Do Humanists Know Anything?

Do humanists know anything? Do they even want to? Academics in the humanities often try to distance themselves from the notion that they are engaged in the production of knowledge. Consider, for instance, these comments by the writer and critic Jesse McCarthy in a recent Chronicle Review roundtable on Jonathan Kramnick’s book Criticism and Truth:

I feel like Kramnick … falls prey to a lure, which is this emphasis on “knowledge” and “knowing,” as opposed to other categories that are pretty fundamental and inextricable to our method: evaluation, judgment, various aspects of aesthetic appreciation. Or even “understanding” — why not that, as opposed to “knowledge”? There is something about this need to defend the discipline on the terms of a kind of analogy to the sciences … that I think unnecessarily strains the argument.

If even the mere use of the word “knowledge” in the neighborhood of the humanities qualifies as an attempt to defend them by drawing an analogy to the sciences, our purchase on what knowledge is has become seriously imperiled. We — scholars, students, and the public — need a wide-ranging conception of knowledge that is distinct from the kind of thing we acquire through the sciences, while nevertheless remaining recognizable as knowledge.

Like it or not, a lot of people care about whether what they’re hearing, reading, or thinking constitutes a form of knowledge. As interesting and enjoyable as our students find their humanities courses, there is a part of them that wonders whether it makes sense to spend a lot of time reading and writing about historically unstable, widely debated ideas that, whatever their merits, seem to amount to little more than that: interesting ideas. From this perspective, science classes involve learning what’s true, while humanities classes involve merely learning about what some people have said. Sometimes we like the things people have said. Other times we dislike the things people have said. Why bother frittering your time away listening to some professor’s opinion about some professor’s opinion when you could acquire actual knowledge?

What’s missing here is an appreciation for the fact that the development of ideas in both the natural sciences and the humanities is a social process. In the natural sciences, the ability of an idea to rise to the level of scientific knowledge is not determined by whether it correctly describes reality as it truly is. It is determined by whether it has satisfied the community’s scholarly standards for truth.

Those standards can include things like accuracy, which have traditionally been associated with reality. But they can also include fealty to other sorts of norms, norms whose connection to the perception of reality is at best dubious. Lots of scientists, for example, value theories that lend themselves to visualization. But no one is under the delusion that theories that can be visualized are somehow more likely to be true. Practitioners of the natural sciences have, as a community, formulated a set of norms that they find satisfactory for the facilitation of scientific inquiry. Not an arbitrary set: The empirically oriented set of norms governing modern science has expanded our knowledge of the natural world in ways that were clearly not possible using the methodological precepts of premodern natural philosophy. Yet not a perfect set either, as contemporary scientists well know: The “p-value ≤ 0.05” norm, for example, is being seriously reconsidered in some disciplines.

It is certain that researchers in pursuit of scientific knowledge will in the future find cause to revise and supplement this set of norms still further. When the community senses that something’s not working, members will have no choice but to go through the disorienting social process of renegotiating what it is they want out of scientific inquiry. The outcome of this negotiation will be nothing less than a new conception of scientific knowledge. Any stability that science now possesses is entirely dependent on the buy-in of the contemporary scientific community.

It is this same social process that has historically governed the evolution of ideas in the humanities. Exemplary works of intellectual and artistic production establish a prominent place for themselves in our scholarly traditions, a place that can endure for surprisingly long periods of time. The humanist’s job is to carefully consider what it is about these exemplars that has captured the attention and admiration of experts, to try to articulate our tacit, presupposed, or subconscious standards for beauty or enlightenment or explanation, which these works have evidently satisfied. Humanists debate the cogency of these articulations with other members of their scholarly community. In the process, their sense of what those standards are becomes both more refined and more explicit.

