Film, Art, and the Limits of Science: In Defence of Humanistic Explanation

by Malcolm Turvey

There is currently a vigorous debate in film studies and related disciplines about the extent to which scientific paradigms like evolutionary psychology and neuroscience can explain the cinema and other artforms. This debate tends to devolve into extreme positions, with many film scholars and other humanists insisting that science has little or no role to play in the study of the arts, while a minority contends that it is always needed to fully account for cultural phenomena like film.



Malcolm Turvey advocates for a more moderate position. He argues that, while the sciences can explain much about film and the other arts, there is much about these phenomena that only humanistic methods can account for. He thereby mounts a trenchant defence of the purpose and value of humanistic explanation, one that nevertheless acknowledges and welcomes the legitimate contribution of the sciences to the study of the arts.

328 pages, Hardcover

Published April 27, 2025

Reviews

[Pate Duncan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Turvey here offers an important corrective desperately needed within cognitivist film and media studies, carefully establishing important guardrails against the potential imperialism of scientific explanation within the arts. The explanatory self-sufficiency of humanistic methods that Turvey avows with moderate autonomism is an extremely important point to raise in defense of the humanities, especially in a moment when they’re being either gutted in the wake of AI or misconstrued into a right-wing Eurocentric curriculum oriented exclusively around extremely restricted canons.

I tend to be a bit more ecumenical towards the hermeneutic tendency that Turvey also decries here even as I take pains to distance myself from it in my own research. I do this in part because of my own somewhat impure intellectual debts (I take a lot from queer studies and queer theory, which necessarily imports a certain amount from hermeneutic and more Continental aspects), but also for strategic reasons: many outside of the humanities (and even some people within them!) don’t see much of a difference between explanatory and interpretive accounts, and I’m skeptical about the strategic value of Turvey’s conclusion against the hermeneutic tradition when it seems that a begrudging solidarity may have greater value in the current political landscape. At the very least, such a move seems a necessary gesture for junior academics navigating an academic landscape that doesn’t particularly reward such explicit disagreement with the reigning paradigm, and I think a bit more realpolitik towards that reality would increase the interdisciplinary potential for this work as it passes into the hands of less established scholars. Still, as Turvey rightly contends elsewhere, such interdisciplinary agreement requires an olive branch on the other side, too.

Quibbles about inside-baseball academic strategy aside, it’s a fabulous book. I was reminded at times of my first exposure to Noël Carroll’s The Philosophy of Horror as an undergrad. I cherish being assigned that book at that formative point in my academic life, especially how eye-opening it was for me to see something written with such clarity and internal coherence (even as that book’s fundamental premise frustrated me to no end!). Turvey’s work here carries on the force of such an approach, and I find it extremely useful as a means to justify my commitment to (and the value of) humanistic explanation in an interdisciplinary field so dominated by scientific research.