ANTH 235,

SCIENCE, ART, AND CRITICAL THINKING

Since

SCIENCEis “the acquisition and organization of knowledge through observation, hypothesis testing, and theory building”

and

ARTis “the practical application of any science”

then

it stands to reason that Science and Art are closely related endeavors, in spite of our society’s propensity to dichotomize, or evenpolarize, them.

Many of us naïvely believe that Science alone ultimately holds a solution to all our problems.

By the same token, some segments of our society have hijacked concepts like biological evolution for political and social agenda rather than advancing human knowledge…

Archaeology rests at the nexus of three important realms in the Western intellectual tradition: the social sciences, the physical and naturalsciences (especially the biological and geological sciences), and the humanities.

AN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE ON CRITICAL THINKING…

To disagree with traditional

religious authority means you are a heretic

political authority means you are a revolutionary

scientific establishment means you are a charlatan

educational authority means you are a failure

Critical thinking means considering all possible explanations for a phenomenon until some can be eliminated by scientific proof…

There are no “raw data”!

Data are largely generated according to expectations.

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle points out the observer’s influence on her/his data.

Werner Karl Heisenberg (1901-1976)

Assumptions and uniformitarianismrule Science (remember Charles Lyell?); it can be no other way.

Science provides certainty, logic, and holistic explanations. Western Science is not unique in this regard.

Six principles to live by:

  1. Science rewards the creative imagination.
  1. Science understands that discoveries come by vision fed by intuition and apparent accidents, therefore…
  1. Set up conditions within which you are compelled to confront some accident.
  1. Stop thinking of yourself as onlycompetent; today’s society is changing too fast for the merely competent to survive.
  1. Great Art and Great Science are outlaw acts; think of yourself as an intellectual subversive!
  1. Live dangerously!

REMEMBER: There’s a BIG difference, but often a very fine line, between being an intellectual subversive (a good thing) and a crackpot (a bad thing)!

Good Bad

Also, in the realm of intellectual subversion, you might enjoy reading some of these famous last words:

Do you find Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle intriguing?

If so, you might enjoy thinking about Schrödinger’s Cat. In 1935, the Austrian physicist, Erwin Schrödinger (1887-1961) proposed a seemingly paradoxical thought experiment (described below) that points out one dramatic way in which an observer might become entangled in one’s experiment!

“A cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with the following diabolical device (which must be secured against direct interference by the cat): in a Geiger counter there is a tiny bit of radioactive substance, so small that perhaps in the course of one hour one of the atoms decays, but also, with equal probability, perhaps none; if it happens, the counter tube discharges and through a relay releases a hammer which shatters a small flask of hydrocyanic acid. If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still lives if meanwhile no atom has decayed. The first atomic decay would have poisoned it. The wave functionfor the entire system would express this by having in it both the living and the dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts.”

Schrödinger, E. R. J. A. (1935). “Die gegenwartige Situation in der Quantenmechanik,” Naturwissenschaftern 23, pp. 807-812, 822-823, 844-849. English translation by John D. Trimmer, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 124, pp. 323-38 (1980).

Also, at some point in your undergraduate career (preferably sooner rather than later) you should read:

Thinking Anthropologically, A Practical Guide for Students by Philip Carl Salzman and Patricia C. Rice (2004, Pearson Education, Inc., Upper Saddle River, NJ; ISBN 0-13-183520-3)

and

A Technique for Producing Ideas by James Webb Young (1975, NTC Business Books, Chicago; ISBN 0-8442-3000-6)