As I’m reading up on the issue of whether one can find “truth” in the humanities, and, if so, what that truth consists of, I had completely forgotten that four years ago I had an exchange with Adam Gopnik on this very issue. As you may know, Gopnik has been a staff writer for The New Yorker for many years, is a terrific writer, and not only has an expansive knowledge of art, literature, and music, but also knows a lot more about science than the average New Yorker writer.
The exchange was originally written for a column called “Letters”, which was designed to allow people capacious discussions by having two people write (e.g., argue) back and forth, each responding to what the other said in the previous letter. I found that the exchange I had with Adam is still archived online, and in fact you can see it by clicking on the title below.
Our exchange comprises a series of eight letters, with four from each of us (I start; he finishes). As you might guess, I gave a “yes” answer to the question below, while Adam defended the humanities as being just as capable of science of producing knowledge. I’m rereading it now, and was impressed with our exchange. I worked hard on my piece, and Adam defended his views vigorously.
I am not going to summarize it, as it’s long and involved—but not, I hope, tedious. If you read here you’ll know my views, but Adam’s are pretty much lost to history since they took the Letters page down. Fortunately, I found where it was archived, and you can read our back-and-forth if the question below interests you.
The link to your letter exchange with Adam Gopnik was not there. Did I do something in error?
This should work: https://archive.ph/swWjt
That is what is embedded in the screenshot. Works for me.
You win, Jerry. No doubt.
He never shows what knowledge is gained by arts; and he ducks your direct challenges to do so. Case closed.
My bad, I found it..
“four years ago I had an exchange with Adam Gopnik on this very issue.”
Oh yeah!
Gonna read the whole thing with comments!
I remember it as if it were yesterday..
I have begun reading and am giving immediate impressions.
1) Your opening letter should have been the end. Well done.
2) Gopnik’s opening paragraphs (I’ve gotten no further yet) are excessively wordy. This always concerns me, since it usually heralds obfuscation.
“People who write obscurely are either unskilled in writing or up to mischief” — Peter Medawar
More soon. Thanks for posting this.
On your number 2, we seem to have similar views about that.
Funny thing is my own writing is usually excessively wordy. I try to trim it down, but even so it’s usually still a bit pudgy.
Editing is hard work. Especially self-editing, it seems. I have worked very hard at it over the years.
I apply some simple reminders: Can I remove any emotionally-loaded words?
Can I use a simpler word? (Also, is there a better, more precise word? I try hard to avoid “big words” in general, especially show-off words.)
What can I delete from this sentence or paragraph and still retain the meaning?
Is this sentence really needed? (I’m amazed how often I find that it’s not.)
I love one thing from Thomas Jefferson, when writing to John Adams (IIRC), “apologies for the length of this letter, I didn’t have time to make it shorter.”
Rev B
“I’m persuaded, instead, that science is not a realm of settled and ‘verifiable’ knowledge but a lucid and labile area of dispute and debate, resolved, for the time being, by argument not assertion.”
Nonsense! It is resolved, always, by objective evidence, neither by argument nor by assertion.
That would be the end, right there, for me.
His whole passage here reminds me of religious apologists “addressing” the existence of god by spouting words about ground of all being, he’s mysterious, mere humans can’t ask such questions, and other word salad.
Hank help me, now he’s making the argument that science is self-correcting and therefore contingent, so that’s the same as an artist’s depiction of the world. And theories require insight from human beings (a point no one is arguing against), therefore it’s all just subjective or inspirational — or something, his point isn’t very clear (another problem).
” it’s also incumbent on scientists not to condescend to the robust empirical content of those fragile humanities”
Please list the empirically-derived truths of the humanities.
“When it comes to Dickens, I fear, to be blunt, that you are still not reading deeply enough, or fully enough. It isn’t some set of haphazard ‘insights or idiosyncratic pleasures, that Dickens offers even In something as simple as “A Christmas Carol”. As I showed here, he offers a very insistent, complex view of how social reform happens: in the view Dickens dramatizes, it can only credibly happen through serial epiphanies in hearts, not through regimented social action. You have to see the spirits to change the world.”
So, one’s subjective reading of the arts is required to get at the truth in it? Or, perhaps, scientists aren’t smart enough or careful enough to understand those truths? Sure doesn’t sound like “independently verifiable” facts to me.
“And no, Jerry, I don’t think you’d learn more about organizational life from a sociologist than from Trollope, who, as I’ve tried to show here, is far more acute about the details of organizations than any sociologist I know. Certainly, the greatest American sociologist I do know well, Howie Becker, your Chicago colleague, heartily agrees that the best sociology is often found outside sociology: in the stories of Calvino, in the films of Frederick Wiseman, or in the plays of David Mamet, to cite some of his favorites.”
