Do Poetry and Science Have Interesting and Important Things in Common? Some Thoughts on ‘Parsimony’ and ‘Provisionality’

Abstract

The current kinds of, and opportunities for, connections between poetry and science are examined. Possible reasons are briefly explored for how the conventional view arose that poetry and science are polar opposites and a proposition is made that we may look for a more intimate kind of relationship between them in the specialized uses of language; the relationship between science and poetry is thereby distinguished from that between science and other arts/humanities. In particular, the notions of ‘parsimony’ and ‘provisionality’ are deployed in order to inquire into the experimental and indeterminate phenomena that science and poetry are each culturally primed to investigate and interpret.

Keywords:

• poetry
• science
• language
• experimentation
• parsimony
• provisionality

Notes

1 For example, in the social sciences the ‘paradigm wars’ between quantitative and qualitative research continue unabated. Civil servants prefer quantitative research, which they think constitutes ‘hard data’, ‘good evidence’, to qualitative research, which they call ‘soft’ — presumably because it’s harder to compress into bullet-points. The qualitative researchers call quantitative research ‘positivist’ or ‘reductionist’ (name-calling is part of the fun).

2 In a BBC Radio 4 programme, first broadcast on 11 February 2013, (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01qhqfv 25/09/2013) ‘Lisa Jardine discusses how complex maths has broken free of the laboratory and now influences every aspect of our lives. James Owen Weatherall applauds the take-over of the financial world by physicists, Marcus du Sautoy revels in the numbers and Kenneth Cukier explores how big data will change everything from disease control to bargain buys’.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lesley Saunders

Lesley Saunders is a Visiting Professor at the Institute of Education and a Research Fellow at Oxford University Department of Education. She is the author of several books of poetry, including Cloud Camera (Two Rivers Press 2012).