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TRUTH and FALSEHOOD in SCIENCE and the ARTS the Arts The authors discuss truth and falsehood in science and ARTS THE AND SCIENCE IN FALSEHOOD AND TRUTH the arts. They view truth as an irreducible point of refer- TRUTH AND FALSEHOOD ence, both in striving for elementary knowledge about the world and in seeking methods and artistic means IN SCIENCE of achieving this goal. The multilevel and multiple-aspect research presented here, conducted on material from different periods and different cultures, shows very clearly AND THE ARTS that truth and falsehood lie at the foundation of all human motivation, choices, decisions, and behaviors. At the Edited by same time, however, it reveals that every bid to extra- polate the results of detailed studies into generalizations Barbara Bokus, Ewa Kosowska aimed at universalization – by the very fact of their discursivation – either subjects the discussion to the rules of formal logic or situates it outside the realm of truth and falsehood. The Editors www.wuw.pl TRUTH AND FALSEHOOD IN SCIENCE AND THE ARTS TRUTH AND FALSEHOOD IN SCIENCE AND THE ARTS Edited by Barbara Bokus, Ewa Kosowska Reviewers Stefan Bednarek Stanisław Rabiej Commissioning Editor Ewa Wyszyńska Proofreading Joanna Dutkiewicz Index Łukasz Śledziecki Cover Design Anna Gogolewska Illustration on the Cover kantver/123RF Layout and Typesetting Marcin Szcześniak Published with financial support from the University of Warsaw Published with financial support from the Faculty of “Artes Liberales”, University of Warsaw © Copyright by Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, Warszawa 2020 Barbara Bokus ORCID 0000-0002-3048-0055 Ewa Kosowska ORCID 0000-0003-4994-1517 ISBN 978-83-235-4220-9 (pdf online) ISBN 978-83-235-4228-5 (e-pub) ISBN 978-83-235-4236-0 (mobi) Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego 00-497 Warszawa, ul. Nowy Świat 4 e-mail: [email protected] online bookstore: www.wuw.pl 1st Edition, Warsaw 2020 Contents Ewa Kosowska, Barbara Bokus, Beyond Truth and Falsehood . 7 Jerzy Axer, Between Science, Art, and Forgery: Latin Textual Criticism as a Case Example . 21 Przemysław Piwowarczyk, Mechanism of Mystification and Demys- tification at the Point of Contact between the Humanities and Science: Case Study of the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife . 36 Karol Wilczyński, Why Is Philosophy Bad for the Soul? Commen- tary on Al-Ġazālī’s Critique of the Philosophers . 46 Maria Łukaszewicz-Chantry, Only a Poet Never Lies… Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski’s Thoughts on the Privilege of Poets . 62 Izabella Zatorska, Illusion and Truth in Theater from the Baroque to Romanticism . 69 Wojciech Sajkowski, Honesty as a Trait of Non-Civilized Man in the French Image of Southern Slavs at the Turn of the 18th and 19th Centuries . 90 Adam Grzeliński, The Validity of Aesthetic Judgments: George Santayana’s Polemics with Tradition . 101 Anna Żymełka-Pietrzak, Not Naked but Wearing “Dress upon Dress”: Johann Georg Hamann on Truth . 115 Marta Baron-Milian, Worthless yet Priceless: The Truths and Economics of Poetry . 128 Paweł Tomczok, Truth and Falsehood of the Mirror: Subjectivity – Reflection – Practice . 147 Michał Rogalski, The Disengaged Researcher as a Type: Truth and Probability in Studies on Religious Thought . 161 Rafał Zawisza, Hannah Arendt’s Marranic Evasions and the Truth of Her Cryptotheology . 172 6 Contents Piotr Kałowski, Narration True and False: Dialogical Self Theory in Psychotherapy . 189 Anna Milanowicz, Truth and Untruth in Irony . 205 Adrianna Smurzyńska, When Does Simulation Enable Us Ade- quately to Attribute Mental States to Others? . 212 Joanna Barska, Music vs. Truth: Illustration in the Context of the Aesthetics of Music . 221 Karolina Kolinek-Siechowicz, Truth and Early Music: The Inter- section of Arts and Humanities . 233 Anna Chęćka, Truth Embodied in Music . 247 Piotr Słodkowski, Truth of a Painting, Truth of Matter: Robert Rauschenberg, Henryk Streng, and the History of Art . 252 Maciej Junkiert, The Polish History of Literature as a Lieu de Mémoire . 259 Jan Kutnik, Truth of the Place and Truth of the Exhibition: “Case Study” of the State Museum at Majdanek . 271 Index of Names . 291 Ewa Kosowska ORCID 0000-0003-4994-1517 Faculty of the Humanities, University of Silesia in Katowice Barbara Bokus ORCID 0000-0002-3048-0055 Faculty of Psychology, University of Warsaw »Artes Liberales« Academy Beyond Truth and Falsehood Science and art, two areas that started being separated delib- erately and consistently on the threshold of modernism, were brought closer together again in postmodernism – thanks to the humanities and social sciences. However, this growing closeness was not a simple reversal of the situation in which the split had occurred; the rules were different, the cause was different, and the objective was different. The perception of science and the arts as areas of different kinds of cultural practice appeared prominently in the thinking of Descartes, whose argument in Discourse on Method sought to empower science, to turn it into a separate area of human activity and to indicate the rules according to which scientific, i.e. cognitive, thinking