This is frustrating. Everytime I start working on #inktober ; the phone rings with someone demanding my time and I have to put the project on the burner.
I really don't want to do all of my October posts at 3:00 AM like I did in September. Anyway, I don;t think I will be able to finish the post I was writing until after midnight.
Anyway, I only have minutes before the end of the month; So, I will jot down a post with a quick post on the difference between the Liberal Arts and STEM Education.
The "liberal arts" is founded on a trinity of subjects called the Trivium. The three legs of The Trivium are: "Grammar, Logic and Rhetoric"
Grammar refers to the structure of language, logic refers to the structure of ideas and rhetoric is the art of communication.
The liberal arts is a study of the way that the human mind works.
A person with a liberal arts education learns how to form and communicate ideas. Logic refers to the structure of ideas. In logic one learns to created models of the world through a process called "analysis." The term "dialectics" used to refer to the opened ended process of formulating the analytical model.
Scientists like to restrict themselves to analytic models that can be verified by observation in nature. It excludes those that cannot. They have yet to find a model that fully explains all natural phenomena.
Mathematics studies complex models. The primary concern of the mathematician is internal consistency. Mathematicians create formulas and equations. These edifices have their origins in logic.
Every line of computer code is a logic statements. Again, I see computer science as a subset of logic.
Engineering and technology refers to the application of the logical models discovered by scientists.
It is possible to apply logic to soft subjects like the study are art, music, and bigger questions such as the nature of being, the nature of God and the purpose of life.
The Conflict Between Science and Liberal Arts
It is common for people to make hay of a conflict between liberal arts and science. Since science is simply a subset of things that one can do with logic, I've always found this idea absurd.
The modern attempt to hold science supreme is an effort to set one collection of things that people can do with logic against the other things.
Like with most conflicts, the real bases of the false dichotomy between science and the liberal arts is politics.
It is natural for different groups of people to seek advantage over others by over-emphasizing the strengths of their camp and devaluing the merits of the opposition.
I hope to get back to the article I was writing sometime after midnght. So, I will end with the open question: Do you see a conflict between the liberal arts and science?