Even more on the great – disciplinary – chain of being Early in
May we looked at the argument by Edward Osborne Wilson that we
can only understand the arts through science. Now Philip
Kitcher, John Dewey Professor of Philosophy at Columbia
University, puts the argument the other way: we can only
understand science through the arts or, more fairly, science and
the arts usefully inform each other. ‘It is so easy to underrate
the impact of the humanities and of the arts,’ Kitcher writes.
‘Too many people, some of whom should know better, do it all the
time. But understanding why the natural sciences are regarded as
the gold standard for human knowledge is not hard. When
molecular biologists are able to insert fragments of DNA into
bacteria and turn the organisms into factories for churning out
medically valuable substances, and when fundamental physics can
predict the results of experiments with a precision comparable
to measuring the distance across North America to within the
thickness of a human hair, their a