CONCEPT
Science and Poetry as Complementary Vocabularies
Midgley's defence of the obvious — that the physicist's sunset and the poet's sunset are both real, and that the reductionist insistence on a single vocabulary produces impoverished understanding.
Science and poetry describe different dimensions of the same phenomena using different vocabularies, and neither vocabulary is reducible to the other. The physicist can describe a sunset as electromagnetic radiation scattered at specific wavelengths. The poet can describe the same sunset as a transformation of meaning, an emblem of ending, an invitation to reflection. Both descriptions correspond to something real. Eliminating either produces an understanding that is accurate in what it includes and impoverished in what it leaves out. Midgley argued that this complementarity is not a diplomatic compromise between warring camps but a structural feature of reality itself — and that the AI discourse's monopolisation by a single vocabulary (the computational) is producing exactly the impoverishment her framework predicts.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The argument is directed against a specific intellectual formation Midgley called scientism: the view that scientific description is the only legitimate form of description and that everything real must