20.221 great promise, not great threat

               Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 20, No. 221.
       Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
  www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/humanities/cch/research/publications/humanist.html
                        www.princeton.edu/humanist/
                     Submit to: humanist_at_princeton.edu

   [1] From: Lynda Williams <lynda_at_okalrel.org> (23)
         Subject: Re: 20.219 more than a great promise

   [2] From: "Hunsucker, R.L." <R.L.Hunsucker_at_uva.nl> (239)
         Subject: RE: 20.211 great promise, not great threat?

--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
         Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2006 08:26:21 +0100
         From: Lynda Williams <lynda_at_okalrel.org>
         Subject: Re: 20.219 more than a great promise

>Still, if there was ever a time for humanists to be
> making common cause with scientists, I'd say this is it. We share a
> common belief in the value of inquiry, and for both groups the
> suppression of inquiry is a far greater threat than the unlikely
> possibility that one side of the sciences/humanities division is
> ever going to have permanent ascendancy over the other.
>
> DS

Put that way, the argument that humanities should support the sciences
makes sense. But it begs the question "in what cause".

The most fundamental problem is that the whole premise of academia as
a bastion of "the spirit of inquiry" is under attack from the new
model of academia as a business.

But perhaps I was simply naive to have imagined there was ever any
other agenda than the good of individual faculty members and
institutions, from a career point of view. Except for a few wonderful
people here and there whose interests lay in pure inquiry, or in
inquiry for the betterment of mankind.

---------------------------------------------------------------
Lynda Williams, SF Author (http://www.okalrel.org)
2005 The Courtesan Prince - Edge SF and Fantasy
2006 "Harpy" in MYTHSPRING
2006 Guide to the Okal Rel Universe - Fandom Press

--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
         Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2006 08:31:07 +0100
         From: "Hunsucker, R.L." <R.L.Hunsucker_at_uva.nl>
         Subject: RE: 20.211 great promise, not great threat?

Colleagues,

First Willard (via Andrew) and then David, if I may be
permitted -- and I'm trying my best to be brief. (Since
one could go on indefinitely on this topic while hardly
even feeling it.)

I'd think that dismissing the two historians' reactions as
"Luddite sentiments" is not only too facile (surely one
can if so inclined counter them in a more substantive
way) and perhaps too denigrating, but -- to me most
importantly -- by implication too scientistic. As though
natural scientists by the very nature of what they do are
bringers of social, cultural and intellectual progression
(not to speak of truth and rationality, mirrors of nature
and suchlike), and uneasiness with their "answers" and
"arguments" can arise only from a sort of imbecilic
conservatism. Feyerabend has laid the validity of this
kind of assumption pretty convincingly to rest. (Not
that he's the only one -- but he did it repeatedly and in
various ways, and eloquently and with good humor, so
I'll mention only him.)

Not that I am inclined to applaud those historians'
line of thinking. They seem (ironically !) to be in the
same boat, very much the wrong boat in my opinion, as
Andrew, already at their very point of departure : i.e. in
presuming that there are essential epistemic differences
between investigators/scholars in the natural sciences
and investigators/scholars in the humanities : in the way
they think, the way they see things, the kinds of
conclusions they draw. Ontologies differ significantly
(though probably less than one used to think, before
Latour and others), epistemics -- not to mention social
and social-psychological determinants -- not significantly.
This is the drift of much of the last decades' work in the
philosophy of science, the sociology of knowledge and
other disciplines. And it accords well with the conclusions
of many an eminent natural scientist once he turns
seriously to reflecting on what he has spent his life doing,
and may well still be doing.

