Frances to William and members...
William partly wrote in effect that it is wrong to compare and apply the methods of scientific investigation to the means of artistic judgement. Science he feels must test things objectively, according to an observable and repeatable process. In seeking scientific proofs, the goal he says is to discover whether separate investigators can arrive at identical results using similar methods. For him it is wrong to think that a work can be "proven" as artistic in this same way, by simply having a group of different people observe the work, because there is nothing objective about this way of determination. For any thinker to hold that the arts must be approached and broached by the exclusive means of science and its logical methods is agreeably to overstate the process of determination. To dismiss the methods of science however as inconsistent or incompatible with the means of judging art in order to justly prove something of an object is to wrongly isolate art from science. What art and science have in common is humanity, and all humans think in much the same ways by the same means, therefore the judgements used to determine objects of art or science will be similar and identical. To feel the beauty of logics or its mathematic forms is no different than to know the truth of aesthetics or its artistic forms. Pragmatism posits that the arts are preparatory and contributory to the sciences, and that aesthetics is preparatory and contributory to logics; and in turn that the sciences are consummatory of the arts, and that logics is consummatory of aesthetics; and furthermore that in the process of any research they are all combinatory; which seems to be a very wise approach. It provides for a search that is pluralistic and normative and fallible, and it is applicable to both art and science. The search for artistic status in objects, or for say beauty in art or for truth in science, after all requires essentially the same probing act of mind. When ordinary objects are thought or known as samples of science, it seems to be mainly by the means of objective arguments made by groups of communal peoples. When ordinary objects are felt or found as works of art, it seems to be mainly by the means of subjective judgements made by groups of individual persons. The peoples and persons are both groups, and the arguments and judgements are both determinations made by those groups. The logical methods of science entail research that starts with curiosity and moves into inquiry and ends with discovery. Samples are selected to be tested with tools in labs. The search is to find some global truth about the samples. The logical method of inquiry is empirical and entails at least experiential observation, and at most experimental operation via instrumental investigation and even utile examination or dissection. If separate scientists arrive at identical conclusions using the same means then some conclusive results might be agreed to. The results of tested samples may offer some accepted proof of truth. If results ever could be found true, then they probably will be eventually, regardless of whether they ever actually will be. It is the search and goal that is important, and not the end, which finality is not attainable in any event due to the determining limits of evolution. The truth therefore ought to be what any collective community of learned experts will tentatively agree on by a consensus of reasonable opinion. The pivotal process here is mainly inductive and empirical, yet it can clearly serve the acts of both art and science adequately.
