Carl writes:
>I think the arts and sciences are fundamentally at odds. To one degree or
>another ever since myths were first created, the arts have been concerned
>with creating visions that could be shared by people at large and thus help
>promote a common understanding of reality. Science, OTOH, is concerned with
>nailing down objective specifics with great precision and rapidly leaves the
>average person in the dust. It's a great mechanism for teaching us more and
>more about less and less, being driven by ever greater specialization that
>results in tremendous technical achievements that are incomprehensible to
>all but specialists, leaving most people -- in search of existential, not
>technical, insights into the nature of things -- alienated and lost. The
>arts connote; the sciences denote; never the twain shall meet.
Well, you can put it that way, but I would argue that your description of science is 1) restricted to the last five hundred years and 2) more the image they would like us to have about science than the way science actually works.
As for the first point: The analytic, divide and conquer, specialist approach of modern science has yielded as much disaster as success. We laugh at the medical science of one hundred years ago. We cry at that of two hundred years ago. "Science" has worked a little bit better when focused on matter than on life. But the specialized vocabulary hides how much of reality must be stripped away before they can speak with "certitude" about anything.
Current phramacology gets us through the day, but it doesn't cure much. Talk to anyone who suffers from a chronic illness.
As for the second point, I used to work in an obstetrics and gyneacology research lab at UCLA and I was a daily witness to drylabbing (not running the experiments at all) and data fudging to support the hypothesis that got the grant. It wasn't about science, it was about getting the grant renewed and it was about the chief researcher (Dr Mary Carsten) maintaining her lifestyle.
But what really bothers me about the often-drawn dichotomy between art and science is that it reinforces the belief that there is a "subjective" realm and there is an "objective" realm; that they are separate; and that that separation must be maintained at all costs. How that gets translated in real life within the context of capitalism is too ugly for words. I guess "Dialectics of Enlightenment" is the best known analysis of the art/science dichotomy in the modern era.
Joanna