On Dec 11, 2008, at 11:19 PM, WJhonson(a)aol.com wrote:
But maybe you could give a concrete example of where
you think there
is bias
against the humanities.
Well, in an earlier reply I pointed to the ludicrous problems with NOR
and "interpretation." There's a policy that is actively geared against
the humanities. (Or, let's be fairer, against literary studies, which
is my field)
Beyond that? Literary studies really does have a substantial DIY ethic
with primary sources. We're not going to publish an essay that tells
you that the theme of John Steinbeck's _The Pearl_ is greed, or that
the narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper" is an unreliable narrator. We
have a basic expectation that you can figure that out. Now, yes, you
can probably, if you go looking, find a source that mentions either of
those facts. But it's going to be a side mention. It might be possible
to stitch together an article via side mentions in scholarly articles,
but it's an awkward and unnatural way to do it that does not resemble
any sort of existing research practices.
A lot of this is that humanities knowledge does not have the same sort
of hierarchical structure that science knowledge often does, where you
go somewhat smoothly from basic concepts to advanced ones. And you
have textbooks that cover the basic stuff, advanced overviews for the
advanced stuff, and journal articles for the absolute newest stuff.
Humanities knowledge does not split easily into basic and advanced
pools, and so you rarely have a textbook of obvious and basic
knowledge about various pieces of literature - and even less so a good
one. Where basic textbooks in the sciences provide explanation, a
basic textbook in an English class is often a reader of various poems
and short stories.
So our bias against primary sources becomes a major barrier to adding
basic knowledge from the humanities. Because while it exists in
patches here and there, there just isn't the sort of systemic effort
to document basic knowledge about literature that there is about
chemistry. We rely more heavily on an oral tradition and on the belief
that there will be a substantial commonality in interpretations
resulting from reading the primary sources.
I think that some of the people who shaped the
early policies were actually involved in the soft sciences.
I'm sure they were. I mean, Larry was a philosopher. But he was an
Objectivist philosopher, and they don't exactly enjoy widespread
acceptance in the philosophical community. I didn't mean "techno-
libertarian" as a comment about disciplinarity - more as a
philosophical view. The Slashdot and XKCD crowd, basically - which
does share certain political and philosophical views, among them a
general hostility towards postmodernism. And that is where we started,
because it's where any crazy free content project in 2003 was going to
start. That was the base you built from in 2003. It's not a problem as
such - they did a great job. But literary studies was not high on
their mind.
An example - I remember in the early days a discussion about using
content from an avowedly Marxist source, and Jimbo saying that, given
how discredited Marxist economics was, he did not think they were a
reliable source. Now, he's right - in economics. But in literary
studies, Marxism remains huge. I mean, absolutely massive. And so
dismissing a source as unreliable and insignificant because it's
Marxist is a really significant problem from the perspective of my
field.
Now, mind you, I suspect most of what happened there was that Jimbo
just didn't really know what was up with literary studies, and the
needs of that area of the project didn't even occur to him - not that
he actively wanted to stomp out coverage of that. But it remains a
bias that was very present in the early days, and has shaped some of
our fundamental attitudes.
-Phil