Good lord, anecdote and appeal to authority.
““I’m persuaded, instead, that science is not a realm of settled and ‘verifiable’ knowledge but a lucid and labile area of dispute and debate, resolved, for the time being, by argument not assertion.”
Nonsense! It is resolved, always, by objective evidence…”
Except for physics, perhaps, where we’d all still be Newtonians if we did not acknowledge that science was — despite Newton — an area of dispute and debate, no matter how many objective apples fell from objective trees.
Oh, and let’s not forget biology, where the settled science of the 19th century was improved upon by recognizing that dispute and debate could reveal deeper insights. Remember that we once lived in a world before Genetics….
I think the problem is that what counts as “objective evidence” changes as frameworks for interpretation of evidence change (the perihelion of Mercury, for example), as the technology for measuring improves (the Michelson-Morley experiments were, from the point of view of today’s measurement technology, a disaster), etc. The history of science is littered with “objective evidence” that turned out to be illusory.
You are recapitulating how science corrects itself.
Better data come along and the consensus changes.
Experimental mistakes (or fraud) are part of that process. Good data replace bad data.
As my boss told me when I joined the FAA, many years ago, “people are basically fuck-ups”. Only science reliably protects us from fucking up.
More, apologies, Jerry for breaking the rool on comment count. I may be transgressing on length and domination too!
You: “But this just tells us that some human behaviors and attitudes are perennial, and we don’t need Trollope to tell us that. (It is this feeling of commonality that, I’ve said, inspires much of the way we respond to the best literature.) ”
Exactly.
AND: The reason that Trollope’s characters WORK in the novel(s) and in our minds is BECAUSE we have already observed those behaviors in the real world! That’s the whole reason he put them in there! Because they resonate with observations already present in our minds.
His letter 6:
He’s wasting a lot of words on style questions about On the Origin of Species and what (he thinks) inspired Darwin. What established Evolution by Natural Selection as a fact (as close to an absolute fact as we are ever going to figure out) wasn’t Darwin’s book. It was objective evidence.
And now: Back to: science is performed by humans, so it’s social, therefore the same as the arts. Hank help me!
“So, a simple question: Do you actually believe, as our creationist friends do, that the undeniably false bits of “Origin” disprove it, or weaken Darwin’s claims, or show Darwin to have used a false or misleading method?”
FFS! Another simple question: What does this have to do with whether the arts produce verifiable knowledge?
“I fear that by insisting that we have a way of reasoning that can produce reliable results, when in fact so many of these results will always be wrong, you are unconsciously offering hostages to the Discovery Institute.”
Right. Scientists get things wrong (and that is only determined by objective evidence!), therefore the DI is somehow validated (rather than laughed at)? Please.
You nail my second paragraph (“AND: The reason …”) here:
“Here I’m simply repeating what Sarah Worth noted about art and epistomology, ‘The best it seems art and literature can do is point out things we already know and believe.’ “
Gopnik exhibits yet another error that religious apologists usually do as well, thinking that because science changes its mind all the time that it’s not any more accurate than “other ways of knowing.” That’s what he is really expressing in those letter 6 excerpts.
He, like religious apologists, expects perfect, unchanging answers when in reality the universe simply doesn’t work that way. But it does allow for clever beings using processes that account for their cognitive and behavioral faults, though imperfectly, to come up with answers, or models, that correspond ever more closely with reality as over time new evidence leads to revisions.
And also, changing your explanation to agree with knew evidence is not a weakness, it’s a core strength that science has that sets it apart from “other ways of knowing.”
And, I’ll just add: I think you are a better, clearer writer than Adam is.
Fantastic essays your letters are. Your excellent education in liberal arts is clearly manifest.
Last letter.
Argh! He continues to assert that the contingent nature of science means that facts are settled b y argument! As he said: He’s talking past you. He’s talking about a different subject.
And, he (absolutely) ducks your challenges even as you answer his. I think he’s telling you: Don’t ask that question. Which concedes your point.
And his passage about music simply concedes your point, whether he realizes it or not.
And, as he shrugs away your challenges, he says you can’t shrug off his. ” This is not some idiosyncratic opinion but a demonstrable truth – and if you think it is not, you (not you personally, Jerry; the scientific circle) have an obligation to argue back; ”
My response there would just be: List exactly how you demonstrate that (Prout’s superior knowledge; and to start, he’d better list exactly what that superior knowledge IS) is, in fact superior. And superior to what exactly?
