On Dec 12, 2008, at 3:11 PM, George Herbert wrote:
I don't think he's trying to diminish the role
of humanities. Just
acknowledge that some of it is less fact based than the hard sciences.
Literary criticism, while well founded, is not as fact-based as
Chemistry or Physics.
Well, I wouldn't say it's not as fact-based. I think that's an over-
simplification of the issue, in that it suggests that there is no
normative force to literary criticism. There is.
I know professional, academic literary critics focused
on popular
culture and science fiction, for example - there's at least one major
annual conference of speculative fiction literary critics, whose
papers are peer reviewed and do serious analysis. But those people
know that they're based on intellectual constructs and opinion, not
underlying physical truth.
Sure. I am one of those academic literary critics. But I don't think
that "intellectual constructs and opinion" quite captures what's going
on there. I know of no literary critics who do not firmly believe that
their views are correct, and who do not base this on the marshaling of
evidence rather than on some blind religious faith. I think it is more
accurate to say that, in literary studies, there is the practical
expectation of disagreement, and an acceptance of the virtue of
argument and debate as a mode of discourse.
I would happily accept any of their appropriate and
topical work as
commentary to put into a Wikipedia popular culture article. But
neither they nor I would assert that it's as unambiguous as say a
chemistry experiment.
I certainly wouldn't say it's as unambiguous as a chemistry
experiment. But that is more often because of the fact of disagreement
than anything else. There is a wider variety of perspectives out of
the humanities than there is out of chemistry. But that is not
equivalent to research in the humanities being opinions.
I mean, I suppose it's a problem if you look to academic research to
provide absolute and irrefutable knowledge. But that's a pretty weird
way to approach NPOV.
-Phil