can be dis- tinguished from artistic, i.e. creative, thinking (Descartes, 1980). The negation of the Cartesian paradigm, in turn, coincided with a trend in linguistics that began strongly highlighting the fact that proposals publicizing the results of someone’s deliberation on epistemological procedures can appear in the social sphere, but only if they are verbalized first. This observation, however, did not translate directly into artistic practice at the time. On the contrary, on the eve of the 20th century stronger emphasis was put on the idea that knowledge about the world which is transferred through a work of art originates from the pre-dis- cursive, symbolic and archetypal realm referring to a universal pre-experience, and therefore might be verified intuitively, either individually or collectively (the issue of a work of art’s acceptance 8 Ewa Kosowska, Barbara Bokus and popularity requires separate consideration that would include not just the psychological aspect but also, for example, the achieve- ments of contemporary memetics). So, 20th-century disputes on the value of discursive and non-discursive learning turned their attention to language, as an integral part of human culture on one hand, and an independent medium governed by autonomous norms and rules on the other. Highlighting the fact that in lan- guage, you can only speak responsibly about linguistic reality, shifted the debate on the nature of truth and falsehood strongly toward logic, leaving unresolved issues of sensing, feeling, and the sufficiency of individual experience. Although those who spoke up for the value of the individual and subjective during this time included Georg Simmel, his proposals initially did not win the approval of academic circles and started being appreci- ated a little later (Simmel, 2007). The problem of the cognitive value of what is subjective and individual remained an intriguing mystery. In the late 19th century (1894) Wilhelm Windelband tried to systematize the status of procedures used for describing individual events from the past or analyzing original products (of literature, visual arts, music, intellect). He proposed a divi- sion into idiographic sciences, i.e. those reporting on the unique, and nomothetic sciences, i.e. those determining laws (Windel- band, 1992). His follower Heinrich Rickert decided it would be more appropriate to distinguish between cultural (idiographic) and natural (nomothetic) sciences (Rickert, 1921). Windelband favored the idea of truth as an absolute value, independent of any pragmatic circumstances (Windelband, 2008). Rickert’s stance was similar, as he gave truth the status of a value – the main object of scientific cognition. Simmel’s proposals, especially his concept of “subjective culture,” went beyond those distinctions and were not verifiable. Neither were they possible to falsify, i.e. undergo procedures popularized by Karl Popper (2019) for the purpose of checking “bold hypotheses” without which science could not develop. Today we can already see limitations in the paradigm of Popper’s falsificationism, especially when we try to apply it to the humanities and social sciences. For example, in academic psychology there are two methodological “camps” – quantitative, relying as much as possible on experiments, statis- tical analyses and conclusions about hypotheses, and qualitative, aiming to learn about the subjective perspective of the individual being studied. Beyond Truth and Falsehood 9 A subjective “sense of truth,” although based on acknowl- edging truth’s objective value, hands the power of judgment to the acting subject. However, some doubt still remains as to the possibility of properly exercising that power in a situation when the judgments themselves are expressed in language. Of course the material of language allows true and false sentences – in the logical sense – to be uttered, but it does not fulfill the requirement of absolutely true statements about the non-linguistic reality. This dilemma was already noticed earlier, and led to the validation of various approximation procedures, among which granting special status to metaphors came to the forefront. At the end of the 18th century this was a new idea, but with time, metaphorical language made its way into science and gradually became an independent medium, with a life of its own, generat- ing its own problems. Among the most important consequences of uncovering the connection between science and the choice of linguistic procedures for the transfer of research results in both the humanities and the natural sciences, we should mention the “narratological turn” that allowed practically any scientific state- ment to be considered in terms of a linguistic statement, in terms of a kind of “story” about a specific case or set of cases; this could be a monophonic story or one being part of a polyphony. Thus, we can approach the scientific statements of a given time in the same way Mikhail Bakhtin (1970) approached the novels of Dostoyevsky. These novels do not represent a single, overrid- ing vision of the author, but are the result of dialogues between independent individuals and their points of view or ideologies.
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