One of the challenges facing the country right now in this time of economic crisis is that we’re also about to be confronted by the result of a decade of neglect of the nation’s infrastructure, in particular, the chronic starvation of our universities. It’s an insidious problem, because as administrations have discovered time and again, you can cut an education budget and nothing bad happens, from their perspective. The faculty get a pay freeze; we tighten our belts. The universities lose public funds; we raise tuition a little bit. A few faculty are lost to attrition, and the state decides to defer their replacement for a year or two or indefinitely; the remaining faculty scramble to cover the manpower loss. We can continue to do our jobs, but behind the scenes, the stresses simply grow and worsen.
I can testify to this from personal experience. My biology department struggles every year with the routine business of retirements and sabbatical leaves — we have absolutely no fat in this group, with every member playing an essential role in the curriculum, so every departure, even temporary ones, increases the strain. We have to frantically rearrange schedules to cover our deficits, we have to drop courses for a year (so the students have to juggle their schedules as well), and we hang by our fingernails waiting for the administration to do basic things, like approve temporary hires or allow us to do a search for replacement faculty. Since the state is contributing less and less every year, we will soon reach a point where we simply won’t be allowed to replace essential personnel, and then the whole system is going to break down.
The University of Florida has reached that point. The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences has been told to cut 10% from its budget. Since the biggest chunk of any university’s budget is salaries, that means a lot of people are going on the chopping block — and the administration has decided to simply get rid of entire departments wholesale, including geology. Think about it: a college of science that simply cuts off and throws away an entire discipline. Is that really a place that is supporting science and education? The partitions we set up with these labels are entirely arbitrary, and we are all interdependent. My own discipline of biology is dead without mathematics, chemistry, and physics, and yes, geology is part of the environment we want our students to know. Now it’s true that if all we aimed to do was churn out pre-meds, we could dispense with geology; heck, we could toss out all those ecologists, too, and hone ourselves down to nothing but a service department for instruction in physiology and anatomy.
But we wouldn’t be a university anymore. We’d be a trade school.
The United States is supposed to take some pride in its educational system — at least, we’re accustomed to hearing politicians stand up and brag about how our universities are the envy of the world. It’s a lie. We’re being steadily eroded away, and all that’s holding it up right now is the desperate struggles of the faculty within it. We’re at the breaking point, though, where the losses can’t be supported much more, and the whole edifice is going to fall apart.
Here’s what you need to do. Write to the University of Florida administration and explain to them that what they’re doing is debilitating, and is going to irreparably weaken the mission of the university. Unfortunately, their hands are probably tied; they’ve got a shrinking budget and have to cut somewhere, and they will do so, but at this point all we can do is ask them to hold off on completely destroying a scientific asset.
The next layer of the problem is the state government. They keep seeing the educational system as a great target for saving money with budget cuts, because the effects will not be manifest for several years — and so they steadily hack and slash and chop, and the universities suffer…and now they’re at the point where they begin to break, and they keep cutting. Write to the Florida legislature! Tell them that we need to support higher education, that as a scientific and technological nation, we are dependent on a well-educated citizenry!
It’s not just Florida, either — your state is blithely gutting its system of higher education, too. Minnesota, for instance, has cut investment in higher ed by 28% between 2000 and 2007, while raising tuition 68% over the same period. We haven’t been given less to do, either — our workload increases while salaries fail to keep up with inflation. This is happening everywhere. We are all Florida.
Another part of the problem is…you. Why do you keep electing cretins to your legislatures who despise the “intellectual elite”, who think being smart is a sin, who are so short-sighted that they care nothing for investing in strengthening the country in ways that take ten or more years to pay off? Stop it! Your representatives should be people who value education enough to commit to at least maintaining the current meager level of funding, but instead we get chains of ignoramuses who want to demolish the universities…and simultaneously want to control them to support their favorite ideological nonsense, via “academic freedom” bills. This is also a long-term goal: we have to work to restore our government to some level of sanity. It’s been the domain of fools and thieves for far too long.
So your not just a stupid socialist but an extortionist too (more on that later).
>>>These are infrastructure and none of it is free.
Good. Now you know it isnt free. It has a cost. Who pays?
>>>Who it should be free for is students
Ah. There was a ground-breaking study done in India. The used to give away condoms for ‘free’. Later the social workers found condoms all over the ground and rarely used. Then they started charging a couple rupees. They were no longer on the ground and used a little more. Lesson: people value things they pay for.
>>>So WE the taxpayers SHOULD be taking it in the shorts on education, cause it’s a necessary investment in a functional society and economy.
If this had any semblance of truth to it, America would have never functioned as a society, because education has never been free. Yet our private universities are still, until the Post-structuralist, discontented, oppositional, redundant, intellectual, humanities professors drive them into the ground, the envy of the world. They also cost money to attend, paid for by the student or their family.
If your statement has an atom of truth in it, why does America still have such robust economy after all these years of non-free (to students) education?
And your a lowlife, gangster, extortionist, no better than Andrew Cuomo.
>>>Just as corporations should pay more to live in a country where they aren’t burned to the ground for things like losing everyone’s 401Ks.
Oh yea, you understand who has money, and who needs to fork it over or else the useful idiots, scuse, people with pitchforks are gonna show up in some AIG execs lawn and deal out a little populist justice, eh? Bet you’re just gleeful with the thought. Scum.
The poet Irving Layton once remarked that “if writing poetry can be compared to making love then literary criticism can be compared to examining love-stains on bed-sheets.”
… just sayin’
Well, what use is half a dick?
Cerberus asks: “Second quick question, what is with the high amount of physicists and comp sci types that are complete dicks?”
I can’t really speak for computer scientists, but as a physicist, over the years I’ve done a lot of explaining of the discipline and its adherents to nonphysicists. In social interactions between physicists, often the single most important currency one can bring is the ability to “solve” the problem. We’re willing to overlook a lot of “antisocial” behavior (aka being a complete dick) if someone can help us do that. Add this to the fact that many physicists were “nerds” growing up, spent a lot of time doing homework and working in the lab during the years when most folks are interacting socially and the fact that they often can’t explain the thing that interests them most to nonphysicists.
Moreover, the training of physicists emphasizes how powerful and broadly applicable the techniques are that they are learning. I’ve known profs who would ask students to estimate the number of piano tuners in the phonebook to within 10% in an oral exam. If a physicist’s experience is circumscribed only by problems for which the techniques of physics are applicable, it’s not surprising that he (and it is usually “he”) will think they apply to all experience.
On the other hand, many physicists are among the most truly educated people I’ve met. They may still hold strong opinions and secretly (or not so secretly) hold physics in higher esteem than other academic disciplines. I have to admit, myself, to a certain contempt for the Feyerabend and related schools who feel free to criticize science without really understanding it.
But basically, the reason you find complete dicks in physics is that there is no human endeavor that is devoid of complete dicks. Physicists may just be a bit less circumspect about revealing that.
PZ asked: Another part of the problem is…you. Why do you keep electing cretins to your legislatures who despise the “intellectual elite”, who think being smart is a sin, who are so short-sighted that they care nothing for investing in strengthening the country in ways that take ten or more years to pay off?
Because the alternative is electing cretins who despise the working man, who think that benefiting from hard work is a sin, who are so short-sighted they think the way to solve a short-term debt problem is to replace it with ten times as much slightly-longer-term debt that they still won’t be able to pay off.
No, of course that description isn’t accurate. Neither is yours. Which is my point. The problem with politics is that it has become a battle of ideologues. All ideologues are political cretins. So every election becomes a choice between cretins, and we the voters are forced to choose the candidate who seems slightly less cretinous.
Provide candidates who aren’t cretins, and the voters will elect legislators who aren’t cretins.
Ah, the libertards still the foresight of nearsighted cave crickets. Some things never change.
Wolfwalker says, “Provide candidates who aren’t cretins, and the voters will elect legislators who aren’t cretins.”
And who, precisely, is supposed to “provide” these candidates? The reason we have ideologues is because the people are ideologically fragmented and are willing to shell out cash to keep the other bastards out even if it means voting one of their bastards in. People are even afraid to talk about politics anymore because it almost always degenerates into shouting talking points past each other. Meantime, Rome burns.
