Art and Science in the Thinking of Rudolf Arnheim Ian Verstegen What is normative in our evolved knowledge of the world? Just as models of mind decide whether to respect phenomenal experience or the apparently more secure findings of physics, we have to decide to give relative importance to art or science. The constructivist or culturalist world view argues that even if science has some transfactual reality, in practice there is wide berth in how these facts are instantiated or clothed in human culture. The scientific viewpoint instead pleads that physical and in general natural constraints give rise to relatively invariant social and cultural formations results. In regard to the first question, the Gestalt school of Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka provided a novel answer: neither phenomenal experience nor physical facts should be given ultimate authority. 1 Phenomenal experience did provide the departure point for any scientific inference. However, what can be called genetic subjectivity is just as much a construction as the derived worldview of the sciences. 2 To create a schematism, if in our phenomenal experience we understand certain phenomena to be “objective” and a part of the external world, and another part to be “subjective” and subject to our own acts of perceiving, then both of these data serve the creation of two kinds of knowledge, the scientifically Objective and the personally Subjective: Datum Construction Phenomenal objectivity>>>>>>>>>>Objectivity Phenomenal subjectivity>>>>>>>>>Subjectivity As Paul Richer writes, 1 Epstein and Hatfield (1994). 2 Richer (1979), pp. 33–55. I. Verstegen (B ) University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA e-mail: verstege@sas.upenn.edu © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 S. Wuppuluri and D. Wu (eds.), On Art and Science, The Frontiers Collection, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27577-8_7 87 verstege@sas.upenn.edu