The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

by David Deutsch

And both, I believe, are seeking it through good explanations. This is most straightforwardly so in the case of art forms that involve stories – fiction. There, as I mentioned in Chapter 11, a good story has a good explanation of the fictional events that it portrays. But the same is true in all art forms. In some, it is especially hard to express in words the explanation of the beauty of a particular work of art, even if one knows it, because the relevant knowledge is itself not expressed in words – it is inexplicit. No one yet knows how to translate musical explanations into natural language. Yet when a piece of music has the attribute ‘displace one note and there would be diminishment’ there is an explanation: it was known to the composer, and it is known to the listeners who appreciate it. One day it will be expressible in words. This, too, is not as different from science and mathematics as it looks: poetry and mathematics or physics share the property that they develop a language different from ordinary language in order to state things efficiently that it would be very inefficient to state in ordinary language. And both do this by constructing variants of ordinary language: one has to understand the latter first in order to understand explanations of, and in, the former.