504-
Huh, I hadn’t thought about it like that, but that makes sense. I always thought it was more the social ineptness mixed with the male dominance that creates sort of a negative feedback loop, but your summary makes a lot of sense. I wonder if the same thing occurs in psychology fields where there is a similar “these approaches are applicable to everything” attitude.
Side note to libertarian trolls (with a wink to the more fanatical Douglas Adams fan: Cerberus loled.
It is amazing how resistant we have become in America to the very idea of long-term investment. It gets to the heart of the University problem as well. We’ve completely forgotten how to value long-term investment, because short-term indicators and measures of success have become central to everything (see Stock Market and corporate responsibility to shareholders before company). I suspect the only way we’ll get back into a long-term frame-of-mind is to jack up the top marginal tax rates to the 1950s levels and no longer make it economically favorable to cash out in the short term leaving someone else to clean up the long term damage. Either that or attack cuttlefish like on xkcd.
My discipline gave us electricity, generation of EM waves, flight, lasers, the semiconductor (necessary for virtually all electronics), the laser, nuclear power, diagnostic radiology, radiotherapy, fiber optics, and much, much more. On top of that it actually tests its predictions, and describes how the world works. It’s also very difficult and requires painstaking work.
The lit critcs, on the other hand, suggest that they might have given the human race…a comic. They don’t seem to be doing anything that could possibly be difficult. Yet they’re paid the same as scientists, and take much of the funding away from us. Understand why I’m bitter now?
All I can do is laugh at this talk about how I’m a “dick”. Have you considered the possibility that I’m not a dick, but an honest guy who speaks his mind, sometimes is justly angry, and in this case happens to be right?
Argh! I would give anything for edit capabilities.
One prominent feminist remarked that the Principia is a rape manual. And who can forget arch-feminist Luce Irigaray’s profound philosophical ponderings:
actually, there’s one more point against litCrit: it was supposed to be so very politically engaged. But the relativism it peddled helped pave the way for 8 long years of Rove, Cheney, and their lot. we deconstructed Enlightenment ideals, gave up on scientism, truth, justice and other phalogocentric myths. and we got what we deserved: the NoFactZone.
i think if dicks like Erasmus ran things for a while, we’d probably do ok.
Erasmus, I am also a physicist, and while I can sympathize with your impatience with the sometines over-inflated egos one encounters in the softer side of academe, I also realize that we in the hard sciences can be exasperating as well. We physicists have our share of idiot savants. I can think of several such idiots trying to tell us there’s no such thing as a greenhouse effect in the atmosphere. Perhaps the surest way to be an idiot (or a “dick” for that matter) is to make definitive pronouncements in areas you have not researched thoroughly. Just because you don’t understand it does not mean it is easy.
cactusren:
You’re mistaking me as an idiot. I’m not an idiot, and I would not profess to this clearly inconsistent set of beliefs that you ascribe to me. I go over the objective differences between science and “Mickey Mouse subjects” in posts #432 and #445.
I am shocked, SHOCKED I tell you to find Erasmus dismissive of feminist theories and misinformed about its purpose and forefront thinkers. Gosh, I was not at all expecting him to be dismissive of feminist ideology. That had absolutely NO warning.
And Watchmen, Gaiman, Matrix, modern comics, Delaney, a wealth of world literature, etc… were only a fraction of the real world effects from ONE of the more UNSUCCESSFUL frameworks of a SUB-DISCIPLINE. The one you specifically said made ALL of the humanities worthless.
Physics also gave us the a-bomb, unstable nuclear power plants, and the woefully misapplied Schrodinger’s Cat. By your rubric, physics has a lot to answer for and by your rubric, all of science should be dismissed as unfruitful.
You’re stubborn, unwilling to show weakness, fragile in your idea of maculinity and apparently an idiot savant, fearful that your limited scope of knowledge doesn’t translate as well to everything as it was supposed to. Frankly, I know you. My partner used to date a guy like you. Ever frightful that one day she would demonstrate she was actually smarter than him, ever desperate to rally around the few subjects he had the edge. Every day only keeping her by chipping away at her self-esteem.
He is alone and unlovable. He is a warning tale to others like you.
Shape up, get over your hatred of women and anything you don’t dominate. It doesn’t serve you well as a person and more importantly it doesn’t serve you well as a scientist. Science is about being open to being wrong, being able to edit over your work to be better able to demonstrate your theories as accurate. No matter how theoretical your work, there will be an application and there will be those who disagree and are on better ground than you. How will you handle being wrong in the real world?
And in the meantime, it’s people like you that make the physics major such a sausage-fest.
suggesting that radical feminist ideologues (like Harding and Irigaray) are wrong is not necessarily a symptom misogyny. plenty of feminists have said the same thing.
If that were all Erasmus had said, no one would dispute it. It’s his inability to distinguish extreme parts from the whole of any subject, combined with his demonstrated refusal to listen to anyone who actually has studied the subject, that people with far more patience than I have are wasting their time engaging with him about.
Misogynistically-motivated or not (and it’s plausible, certainly not proven), he’s clearly a Fachidiot with a bad case of Dunning-Kruger.
matt, you’re historically illiterate. Here’s a little crash-course for you:
America’s wealth accumulated between 1940 and 1970. This is because it had a massive headstart on all others by the simple fact that WWII didn’t destroy it, but rather revived its economy vie the newly created military-industral complex. and how did society invest this headstart? by giving almost all men who wanted it a free (aiee!!!!!) education and a living-wage job. The oil-crisis and Carter’s failure as president ended this rising prosperity. since Reagan, the middle-class has been shrinking: people’s wages have been shrinking while the cost of everything essential (health care, education, etc) has been rising. From a truly wealthy nation, the U.S. has transformed into a nation so deeply in debt, it won’t be able to dig itself out, both on a state (the chinese are getting antsy about all those potentially worthless IOU’s they’re holding) and on a personal level (forclosures, bancrupcies, suicides because of bad finances)
And as to the U.S. having the best universities in the world: of course, and Marie-Antoinette had the coolest, most awesome house in all of France. Money can buy the very best for the very few. How is that an argument for implementing it as the sole means of doing things?
tsk, tsk–history, Jadehawk?
Haven’t you learned yet that if it isn’t hard [sic] science, it doesn’t count?
The used to give away condoms for ‘free’. Later the social workers found condoms all over the ground and rarely used. Then they started charging a couple rupees. They were no longer on the ground and used a little more. Lesson: people value things they pay for. Matt
Right; and an education is exactly like a condom, isn’t it Matt? I mean, picking up a supply of free condoms from a dispensary takes as much effort as studying for a degree, right? And the only way people ever “pay” for things is in terms of actual money, yes? Putting work into something couldn’t possibly have a similar psychological effect, could it? Nah – that would mean you’d have to think, rather than just spew libertardian slogans, and that would never do.
But he wasn’t commenting that particular ideologues were wrong; he was trying to use them as an example that the entire field is flawed and worthless. Big difference.
Basically, it’s pretty simple: Erasmus doesn’t think that humans are worth studying. Maybe their physiology, perhaps, but what they do with their brains? Nope. Must be a pretty lonely and dull existence in his world.
The used to give away condoms for ‘free’. Later the social workers found condoms all over the ground and rarely used. Then they started charging a couple rupees. They were no longer on the ground and used a little more. Lesson: people value things they pay for. Matt
Right; and an education is exactly like a condom, isn’t it Matt? I mean, picking up a supply of free condoms from a dispensary takes as much effort as studying for a degree, right? And the only way people ever “pay” for things is in terms of actual money, yes? Putting work into something couldn’t possibly have a similar psychological effect, could it? Nah – that would mean you’d have to think, rather than just spew libertardian slogans, and that would never do.
Yeah, I’m dismissive of a feminist who believes energy-mass equivalence is sexist on the grounds that it “privileges” the speed of light. This means I reject the whole of feminism. And I’m the one who’s being dogmatic, impervious to reason, yadda-boring-yadda.
