The Ethical Challenge of Multidisciplinarity: Reconciling ‘The Three Narratives’—Art, Science, and Philosophy

Language—and by extension our story telling activities in general—enables usto confront the contingencies of life by answering the immediate question: what’s happening and what is going to happen next. Science also attempts to answer this question. However, there appears to be—at least in the western cultural tradition—a fundamental tension between the literary-artistic and the scientific projects: whereas the artist seeks to recreate human experience, thereby evoking basic ethical issues, the scientist seeks ethically-neutral, evidence-based facts, as the constituents of our knowledge of reality. It is thus left to others—to the philosopher, theologian, critic, or historian—to bridge the theoretical and ethical gaps between the world of ‘fiction’ and the world of ‘fact’, of art and science. Among other things, the ever increasing rate of production of scientific data in the modern age poses a new multidisciplinary challenge: how to address the unresolved/unresolvable tensions between the language of normativity and the language of facticity.

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