Science And 'The Humanities' Are Wedded, Not Divorced

While many scientists value and are strongly interested in literature, music, and art - what are commonly called "the humanities" - they believe that the status of these disciplines is completely different from that of science. The "subjective" humanities deal with culture-bound "values" and "taste," while the "objective" sciences are concerned with "truth," which in this scenario transcends culture. In other words, even though science is a product of culture, it is completely independent of culture. This belief in the mutual isolation of science and culture is not confined to scientists. In recent articles a prominent art historian and a literary theorist each warned against attempts to relate science and art or science and literature. It seems a great many people across the disciplinary landscape have a stake in maintaining disciplinary boundaries; we define ourselves professionally as much by what we are not as by what we are. Meanwhile, like many of my scientific colleagues I am interested in a number of nonscientific areas, such as literature and music. And while it is as obvious to me as to everyone that studying literature and working at the lab bench are very different activities, I have never believed that they are utterly unrelated. I am aware, for instance, of the extent to which scientists value order and beauty in their work. Furthermore, I am convinced that science involves much more creativity than is usually supposed in the mere uncovering of a pre-existing truth. I did not actively question the prevailing belief about the separation of science and culture until a little over 10 years ago, when in the course of returning home from a two-year sabbatical leave, I dallied for two months at a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) summer seminar entitled "The Functions of Discourse in Science and Literature." It changed my professional life. It also helped propel me to the following conclusions. Science is an intrinsic part of culture. Understanding the interrelationship between science and culture can enhance our appreciation of our own disciplines, and lead us to reflect on them in revealing ways. The entanglement of science with culture should not be seen as a threat to the objectivity of science. Rather, it can have positive effects on nonscientists' image of science. The NEH seminar introduced me to the discipline of literature and science, which has been a field of scholarly activity for over a century. One of its oldest, ongoing research traditions has involved the tracing of scientific influences on literary works. In the work of Chaucer, for example, one can find the imprint of the astronomy and medicine of his day. In more subtle and pervasive form, one can also find the impact of Kelvin's "heat death" hypothesis on late 19th-century writers such as Conrad. Studies such as these leave little doubt that scientific concepts and conceptions of science have been widely disseminated in common culture for some time, and have long provided rich material for imaginative artists. However, to examine the portraits of fictional scientists, or to track down the literary appropriations of "entropy" or "indeterminacy," is to see the culture/science interaction from only one perspective. This perspective - in which influence flows from (active) science to (passive) culture - is by far the most familiar one; and it accords most readily with the notion of autonomous science, standing outside culture and "impacting" on it. However, this perspective does not reveal the sum total of culture/science interactions. There is also a reverse flow from culture to science, and it is language that provides the avenue for this two-way interchange. All language, ordinary or scientific, makes use of metaphor. Sometimes the metaphors are derived from technical terms that migrate into everyday language - "equilibrium" is a well-known example. The reverse situation, in which ordinary language gets converted into scientific terminology, is more often the case - think of words like "force" and "energy." Discovering the metaphoric character of technical chemical language was a revelation to me. Several years ago, I read a paper by a respected theorist in which he characterized molecular structure, the central concept of modern chemistry, as a "metaphor." A careful reading of the relevant literature convinced me that he is correct. It's clear to me that chemists using the phrase "molecular structure" in different contexts believe that they are all talking about "the same thing," when in fact they often attach demonstrably different meanings to the words, and have done so for some time. The plasticity of this concept was concealed by the shared illusion that scientific language can be made infinitely precise. Not only is this not so, but I have been persuaded that the limits to linguistic precision are in fact beneficial. As one author has pointed out, the open-endedness of scientific metaphors encourages us to keep pushing our concepts and theories in new directions, thereby discovering their further applications and ultimate limits. Another illusion having wide currency is that scientific reports "tell it like it was." However, one of my literature and science colleagues, a nutritional biochemist, is studying the ways in which journal articles are fictional reconstructions of what actually goes on in the laboratory. What he and others have found are a limited set of "story lines" in each scientific subdiscipline. All journal articles follow these narratives, and they are related to what transpired in the lab much as the plot of a novel is related to real life. Science, like literature, has its genres. It's my firm belief that my interest in literature and science has made me a better chemist, certainly a better teacher of chemistry, forcing me to examine beliefs that I have taken for granted since I was a student. If we professors cannot do that, how can we urge a critical attitude on our students? The study of literature and science not only has broadened my understanding of science, but also has broadened my interactions with academic colleagues. Over the last several years I have been stimulated by the work of literary scholars, historians and philosophers of science, art historians, and so on. We have shared diverse approaches to our common interest. To be sure, there have been moments of frustration - those who don't practice it have to be constantly reminded that science is a set of practices as well as a body of theory. On the other hand, if one is engaged in an open exchange marked by good will, one can also learn much from the perspective of those who have no stake in seeing science as the professional has been indoctrinated to see it. I should note that none of what I have said above diminishes science for me. Nor does it for most others, particularly nonscientists. At a time when so many of our contemporaries display strongly ambivalent attitudes toward science, both valuing it and deeply fearing it, the demonstration that science is a part of culture can be very reassuring. That a human institution has achieved so much is amazing; we should not hesitate to place it alongside the other great products of human culture and intellect. Stephen Weininger is a professor of chemistry at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and a past president of the Society for Literature and Science.

Science And 'The Humanities' Are Wedded, Not Divorced

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Stephen Weininger

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January 1990

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