As goes without saying, I don’t think “ALL” the humanities are worthless. For the umpteen-thousandth time, my opinion is greatly more nuanced; get off the strawmen. (Does that make me a misogynist? Should I say “strawpeople”?)
Actually, nuclear power is on the whole remarkable for is safety. Nuclear weapons are arguably the main force that has so far prevented World War 3. And judging from my encounters on the Web, New Age abusers of Schrödinger’s cat are more frequently philosophy graduates than physics graduates.
What, do you think you’re Sherlock Holmes or something? Awful grandiose deductions you’re weaving there.
I noted with wry amusement that your attempt to portray physical science as “masculine” reminded me of a certain feminist claiming the Principia is a “rape manual”. It follows, straightforwardly, that I am trying to dominate women. Honestly, you should speak to a head doctor, ASAP.
You imply that the humanities are “feminine” while the physical sciences are “masculine”. It really beggars belief that you would have the brazen cheek to advance as obvious these patronizing, bigoted, archaic assumptions, and then accuse me of sexism. I don’t know whether to be infuriated or amused.
Lies like this only reveal the sheer desperation of my opposition. If you scroll up, you’ll see that I sang the virtues of psychology, and I said that in theory sociology could be a wonderful discipline. I’m all for learning more about humans. I just don’t believe lit crit IS learning about humans. I don’t see any reason to believe they’re committed to discovering any knowledge whatsoever.
Cerberus, I understand that your frustration. I also understand at some level the frustration that Erasmus feels. I got my doctorate in physics back in the ’80s, and there were plenty of “feminist” and sociological studies of physics. The vast majority of them were garbage–the product of lazy researchers who hadn’t seen the need to understand how physicists really do physics. Many studies out and out accused physicists of racism, sexism, genocide and whatever else the researcher cared to throw in. Now as I say, these were garbabe studies–best ignored. However many physicists–Erasmus, evidently among them–could not ignore them and dismissed any sort of social criticism as anti-science. This is a pity, as there were some studies that were quite insightful and have led to a much more gender neutral discipline(80/20 male to female rather than 90/10 as it was in the 80s).
I really love being a physicist. There is nothing like the feeling of cracking a difficult problem and being the first person on Earth to understand it. Physics analysis really is powerful and applies to a variety of areas you wouldn’t expect at first (some of the financial WMDs that brought down Wall Street were the product of physicists working there ;-). I’m a strong believer in the scientific method. At the same time, I realize that there are aspects of human experience where application of the scientific method yields results that range from comic to tragic. So, in sum, I’m sorry you have had some bad experiences with physicists. I hope the future holds some that are more positive for you, as there are a lot of physicists who are fine individuals indeed.
Erasmus, you say that you do not intend to condemn an entire approach (in this case feminism) by condemning charlatans like Irigaray. Ok, that’s great. But why do you insist on not extending the same courtesy to literary critics? I mean, when you say:
that seems like a misunderstanding of what literary criticism is about. I’ve already pointed out that to talk about discovering something in literature is not the same as talking about discovering something in physics. Nor should it be! But that doesn’t mean that it’s worthless or that the entire field (which is encompassed in your statement above) is somehow being disingenuous in trying to explain their aims to you.
All I’m asking from you is that you talk to some people who work in this field and ask them about what they do. Don’t demand that they justify their existence on your terms, but really ask what their work is about. I think you’ll find that most people who study literature full-time are not charlatans out to hoodwink you, but are genuinely interested in advancing the understanding of literary works.
Just for the record, if you want to read some informed and responsible feminist commentary on science, read Louise Antony, Helen Longino, or Kathleen Okruhlik. :-)
Philip Kitcher is really good too.
Ray, it sounds like you’ve given these issues serious thought. From what I have read of Sokal’s writing about why he carried out the hoax (oh, noes!–primary source alert! :), I think he tends to agree more with you than with the extreme to which Erasmus has taken his position.
In Sokal Hoax – ‘A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies’, he writes:
and later:
and later:
In other words, he was an attempted ally, trying to shine light on a problem with a discipline he considered worthy of taking the trouble to engage with.
So despite his superficial invocation of Sokal (completely out of context, just like he did with Chomsky), I think Erasmus’ total dismissal of literary criticism offhand, plus his argumentation from incredulity, put him at odds with Sokal.
Ironically, he won’t comprehend this argument, exactly because he determinedly refuses by definition to look at the very evidence to understand that fact.
I’ve a BA in English Lit, minor in Geology and wound up as a software developer (well, until that work was outsourced, now I manage those who get to do the interesting stuff). While much of critical theory can be seen as ponderous bullshit (and it is, mind you), those mocking it still fail to see the value. Do you know how bright and creative one must be to craft such bullshit? Takes a great deal of grey matter to do that well.
Frivolity aside, studying literature aided my study of geology immensely. One learns how to think critically; how to look at all sides of a problem; how to tease meaning from obscure bits of informations; how, perhaps most important, to see patterns and connections. Focus on the whole and the parts, not one or the other.
Universities should not be trade schools. I studied what I found fascinating, not what I thought would get me a job. Yet, because of my diverse studies, I found myself able to anything, so long as training on the details was offered. When I was hired as a programmer (by way of a company run training program), the manager actually told me they found English Lit majors and music majors made some of the best canidates. Why? Because while they may need training on the syntax and mechanics, they understood the logic.
Broad education is desirable and necessary, particularly at the undergrad level. Too much specialization leads to an incomplete mind. I’ll have to resort to anecdote here, forgive me, but a prime example would be my sis-in-law’s ex boyfriend, who had a PhD in Astronomy. We were attending a play (Henry V) when he turned to my wife and I and asked why Shakespeare wrote “all these plays about Henry.” That is not an educated man.
Two final points: first, that “elite” is now a dirty word sums up the situation we face succinctly. Second, all those who call themselves scientists, yet mock the humanities, would to well to recall they are doctors of philosophy.
Jerry:
Look, I just don’t buy that argument. Discovering the truth of something isn’t coming up with one interpretation out of infinitely many possible interpretations. And even if they WERE discovering some sort of truth (of which I’m highly skeptical), so what? Is there ANY evidence at all that an important chunk of taxpayers have the slightest interest in the intricacies of extremely refined and esoteric literature? It seems almost certain to me that if we’re going to bark up that tree, it would make more sense to have an academic department that deconstructs pop music, or Friends, or American Idol.
Even if they are, I don’t care. Doesn’t it strike you as a little unfair that people are paid, the same as you, to indulge in the kind of activities that occupy you only when you’re exhausted after hours of painstaking research? Resentfulness isn’t a laudable emotion, but consider: if lit crit were abolished, how many more science PhDs could they take on?
Yes, I’ve talked to people from the humanities; I don’t know why you would assume differently. Many are very pleasant and intelligent people. And, trust me, for every enthusiastic post-structuralist sophisticate, there are several disgruntled humanities graduates working in jobs unsuited to their intellectual abilities, who sincerely regret their choice of major, and are utterly fed-up with obscurantist dressing-up of trivially trite ideas.
thalarctos:
I wasn’t quoting anyone out of context, that is unadulterated dogshit. I said many of my opinions are inherited from Sokal; I did not say Sokal agrees with me all the way. I admit that I go much further than him in a number of respects. (Though it’s significant to note that I’m anonymous. If you knew my identity, I wouldn’t be as forthright, because I know these opinions would only result in howling and shrieking, and general rocking of the boat.)
And I wasn’t taking Chomsky out of context, either. Once again, these lying, straw-clutching, despicably dirty tricks, only serve to highlight the self-serving desperation of my opponents.