Philosophy, for example, has long been fascinated by the concept of justice. Philosophers since antiquity have focused lots of energy on proposing articulations of what it means for an act or a society to be just. The dominant articulation in our time has been John Rawls’s “justice as fairness,” which holds (in one popular formulation) that economic inequality is just only to the extent that it is necessary to make the worst off as well off as possible. Rawls’s proposal has spawned a vast and vigorous literature, encompassing not just the work of other philosophers, but of economists, political scientists, legal theorists, sociologists, and others. These scholars have criticized, refined, applied, and adapted Rawls’s framework in the hopes of seeing whether its apparent promise can satisfy our society’s intuitive, logically tutored sense of what makes a distribution just, whether it can illuminate social-policy pathways that strike us as both morally and economically sound, and so on. As with any scientific theory, whether Rawls’s conception of justice succeeds and in what form will depend on the extent to which it can perform the philosophical, economic, and political tasks we assign to it, in a manner that we deem satisfactory. Just as in science, there is no higher court than the relevant scholarly community.

By bringing out into the open the reasons behind the exemplary status of certain human achievements, the community of humanists provides us with a framework for reflecting deeply and cogently on our experience of creative works. Anyone who can look at a painting can have a feeling about it. But critics and art historians can articulate that feeling and draw attention to the features of the painting that are responsible for it. Using a set of norms developed by previous generations of scholars, they are able to transform our raw experience into propositional awareness. The first time I saw a Rothko painting, I thought, “cool.” When the historian Stephen Polcari refers to their “directness” and to the “emotional experience” they represent, I can feel my experience of those paintings deepening in a way that no amount of staring would have been able to achieve.

Some paintings elicit a reaction that emanates from their garishness. There are constraints on what can qualify as a “garish” painting. Those constraints tell us something about what garishness is. Art critics acquire knowledge when they acquire the concept garish. But our culture or our language could have developed in such a way that we simply would not have the concept garish, nor a functional equivalent that makes the same kinds of distinctions. In that horrifying possible world, it would be impossible to know whether a painting is garish.

Why do we balk at the notion that a student might, through this educational process, acquire “knowledge” of beauty, or of justice? If acquiring scientific knowledge involves learning things that have satisfied the scientific community’s standards, why would learning things that have satisfied the critics’ standards not qualify as aesthetic knowledge?

An opponent of this sacrilege will fear that to assert such a thing would be to trivialize knowledge — or worse, to relativize it. He wants nature, rather than the scientific community, to have the last word. But if you probe this opponent even gently, you will find that his conception of scientific knowledge is built on a house of cards. He can’t bring himself to confess what everyone has always known: Nature doesn’t have words; we do. The laws that we use to describe nature — those are ours. We developed them in order to explain aspects of our experience with nature. Members of a scientific discipline overwhelmingly endorse that discipline’s laws. But what if they hadn’t? What if they had found that those putative laws did a rather poor job of summarizing their observations? Would nature nevertheless have had the last word, pushed us aside and said, “No, you are going to use those laws whether you like it or not?”

When we pretend that there is something beyond the scientific community pulling the strings, we invest its members with a perverse species of priestly authority. Science is the attempt to systematize our experience of nature, in whatever form those experiences might come. We call a systemization “scientific knowledge” when it gains the assent of the community of scientists — not just when it was developed through the scientific method. The scientific method — comprising observation, hypothesis, experiment, analysis, conclusion — is not a recipe for the production of knowledge. It is a highly schematized representation of some major nodes of some scientific investigations. But the mere fact that a conclusion has been reached through scientific investigation does not thereby qualify it as scientific knowledge. Scientific knowledge is what sometimes occurs when some bit of research acquires the (often tacit) approval of the scientific community after having undergone sufficient scrutiny.

Some of this research will adhere perfectly to the scientific method, and some of it won’t. Whether it does or not, the fate of any bit of research lies solely in the hands of the relevant disciplinary community, because it is that community’s overwhelmingly uncoordinated appraisal of the research — not the pattern of investigation itself — that determines whether it will feature in future inquiry, or in textbooks, or as the basis for policy recommendations. The fundamental point is that, to the extent that the scientific process exemplifies the process by which genuine knowledge is produced, that process is defined by its distinctive set of social filtration and preservation mechanisms rather than by following any sacred recipe or step-by-step instructions. Those instructions can be assiduously followed in the comfort of your home. It takes the combined individual judgments of a community of practitioners to produce scientific knowledge.

