Science and Art

These are some stray thoughts on the relationship between science and art. If I had enough time, they would form the kernel of a larger essay. I still wrote them anyway, because at least then I might end up picking the thread up again later! They are in decent enough shape as is that I don’t mind sharing them here.

1.

It’s tempting to think that science and art have little to do with each other. Science unveils reality, while art expresses human creativity. Of course, even on such a view, there is some comparison. Both involve making and improving something: in their daily work, scientists write and revise much as creative writers do, or repair and calibrate equipment much as an artist or musician would in their studio. Many of the basic activities in science and art resemble each other. There have also been historical episodes where science and art overlapped: think of harmony and mathematics in ancient Greece, or the geometry of linear perspective in Renaissance Italy, or photography in the 19th century, or data visualisation in today’s cosmology and astronomy. But perhaps these connections are superficial. Aren’t the aims of science and art are fundamentally different? Truth is objective, while the aims of art are subjective. They might borrow tools from each other like neighours, applying scientific procedures to artistic work, or artistic techniques to advance scientific research.¹ But in science those tools enable discovery, whereas in art they spur invention. So it cannot follow that science and art share a deeper connection.

That line of thought may be tempting, but it relies on a broad distinction between discovery and invention. As a consequence, it also assumes that science has one principal aim, the truth, and that art only has subjective aims.

2.

The distinction between discovery and invention is much less obvious than it seems. Usually we’d mark the difference by saying discovery is finding something that already exists but hadn’t been noticed, whereas invention is creating something new. On this picture, paleontologists discovered Magerifelis peignei, while the ancient Egyptians invented Felis catus (by breeding it). Or Janssen invented the microscope, while Leeuwenhoek used it to discover microorganisms. However, this distinction papers over ambiguities of meaning. Until recently, “invention” covered both sides of the distinction, in line with the Latin root inventio which also had both senses. We can see this usage in an influential sociology article from 1922, “Are inventions inevitable?,” where the authors freely move between “invention” and “discovery” to describe examples which cut across the popular distinction.

The law of the conservation of energy, so significant in science and philosophy, was formulated four times independently in 1847, by Joule, Thomson, Colding and Helmholz. They had been anticipated by Robert Mayer in 1842. There seem to have been at least six different inventors of the thermometer and no less than nine claimants of the invention of the telescope. Typewriting machines were invented simultaneously in England and in America by several individuals in these countries. The steamboat is claimed as the “exclusive” discovery of Fulton, Jouffroy, Rumsey, Stevens and Symmington.²

Inventio literally means “in coming,” a spatial description that turns into a metaphor when applied to ideas or creations. “Discovery” traffics in a similar metaphor: removing a cover to reveal something underneath. I don’t mean to make a merely semantic point. We’re not bound to etymology; we can transcend existing usages by inventing (or discovering?) new ones, including new distinctions. But our distinctions should be clear and useful. The popular distinction between invention and discovery is unclear insofar as the distinction between finding something and creating something is unclear. Did Cartier find New France or create it? Both, in effect. He was the first Frenchman to find the land, and in finding it he dubbed it for François I. Did Darwin create or find the theory of natural selection? Again, both. He recorded information and read reports which, through long and careful reasoning, revealed patterns to him, and he formulated an explanation of those patterns by analogy with domestic animal breeding. Darwin’s process of discovery coincided with the process of invention. That is, he thought the theory through as he observed, read and wrote. Likewise, Gray and Bell discovered that telephony was possible by imagining and building their devices. We can try to clarify this ambiguity by talking about finding and creating, but it only goes so far. In a sense, Gray and Bell found and created a way to transmit audio signals via wires. Beethoven and Schubert found and created new ways to use the sonata form. Renoir and Monet found and created new ways to use their brush for specific effects.

The distinction is too tenacious to be baseless, though. Perhaps we can think of it like this: discovery, or invention, is part of imagining and realising possibilities. Possibilities to know or to do something are constrained by our capacities; we can only come to know what we are capable of perceiving (or conceiving), and we can only do what our bodies and skill allow us to do. Possibilities are also constrained by the things and structures we interact with. Our theories about biological species are constrained by the very species we’re studying. Similarly, our ability to expand a musical form is constrained by how that form has been used before and by the limits of our instruments and imagination. These constraints can be more or less restrictive in different cases. In part, then, the distinction between discovery and invention is trying to articulate the differences between constraints distinguished by how narrow a path they leave. It would seem, maybe, that there’s only one way to describe the flow of electricity, while there must be many ways to harness it for communication. Or that there’s no single way to paint a subject, even if there are constraints arising from the subject, the artist’s materials, and the artist’s own body.

