> Mr. Cunningham,
>
> Althoug I had a very pretty bad english, gonna try to come out my
> oppinion.
Ciao Ricardo,
Thanks for your response. Don't worry about your English, it is
just fine and you raise important points about Root-Bernstein's
article. You are correct that the arts and sciences should not
be in competition, but in many contexts they are. Government
and university budgets often directly pit them against each other.
In the US, the government is severely cutting support of our
National Endowment for the Arts, but maintaining support of
the National Science Foundation. Even in our Public Schools,
Art and Music are seen as peripherals, the first programs to
be cut when money is tight.
I agree with you that the Arts are tools for communication, but
I disagree that the Arts and Sciences are different aspects of
the _same_ knowledge. I don't believe that there is some pure
form of knowledge, some kernel of truth that can be expressed
in different ways by different forms of expression. Just as there
is not such thing as a perfect translation between Italian and
English, so too is there no perfect translation between mathematics
and language, for example. The issue of intersemiotic (as Jay Lemke
referred to it in a recent message) or transmediation of signs is quite
neglected in discussions of communication practices. The Arts
don't just assist the development of scientific knowledge, they
create new knowledge that is not reducible to either the Arts or
the Sciences.
For purposes of convincing politicians to support the Arts, it
is a good strategy to argue that the arts are helpful to sciences.
Meantime we all need to continue to work hard on developing and
demonstrating the multiple modes of meaning making that go into
any communicative act, whether that is act is publishing a scientific
article, talking to your cat, or composing music.
Cheers.....djc