Abstract
This article outlines the need for the arts to be integrated into the scientific ways by which educators pursue an understanding of exceptionality. This need emerges from an awareness of profound similarities between the two ways of knowing and from the increasing disenchantment across the social sciences with the dominant scientific paradigm. To persist in the strict separation between scientific thought and the arts would be to restrict the progress of knowledge. Nobel Prize winner Prigogine suggests that the symbol for 20th Century science are art forms. Implications for the field of special education is suggested.