Inquiry and performance: Analogies and identities between the arts and the sciences

The concept of performance can be used to explain and elaborate key aspects of various issues often neglected within traditional philosophy of science, including among others artistry, technique, and affective power. The word 'performance' has a spectrum of meanings, but one important sense in which it is applied, especially in the dramatic arts, is to the conception, production, and witnessing of material events the experience of which gives us something more than what we had before. When viewed in this way, the structure of performance is not a metaphor extended merely suggestively from the theatre arts into experimental science; it is the same in both. In both contexts, the representation (theory, language, script) used to programme the performance does not completely determine the outcome (product, work), but only assists in the encounter with the new. The world is wilder and richer than we can represent; what appears in performance can exceed the programme used to put it together, can even surprise and baffle us. An experiment planned and programmed on the basis of a certain theory can disclose things that trigger changes in that theory.