' QS te we mw et le “to picture the artist’s act of creation in * the terms of Hollywood: Comel Wilde Chopin gazing fondly at Merle Oberon as his muse and mistress George Sand #-and then sitting down at the Pleyel pi- «. anoforte to compose his “Preludes.” As . scientists know full well, science is done = quite differently: Dozens of stereotyped . ‘and ambitious researchers are slaving # all trying to make similar discoveries, %- all using more or less the same knowl- * edge and techniques, some of them suc- @ other hand, tend to conceive of the sci- = entific act of creation in equally un- “= realistic terms: Paul Muni in the role of » the one and only Louis Pasteur, who ¢ while burning the midnight oil in his '% laboratory has the inspiration to take B.some bottles from the shelf, mix their yx contents and thus discover the vaccine a for rabies. Artists, in turn, know that art sis done quite differently: Dozens of & stereotyped and ambitious writers, Po painters and composers are slaving away poke :. to produce similar works, all using more = =-or less the same knowledge and tech- s- niques, some succeeding and some not. #- A second reason is that the belief in | & the inevitability of scientific discoveries ‘appears to derive support from the & often-told tales of famous cases in the $i history of science where the same dis- 3s covery was made independently two or ie more times by different people. For in- % stance, the independent invention of ‘the calculus by Leibniz and Newton or of natural selection in evolution by Wal- lace and Darwin. As the study of such “multiple discoveries” by Robert Merton -yarely, if ever, identical. The reason they are said to be multiple is simply » that in spite of their differences one can % recognize a semantic overlap between » them that is transformable into a con- 4. gruent set of ideas. The third, and somewhat more pro- found, reason is that whereas the cumu- « lative character of scientific creation is -at once apparent to every scientist, the similarly cumulative character of artis- tic creation is not. For instance, it is ob- : vious that no present-day working ge- » heticist has any need to read the origi- « nal papers of Mendel, because they have 2 been completely superseded by the * work of the past century. Mendel’s pa- - pers contain no useful information that cannot be better obtained from any in the role of APPEQNEChI orRetease 2004 ©, away in as many identical laboratories, - - improve on the styles and insights that : ceeding and some not. Artists, on the . communicating deep insights into af- - height. To some limited extent, there- ‘a in as many identical garrets,. all trying - lesser dramatistsP — portant difference between the creations the independent recognition of the role” of Columbia University has shown, how- - ever, on detailed examination they are. modem texthag POEM FET Refease 200NG3128 *CIRSRDP SED cal literature, In contrast, the modem wri--, composer or painter still needs 10342600\CKA3R DR9E-00787I works of Shakespeare, Bach or Leonar- do, which, so it is thought, have not been superseded at all. In spite of the seeming truth of this proposition, it must be said that art is no less cumulative than sci- ence, in that artists no more work in a traditionless vacuum than scientists do. Artists also build on the work of their predecessors; they start with and later nh tives On $1500 to $8500. A nation wide s service used by. over 20,000 executive and pro- fessional men as a quick and convenient source of credit, either for immediate needs or edit line f re use, No collateral ...no embarrassing | investigation. All details han- | dled by personal mail in the privacy of your office. . References: ’ The First National Bank of Minneapolis _ Continental Illinois National Bank ; of Chicago ' have been handed down to them from their teachers, just as scientists do, To stay with our main example, Shake- speare’s Timon has its roots in the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. It was those authors of Greek antiquity who discovered tragedy as a vehicle for fects, and Shakespeare, drawing on many earlier sources, finally developed that Greek discovery to its ultimate Phone, toll free, 800-228-7228 or write. Mr. T. K. Lindblad . Executive Loan Director {Dp Industrial Credit Plan, Inc. _ 271 Hamm Buildin: St. Paul, Minnesota 55102 fore, the plays of the Greek dramatists have been superseded by Shakespeare's. Why, then, have Shakespeare's plays not been superseded by the work of later, Here we finally do encounter an im- of art and of science, namely the feasi- bility of paraphrase. The semantic con- tent of an artistic work—a play, a cantata or a painting—is critically dependent on the exact manner of its realization; that, is, the greater an artistic work is, the more likely it is that any omissions or changes from the original detract from its content.'In other words, to para- phrase a great work of art—-for instance to rewrite Timon—without loss of artis- tic quality requires a genius equal to the genius of the original creator, Such a successful paraphrase would, in fact, constitute a great work of art in its own right. The semantic content of a great scientific paper, on the other hand, al- though its impact at the time of publi- cation may also be critically dependent on the exact manner in which it is pre- sented, can later be paraphrased with- out serious loss of semantic content by lesser scientists. Thus the simple state- ment “DNA is a double-strand, self- complementary helix” now suffices to communicate the essence of Watson and Crick’s great discovery, whereas “A man responds to the injuries of life by turn- ing from lighthearted benevolence to passionate hatred toward his fellow men” is merely a platitude and not a paraphrase of Timon. It took the writing of King Lear to paraphrase (and im- Gur 20th year of service to the World’s finest craftsmen and technicians. “tnglewaod, Colorads, pn G= con Ce ee ee | I Send aFREE copy of the nc Flasher I las" 1 name i city A state i I i address 1 i t iNational: oC ontere, oe OOO Weskdnion Ave. -Oept: JAC. N77: MOY Sateense #910- OU ql