Yup. I’m one such. I wish my MA was an MSc instead. If it were, I probably wouldn’t be about to lose my job. Do I resent my litCrit profs for running a legal pyramid scheme? You bet I do. Oh well, I was young and gullible. Live and learn. Maybe I’ll write a novel about it. LOL
Erasmus:
The point that I keep trying to make is that you are applying standards of truth in the wrong way to things that aren’t susceptible to being discussed in those terms. I’ll be concrete: over the last century in the USA there has been vigorous debate about the question of the proper way to interpret the Constitution. There are various positions on this issue, many of which are credible (and some which are not). Is there a “truth” to be discovered within that document? That’s an incredibly thorny question and there’s a good reason why decades of very smart people working on this problem have not provided a definitive answer. In the same way, the question of whether there is a “truth” to be discovered about “Moby-Dick” is also irrelevant. What a good critical analysis of “Moby-Dick” will do for you is to allow you to see that work in a different aesthetic light.
First, I’m not convinced that what taxpayers have an interest in is relevant. In fact, even though modern literature departments do analyze (let’s not use the loaded term “deconstruct”) pop music and other elements of popular culture, people still don’t care about that. So what? Does anyone care about my research? Almost certainly not. In fact, even in the best possible case in which the project that I work on yields the best possible results, will it produce some kind of tangible benefits to anyone? I would be very dubious of making that claim!
No, it doesn’t. And why should it? This is baffling to me. First of all, they aren’t paid the same as me (graduate students in the sciences are paid substantially better). Second, they make a decision to pursue one line of work instead of another, and that’s their business. I don’t envy anyone who has to find employment as a humanities’ Ph.D. in this economic environment, so I find very little to be resentful about here. Third, I don’t think they are “indulging” any more than I am; from what I know, they work just as hard as I do but in different ways.
What’s more important to me than intra-academic rivalry is cross-academic solidarity. As PZ noted in his original post, the academic infrastructure in this country has been the subject of a systematic dismantling over the last 40 or so years. Part of the tactic of that dismantling is the denigration of the scholarly life in the public press; this I resent much more than I could possibly resent the existence of professors of English. Because today, maybe that denigration is directed against English departments, but it never stops there; once the beast swallows them, it’ll come for me as well, so I view a defense of other academics as being almost as important as a defense of my own profession.
None. Surely as a Ph.D. yourself (unless I’ve misunderstood your previous posts) you know that Ph.D. funding for science graduate students is unrelated to the funding for the humanities. I mean, in some grand sense they are related, of course, but killing the English department would effectively yield zero financial benefit to me or to any other prospective graduate student in the field. That money is minuscule in comparison with what’s required to fund even relatively small projects, and anyway I get my funding from a completely different source. Not to mention that I’m entirely unconvinced that we somehow need more physics Ph.D.s out there. Where will those people work, given that the number of professorships is dwindling? Anyway, that’s a separate topic.
Sure, there are people who regret their choices. But I’ll bet you that their disgruntlement has much more to do with the fact that virtually all avenues for doing the kinds of research they want to do have been closed to them by a system that has flooded the market with postdocs and adjuncts without regard for the demand that exists for them. Again, this is an important but ultimately different question from the question of the worth of the entire discipline. I could certainly write a lot about it, but I think it would go too far afield from the point I’m trying to make.
It’s not just a question of funding so the response is not fully adequate.
By abolishing faculties of theology and literary criticism, you’d effectively direct bright young people who like a challenge toward more worthwhile disciplines. Many would find a home in history, or economics, or even computer science.
I did not say Sokal agrees with me all the way. I admit that I go much further than him in a number of respects. (Though it’s significant to note that I’m anonymous. If you knew my identity, I wouldn’t be as forthright, because I know these opinions would only result in howling and shrieking, and general rocking of the boat.) – Erasmus
Are you suggesting that Sokal is not expressing his real opinions, and secretly agrees with you that the humanities are rubbish? If not, what are you saying here?
Shouldn’t be too hard to see what I’m suggesting. One ought to be careful about judging what people really think solely from their public statements, because they don’t want to be persecuted, or at least they don’t want to stir animosity at their universities. Maybe Sokal would admit his private opinion is a little stronger, if he trusted you and you were to question him privately. Of course I’m not implying that his convictions always coincide with mine. I’m sure he would disagree with a number of the opinions I expressed in this thread, even if there were no fear of shrieking humanities people.
The Erasmus thread. Sigh.
It helps when I imagine the thread as a metaphorical Socratic dialogue, and Erasmus as the antagonist therein. :)
(I’m trying to be charitable here).
I prefer ‘protagonist’ myself. But yes.
Blah blah blah. I have no idea why you would make such a big deal of this. I very clearly disavowed resentfulness, and indicated that my chief concern is the money being taken from science. I personally would be happy live like a tramp on the street if that were to significantly bolster scientific research. If I didn’t feel the humanities were diverting money and personnel away from science, I would be quite content to leave the postmodernists to their meaningless games.
Well the “grand sense” is everything, especially in Europe, where I live. Here universities depend largely on state funding, and more money for the Department of English Literature means less money for the Department of Physics. In fact I’m pretty sure this trade-off applies all over the globe: for one thing, PZ’s above article seems to suggest this.
It’s simply not true that all science research is expensive. I’m a theorist. All I require is a library, a computer, pens, paper, and a few co-workers. Applied mathematics is actually remarkably cheap.
Then there’s that fine point raised by LeftJab, namely that lots of brillaint young minds are being wasted on postmodernism, deconstructionism and whatever. And, by the way, I think you massively, hugely underestimate the sheer extent of outright obscurantism found in those fields. Almost every single time when I glance at an abstract of a lecture or paper from one of those departments, it consists of pretentious bullshit like the stuff I cited above. Usually, through the thicket of pomposity, there’s some meaning in there, and if I really wanted to believe they were doing respectable work, I could nod my head and convince myself that I understand where they’re coming from. But I’m a realist. They aren’t original thinkers, for the most part, and almost without exception their ideas are trite or nonsensical. This would be painfully manifest if they were to use plain words, so they don’t. You know Dawkins’ Law of Convervation of Difficulty?
“Dawkins’ Law of Conservation of Difficulty states that obscurantism in an academic subject expands to fill the vacuum of its intrinsic simplicity.”
Not in the least. The disgruntled humanities majors that I’ve met would never have considered doing “research” in post-structuralism. (In and of itself a hilarious notion.) That would never have occurred to them.
I really shouldn’t stick my oar in, as I haven’t had time to do more than read the original post and skim over the comments. But as a mathematics postdoc, who was trained in the UK system (albeit now working abroad), I find Erasmus’ vehemence and simplification/misreading rather depressing. Based solely on anecdotal evidence, the UK funding situation for the humanities is pretty dire, more so than for the physical sciences; so any supposition that they constitute a significant drain on resources that could be given to the True Intellectual Explorers (ahem) would seem wide of the mark in that context. (Can’t speak to the situation in Continental Europe.)
I’m sure some writing is pretentious and obscurantist, but it also seems possible that some of the supposed examples are working in the jargon of the trade. Try reading stochastic calculus at the Dellacherie-Meyer level and see if that doesn’t seem wilfully obscure or pedantic (better qualified people than me assure me it isn’t). Or your average high-level algebro-geometric-number-theory paper.
I’ve seen elsewhere – so this is not meant to apply directly to Erasmus’ own phrasing – a distressing whiff of what is here ( http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n02/coll01_.html ) referred to as ” ‘No Bullshit’ bullshit”, albeit in a different context. For me at least, academic training is about a search for understanding in a broad and varied sense, not “finding what is really true in a Johnson-kicking-a-rock-and-refuting-Berkeley sense”.
Lastly, to refer at #538 to “postmodernism, deconstructionism and whatever” (is the last word supposed to be pronounced in quasi-Valley-Girl intonation?) is perhaps not the best debating tactic when others on this thread believe you’re not taking the terms of discussion seriously. My own lines of research get brushed off in an analogous way, so I get a bit touchy when I read phrasing like that.
Apologies for the rambling.
Huh? There are lots of natural scientists right here on this blog. I’m one. Do go ahead :-)
Then why do you comment on this thread at all?
Fine, but that’s not a difference to science.
Teaching people is an investment. It generates more money — cold, hard cash — than it requires.
That’s basically the same thing — if you can’t be infinitely certain about the position of a particle, that’s the same as when there’s no infinitely small position: it doesn’t make sense to talk about a space smaller than a tetrahedron with an edge length of 1 Planck length, because space itself is uncertain at that size.
