Although I'm a huge fan of science, I very much enjoyed this short piece by William Deresiewicz in The American Scholar today about how new scientific discoveries are considered by many to be the only "real" way of validating things we already knew, though experience or art.
"The problem, all around, is scientism: the belief that science is the only valid form of knowledge. To accept as much is to deny the authority of one’s own experience. Never mind Dickens; everyone who lives in a city understands that urban life is stressful. And it is nothing other than experience upon which art stakes its claim: the experience of the individual creator, and her ability to give it a form that resonates with our experience. Art is a rebuke to the cult of expertise. It is allied with citizenship, that other domain of the passionate amateur. In both, we stand on our right to speak from the self."
It's well worth reading the rest of the piece here.
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