors (presumably) agreed that the story was the important thing, not one author's vision of it, and (also presumably) added to it in much the way that science is cumulative today. Medieval art generally glorified the church or the state.)

However, because this is the way western society views art today, we can use this as a test. Is it art or science? Well, is its teaching organized around the creators, or around the content?

Philosophy and linguistics are somewhere between art and science by this test. So is symbolic AI, while data mining is pure science.

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Art vs. science

0Douglas_Knight

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[-]lukeprog13y150

Art history and science history are both told as stories of the 'great' figures of the field.

Books teaching scientific method often don't mention Bacon, Bernouilli, or Bohr, and books teaching artistic method often don't mention Brueghel, Beethoven, or Buñuel.

Examples of books teaching artistic method, which don't much dwell on famous dead people: Writing the Broadway Musical, Mastering Composition, and The Craft of Musical Composition.

It sounds to me like you're comparing books on art history to books on scientific method.

I think PhilGoetz uses art and science here as 'that what artists, scientists produce'. In that sense, 'who did it' is more important in art than in science - a lot of art cannot really be appreciated without knowing the background of the creator and/or his or her motives. But the appreciation for, say, Maxwell's equations does not depend on what I know of their maker.

[-]Bill_McGrath13y30

My training in music composition focuses quite a bit on Famous Dead People; but using examples from their music. It's a case of "This is how Bach/Beethoven/Brahms/Schoenberg did this, it proved effective, you can possibly learn from it." We're not expected to write in pastiche styles however, rather to approach more fundamental issues of writing music with methods that have been shown to work.

I can't really see any other way TO approach it; the reason that Bach's strong basslines work is rooted in how humans perceive sound. The easiest way to pass this on is to provide examples.

EDIT: That said, I'd be interested in reading that Hindemith book. (Hilariously, in light of the current discussion, it's because he's a composer I'm interested in - a Famous Dead Person.) My supervisor wrote a paper on Hindemith's approach to teaching counterpoint, but I didn't realize he had textbooks.

[-]PhilGoetz13y00

No, as books on physics, or mathematics, or neuroscience, are not books on scientific method. They are books on the particular content of a particular field.

[-]lukeprog13y00

But in the same way, The Craft of Musical Composition is about the content of the field of musical composition. It's about the mathematics of musical notes, the various tonal and atonal structures available, the dynamics of moving from one structure to another, different approaches to counterpoint, etc... Right?

[-]Shephard13y00

There definitely are parallels between studying either the process or the "content" of a scientific field and studying what I would refer to as "technique" in the art world. Musical composition is one example, and as a visual artist I can add things like color theory, semiotics, visual composition, and the handling of various mediums. These are phenomena that can and have been taught and written about. They can be as objectively addressed as any scientific subject in that you can say "if you follow procedure X, you'll get Y result".

But these things are supplemental to the primary goals of art/artists which are profoundly different from the goals of science/scientists. The goals of artists are generally personal and/or subconscious. They don't (normally/consciously) involve a hypothesis to be proven or disproven (and artist statements are typically written after the work is complete, not beforehand).

There are formal studies of what groups of artists may be trying to achieve (surrealists, cubists, expressionists, etc), but the cultural and biographical details are usually very relevant. I guess I'd say that your test is one possible measure of a more general question: "Is the endeavor more focused on making a statement, or on answering a question?". The more it emphasizes the former the more likely it is to be art (or politics, or lunatic raving. Or all three, depending on how entertaining, persuasive, or coherent it is), the more it emphasizes the latter the more likely it is to be something deserving of the name science (even if it may also deserve to be preceded by the words "sloppy" or "pseudo").

[-]Nominull13y140

Really? Most of my study of linguistics has been done reading legitimate textbooks or class notes and not giving much mention to particular linguists. I mean you might talk about Gricean Maxims but that's not much different from talking about Newton's Third Law. Chomsky was mentioned at the start of my Syntax class but I doubt you're going to get out of a course in Modern Physics without hearing the name "Einstein". In my experience linguistics is no more focused around the creators than physics is.

[-]PhilGoetz13y20

If you're studying phonetics, language development, cognitive linguistics, or comparative linguistics, then I'll agree. I was thinking mainly of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, which have I usually seen presented one linguist at a time, and in which you may be expected to take sides in a war if you want an academic position.

You could also try measuring "artness" by the level of vitriol and partisanship present in the field. Linguistics has at times scored pretty high on that measure.

[-]Nominull13y30

It sounds like either you got an unusually bad linguistics education or I got an unusually good one. Any other trained linguists want to chime in with their experiences?

[-]erratio13y30

At my undergrad I felt like I was expected to side with my professors in their worship of Chomsky. Also, my general experience is that Chomsky is a lightning rod for the more polemic aspects of the field, he loves to make sweeping dismissals of entire subfields, which then encourages people to take sides.

In grad school, in syntax and historical we do go through concepts by reading specific papers written by Famous People in the field, but we also deconstruct those papers. It's not so much "you need to read Pollock to understand the cartographic approach to syntax" as "here's a bunch of evidence Pollock found to suggest we need more fine-grained projections". And more than one of the profs has explicitly told us that part of the reason we're learning by reading the primary literature rather than decontextualised versions is because we need to learn how to read and analyse academic papers if we want to be able to do our own research.

I would also note that the primary difference between linguistics and modern physics is that in modern physics there's a correct answer to teach, while in linguistics most areas haven't yet been settled. Instead there are a lot of different theories with different areas of explanatory coverage and no unifying theory that works yet. It's the kind of situation that fosters Blue/Green partisanship and I would expect that to persist until someone comes up with a theory that's more obviously correct than the current offerings.

[-]Nominull13y00

There isn't a correct answer to teach in Modern Physics, either. (Well, there is, but just like in linguistics, it's not agreed upon as to what it is.) You have controversy over things like what interpretation of quantum mechanics to take, or whether string theory is a load of nonsense, or whatever.

[-][anonymous]13y10

.

So strange seeing my full name on the Internet so often, but not referring to me.

[-]Douglas_Knight13y00

It seems weird to me to compare art and science. I would rather compare the academic humanities to the sciences, since they claim to produce knowledge and it seems more straight-forward to make the comparison. People learn Newtonian physics from new accounts, but they still learn Kantian ethics and metaphysics from Kant.

[-]DanielLC13y00

Is it art or science?

I don't think it's a dichotomy. At least, not in the sense of fine art and the scientific method. If you're referring to the saying "more an art than a science", I think it's more talking about being based more on intuition vs. explicit thought.

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