To what extent do you consider these stereotypes accurate, and to what extent do you consider them distortions of the ways in which the sciences and the arts give us their knowledge?

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Jane Kwong

1679 words

Popular stereotypes frequently present the scientist and the artist as extreme opposites in their pursuit of understanding- the scientist as being objective, disciplined and rational, and artist as being subjective, impulsive and imaginative. Yet are they really so different in the ways they look at the world? To what extent do you consider these stereotypes accurate, and to what extent do you consider them distortions of the ways in which the sciences and the arts give us their knowledge?

Our world has been accelerated due to the advancement of both artists and scientists. For that, people have made stereotypes of these two professions in hopes of understanding them.  These stereotypes are useful when it allows us to classify people that belong in each profession and have a general overview of them.  However, it is catastrophic when it conjures wrong ideas about each expert as it would prevent people from really understanding who they are. Stereotypes occur as a result of attributing the supposed characteristic of a group to all of its individual members. Stereotyping assumes and emphasizes the uniformity within a group and exaggerates the differences between them. Scientists are stereotyped as being objective, disciplined and rational while artist are to bee subjective, impulsive and imaginative.  These stereotypes are ultimate opposites in their way of understanding.  How accurate are the stereotypes? To what extent are the stereotypes distorted?

Webster dictionary defines science as “a body of truths that are discovered by the correct application of scientific methods.” The scientific method is a “principle and empirical process of discovery and demonstration considered characteristic of or necessary for scientific investigation, generally involving the observation of phenomena, the formulation of a hypothesis concerning the phenomena, experimentation to demonstrate the truth or falseness of the hypothesis, and a conclusion that validates or modifies the hypothesis.”  The definition of science stated above has problems that need to be addressed as not all science are derived from generalized knowledge and only some sciences can genuinely test their results by the empirical method.  Moreover, it can never be known whether science does or does not reach absolute truth. So at best, scientist, one who is an expert on sciences, can only hypothesize by putting theories forward that allow predictions that have a high probability of occurring.  The predictions may be able to be tested but there is not certainty in it.  To study any phenomena, scientists have to use their common sense as a basis of obtaining knowledge.  Science then needs to eradicate subjective elements systematically so they are able to arrive at what is common to all the observations. It is inevitable that scientists are often stereotyped in being objective, disciplined and rational.  

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Scientists ways of knowing are most often through logic, especially by reasoning, as they often need to piece together data or link new data to past knowledge in order to interpret it.   The discovery that our solar system is heliocentric, sun-centered, and not geocentric, earth-centered, is first made by Aristarchus of Samos in 310-230 B.C.  He made this through deductive reasoning that since the sun is significantly larger than earth, it makes more sense for the earth to be rotating around the sun rather than the other way around.  This hypothesis is however not widely accepted even when Nicholas ...

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