(And thanks to Einstein, it doesn’t matter that I talked about time rather than space, because that, too, is ultimately the same.)
It can be done as such. Remember, science has a very simple definition — as long as you can answer the question “if I were wrong, how would I know, and how could I demonstrate that to others?”, you’re doing science.
(I don’t doubt that lots of woo is actually practiced in the field. But it doesn’t have to be.)
Who cares? Experiments are basically absent from geology, paleontology, astrophysics… what’s needed for science is repeatable observation, whether of an experiment or of something else. Experiments just make it easier.
We may be having a little linguistic culture shock here. In English, the term “science” is often applied to just the natural sciences. That’s not what I’ve been doing above.
Then what is the “coherent goal” or “importance” of vertebrate paleontology (my own field)?
So you missed the Tianyulong post?
Also, http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/science/.
:-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D
My day is saved!
Is that not curiosity???
If it doesn’t matter to you, why did you make the silly claim that “this blog has fewer readers than a class of preschoolers“?
Fail.
<headdesk>
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An education isn’t a thing. It’s a process that allows you to land a job where you’ll have a nice income.
<headdesk>
TSIB.
(I react so strongly because the introduction of fees at Austrian universities in 2001 was justified by the minister for Education And Stuff, who had BTW never seen a university or even the harder type of highschool from the inside, with the proverb “what doesn’t cost anything isn’t worth anything”. That’s right, she tried to derive an ought from an is. <headdesk> She’s now gone, and so are the fees in the majority of cases.)
It took me five seconds to figure out what “and I and asked” was supposed to mean. You have committed a hypercorrectivism: you mean “to my wife and me”. :-)
Only in the USA anymore. Frankly, this is a relict from those medieval times when “science” was done by just thinking and studying the works of ancient philosophers — when everything a university taught was medicine, law, philosophy, or the Seven Liberal Arts. I’m a Master of Natural Sciences, and my cosupervised thesis will make me a Doctor of Natural Sciences (Austria) and, bizarrely, a Doctor of Pierre & Marie Curie University (France). No philosophy (after the last year of highschool) other than science theory, thank you very much.
Stop right here. Is that so in the USA? Over here, not all are financed by a scholarship, let alone get a salary.
Wrong question.
Right question: How many physics professorships should there be? How many would it be useful to have?
This has to be made much more public. I’m not a theorist, and I’m nonetheless in the same situation — all that costs halfway serious money is sending me to congresses so I can present my results. A molecular-biology lab burns such sums in a week.
Sometimes disciplines that don’t cost enough aren’t taken seriously enough to be funded at all…
Right, have done a second sifting of the thread, whose exchanges of gunfire seem too lengthy to try and precis here. But this struck me: at #393, “Erasmus” wrote in part:
It’s quite normal in my country, among science types, to pour scorn on “softie subjects” or “Mickey Mouse subjects”. (I didn’t invent those terms.) People of this opinion usually keep quiet about it in public, because they don’t want to offend anyone, and they don’t want to “rock the boat”. But, you know, this is Pharyngula. This is the place where regulars delight in calling a spade a spade, regardless of whose toes get stepped on. So I’ll not “don kid gloves”.
I’m afraid that, coupled with his first post on this thread, this gives me the strong impression that Erasmus came on here expecting to be with like minds, and is frustrated that this is not so. The fact that lazy swipes by “science types” (whoe’er they be) are bandied about in what I’m guessing is the UK is not actually a point in favour of the view Erasmus is espousing. Lots of idiots say lots of things, and lots of sensible people say idiotic things when not giving things due thought. This is little different.
Also, Erasmus: the point is not that you’re calling a spade a spade, it’s that you’ve shown no sign of listening to others here who point out that you’re calling a shovel a spade. (Hey, if you can get away with Pooterish appeals to geek authority, I’ll don my Pratchett cap.) There may be a case – though I’m temperamentally inclined to doubt it – that there is something intrinsically superior about `scientific enterprise’ when set aside the humanities. However, your own effort here’s been really quite shoddy.
One prominent feminist remarked that the Principia is a rape manual.
And it’s almost certain that are that you’ve never read anything more of Sandra Harding’s work beyond the phrase “rape manual” or bothered to look up this phrase in context.
If you had read this in context, you would have seen that Harding does not describe the Principia as a “rape manual”, and indeed her rhetoric relies on the inadmissibility of calling it a “rape manual”.
Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism, p. 113
Here you can clearly see that she is not attempting to describe the Principia, but is rather using “rape manual” as a vivid way of demonstrating an overlooked argument: an argument to show that gendered metaphors were irrelevant to subsequent scientific progress, given that mechanistic metaphors are assumed to have played a major role. Her argument hinges on it not being “illuminating and honest” to call the Principia a rape manual and hence, by parity of reasoning, that it is also not illuminating and honest to exclusively appeal to the mechanistic metaphors as an explanation for the fecundity of classical physics.
Maybe she’s misreading the traditional narrative in the history of science. Maybe her challenge is easily met. Maybe it can be shown that these gendered metaphors had no influence.
That’s where research in the humanities comes in, but that’s not the sort of research that ignorant, incompetent, and feckless polemicists like Norman Levitt and Paul Gross (and Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont for that matter) wanted to do. It’s too much like hard work! Better to quote mine a single phrase from a whole book and lead the readers to believe that those way craaaazy feminists think that the Principia is a how-to guide for rapists!
Whether Harding even believes that scientific concepts can be gendered is an open question. Most of her book doesn’t deal with that issue; much of it is a consideration of how women were represented and underrepresented in research institutions and funding bodies, and how that might have contributed to the choice of projects to be studied.
At one point she does address the question of gendered concepts in science.
Op. cit., p. 47.
Doesn’t it sound like she’s holding it at arm’s length with words like “improbable”? Does this sound to you like a woman who sincerely believes that the Principia is a “rape manual”?
Maybe you should try reading some of these people before trusting these dishonest polemicists, because frankly Gross and Levitt’s Higher Superstition and Sokal and Bricmont’s Fashionable Nonsense are the humanities’ equivalent of Johnson’s Darwin on Trial. In both cases they’re trials held in a kangaroo court with a clearly predetermined outcome.
And for the record, I’m a biology student, not one of these “wretched humanists”.
Ok, one more response and then I’ll probably let it go since this thread is dropping off my newsfeed radar.
It looks to me like I made the mistake of assuming that Erasmus was American; sorry for that. It looks like the funding situation in the UK is pretty unfortunate if you are really forced to compete across departments and a physicist’s funding is in competition with that of an English professor. I know that’s not the case in the US; I don’t want to hold up the American system as some kind of efficiency paradigm, but I’m fairly sure my funding (which comes from NASA) is about as independent of the funding of the humanities as can be.
In that case, my thinking is that what needs to be changed is the funding system. You’re working within a system that pits you against other academics because it’s easier to get you to turn on each other than to actually fund universities properly. I wish I had some special insight here, but I don’t. It looks to me like the funding system really needs to be changed because otherwise, sure, you might win temporarily if you vanquish the postmodernists, but you won’t win in the long run.
To David Marjanovich:
I don’t know how to answer that, honestly. It sure would be great if every person who seriously wanted to be a physics professor and could demonstrate the necessary competence could be one. Right now, sitting as I am on the ground floor, that looks to me like a pipe dream; I have very little hope of landing a professorship and I certainly don’t feel like doing the postdoc dance for another 10 years, so I’ll probably get off the academic track after I get my degree. Again, this is a question of changing the funding system to some degree, but the trend at universities for professors of all disciplines is very discouraging. The very best can still hope to find positions, but most of the merely competent graduate students who will be graduating in the next decade are probably not going to wind up in academia.
Reading this thread through to the end and the ignorant comments made by ZK, Erasmus, Matt, et al. have depressed me more than I can say. I’m half tempted to leave academia entirely and take up one of my former jobs. I’ve been a bus driver (I still have a valid CDL), a package handler at UPS, a factory worker making pet kennels, a data entry clerk…. I’ve taken these many jobs because I want to emigrate and I don’t want the massive debt that most students have upon leaving university.
