I have recently made the acquaintance of a Philological Crocodile, who raises an interesting question: Are scientists really smarter than scholars of the humanities? 1 And then the crocodile chomps it to bits. As it happens, I have an opinion on this question. Fortunately, I commit neither of the sins he excoriates.
I know a lot of really smart people on both sides of the divide. The humanities scholars are better at arguing. The scientists accomplish more, so we look smarter. This appearance can be traced to one underlying fact: in the sciences we have an objective standard for what is “true”. No theory ever completely passes that test, but a lot of ideas fail it. In the humanities, nothing seems ever to be completely decided. Any theory is as good as the person arguing for it.
This has an immediate practical consequence. Those who purport to study the humanities must learn centuries of earlier work and include it in their research. A dissertation in the humanities has hundreds of pages of description of earlier thoughts on the subject, accompanied by acknowledgements or refutations. The sciences carry little of that baggage. Because a scientist can be proven incorrect or irrelevant, all the previous thinkers and researchers who have turned out to be wrong can be ignored. Therefore, the sciences can progress faster.
My dissertation; banana for scale
A visit to our Physics Department library in the 1980s gave me a lasting impression of this phenomenon. One bookcase held printed copies of all the doctoral dissertations in the history of the department. Most were about a centimeter thick. These were written by people who had made a significant original contribution to our knowledge of the natural world. A couple were 7-10 cm thick. These were dissertations for degrees in education or philosophy of science.
Mine was 133 pages long, double-spaced, and that includes the ancient tradition that figures should be on their own page and the caption on the facing page. My references were numbered 1 through 64. Can you imagine anyone getting past a humanities review committee with 64 citations? Citations to the committee-members themselves probably have to be more than that.
So that’s my resolution of the whole argument. Scientists look smarter if we’re measuring achievement, but humanities scholars look smarter when we argue with them. If the humanities had a way to prove someone definitively wrong, future researchers could ignore anyone in that category and everyone could save a lot of time. It invites speculation — what would the humanities look like, if they advanced like the sciences do?
tom hillman
my citations have more citations than that.
DS
Bearing in mind, some fields of Humanities do use empirical data – it’s not as rigorous as the Hard Sciences, but it’s not simply fluff and opinion either. I myself would argue that Science and Humanities cannot properly exist without the other – Humanities introduces ethics and limits to scientific endeavour, whereas Science grounds Humanities in the exterior world.
Moreover, the (very nineteenth century) notion of an objective, scientific Humanities… I think that gets you potential dystopia. Democracy gets dismantled in favour of Plato’s Republic. History warps into Asimov’s Psychohistory. Economics? Well, the people who treat Economics as a science have a somewhat sordid habit of denying reality.