What I'm trying to say, I guess, is that the whole discussion,
the whole controversy if you will, in the end is hardly fertile.
So that a question such as Willard's, "the question of how we
know what we know", of "the comparison with what we in
the end plainly know [and an intellectual space with pseudo-
natural objects obeying algorithmic laws]", should never be
seen as an occasion for setting a "science" way of thinking
off against a "humanities" way of thinking (or of reasoning
or of arguing). We don't need humanities answers instead
of science answers, or vice versa, we just need good answers.
The only good answers, at least the only answers to this
kind of question which I have ever found compelling, can
never be forced into one or the other of those two (artificial,
and presumably incommensurable) categories. That's the
great glory of real intellectual cogency. It's to me a tremendous
reassurance, namely that we're all in this together. What more
could you want ? (And don't be nervous about the "sciences";
they've if anything more to fear from us these days than we
from them.)

And then as to David's posting under this heading.

This all sounds quite (direly) intriguing, to quote : "a historical
moment when the authority, independence, and integrity of
the natural sciences have been under sustained attack from
powerful retrograde forces", "the suppression of inquiry" --
which makes one all the more curious to what he's in fact
referring. And "empirical evidence" of what ?? Maybe I missed
something along the line, but it all sounds sufficiently ominous
to merit some discussion even on this list (now that we're off
on science as opposed to us). I'm quite curious.

I hope he will fill us in and be more explicit, for I'd welcome the
occasion to see discussed, against the background of an actual
specific contemporary situation, concepts such as the authority
and independence of the natural sciences -- topics on which
there exists a great deal of confusion and misunderstanding, it
seems to me.

Laval Hunsucker

Universiteit van Amsterdam
Universiteitsbibliotheek / Bibliotheek Geesteswetenschappen

>
> On Sun, 24 Sep 2006 08:50:12 +0100, willard_at_LISTS.VILLAGE.VIRGINIA.EDU
> wrote:
> > Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 20, No. 211. Centre for Computing
> > in the Humanities, King's College London
> >
> www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/humanities/cch/research/publications/humanist.
> ht
> > ml www.princeton.edu/humanist/
> > Submit to: humanist_at_princeton.edu
> >
> >
> > Date: Sun, 24 Sep 2006 08:35:30 +0100
> > From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty_at_kcl.ac.uk> > promise, not
> great threat?
> >
> > Recently I found myself in conversation, in the kitchen of an
> > academic residence in Leiden, with three other academics, one of
> > them a distinguished older historian, one a younger sociologist,
> > the third a much younger historian. In the course of talking about
> > this and that, the older fellow asked me what I did. Weighing
> > heavily on my mind was a public lecture I was writing on just that
> > topic, so I summarized the contents of the lecture. In
> it, as is my
> > habit these days, I argue that computing gives us powerful help in
> > addressing the question of how we know what we know -- by allowing
> > us to set aside what can be described computationally, leaving the
> > uncomputable residue. This leads to some research that draws on
> > ideas in the philosophy of experimental science, and to
> speculation
> > (to me compelling) of how computing defines an intellectual space
> > within which one can operate *as if* the objects of study were
> > natural objects obeying algorithmic laws -- the point,
> again, being
> > in the comparison with what we in the end plainly know. My appeal
> > is, and was then, in the kitchen in Leiden, to curiosity. Who, I
> > wonder, would not want to pry into how they know what they know --
> > with any tool that comes to hand?
> >
> > Silly me. Curiosity kills cats. But I exaggerate. I wasn't killed.
> > My senior colleague was soft-spoken and very polite. In his own
> > way, however, he illuminated the problem -- he said he was
> > "disappointed". What he wanted from me, he said, was a strong
> > argument from the humanities rather than one from the sciences. I
> > thought I was giving him exactly that -- no scientist qua
> scientist
> > would argue as I do. Later on, the young historian told me, "we
> > don't like being told that the sciences have all the answers!"
> > Again, my point was precisely that the answers coming from the
> > sciences are interesting to me precisely because they
> fall short --
> > though I admit to, and am curious about, intriguingly closer
> > answers coming from the neurosciences, as they up the ante a fair
> > bit.
> >
> > I would be very interested to know where you think the problem is,
> > especially if some part of it, as I suspect, is due to
> > muddleheadedness on my part. Richard Rorty said some time ago (in
> > an London Review of Books piece) that he thought we are seeing an
> > end to the epistemic wars between the sciences and the humanities.
> > Ian Hacking has done much to change hostilities into negotiations.
> > I think we have a big role to play here -- and, if I am
> right, that
> > it just could be the most important result of all.
> >
> > Comments?
> >
> > Yours,
> > WM
> >
> >
> > Dr Willard McCarty | Reader in Humanities Computing | Centre for
> > Computing in the Humanities | King's College London | Kay House, 7
> > Arundel Street | London WC2R 3DX | U.K. | +44 (0)20
> 7848-2784 fax: -
> > 2980 || willard.mccarty_at_kcl.ac.uk
> www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/wlm/
>
> --[2]---------------------------------------------------------
> ---------
> Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2006 07:33:04 +0100
> From: Andrew Brook <abrook_at_ccs.carleton.ca>
> >
> Willard, two things:
>
> 1. By no means all historians would share the Luddite sentiments you
> ran into. After all, many history depts are part of faculties of
> social science now. Individual differences are enormous, here as
> elsewhere in academia.
>
> 2. Some academics simply don't listen. At a talk recent, a very
> senior named chairholder told a younger presenter that the case he
> had made about a certain issue was absurd and that what he should
> have said was X. He then laid out as X precisely the case that the
> presenter had made! Hadn't heard a thing.
>
> It is said that intellectual battles are won not with our colleagues
> but with the generation that is currently our graduate students. I'd
> be willing to bet that some of the graduate students of the
> historians you mentioned would have reacted quite differently from
> the way the historians reacted.
>
> Andrew
>
> --
>
> Andrew Brook
> Chancellor's Professor of Philosophy
> Director, Institute of Cognitive Science
> Member, Canadian Psychoanalytic Society
> 2217 Dunton Tower, Carleton University
> Ottawa ON, Canada K1S 5B6
> Ph: 613 520-3597
> Fax: 613 520-3985
> Web: www.carleton.ca/~abrook