. emer has cupersedo? proved Far Release 200 1403/2641 phe P9 * Shakespearean dramatic repertoire. «The fourth, and probably deepest, yeason for the apparent prevalence among scientists of the proposition that artistic creations are unique and .scien- tific creations are not can be attributed to a contradictory epistemological at- titude toward the events in the outer and the inner world. The outer world, which science tries to fathom, is often viewed from the standpoint of material- ism, according to which events and the - yelations between them have an exis- tence independent of the human mind, Hence the outer world and its scientific Jaws are simply there, and it is the job of the scientist to find them. Thus going after scientific discoveries is. like pick- ing wild strawberries in a public park: the berries A does not find today B or G or D will surely find tomorrow. At the same time, many scientists ner world, which art tries to fathom, from the standpoint of idealism, ac- - eording to which events and relations SCIENTISPRDNO ists is idealized in this ehinonRete ase AION Zp: CIGAbRSE-conerRago zt supeeae hie “Prel- | duction A Song to Remember. Frédéric Chopin (played by Cornel view the in- | their reflection in human thought. Hence there is nothing to be found in the inner world, and artistic creations are cut sim- ply from whole cloth. Here B or Cor D could not possibly find tomorrow what because what A found A found today, had never been there. It is not altogether to find this split surprising, of course, epistemological attitude toward the two worlds, since of these two antithetical traditions in Western philosophical thought, materialism is obviously an un- satisfactory approach to art and idealism an unsatisfactory approach to science. t is only in the past 20 years or 50, more or less contemporaneously with the growth of molecular biology, that a resolution of the age-old epistemologi- cal conflict of materialism v. idealism was found in the form of what has come to be known as structuralism, Structur- alism emerged simultaneously, inde- pendently and in different guises in sev- eral diversé fields of study, for example a oo udes.” Science, as any scientist in inguistics, anthropology, éuq77m000200080054-5 - ¢ Both materialism and idealism take ir’ for granted that all the information gath-#! ered by our senses actually reaches ours, mind; materialism envisions that thanks:& to this information reality is mirrored in the mind, whereas idealism envisions that thanks to this information reality is2 constructed by the ; on the other hand, has provided the in--& sight that knowledge about the world. enters the mind not as xaw data but ine already highly abstracted form, namely-#. as structures. In the preconscious proc! ess of converting the primary data of 4, our experience step by step into struc=3z tures, information is necessarily lost, be- cause the creation. of structures, ‘e recognition of patterns, is nothing else.¢ than the selective destruction of infor- mation. Thus since the mind. does not: gain access to the full set of data about the world, it can neither mirror nor con- - struct reality. Instead for the mind real, ity is a set of structural transforms o hia muse George Sand (Merle Oher- ows, a mind. Structuralism,: | ( differently. - transform: in that “st from “wee tive destn of prima only after so transfo ent W existing it studies cé process ¢ _ mammals that the | ing to the offer an: those ten vance of two pro under ¢ maturity structur standing appreci logical: o oy ee pre
ww ily. sat ee hey On ee Pee eed .psmary data taken from the world, This -. transformation. “in that mation f ° eeetures are phReleas set gonon/dbe Cte ROA O78 7RaghVOHSRdHE SS or, or ftom “weaker” structures through selec- tive destruction of information. Any set of primary data becomes meaningful only after a series of such operations has so transformed. it that it has become con- gruent with a stronger structure pre- existing in the mind. Neurophysiological studies carried out in recent years on the .. process of visual perception in higher mammals have not only shown directly that the brain actually operates accord- ing to the tenets of structuralism but also _ offer an easily understood illustration of « those tenets. ] . Finally, we may consider the rele- :. yance of structuralist philosophy for the «: two problems in the history of science ge under discussion here. As far as pre- ie maturity of discovery is concerned, structuralism provides us with an under- . :standing of why a discovery cannot be appreciated until it can be connected S logically to contemporary canonical SSIs £, ARTISTS’ MISCONCEPTION of the scientific act of creation is «Sin hs SDE PSR Release eit knowledge. In the parlance of struc- with which primary scientific data are made congruent in the mental-abstrac- tion process. Hence data that cannot be transformed into a structure congruent with canonical knowledge are a dead end; in the last analysis they remain _ meaningless. That is, they remain mean- ingless until a way has been shown to transform them into a structure that is congruent with the canon. As far as uniqueness of discovery is concemed, structuralism leads to the recognition that every creative act in the arts and sciences is both common- place and unique. On the one hand, it is commonplace in the sense that there ‘is an innate, or genetically determined, — correspondence in the transformational operations that different individuals per- form on the same primary data, With reference to science, cognitive psychol- ogy has taught that different individuals recognize the same “chaimess” of a chair because they all make a given set of world mental structure. With reference to art, analytic psychology has taught that there is a sameness in the subconscious life of different individuals because an innate human archetype causes them to make the same structural transforma- tions of the events of the inner world. _And with reference to both art and sci- ence structural linguistics has taught that communication between different individuals is possible only because an innate human grammar causes them to transform a given set of semantic sym- bols into the same syntactic structure. On the other hand, every creative act is unique in the sense that no two individ- uals are quite the same and hence never -perform exactly the same transforma- ‘tional operations on a given set of pri- mary data. Although all creative acts in both art and science are therefore both commonplace and unique, some may _ nonetheless be more unique than others. ” Muni) has the sudden inspiration to diacover the vaccine for rabies. Art, a6 any artist knows, is done quite differently. rothers Beit ClAeRDR96-007 5FROCE RODOGHO HS Archive Both photo- 93