The big question for this segment is, how are problems solved in the creative arts?

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In the 1980s, there was a revolution in theoretical protest to the arts, and

the language in which people talked about them changed.

It became much more technical, much more related to philosophy and

linguistics, and acquired what looked like a more scientific dimension.

As someone who was still relatively near the beginning of his career at the time,

I was at first very excited by this.

Especially, as it offered such a contrast to the way I had so

far been looking at things.

Later on, I came to feel that these new approaches added very little to our

understanding of culture and

indeed, may have actually made people less likely to study the arts.

But at the time, I did some thinking about the structure of academic arguments, and

whether or not propositions about the humanities could have the same rigor of

scientific theories.

I looked at Kuhn, Popper, Lakatos and Musgrave and Feyerabend in particular,

to understand how thinking about scientific argument have evolved in

the second half of the 20th century.

What I could readily see how the shift from a largely liberal

to an explicitly political motivation in literary studies for example,

could be seen as a paradigm shift in Kuhnian terms.

It was harder to see how at the level of specific propositions,

one could find many connections between the structure of scientific theories and

what people say when they are talking about the arts.

There seem, to me, to be three reasons for this.

Firstly, scientific theory generally requires the capacity to

reproduce results in an experimental or observational context.

There's no such requirement for thinking about the arts.

Secondly, at least in Popper's terms, the integrity of a theory depends

on statements about the conditions under which it might be fortified.

Again, although it is possible in certain very specific circumstances

to develop a falsification criteria for theories relating to the arts,

this is by no means a general requirement or generally possible.

Finally, scientific theories can also be seen to evolve within a network of

empirical activities and competing ideas and

rarely emerge fully formed in a single moment.

Again, when people speak of the arts, they are rarely doing so

in this kind of context.

I therefore concluded, the one contemporary cultural theory

often had the appearance of scientific discourse.

It was not scientific discourse using the definition of the word of the time,

most readily accepted by scientists.

Nevertheless, people do say things about the arts which have

intellectual integrity.

I hope I do so myself.

So it is worth at least trying to understand in what this integrity

might in here.

In doing this, I'm going to look solely at my own practice as a very experienced

scholar and writer.

If I'm going to characterized what I do in the shortest way possible,

it would be I make connections.

What I mean by this, is the great majority of research in scholarship and

the humanities is not a scholarship of discovery, finding a new planet,

discovering a new medicine.

But rather a scholarship that which works by taking things which are well known,

ensuring how they relate in new ways.

This is not to say that there are not elements of pure discovery.

For example, I have discovered previously lost fragments of medieval manuscripts.

But that generally, scholars in the humanities

showed how understanding of human culture can be enhanced.

And they do this by showing how apparently disparate elements are,

in fact, connected.

For example, many years ago,

I was looking at rituals in continental Europe by which villages would conduct

quite violent rites on neighboring communities to steal may poles.

Given the parallels I was tracing between practice in Europe and

practices in Britain.

It seemed to me surprising that no such activity seemed to have

been recorded there.

And then I found an early 16th century report from the magistrates court,

where some young men were punished for disorderly behavior,

in that they had attacked some people in a neighboring community and

vandalized the village maypole.

In other words, the cultural activity of ritual may pole stealing

existed only in the English juridical record.

From the point of view of the villagers,

what was going on was orderly ritual and custom.

From the point of view of the authorities,

what was going on was disorderly and illegal.

And of course, the illiteracy of the villagers

meant that they could not record their own view of what was happening.

As a scholar, what I was doing was making a connection between two different

discourses, and kinds of evidence, and, by doing so,

giving a voice to different way of looking at the past.

I'm also very dependent on intuition.

I often say jokingly that intuition beats numbers every time.

But there's an element of seriousness in this in my own practice.

For example, I feel certain works of art has a chemical change in my own body.

I always experience the resolution of the Fugue in the first movement of

Bach's third Brandenburg Concerto,

with the jolt that you get when you drive too fast over a dip in the road.

When I look at Samuel Palmer's late etchings,

I infallibly feel a grief akin to profound homesickness.

I can often identify the authorship and place of authorship of poems I have not

read before, simply by referring to the pictures that form in my head when I read

them, and not due to any special stylistic analysis.

And I've always been able to do this, which is why I suppose I do humanities,

not science.

When I would not want to relegate these apparently circumstantial features of my

own practice to a coherent theory, it is the case that what I do and

have done successfully for

many years is far more dependent on them than it is on the more formal battery of

scholarly skills and techniques, that I can also bring into play.

Ultimately, what I feel, perhaps I'm talking about emotion intelligence here,

about my material and

how it arranges itself before my eyes, is what I convert into scholarly discourse.

Scientific discovery seems often to proceed by a carefully and

thoughtfully graduated progression from one idea to another.

We're testing alliteration, delivery stage.

I feel no need in travelling from idea a to idea zed to do this.

And this too clearly differentiates my thought process and

method from those of colleagues working in the Sciences.

Which is not to say,

that imagination is not also an important part of truly great scientific thinking.

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The Creative Arts and Problem Solving

Evaluating Problems

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