Even if we understand the distinction between discovery and invention as a shorthand for constraints, it’s systematically misleading. Constraints lie along a spectrum rather than sorting into two kinds. It’s also doubtful how strict the constraints are in scientific examples. It might feel natural to assume that science leaves a narrow path, but there are compelling arguments against this. There may be more than one way to describe (as in model or theorise) nature.³ Nancy Cartwright imagines how it might look in Nature, the Artful Modeler:

Nature’s methods are our methods … That’s why ours work so well. But she is not Kant, the grand synthesizer; Augustus Caesar, whose decrees went out to all the world; nor Boole, Frege, Russell, or Peano, doyens of deduction. Perhaps Isambard Brunel, with his dockyards, railways, and steamships; Margaret Knight, whose machines made flat-bottomed paper bags, cut shoe soles, and raised sash windows, or Alice Waters, creator of super new California cuisines.⁴

With her last examples, Cartwright hints that not only is the distinction between invention and discovery systematically misleading, but the better way to think about scientific progress is through paradigm cases in the arts and engineering.

3.

The tempting line of thought I’ve been replying to is common, but this debate is very old, and naturally it’s also common to hear that art and science are virtually the same. Consider this programmatic statement by art historian James Elkins:

I don’t think that aesthetic concepts like beauty, delight, and elegance really are the workable bridges between art and science. Those words are too unfocused, too vague and ethereal, too well intentioned, emotionally pallid, sentimentally idealistic, formal, and slippery to yoke anything I recognize as science to anything I think of as art.⁵

He goes on to argue that the paradigmatic examples of art as science are marginal in the history of art.

Or consider this video on glass and glassmaking in the physical sciences,⁶ where Angela Collier argues that it’s strange to equate scientific glassmaking to art simply because it’s a skilled, creative craft. Many activities in the sciences require creativity.

The problem in both cases is that the aesthetic concepts being invoked, like “beauty” or “creativity,” are too vague and shallow to do justice to what is important about the arts and sciences.

Science and art don’t share the same aims or methods, but there are formal parallels between them. Their work is subject to continual refinement which could, in principle, go on forever. And they’re sustained by communities who develop and teach their practices, which aim at common goods. Science and art are different yet fundamentally analogous activities.

Take refinement first. In the sciences, there is always some new evidence to consider and some new question to answer. The thought of answering all possible questions about copper, or whatever, is absurd; there would always be some new path to explore. Likewise measurements could always be more precise and accurate, even if there would be diminishing returns. We can make similar observations about art. There is an old platitude that a work is never really finished, only set aside. The pianist Arthur Schnabel, according to tradition, once quipped that he preferred music which is better than it can be performed. Such music acts like an ideal the player can strive toward over their entire life; but of course the composer also strove for a distant aesthetic ideal when they wrote it. This is not to say that the aims of science and art are impossible or elusive, but they are inexhaustible fountains of riches.

They both also require a community. Scientists and artists require an education to enter their crafts. Research and artworks are also communicative: even if they are of different kinds, they have something to tell us, something to teach. As C. S. Peirce has argued, we cannot say that something has entered scientific knowledge until it has met the test of others’ criticism. We could say something analogous about the reception and appraisal of art.

I’ve said nothing in any depth, especially nothing about any specific science or art, which would be necessary to make a more solid case for this analogy and to describe its limits. Still, I’ve made enough general observations, combined with the analysis of invention and discovery, to see the lay of the land.

So end my stray thoughts.

Published References

Cartwright, Nancy. 2019. Nature, the Artful Modeler: Lectures on Laws, Science, How Nature Arranges the World and How She Can Arrange It Better. Open Court.

Elkins, James. 2009. “Aesthetics and the Two Cultures: Why Art and Science Should be Allowed to Go Their Separate Ways” in Rediscovering Aesthetics, edited by Francis Halsall, Julia Jansen and Toby O’Connor, pp. 34-50.

Hacking, Ian. 2000. “How inevitable are the results of successful science?” Philosophy of Science 67(Supplement):S58-S71.

Hacking, Ian. 2012. Why is There Philosophy of Mathematics at All? Cambridge University Press.

McGee, Harold. 1984. On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. 2nd ed. 2004. Hodder & Stoughton.

Ogburn, William and Thomas, Dorothy. 1922. “Are inventions inevitable? A note on social evolution.” Political Science Quarterly 37(1):83-98.

Ruphy, Stéphanie. 2016. Scientific Pluralism Reconsidered: A New Approach to the (Dis)unity of Science. University of Pittsburgh Press.