Science
cience is an art. A systematic, repetitive, incremental, pretentious, supposedly objective, socially valued kind of art. Man is an artistic animal, who projects his values on what he does... Science is a human construct, isn't it?
In the beginning, in Ancient Rome, ARS was the latin verbatim employed in reference to the 'study of causal relations' (a kind of protoscience, according to B. Russell).
In the XIVth-XVth centuries, Science somehow gained autonomy from the Arts. Thence, man became "scientific". Science tried to impose its patterns to the Arts, which came to be defined in a negative sense (residually): if sth was not scientific, it was possibly artistic.
In fact, the opposite is closer to true: often, if something creates beauty and requires creativity, it is usually hailed as being art. That which can be done mechanically, and therefore is devoid of true enterprise, is therefore (by elimination) described as science, despite the fact that scientific research also requires substantial creative vision and willpower.
Despite being quite a philosophical triumph over the more superstitious thinking that existed in Europe just before the Renaissance, science is usually regarded as exclusively the domain of the socially inept and weak of spirit. While some such people do work in science, probably about as many work in "artistic" endeavours.
Art is sometimes sneered at as being less than useful, but if you judge people's opinions of things by their actual reactions than by what they claim is better, and do this over a wide enough sample of people (at least in Canada or the U.S.), I suspect that you would find that art is held in higher esteem than science. And this from two supposedly technophilic nations.
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