🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <6433@hubcap.clemson.edu> Bill Wolfe writes:

>From article <6103@pt.cs.cmu.edu>, by ram@wb1.cs.cmu.edu (Rob MacLachlan):
>There is a general progression which all fields go through:

>Art form  =>  Engineering discipline  =>  Hard Science

>The progress along this route is proportional to what is known
>about the field.  

It seems to me, rather, that the three disciplines can better be
distinguished by their purposes.

Art is (I believe) principally concerned with the production and
communication of subjective experience (feelings, thoughts,
sensations, intimations, and the like).

Engineering is primarily concerned with control over the physical
universe.

Science is concerned with discovery of the laws of nature.

Any of these disciplines can be done with a greater or lesser amount
of knowledge.  Various forms of crafts (such as those we learned in
Boy Scout camp) are primitive forms of engineering that require
considerably less knowledge than designing a spacecraft.  The
fingerpainting we did in school is considerably less knowledgeable
than the work of Rembrandt.  A baby's attempt to find out about
physical reality by alternately tasting, feeling, smelling, and seeing
an object is a primitive form of science -- he too, is concerned with
discovering the regularities in his environment.

I don't think an expert in art is any less knowledgeable than his
counterpart in engineering, or that an expert engineer is more
ignorant than a top-level scientist.  It is just that the subject
matter is different and the purpose is different.

Is one form of knowledge more "proper" than another?  I don't see how
one could say that.
-- 
Sarge Gerbode -- UUCP:  pyramid!thirdi!metapsy!sarge
Institute for Research in Metapsychology
950 Guinda St.  Palo Alto, CA 94301