He’s like wrestling with a wet noodle!
Jerry’s last letter brings up an interesting point, although I think it works differently than he supposes: “And what is the knowledge we gain from non-programatic or “absolute” music like Beethoven’s first piano trio and his first string quartet? If, like science, art is a “way of knowing”, these questions shouldn’t be hard to answer.
And if you do see knowledge—again, justified true belief—coming from these works, why do people differ in their responses to them, or in how they interpret them?”
But in fact there is a near-universal consensus: nearly everyone familiar with Beethoven agrees on the greatness of
his music (although I would name later chamber works). It is like the consensus achieved in science from replicated results.
Something in his music triggers responses replicated in many, many listeners. What is it?
I think it has something to do with the human brain’s response to motion—at the lowest level in melodies, at a higher level in harmonic movement, at a still higher level in the larger structures of whole movements. What I’m getting at is: there is something verifiable here, as in science, but we don’t understand what it is. Yet.
Yes, but that is not what music scholars would argue when they say that Beethovens symphonies provide truth. In fact, they are providing a HYPOTHESIS here that needs to be scientifically tested. A hypothesis is not truth. I freely admit that hypotheses can ARISE from the arts and other non-empirical humanities. What about the question of why so many people think that Thomas Kincaid created schlocky art? Is that a truth in Kincaid’s works?
“Something in his music triggers responses replicated in many, many listeners. What is it?”
But many others strongly dislike his music. Which group is “correct”? What is the knowledge (aside from the poll results cited)?
I’m skeptical of your “nearly everyone”. Do you have data to back that up? How was it obtained? I think you are thinking of “nearly all” classical music listeners. I think we should poll rap fans. Or death metal fans.
Adam Gopnik gets it backwards in Letter 6. Phrases of music, rather than ongoing narratives and histories, are what provide musical knowledge.
To be called knowledge data must be available to all. The data composers create are patterns of pitch, rhythm, texture, and tone color that, once written down, exist in the universe as much as do the patterns of weather that lead to rain or snow. It is the duty of the performer to recreate these patterns, thus bringing knowledge to the audience. Performance is the test in music. A bad performance hides the patterns, a brilliant performance showcases them.
In his book, Formalized Music, Iannis Xenakis says on pp 178, “To make music means to express human intelligence by sonic means.” Igor Stravinsky seemed to agree when he said “music expresses itself.” (Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Expositions and Developments, 1962). Music provides knowledge of the composition itself, but is that knowledge trivial?
Music may express itself, but the reactions of the listeners may differ. Also, without the composer telling us (and even then they can’t be trusted), how do you know HOW the music was composed? Are you saying that the “truth” in music consists of only the music? That like saying that the “truth” of a novel consists of the words and how they were put together.
And if the composition itself constitutes “data”, then what is the truth that arises. You seem to be saying that the composition itself is the “truth”. That’s not what music scholars and critics mean by saying that “music provides truth.”
Why would performers be concerned about how the music was composed? Their interests lie in recreating the patterns revealed by analysis of the musical score. Those recreations pay attention to articulation, volume, pitch, vibrato, tone color, and rhythm. A staccato, for example, may be played clipped, short, or broad. A tyro might jumble them together unaware that he is doing so. A pro realizes that to recreate patterns consistency is a requirement. Thus if he plays a pattern with clipped staccato the first time it appears, unless he can find a compelling reason to do otherwise, he will play all repetitions of the pattern with clipped staccato. Thus knowledge of the pattern is made clear to the audience.
The reactions of listeners vary. Composers who have mastered their craft may seek the approval of certain audiences. Approval is not guaranteed. When Bach composed The Art of Fugue he didn’t care what anybody thought because the fugue was dying. He made art for art’s sake.
I dislike the word “truth.” A few words from the movie Absence of Malice, in which the response to the question “Is it true?” is “No, but it’s accurate,” perhaps explain why I prefer to use “knowledge” instead. The knowledge music gives consists in the communication of the patterns within each composition. The development of “da-da-da-dum” in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony creates patterns available to all that can be considered knowledge. But, again, is it trivial?
Music is the most abstract of the arts. To compare its abstractions with concrete and active words strikes me as whimsy.
So you can’t say that The Art of Fugue is “accurate” except when you’re talking about somebody playing it or reproducing the music. But scholars do say that the arts produce truth: after all, that is what my back and forth with Gopnik is about.
