Film, Art, and the Limits of Science : In Defence of Humanistic Explanation

There is currently a vigorous debate in film studies and other disciplines that study the arts about the extent to which natural-scientific paradigms like evolutionary psychology and neuroscience can complement if not replace humanistic methods in explaining the cinema and other artforms. This debate tends to devolve into extreme positions, with many film scholars and other humanists insisting that natural science has little or no role to play in their disciplines, while a minority contends that it is always needed to fully account for cultural phenomena like film.

In this intervention into this debate, Malcolm Turvey advocates for a more moderate position. He argues that, while the natural sciences can account for much about film and the other arts, there is much about these phenomena that lies largely or entirely beyond their reach. Countering the dominant but impoverished conception of the humanities as primarily hermeneutic, Turvey contends that humanistic scholars don’t just interpret films and other works of art. Instead, they offer explanations—of the functional design of artworks, of the norms constituting them and our appropriate responses to them, of the categories to which they belong, of the reasons they are made, of the context in which they are crafted and consumed, and of much else. Drawing on a range of examples chiefly from cinema and film theory, Turvey provides compelling reasons for why such explanations are not principally natural-scientific in character even while, in other respects, the natural sciences have much to contribute to our knowledge of the arts. Inspired by the later Wittgenstein''s complaint that the scientific method "elbows all the others aside," he also criticizes the over-confidence in science on display in some recent natural-scientific explanations of film. He thereby mounts a trenchant defense of the purpose and value of humanistic explanation at a time when the humanities are increasingly under pressure to justify their existence, one that nevertheless acknowledges and welcomes the legitimate contribution of the natural sciences to the study of film and the other arts.