Art-making is a form of knowledge production — not decorative illustration of pre-existing knowledge but a mode of inquiry through which understanding that cannot yet be formulated in language takes form. Elliot Eisner's lifelong argument that arts education is not enrichment but fundamental to the full development of intelligence rests on the recognition that different symbol systems develop different cognitive capacities, and that linguistic and logical-mathematical intelligence do not exhaust what the mind can know. The artist's attentiveness to form, sensation, relationship, and meaning is a training in the discriminative perception that the Sutras call viveka.
Patan