On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 12:28 PM, Phil Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
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.
I wouldn't expect even hard sciences research to produce absolute irrefutable knowledge - the acknowledgement that data can be wrong, theories can be wrong, or can be approximations with as yet unknown boundaries of accuracy, is a fundamental part of serious physical science work. Just yesterday, I discovered some papers which showed that a major engineering theory in a field I seriously hobby in had a inaccurate underlying assumption and inaccurate predictions across a wide range of possible values of the input constants. Those formulas have been used throughout the industry in question for over 60 years, and nobody noticed the flaw until about 10 years ago. Even then, when it was published, the textbooks that came out in the next couple of years didn't include the correction.
The issue at hand is that the standards for the humanities and for hard sciences aren't the same - one can argue about the verbage used, what I said comes from the viewpoint of someone who tends to the physical sciences. But it's not denigrating the humanities to acknowledge that they're different approaches and standards. There are plenty of people in the pure humanities who take scholarship very seriously and are as rigorous with their work as any physical scientists are.
This doesn't mean that we can't or shouldn't use humanities publications as references in Wikipedia. It does introduce a bit more confusion about what standards we use for sources and claims meeting the standard of "reliable". It's fairly unambiguous that a paper in say Physical Review Letters can be treated as credible (not correct, but credible/reliable), absent a solid disproof. Which of the literary criticism academics, publications, etc. can be so assumed to be accurate is more opaque to the outsider and harder to demonstrate / validate, I think.
That doesn't mean that we should reject them as a field, no. It just means that when there's a question, it's harder to tell.
I am willing to live with that and put the effort in if such a question comes in front of me, because I value that type of information even though I don't participate in creating it. Hopefully the community at large in Wikipedia can operate in a similar manner.