And nothing makes me want to emigrate sooner than reading threads like these. Academia generally has been under attack since the Reagan administration and the assault on the humanities dates from the same period. The “Science Wars” were never what they claimed to be, and people like Sokal ought to have better. “The Flight from Science and Reason” conference, which spawned a book by the same name edited by Norman Levitt and Paul Gross, was sponsored by the John M. Olin Foundation. Does anyone think they were sponsoring it because they were incredibly concerned about academic feminism, lit crit, and the strong programme in the sociology of science?
The idea is ludicrous. The Science Wars were a clear warning to leftists of every stripe, scientist and non-scientist alike, that they had better step off and stop critiquing the products and the processes of science just as genetic engineering was creating the conditions for the privatization of staple crops and the pharmaceutical industry restructuring medical care in its own image.
The far-right has created a perfect positive feedback loop:
1) The anti-intellectual populists and the so-called “hard” science snobs dismiss whole areas of academic endeavors.
2) The “minarchist” buffoons (it’s no accident that Matt has shown up) then come in and argue that we should cut these programs if they’re so worthless.
3) The politicians piece together 1 and 2 and cut budgets because they can afford to get rid of a few of these “worthless” departments.
4) The administrators, many of them from business backgrounds, react by cutting departments and raising tuition rates, then apply business models to make their university more “successful” and “efficient”. In practice, this means appealing to students by treating them as customers, in order to justify the skyrocketing tuition rates, and switching out tenure track positions with adjunct faculty with no job security and no living wage.
5) The students then start acting not like customers but feudal lords with professors as their liveried servants. Grade inflation abounds, especially among adjuncts who have the most cause to fear bad student assessments, academic freedom suffers (the case of Doug Giles is particularly egregious), and students only want vocational training in “practical” majors.
Then “impractical” subjects come under more fire. We’re back at 1) again, slowly spinning around in a dance of death.
I’m sick of it. I’m ready to let these idiots have their brave new world run by MBAs who know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
Art? Music? Literature? Who needs it? Let the ‘market’ decide! I’m sure we can do just fine with our hotel room watercolors and endless Thomas Kinkade reproductions!
I don’t even know how to fight it. The U.S. is a cultural and artistic backwater because we were run as a strictly for-profit enterprise by the colonizers, who kept their money to bask in the arts that they could purchase for themselves in Europe. Ironically, you don’t have to tell poorer nations about the value of the humanities either. In Mexico’s Rotonda de las Personas Ilustres, you can find artists, composers, poets, writers, and so on, because sometimes it seems like the only relief from the bad times is to take courage from being part of a common culture, the culture of José Orozco, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Silvestre Revueltas, Carlos Chavez, Octavio Paz, etc.
Here, in the U.S. we have the unenviable distinction of being historically an uncultured, ignorant people and rich enough to indulge our boorishness and ignorance…for a while.
Well, there are a lot of errors there that it pains me to note, particularly dropping verbs in my attempts to edit it. I shouldn’t get so impassioned but ignorance, whether the populist know-nothingism of the creationists or the smug sanctimony of our hard(-headed) scientist, really pisses me off.
Just to respond to Jerry at #543:
It looks like the funding situation in the UK is pretty unfortunate if you are really forced to compete across departments and a physicist’s funding is in competition with that of an English professor
Assuming Erasmus is indeed working in the UK — and he’s been at pains not to specify, which is fair enough — then I’d be extremely interested if he could give evidence for anything like this. I don’t really understand UK funding mechanisms in practice (as opposed to how the Powers That Be *claim* it works) but I haven’t heard any stories of any depts where this happened.
Moreover, a crude zero-sum cost analysis doesn’t seem apt here. If the humanities evaporated, universities wouldn’t fund more researchers in the physical sciences. They’d just build another business/management school, I suspect. And then they’d come after those physicists who weren’t getting big grants to run astrophysical MHD simulations, and only doing blue sky stuff. And then they’d come after someone else…
There were some pretty heinous closures of a Chemistry dept or two over the last few years, but it’d be bizarre IMHO to think that the universities could or should have found last-ditch funding by axing some depts Erasmus would disapprove of.
(In the interests of disclosure, non-applied mathematics in the UK finds funding hard to come by, as it drinks from the same well as the physical sciences. So I am perhaps not as sympathetic to *physicists* grumbling over cash as I should be.)
Oh, and thanks for Nulfiddian at #542 for confirming my suspicion that Erasmus’s allusion to the Principia as “compared to a rape manual” was at best misguided. Though I doubt I have time to track down Harding’s book any time in the near future.
The problem with Erasmus, I believe, is the fact that he’s operating with a set of assumptions that render him impervious to arguments:
1. Only natural science gives real knowledge.
2. Society and art are boring, trivial matters, completely undeserving of any serious study.
3. Fine arts are utterly worthless to mankind.
If ever the term “scientism” was appropriate, it’s here. Arguing a priori from these core assumptions, he uses his misreading of Sokal (who states his case from vastly different premises) as a crutch to back his animosity towards the humanities and call for their outright elimination. Not reevaluation of some theories, not increased rigour and improved standards of study – complete elimination.
I suppose it was futile to attempt to explain the value of the humanities to someone who thinks Erasmus’ best work (and indeed, the only “real” work) was in zoology. The use of art and culture is in being human. The social ties that bind us, the art we produce to express certain aspects of our experience in the universe, the cultural artifacts we’re surrounded by, the stories we tell to each other about each other – all this is part of what makes people people. Each and every one of your posts could be summed up as “*bzzt* DOES NOT COMPUTE” – you just don’t get this part of being human, for whatever reason.
Social sciences and the humanities are fields of study dedicated to critically analysing these aspects of being human. Their starting point is the recognition that social processes and works of art are interesting, and that studying what humans do is as important as studying what nature is. Here’s the kicker, the bit that’s giving you the most trouble in understanding the “softie subjects”: what humans do is qualitatively different from what nature is. A quote from Sokal might help you grasp this point:
Nullifidian,
I think that the problem with Harding’s approach is that it seems almost designed to alienate. There are plenty of us in the hard sciences (I am a physicist) who are sympathetic to some feninist criticism. However, when it comes to having my profession compared to a sex crime, even I tend to take a bit of umbrage. The fact of the matter is that Newton, Bacon et al. were men of their time and expressed themselves in the language of their time. Religious and literary writers (including some women) used similar unfortunate metaphors. And the alienation is made even deeper by the fact that Harding and others writing in a similar vein do not seem to have even made an attempt to understand the culture of physics as physicists experience it. Many physicists, myself included, have worked hard to bring women into the field, to foster their learning and mentor them, and indeed to change the culture of physics to try and make it more conducive to their success. We did this not just out of a sense of fairness, but also because we feel it is good for our profession. Critiques like Harding’s do not make this task any easier with my colleagues.
“By abolishing faculties of theology and literary criticism, you’d effectively direct bright young people who like a challenge toward more worthwhile disciplines. Many would find a home in history, or economics, or even computer science.”
Or drop out, or not go to college. I’ve known several people who made much better theologians, philosphers, classics scholars etc. than they would have made computer programmers etc. I had one friend who was so into philosophy that he nearly didn’t fulfill his distribution requirements.
And naturally, you once again refuse to tell us exactly what are facts or class of facts of which I am ignorant. No doubt, that’s because you can’t.
For some reason your comment was delayed. I didn’t ignore it, simply didn’t see it until today. It is actually quite easy to provide examples:
1) Erasmus. You refer to Erasmus from Rotterdam yet when you talk about the book you read that inspired you, you’re talking about Erasmus Darwin, not Desiderius Erasmus, the actual great thinker who inspired the Darwin’s to name their little boy after him. While the younger Erasmus did write some valuable works, his contribution pales in comparison to the intellectual genius of Desiderius Erasmus. A couple of us pointed to this confusion on your part, I mentioned some of his most famous works, which have nothing to do with encyclopedia, and you utterly, completely, missed the references.