It seems to me that your definition of “knowledge” is not what usually counts as knowledge: “justified true belief.” Instead, you have made up your own definition of knolwedge for music, which means “somebody is reading the score and playing it”. “Da-da-da-dum” isn’t knowledge in the way we’re talking about in this post; it’s simply what the author produced. In the same way you could say that “knowledge” for “The Great Gatsby” is simply the words that Fitzgerald wrote. I doubt that most scholars would say that the text itself is knowledge, which is what you’ve maintained for music. At any rate, I’m sorry that you consider this argument “whimsy”, but it’s been going for decades.
This should end the exchange lest we dominate the thread.
As someone about 800 pages into a history of the best in rock music I’m writing (just starting the period after year 2000, almost home!), I have given the topic of what makes music great a lifetime of thought. Great music cannot be reduced merely to “taste” or every pop bestseller, including the Beatles, would have to be considered the apex.
I agree with the statement about a consensus among music scholars. And an informal qualitative analysis I once conducted of the evaluative language of critics brought me to 9 criteria of great music (of any genre): 1) Technical ability; 2) Variety and integration of elements; 3) Main attraction is music not words, personalities, fame or sales; 4) Intellectual or emotional impact; 5) Unified expression of the piece; 6) balance between convention and innovation (too conventional it is derivative; too innovative it may not be music)(some works were so incredibly innovative but continue to make a strong impression from Stravinsky to Beethoven in classical, or in rock from Captain Beefheart, Frank Zappa, Neu! or Nico); 7) the knowledge the listener brings to the music; 8) economy of means; 9) durability over time.
I think too great music requires effort to realize in both its making and appreciation; most people don’t watch films, read books, or listen to music that is demanding; with music the ability is known scientifically as “auditory processing,” which includes discrimination of components, known as complexity. Taylor Swift and most pop music is just a pretty melody and invites dance (and can still be fun), but those alone do not invite the “higher order” processing or wisdom we seek in the best music whether classical, jazz, rock or world music. There should always be room for discussion and debate, that’s how progress in evaluation has always been made. But opinions must be backed up with solid evidence!
Question: So what is the “truth” in Beethoven’s Third Symphony? Yes, music critics generally think it’s great, and there may be evolutionary/genetic reasons why they have a consensus (reasons we don’t know), but those reasons take the form of “here are the neurons and selective pressures involved in evaluating music”. But that is not a “truth” in the music, nor have critics construed it that way. In fact, there’s not only not “progress” in classical music or rock (in my view; I’ve written about this), but I read articles last night stating explicitly that the argument goes on about whether there IS truth in music, literature, or art. If poeople can’t even agree on that, then how can they agree on what IS the truth in music or art or literature?
I agree (no surprise there!).
I was struggling with how to go after the music discussion. (And the reason is because there’s no objective knowledge in there — if there were, people would discover it and everyone would agree if they were knowledgeable. The assertion, “it’s a matter of taste” wouldn’t come up, as it doesn’t in scientific knowledge.)
You correctly identify that the only truth there is to correctly identify how listeners and critics and scholars evaluate the music. Or how accurately a player conforms to the score.
Is it true that, as Gopnik seems to claim, that Bach’s works are objectively “greater” that Mozart’s? Really? How does one even assess that? I think Mozart was significantly more popular amongst listeners in his lifetime. Doesn’t that mean his music is greater? What is the “purpose” of music in the first place? Is it not to entertain listeners? If more listeners are entertained and engaged, doesn’t that make it greater?
And very many will disagree with my analysis just above (in many cases I would disagree with it!) This proves your overall point.
What does it even mean that one piece of music is “greater” than another? Louder? (Just indicate ffffffff …!) Longer on the score pages? Longer during performance (reminds me of many memorable lines from the movie Amadeus)? Bigger changes in pitch? More changes in pitch? More instruments playing? The most familiar melody? The least familiar melody? More consonant harmony? Less consonant harmony? More changes in time signature? Slavishly adhering to only a single time signature (and maybe the same key) in all one’s composition (tying one’s hand behind the back). The most key changes?
Nope. We know it when we hear it. And everyone has a different opinion.
Where we usually land is on: Accepting the opinions of a group of authorities whom we trust or like or agree with our taste.
I see no justified true belief there.
Those are a pretty good set of features of great music.
I can guarantee you that, for instance, the Beatles were not thinking of those when they wrote their music. (I recommend this video: How much music theory did The Beatles know?)
To me, that means they are features of what ends up making music “great”.
From what I can tell, you took expert opinion on music and then extracted the common features of those pieces ranked as “great”. Seems as if taste (opinion) still comes in. (I like your list.)
Not sure how (7) and (8) are components of the music itself.