Fair points, but rather different from what I took home from that quote. I saw Davy as saying more that the wonder inherent in hypothesis-generation is closely identified with the aesthetic wonder of art of music—and presumably of unexplained magic tricks. I wouldn’t be too terribly surprised to discover that they all engage the same reward pathways on a biological level.
We do need filters, but that’s where the imagination/reason distinction comes in. However wonderful it is to generate ideas, it’s only by checking them that we free up space for the next wonderful idea.
It can certainly be read that way: and I’d agree that this is often the ‘creative source of discovery’. My problem is the line about ‘perception of truth’, which I think appeals to a too-common idea that we have a natural ‘truth-sensing’ apparatus and we just need to clear stuff out of the way. It’s dangerous for science and other human discovery if we assume that the first satisfaying, consistent explanation of something is true.
Fair points, but rather different from what I took home from that quote. I saw Davy as saying more that the wonder inherent in hypothesis-generation is closely identified with the aesthetic wonder of art of music—and presumably of unexplained magic tricks. I wouldn’t be too terribly surprised to discover that they all engage the same reward pathways on a biological level.
We do need filters, but that’s where the imagination/reason distinction comes in. However wonderful it is to generate ideas, it’s only by checking them that we free up space for the next wonderful idea.
It can certainly be read that way: and I’d agree that this is often the ‘creative source of discovery’. My problem is the line about ‘perception of truth’, which I think appeals to a too-common idea that we have a natural ‘truth-sensing’ apparatus and we just need to clear stuff out of the way. It’s dangerous for science and other human discovery if we assume that the first satisfaying, consistent explanation of something is true.