Thank you Jessica, I think this essay is point on. I am convinced: Art, poems, stories, music, nature carry in them interwoven meaning and development that literally conscious linguistics and cognition cannot carry. Math is fantastic for proving and validating the imaginable and less effective at conveying the unimaginable. Einstein, pretty good at math, postulated imagination as a key ingredient to be prized as an attribute.

I have a bias in this response, it may or not have validity and even if the impression is valid the core discipline may or may not have value. People like CG Jung postulated and explored in their best analytic effort the idea of the unconscious mind. We have dreams when we sleep. We have patterns in our lives that do not seem to be cognitive based. We express things artistically that aren’t from a lab but are “blowing in the wind”. My guess is this area of being human is invaluable and that it has really been placed on the back burner and shoved aside especially over the last 30 years. As a practical matter it appears in things in your essay such as reduced budgets for “liberal arts”. Maybe I have a legitimate basis for my sense of loss, maybe I’m just making up a story because I like the idea of seeing possible value in that which might appear artsy or abstract.