You found a guy who wrote an encyclopedia more important than the guy who is considered the inspiration for Luther and the Protestant Reformation. That suggests a lack of intellectual curiosity and general ability when it comes to the so called “soft-sciences.”
2) You have made a number of comments that suggest that while you claim to “respect” history, you actually don’t and really consider it beneath you while at the same time you present such a limited understanding of the field it is truly embarrassing. You scoff at the idea of reading primary source documents. That you wouldn’t bother to actually read papers by Einstein again suggests a lack of intellectual curiosity that truly has me wondering how in the world you didn’t end up digging ditches or working in a factory. To read a brilliant person’s description of their most fundamental discoveries is an exercise in understanding at its most fundamental level. You’d rather read a book about someone than read their own work? That is truly pathetic.
3) The fact that you don’t seem to take any real time to analyze what you’re reading when it comes to subjects you consider beneath you (despite your protests to the contrary), provides solid evidence that the real reason you are so arrogant about those “lesser” fields is because they utterly baffle you. You can’t “prove” most things in history, political science, sociology, anthropology, archaeology, economics, hell anything dealing with people, their choices, their feelings, their beliefs. That’s why some of us chose those areas of expertise and really, despite your obvious attitude, they are just as valid and just as important as your “hard sciences.” Without these studies modern society wouldn’t exist and your ability to do your “important” work wouldn’t exist.
I don’t have time to further explain your mistakes and misconceptions. I have work to do, perhaps if I have time tonight, I’ll add to this explanation. Odds are good you’ll dismiss or simply ignore the points I make here, sadly the other “soft scientists” amongst our peers will recognize that I am making quite valid points.
I think you’re right, Ray, and that may be the problem–the people who would greatly benefit from feeling a dose of the same alienation women feel when confronted with institutional sexism are often impervious to any empathy at all, while exactly those men who *can* feel it were already on our side to start with.
And that is exactly my problem with the “nuke ’em all from orbit; it’s the only way to be sure” approach. I certainly understand it viscerally, but the collateral damage it causes to allies like you troubles me too much.
I can certainly see your point, but I don’t think it necessarily follows that if she had not made that point, those colleagues like Erasmus would then automatically be more receptive. It’s quite possible that they would just seize on something else as justification. As far back as Plato, they were writing pseudo-taxonomies to justify keeping women down; Harding did not hand them their first weapon ever. I think it’s more like an airplane looking for a runway–any runway at all–on which to land. If it hadn’t been Harding, it would have been another justification.
So I don’t know. It’s really a thorny problem, but I’d be a lot more radical that I am, if not for that very problem you pointed out–the damage it does to male allies, some of whom have been among my best mentors. But that may make the problem intractable–I just don’t know.
I think that the problem with Harding’s approach is that it seems almost designed to alienate. There are plenty of us in the hard sciences (I am a physicist) who are sympathetic to some feninist criticism. However, when it comes to having my profession compared to a sex crime, even I tend to take a bit of umbrage.
She wasn’t doing that either. I hoped I’d made it pretty clear that her whole argument hinges on it being just as inadmissible to reduce the whole field to a giant rape metaphor as it is to reduce the whole field to a giant clockwork metaphor, but that’s exactly what we do when we speak of “Newton’s mechanics” or “classical mechanics” or simply “mechanics”.
In context, her “rape manual” statement was a rhetorical kick in the pants to make one sit up and take notice of her argument. This is not at all uncommon (like litotes, another rhetorical technique I just used).
I’m sympathetic. I almost became a physicist. I’m an excellent mathematician, but I always knew I didn’t want to do pure maths, so when I finally decided to switch my major from classics to science, I was torn between physics and biology. Horace Freeland Judson’s The Eighth Day of Creation made up my mind for me.
he fact of the matter is that Newton, Bacon et al. were men of their time and expressed themselves in the language of their time. Religious and literary writers (including some women) used similar unfortunate metaphors.
You’re doing the exact same thing the historians of science that Harding was complaining about are doing: trying to diminish the gendered metaphors as merely “unfortunate” uses of language that reflected a specific, historically-dependent mindset.
However, if it was part of the mindset, then it was clearly a factor in how they thought about nature, and it would be an act of historical revisionism to scrub all that and pretend that the only fecund metaphor was the “clockwork” conception of the universe.
And the alienation is made even deeper by the fact that Harding and others writing in a similar vein do not seem to have even made an attempt to understand the culture of physics as physicists experience it.
I would argue that she is attempting to understand the culture of physics as physicists experience it, and succeeding pretty well, since much of her book is devoted to questions of how women are represented or underrepresented among research teams and funding bodies, and how that influences the subjects selected for study. The composition of the research team and the the disbursement of grants are two of the most critical moments in defining the direction of research.
Many physicists, myself included, have worked hard to bring women into the field, to foster their learning and mentor them, and indeed to change the culture of physics to try and make it more conducive to their success. We did this not just out of a sense of fairness, but also because we feel it is good for our profession. Critiques like Harding’s do not make this task any easier with my colleagues.
I really do have to laugh at this because this is exactly what she has said herself!
Harding S. (1998) “Women, Science, and Society”. Science 281(5383): 1599-1600.
Harding, as you can see, actually has a very nuanced approach to the issue of women and how women are perceived in science. If that’s a stumbling block to bringing women into physics, then perhaps you’re trying too hard to placate the sexist old guard that still remains in physics departments. If, on the other hand, you think the term “rape manual” and how it has been used is a stumbling block, that’s really not her fault any more than it is the fault of biologists who find their works quote-mined by creationists. That’s what’s going on here, with the only difference that Norman Levitt and Paul Gross were the ones throwing scholarly standards to the wind by quote mining. There’s no possible way to completely protect one’s words from being deliberately misconstrued by ideologues on a mission.
Blame Levitt and Gross because they’re the ones who are using dishonest tactics to attack a fellow scholar. They’re doing so in order to create a rift between feminists, anti-racist activists, etc. and scientists, and then misusing the authority of science to steamroller over women, non-whites, and the working class generally. Their work is part of the conservative retrenchment.
Academic feminists like Evelyn Fox Keller, Sandra Harding, Londa Schiebinger, etc. welcome the idea of involving more women in science, but they’re clear-eyed about the difficulties, some of which start well before you or any of your colleagues have the opportunity to throw open their doors to women. It’s not easy, even for women who go onto pursue science at the post-secondary level, and I don’t see how pointing that out is necessarily counterproductive. If anything, it’s better to be aware of the difficulties that remain so that they can be cleared out of the way as fast as possible, and convey these difficulties to women who are pursuing science at the post-secondary level so they’re prepared for what’s to come and won’t burnout dealing with institutional sexist crap down the road.
Moses #141,
Alabama actually studied it and found that the freshmen recruiting was directly related to the success of the football program. The lowest p value was with the final ranking on the poll and the highest p value was with the number of articles on Lexus Nexus following a win in the Bowl Game.
It is even more telling as the number of students from outside the state of Alabama is more inclined to choose based upon the success of the football team in the main recruiting states of TN, GA, FL, and TX. Texas is where they have seen a lot of growth particularly in Merit Scholarship Awardees since so many wish to go out of state.
Not wishful thinking as schools are just another business and run on the numbers. BTW the President of the University of Alabama came from Texas and that was included as I recall as a possible reason for the success in that state.
Thank goodness I got my undergrad in Liberal Arts I suppose. ;)
A few preliminary remarks:
(1) Is there really a need for this mob-like piling on? Surely if my arguments are as bad as people are implying, then only a few of you will be needed to refute me.
(2) One noteworthy thing about this thread is the impressively large number of times I have had to write “I didn’t say that”, or equivalent, in order to negate someone’s false attribution. Such persistent misrepresentation can only be a sign of deep-seated insecurity.
(3) Dismissing me as an ignoramus is begging the question. If I’m right, then there is very little of substance to be known about lit crit, fine arts, etc. If I’m right, then I’m an ignoramus about lit crit in exactly the same way as most of us here are ignoramuses about theology.
