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Asked by danm to Arttu, Ceri, James_M, Monica, Philip on 18 Jun 2011.
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James M Monk answered on 18 Jun 2011:
The arts can be another way of trying to understand aspects of the world and the nature of what it is to be human. There is a philosophy of art I suppose, which tries to “explain” art (or at least what the artist means by his or her art), but that is nothing to do with science.
Explaining art is not subject to the scientific method. We cannot perform an experiment in order to test the meaning of a work of art because that meaning is entirely subjective to either the artist of the person experiencing the art.
So my answer is that science doesn’t take away from the emotional experience of art because science does not explain art in that sense. Sometimes I wonder if fundamental physics has more in common with the arts than with engineering, say, because like artists we are trying to understand the world, and I would even go so far as to say we are trying to capture some of its beauty.
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Comments
danm commented on :
Thanks James, but we don’t feel anything randomly, and there is a reason for everything. It is therefore possible to describe what we feel and how we feel it entirely by using science (it’s just very complicated as it depends on so many previous experiences!). To give a very simple example, we can explain dissonance vs consonance in music by considering the frequencies and harmonics etc. Although we can’t perform an experiment on the art form itself, we can perform an experiment on people experiencing the arts, and then identify what it is about them which gives people the sensations they described. So using my earlier example, someone may realise that consonance gives a very different experience to dissonance, and so get lots of people and see what they think. Then, they may try to find out why, and find that it’s to do with the frequencies and harmonics etc. I hope this simple example helps illustrate what I’m trying to get across.