11 ms·

This article has some good points but is a bit meandering. The best point is right there at the beginning: the humanities study things which are not (entirely)

by Frippy 6y ago

This article has some good points but is a bit meandering. The best point is right there at the beginning: the humanities study things which are not (entirely) subject to scientific rigor, but which are still worth studying. This sort of begs the question, why is anything worth studying? I think Francis Bacon made the best point about this: knowledge—real knowledge—is about the ability to reliably recreate some effect. With something like the material characteristics of a metal, we can use the rigor of experiment to figure out how to create metals with desired characteristics. We subject the metal to varying levels of heat, pressure, etc. and see what happens. With governments this is basically impossible. You can't run controlled experiments against governments that are similar in all aspects but one. But it is still useful to study governments if we want to design good ones. You can make a good argument that much of America's success is the result of the Founding Fathers studying the many forms of government that preceded them. I would argue all other humanities are essentially the same. Literature and philosophy are collections of "experiments" conducted and suppositions made by our predecessors about how to live good lives. English composition is about how humans can effectively communicate in that language. Etc, etc. Are the various stories, rules of thumb, and bits of wisdom in these disciplines scientifically rigorous? Of course not. They can't be. But they can still improve our odds of reproducing some desirable effect, and that makes them knowledge worth having.

aliante 6y ago
> humanities study things which are not (entirely) subject to scientific rigor That is putting it mildly. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair
- Frippy 6y ago
  Yeah I agree, there are some particularly egregious examples. If you want a good laugh about this stuff, "Fashionable Nonsense" is a great book.
mc32 6y ago
>” the humanities study things which are not (entirely) subject to scientific rigor, but which are still worth studying.” An issue with these things is that institutions and government make major decisions based on the output from these fields. It’s not that we discount them completely but we should also consider opposing data from alternate studies, but what you get is agenda driven decision making (on all sides, this isn’t the province of one ideology).
- ianleeclark 6y ago
  > An issue with these things is that institutions and government make major decisions ... what you get is agenda driven decision making What do you think politics is? Everyone in politics has an agenda. > It’s not that we discount them completely but we should also consider opposing data from alternate studies Politicians already do this. Whenever there's a decision being made, it's being processed through a host of ideological positions.
  - mc32 6y ago
    I’m fine with these if they have some data that’s withstood scrutiny —but I’ve seen governments make decisions based on studies published by second tier educational institutions because it dovetails with their ideology.
    - ianleeclark 6y ago
      I still would like to know what your conception of politics is. > I’ve seen governments make decisions based on studies published by second tier educational institutions because it dovetails with their ideology. Do you have an example of this for a humanities specific field? I could see maybe philosophy, but I really don't think most humanities fields have the political power a lot of people attribute to them.
  - kortilla 6y ago
    Agendas are expected. Don’t use an economics paper to back a policy decision under the guise of data/science-driven policy making though.
jseliger 6y ago
One big issue is how the humanities are widely practiced today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23728642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23728642
- Frippy 6y ago
  Yep I agree, I had some horrible professors as a history postgrad that embodied this exact approach.
unishark 6y ago
If you can't control the experiment and identify causation or limit the number of changed variables, you really shouldn't even use the word "experiment". Sure there's an upside in letting smart people try to figure things out. But there's a downside in legitimizing the practice. Especially since academia isn't so just about intelligence but as much or more about self-agency. The people who push hardest for agendas get the funding, write the books, etc.
- Frippy 6y ago
  I'm not sure what a better word would be. We use the same word informally to describe how babies learn—they poke and prod at their environment and see what happens. Just because they aren't rigorous doesn't mean the process doesn't give them some idea (with an implicit confidence level, of course) of how things work.
pmoriarty 6y ago
"knowledge—real knowledge—is about the ability to reliably recreate some effect. ... Literature and philosophy are collections of "experiments" conducted and suppositions made by our predecessors about how to live good lives" Completely and strongly disagree with both of these. Even in the sciences, there are many who value gaining knowledge for knowledge's sake, for the joy of discovery, and for a better understanding of the world -- quite apart from its utilitarian value in "reliably recreating some effects". Now on to the humanities... just a couple of examples: Do you feel that you know your children, your siblings, your lover, or your parents? Is the point of that knowledge to recreate some effect? Or is that not "real knowledge"? Historians write about what happened, and would probably consider themselves to be imparting knowledge, but they are not necessarily after giving people the power to recreate some effect. Now on to your claim that literature and philosophy are about how to live good lives. This sounds like a view influenced by the ancient Greeks and Romans, and is about a couple of thousand years out of date. Both literature and philosophy have grown in many different directions since then (though even then this was hardly the only aim of literature or philosophy), and plenty of people who work in both fields don't concern themselves with the aim of how to live a good life. Plenty of literature in the last century, for instance, is about pointing out the futility of trying to live a good life, or the absurdity of life, about humans constantly and inevitably being frustrated in their striving to live any kind of life, about going mad, about going in circles, about failure. The Existentialists were some of the most well known of such authors, but there are thousands of others. Representatives of analytic philosophy have often sneered at the aims of ancient philosophy, such as trying to find what it means to live a good life, and have (in an echo of scholastic philosophy) instead often focused on endless technical minutia such as analyzing sentence structure or logical forms of argument. Some other forms of philosophy are more about pointing out underlying assumptions. Yet others point out problems with these assumptions, such as Hume's critique of causality. And others still, such as some phenomenologists or the cognitively-oriented analytics, are more interested in describing how perception works or what phenomena appear. Yet others are interested in what we can know, what reality is, or what science is, etc. Sure, some philosophers are still interested in how to live a good life, or what makes for a good life.. but that is a rather specialized and narrow concern of a relatively small number of philosophers, and there's a lot more to philosophy in general than that. Incidentally, Francis Bacon had a highly scientistic view, and believed that every field should be more like the hard sciences, and that science was the only legitimate or best way of understanding the world (a view you seem to be echoing). Many people in the humanities do not agree with this view.

