On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 12:28 PM, Phil Sandifer <snowspinner(a)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.
--
-george william herbert
george.herbert(a)gmail.com