Psychological Aesthetics, Speculative and Scientific

L C ~ J / I ~ / I ~ / O . Vol. 10. pp. 56-58. Perganion Press 1977. Printed in Great Britain PSYCHOLOGICAL AESTHETICS, SPECULATIVE AND SCIENTIFIC* D. E. Berlyne** Those of you who have been associated with the International Association for Empirical Aesthetics since its beginning, twelve years ago. will remember some of the controversies that arose when we faced the question of how to translate the title of the organization and to get the title of the journal Science de /'A,./ into English. Scientific Aesthetics seemed to fit very well what was intended. But the difficulty was that the word .srierrr/fiyiiein French had a much broader connotation. I t covers not only such activities as history and philosophy but virtually everything that scholars connected with art do. including art criticism, art history and philosophical aesthetics . The fact. and it is a very troublesome fact, is that the word .wie/rcc, in English and .c.cierice in French (with equivalent words like Wi.s.c.err.schufi in other continental (European] languages) do not mean exactly the same. In both cases there is ii broader and a narrower sense. But in continental languages. science has come to cover virtually any kind of systematic scholarly study. so that the best translation in English would be something like 'humanistic scholarship' or 'speculative scholarship'. In English-speaking countries, on the other hand, the word science has become confined almost entirely to investigation concerned with statements about observable phenomena and matters that can be deduced from observable phenomena and based on observation through experiment and other forms of controlled empirical study as its criterion of validity. Over the centuries, two main, and very different traditions of studying human behaviour and its products have grown up. On the one hand, we have a scientific approach (in the restricted English sense), which was encouraged by the early successes of Descartes, Pascal, Galileo and Newton in combining mathematics with empirical observation, followed by increasing triumphs as the scientific method was extended to newer and newer subject matter, including the investigation of living tissues and living organisms. On the other hand, there ih the rival tradition, which has many roots. It was encouraged by Vico in the eighteenth century, who suggested that the study of human activities required a 'new science', in which there was more room for imagination, emotional sensitivity. and a study of historical and cultural context than would be appropriate when researching questions concerning inanimate matter. Then, there is the even older tradition of hermeneutics. the technique of interpreting texts. which began quite early to be applied to religious texts, but gradually spread to legal, historical and other documents. The contrast between this tradition and the empirical scientific tradition came to a head at the end of the nineteenth century when a group o f German philosophers distinguished two kinds of scholarship, or 'science' as they called them. that were appropriate to and applicable to the doings of human beings. Dilthey differentiated between Nutrtrwisserrd i r ! f i (natti raI science) and Gei.Tieswisserrschuft (realIy un- *Opening address to the Vlth International Symposium of Empirical Aesthetics held in Paris on 16-17 July 1976. **President, International Association o f Empirical Aesthetics. Dept. of Psychology, University of Toronto M5S IAl. Canada. - ~~~ ~ ~~~ ~ ~ translatable, but meaning something like mental and spiritual science). Windelband contrasted nomothetic with idiographic research. Ricket differentiated natural science from cultural science. These three diochotomiesdenotedmore or less the same two kinds of intellectual activity, and although the three philosophers concerned believed that both were possible, they were clearly biased towards the 'humanistic ' or idiographic. Several polarities have been adduced to capture the contrast between nomothetic and idiographic investigation. The one seeks generalizations pertaining to classes of objects or events, while the other aims to illuminate specific instances. The one aims at explanation, including the causal explanation . while the other aims at understanding, including understanding the intentions and meaning. Many writers use the untranslated German word Versfeherr to denote the special kind of understanding that is here in question. The one isolates the elements, factors, variables, while the other relates elements to the wholes of which they are part and relates these wholes to their contexts. The one...