by Frippy 6y ago

aliante 6y ago

> humanities study things which are not (entirely) subject to scientific rigor That is putting it mildly. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair

Frippy 6y ago
Yeah I agree, there are some particularly egregious examples. If you want a good laugh about this stuff, "Fashionable Nonsense" is a great book.

mc32 6y ago

>” the humanities study things which are not (entirely) subject to scientific rigor, but which are still worth studying.” An issue with these things is that institutions and government make major decisions based on the output from these fields. It’s not that we discount them completely but we should also consider opposing data from alternate studies, but what you get is agenda driven decision making (on all sides, this isn’t the province of one ideology).

ianleeclark 6y ago
> An issue with these things is that institutions and government make major decisions ... what you get is agenda driven decision making What do you think politics is? Everyone in politics has an agenda. > It’s not that we discount them completely but we should also consider opposing data from alternate studies Politicians already do this. Whenever there's a decision being made, it's being processed through a host of ideological positions.
- mc32 6y ago
  I’m fine with these if they have some data that’s withstood scrutiny —but I’ve seen governments make decisions based on studies published by second tier educational institutions because it dovetails with their ideology.
  - ianleeclark 6y ago
    I still would like to know what your conception of politics is. > I’ve seen governments make decisions based on studies published by second tier educational institutions because it dovetails with their ideology. Do you have an example of this for a humanities specific field? I could see maybe philosophy, but I really don't think most humanities fields have the political power a lot of people attribute to them.
- kortilla 6y ago
  Agendas are expected. Don’t use an economics paper to back a policy decision under the guise of data/science-driven policy making though.

jseliger 6y ago

One big issue is how the humanities are widely practiced today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23728642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23728642

Frippy 6y ago
Yep I agree, I had some horrible professors as a history postgrad that embodied this exact approach.

unishark 6y ago

If you can't control the experiment and identify causation or limit the number of changed variables, you really shouldn't even use the word "experiment". Sure there's an upside in letting smart people try to figure things out. But there's a downside in legitimizing the practice. Especially since academia isn't so just about intelligence but as much or more about self-agency. The people who push hardest for agendas get the funding, write the books, etc.

Frippy 6y ago
I'm not sure what a better word would be. We use the same word informally to describe how babies learn—they poke and prod at their environment and see what happens. Just because they aren't rigorous doesn't mean the process doesn't give them some idea (with an implicit confidence level, of course) of how things work.

pmoriarty 6y ago

"knowledge—real knowledge—is about the ability to reliably recreate some effect. ... Literature and philosophy are collections of "experiments" conducted and suppositions made by our predecessors about how to live good lives" Completely and strongly disagree with both of these. Even in the sciences, there are many who value gaining knowledge for knowledge's sake, for the joy of discovery, and for a better understanding of the world -- quite apart from its utilitarian value in "reliably recreating some effects". Now on to the humanities... just a couple of examples: Do you feel that you know your children, your siblings, your lover, or your parents? Is the point of that knowledge to recreate some effect? Or is that not "real knowledge"? Historians write about what happened, and would probably consider themselves to be imparting knowledge, but they are not necessarily after giving people the power to recreate some effect. Now on to your claim that literature and philosophy are about how to live good lives. This sounds like a view influenced by the ancient Greeks and Romans, and is about a couple of thousand years out of date. Both literature and philosophy have grown in many different directions since then (though even then this was hardly the only aim of literature or philosophy), and plenty of people who work in both fields don't concern themselves with the aim of how to live a good life. Plenty of literature in the last century, for instance, is about pointing out the futility of trying to live a good life, or the absurdity of life, about humans constantly and inevitably being frustrated in their striving to live any kind of life, about going mad, about going in circles, about failure. The Existentialists were some of the most well known of such authors, but there are thousands of others. Representatives of analytic philosophy have often sneered at the aims of ancient philosophy, such as trying to find what it means to live a good life, and have (in an echo of scholastic philosophy) instead often focused on endless technical minutia such as analyzing sentence structure or logical forms of argument. Some other forms of philosophy are more about pointing out underlying assumptions. Yet others point out problems with these assumptions, such as Hume's critique of causality. And others still, such as some phenomenologists or the cognitively-oriented analytics, are more interested in describing how perception works or what phenomena appear. Yet others are interested in what we can know, what reality is, or what science is, etc. Sure, some philosophers are still interested in how to live a good life, or what makes for a good life.. but that is a rather specialized and narrow concern of a relatively small number of philosophers, and there's a lot more to philosophy in general than that. Incidentally, Francis Bacon had a highly scientistic view, and believed that every field should be more like the hard sciences, and that science was the only legitimate or best way of understanding the world (a view you seem to be echoing). Many people in the humanities do not agree with this view.