Original scientific paper
Can art provide knowledge?
Natia Ebanoidze
orcid.org/0000-0002-7328-8557
Abstract
The question of the relationship between art and knowledge and whether andin what sense art can be regarded as a form of knowledge has been addressedfrom different perspectives but it still does not have secure grounds incontemporary aesthetics. The argument involves rather skeptical attitudes– from Plato to Kant and throughout the dominance of positivist tradition inWestern philosophy in the first half of the 20th century – as well as cognitivistapproaches, such as James O. Young’s view of art as a source of knowledge,which has the capacity to provide both propositional and practical knowledge.The “linguistic turn” in contemporary thought and the ensued iconizationof language in western culture led to the identification of cognitive potentialwith discourse, resulting in inequitable disregard of sensory awarenessand turning the human experiences and cognition into the product of language.The submission of iconicity to semantics and reducing the pictorialto interpretable text without sensory significance led to the questioning ofthe cognitive aspect of visuality.The hermeneutical perspective, drawing upon Michael Polanyi’s view ofall knowledge as established in relation to tacit thought, considers art asembodying tacit knowledge and emphasizes the importance of the inherentinexhaustibility of meaning in art that can contribute to the inquiry. Recognizingthat knowledge is not always reducible to language, such perspectiveliberates knowledge from the dominance of the propositional and providesfurther insights for the phenomenology of art as a creative practice.
No doubt that the ways of representation in arts are fundamentally differentfrom those in the sciences and both realms contribute to knowledge in radicallydifferent ways. However, while the ways to explicate how art can enhancethe faculty of judgment and practical knowledge might be relatively obvious inliterary works, the question of how visual works can provide the same kindsof knowledge is more ambiguous. Consequently, the question of epistemicpotential of visual representation is even more challenging.Image as a system constructed according to the immanent laws with its owniconic sense - which determines its difference from reality as well as fromdiscourse – challenges perception, because a conceptual, abstract tendencyof perception is incompatible with a sensual particularity of the image(Boehm). At the same time, it allows a multiplicity of experience made possibleby simultaneity inherent in the image provided that we understand theact of seeing as comprising simultaneity and consecutiveness as well as theunconscious, pre-conceptual processes. It is the expressive potential of thepictorial and the specificity of art as an experiential and perceptual modalityembodying representational meanings that distinguishes it as a distinctiveform of knowledge. In an endeavor to defy the approach of semiotics and theepistemology of science that insist on amodality of knowledge and its dependenceon discursive context, this paper rejects the reducibility of knowledgeto language and embraces the approach that advocates „disestablishing theview of cognition as dominantly and aggressively linguistic“ (Stafford).
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
314801
URI
Publication date:
5.3.2024.
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