>
>
> Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2006 07:58:51 +0100
> From: David Sewell <dsewell_at_virginia.edu>
> Subject: Re: 20.211 great promise, not great threat?
>
> > Richard Rorty said some time ago (in an
> > London Review of Books piece) that he thought we are
> seeing an end to
> > the epistemic wars between the sciences and the humanities. Ian
> > Hacking has done much to change hostilities into negotiations. I
> > think we have a big role to play here -- and, if I am
> right, that it
> > just could be the most important result of all.
>
> I can't speak to the epistemic issues, but at least within the context
> of the United States it would be the height of irresponsibility for an
> academic humanist to persist in fighting the old "two
> cultures" battles
> against our colleagues in the sciences at a historical moment when the
> authority, independence, and integrity of the natural
> sciences have been
> under sustained attack from powerful retrograde forces.
> Elsewhere things
> are not so dire, at least to the extent that putting fingers in one's
> ears and muttering "I can't hear you!" has not been considered an
> appropriate response to empirical evidence by most central
> governments.
> Still, if there was ever a time for humanists to be making
> common cause
> with scientists, I'd say this is it. We share a common belief in the
> value of inquiry, and for both groups the suppression of inquiry is
> a far greater threat than the unlikely possibility that one
> side of the
> sciences/humanities division is ever going to have permanent
> ascendancy
> over the other.
>
> DS
>
> --
> David Sewell, Editorial and Technical Manager
> ROTUNDA, The University of Virginia Press
> PO Box 400318, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4318 USA
> Courier: 310 Old Ivy Way, Suite 302, Charlottesville VA 22903
> Email: dsewell_at_virginia.edu Tel: +1 434 924 9973
> Web: http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/
>
Received on Wed Sep 27 2006 - 03:58:04 EDT