Now, on what in particular will these individual judgments depend? If we know anything about science, we know that scientists draw their conclusions based on “the evidence.” What could be more scientific than that? Nothing. That is the most scientific that it is possible to be. It is also nearly as vague as it is possible to be. No one should doubt for a second that natural scientists take evidence from observation and experiment very, very seriously. But evidence, regardless of its form, cannot by itself determine what one ought to believe. Two individuals faced with all the same data can nevertheless rationally disagree with one another.

This trivial point, easy to appreciate in the abstract, is for some reason treated as a scandal when applied to the domain of scientific inquiry. In the minds of many of my students, the difference between science and whatever the hell it is I do is that scientists can come to consensus because their individual use of scientific evidence guarantees that each one of them will arrive at the same logically unavoidable conclusion about nature. For them, human judgment is simply a contingency by which these logically unavoidable conclusions are reached. The hard truth, which it can take several semesters for them to come to terms with, is that scientists who agree on all the facts nevertheless routinely disagree about how those facts ought to be interpreted — and that, no matter how many more facts they acquire, rational disagreement will always be possible. Anyone who says otherwise is promoting an epistemological fantasy world that, while undeniably comforting, erects more hurdles than it clears when it comes to understanding the production of knowledge.

Individual and community-level judgment has always played a determinative role in the development of scientific knowledge, and it always will. Students need to have an image of science that emphasizes, rather than suppresses, the indispensable role of human judgment. Understanding the power of scientific inquiry begins by reflecting on how a thoroughly human endeavor can deliver the sorts of results for which science is justly famous. Scientific knowledge is not what we come to believe about nature after making sure that we’ve subtracted the influence of human thought. It is a product of human thought.

A corollary is that philosophers, historians, and critics are also engaged in the systematization of experience — not of nature, but of ourselves and of each other. Some of their systemizations gain the assent of the scholarly community. We are discouraged from calling this “knowledge” because it doesn’t look much like what we think scientific knowledge looks like. Then again, scientific knowledge doesn’t look much like what we think scientific knowledge looks like. We need to develop a better general representation of knowledge that accommodates the human realities underlying scientific knowledge. Only then will the nature of humanistic knowledge come into focus.

If and when it does come into focus, we will find that it is increasingly under threat. The sense in which a given field in the humanities constitutes a disciplinary community is now mostly nominal. Our intellectual culture valorizes the pursuit of categorically novel approaches to categorically new research topics. This has not been without benefit. But there are costs to unrestrained novelty seeking. It is not congenial to the development of genuine expertise. It does not promote depth of insight. And it tends to be bored by what is widely accessible. As a result, to our discredit, we largely do not regard an interest in general, popular, or well-worn themes as intellectually serious. It is also to our detriment. Our widespread disdain for the preservation of a set of exemplars from which to extract disciplinary norms has fueled the degradation of humanistic disciplines as intellectual communities. Without those communities, the most important kinds of knowledge — scientific, moral, aesthetic, philosophical, historical — are not possible.

In addition, if we insist on taking up topics that will, at most, be of interest to a handful of other humanities professors, who is to blame when the broader culture turns against us? The philistines who lack the capacity to discern value? Or the stewards of value themselves, who would often rather whisper into a void than deign to provide others with sufficient enticement to lead an examined life? We may have reached the limits of what can be achieved by arguing for why the humanities are valuable. But we have always had other options. We can invite people to learn about the value of the humanities by acting as guides through works that exemplify that value.

Canonical works used to serve this function. Canons are now controversial for a number of reasons. What is not clear, though, is whether humanistic knowledge is possible without them. The history of science is an important and untapped repository for understanding how canons can help guide the development of disciplinary practice while having surprisingly little influence on what practitioners actually come to believe about the world. Newtonian mechanics is canonical, but no practicing physicist thinks that the universe is literally and fundamentally a Newtonian one.

The story we’ve been told about the nature of scientific knowledge profoundly misrepresents the substance of that knowledge. Its real substance — that which distinguishes it from mere opinion — is something that research in the humanities can, and routinely does, acquire. When the humanities create knowledge, it is not because they sometimes successfully mimic the natural sciences. It is because they, like the natural sciences, sometimes produce a way of framing some phenomenon that is able to gain the assent of the scholarly community. That’s going to have to be good enough.