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Date: | Sun, 22 Oct 2000 16:17:06 EDT |
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John Smyth <[log in to unmask]> writes bguilingly:
>Contemporary science corrects and replaces old science, while
>contemporary art hardly replaces the old--at its best, new artistic
>innovation serves to heighten the meaning of art from the past. There
>should be no direction in art. To assess the "progress" of art in the
>same way that one assesses the progress of science is a big mistake.
In the hard sciences to gain acceptance something has to be falsifiable
to be verifiable. Something not falsifiable remains, at best, a theory,
or a postulate, or an axiom. That means the quest for truth in science
is open-ended and that therefore there may be no progress, simply because
there may be no progress toward and open end.
To be sure, something new can replace something old but thereafter plenty
of the old will still linger as residue. It's largely the same in music,
except that falsification by logic is not involved, as falsification in
music involves esthetical speculation. In both hard science and dulcet
music history plays an important part and labeling is its handmaiden.
Thus quantum philosophy as applied to physics is distinguished, and
distinguished usefully, from classical physics. By related token, in
music the avant-garde label betokens a valid and important distinction
from the conventional label. To the ears of quite a few listeners this
distinction is fundamental: they like the one and dislike the other.
Denis Fodor
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