Nullifidian:
So I’m wrong about the “rape manual” quotation; shouldn’t have used it anyway, because I got it second-hand. My other quotations (about how the speed of light is “privileged” and how fluid mechanics is inherently sexist) are sound. You are wrong that Sokal and Bricmont’s Fashionable Nonsense is a trial “held in a kangaroo court with a clearly predetermined outcome”. Most of their quotations concern only abuse of concepts in their fields of expertise, mathematics and physics. Many of the quotations seem to have no possible charitable interpretation whatsoever (e.g. when the erectile organ is compared with the square root of -1).
dogmeatib:
That’s a nasty habit you have there: you utter several lies with every post.
I said I’d read a book by Gould in which Erasmus features prominently. I have no idea why you would profess to surety when you cannot POSSIBLY be so certain. Gould was a great scholar and wrote on many diverse themes; how could you know that the Erasmus in question had to be Erasmus Darwin?
Not for the first time, it turns out you’re wrong. The book is called The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox: Mending and Minding the Misconceived Gap Between Science and the Humanities. As I said, Erasmus of Rotterdam is discussed in that book, and at some length. Now enough of this irrelevant, pedantic BS about my pseudonym.
A clear lie, because I said, unambiguously, that I have read Einstein’s originals. I enjoy them and find them very profitable. But even if I didn’t read Einstein, I can’t see why that would be “truly pathetic”, seeing as most physicists don’t in fact read Einstein, or many original sources at all for that matter. It is nonsense to say that I scorn original sources; that is a slanderous charge, wholly without foundation. What I said is that I can’t understand why, in the humanities, original sources get priority over ideas. Instead of telling me what’s so good about Kant, philosophers prefer to refer me to Kant. Scientists usually don’t tell me to read Newton or Darwin or Einstein; they just tell me what it is these great men said.
TooMuchCoffeeMan:
But I’m not advocating abolishing only lit crit research; I would like the state to stop supporting whole departments. Most universities have departments of Media Studies, Eng Lit, Women’s Studies, and other subjects I don’t feel meet the appropriate standards of academic rigour. A tidbit of arithmetic shows that a lot of money would be saved if these departments were axed, nationwide. You could argue that the money saved wouldn’t necessarily go to science. Maybe, but I’m inclined to believe that almost any alternative application of the money would be putting it to better use.
I don’t know why you would assume that the swipes by “science types” that I alluded to were desultory, unthinking swipes. Actually I’ve been joking about “Mickey Mouse subjects” with a number of my close friends for years now (and they aren’t idiots, by any measure). We send one another emails detailing the latest hilarious snippet of obscurantism. It’s all very funny. Also, distinguished intellectuals like Noam Chomsky, Richard Dawkins and Steven Weinberg have publicly expressed contempt for major, whole branches of study, like postmodernism, deconstructionism, post-structuralism, the strong program, and whatever. (The “whatever” is pronounced not as a “quasi-Valley-girl”, but as a rough-and-ready, pragmatic Englishman. And I feel it’s justified. There are a number of names in the humanities for endeavours to muddy the academic waters by challenging the very concept of “truth”. I’ve been interested in this for a number of years now, and it still hasn’t become the slightest bit evident to me how “technical training” could possibly be helpful in analyzing such questions. It all seems like obscurantism, and all seems to hinge on the essentially the same few miserable ideas. So I dismiss the whole rotten edifice with a pejorative “whatever”.)
2) You have made a number of comments that suggest that while you claim to “respect” history, you actually don’t and really consider it beneath you while at the same time you present such a limited understanding of the field it is truly embarrassing. You scoff at the idea of reading primary source documents. That you wouldn’t bother to actually read papers by Einstein again suggests a lack of intellectual curiosity that truly has me wondering how in the world you didn’t end up digging ditches or working in a factory. To read a brilliant person’s description of their most fundamental discoveries is an exercise in understanding at its most fundamental level. You’d rather read a book about someone than read their own work? That is truly pathetic.
In a semi-defense of Erasmus, this is simply another example of his extreme scientism rather than necessarily being a sign of intellectual incuriosity.
And don’t be so elitist about digging ditches or working in factories. I’ve done both in my life to get myself to this point in my college education where I’m poised to enter academia. I had a very dull two weeks shoveling gravel at a drained fishing lake, prior to its reopening, and I worked several months in a factory making pet kennels before I graduated from KU.
In the sciences, the most interesting research is generally the newest stuff, and understanding the fundamentals of a discipline is usually achieved by reading textbooks rather than original sources (e.g. you don’t need to read Einstein on general relativity if you have MTW’s Gravitation instead). Going back to original sources can be seen as working in the wrong direction if one is looking at scientific practice as the gold standard by which all other disciplines are judged.
That said, I do agree with you that reading original documents can be an exercise in understanding at a fundamental level. One of the things that is sustaining me while I pursue two different (!) disciplines at the graduate level is the possibility of uniting them as an academic in classes and in my research. I’d love to teach a class in rhetoric where Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species is treated as an exemplar of how to make a solid, inductive argument. OtOoS is really “one long argument” as Darwin described it, and has been singled out by the philosopher Edward Craig—another wretched humanist!—as a work that can be profitably read as a philosophical treatise.
I’d probably be tempted to include a little bit of Einstein’s popularization, Relativity: The Special and General Theory, as well.
So I’m wrong about the “rape manual” quotation; shouldn’t have used it anyway, because I got it second-hand. My other quotations (about how the speed of light is “privileged” and how fluid mechanics is inherently sexist) are sound.
They are? So you didn’t get them second-hand?
You are wrong that Sokal and Bricmont’s Fashionable Nonsense is a trial “held in a kangaroo court with a clearly predetermined outcome”. Most of their quotations concern only abuse of concepts in their fields of expertise, mathematics and physics Many of the quotations seem to have no possible charitable interpretation whatsoever (e.g. when the erectile organ is compared with the square root of -1).
Many? But not all? So that means that Sokal and Bricmont do sneer at quotes that have charitable interpretations that might acquit the authors mentioned of “abusing concepts” in the fields of mathematics and physics.
And you’re still trying to tell me that this is not a kangaroo court approach?
Furthermore, how do you know that those quotes you’ve mentioned have no possible charitable interpretation unless you’ve read them in context? And what does it mean to us if, in fact, no charitable interpretation can be made of the words? Should I storm the rooms of poststructuralists and demand that they stop their use of analogies at once?
Sokal and Bricmont argue that these allusions are used to make their targets’ writings obscure. If that were the case, then Sokal and Bricmont, with their background in maths and physics, should evince the best understanding of what’s being written but they don’t, and their “understanding” has been critiqued not only by other “postmodern” writers, but also mathematicians Gabriel Stolzenberg and Arkady Plotnitsky (cf. The Knowable and the Unknowable: Modern Science, Nonclassical Thought, and the “Two Cultures”, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2002).
Don’t forget, you’re not the only person to have read this book. I read it as an undergraduate and found that the only part that was only semi-embarrassing was the little interlude on the philosophy of science (marred, unfortunately, by their incompetence in dealing with modern philosophy). Nothing that I have learned since then has caused me to revisit my initial assessment of them.
I skipped past this bit earlier, but now it’s sticking with me:
Dismissing me as an ignoramus is begging the question. If I’m right, then there is very little of substance to be known about lit crit, fine arts, etc. If I’m right, then I’m an ignoramus about lit crit in exactly the same way as most of us here are ignoramuses about theology.
This analogy only holds if we agree that there is very little of substance to be known about theology. I certainly don’t think so. I freely admit to a broad ignorance in theology, but I certainly don’t think that this is anything to celebrate.
Ironically, what little I do know of theology is, in part, that approaches from literary criticism have been some of the driving forces behind theologians’ abandonment of traditional “proofs” for Jesus’ existence (like the Testimonium Flavianum), traditional views of Jesus, the Mosaic authorship of the Torah, etc. and that it continues to be influential in moving theologians away from fundamentalist and inerrantist positions.
But lit crit has never got us anywhere, so the theologians can stop reading the Tanach for “duplets” and “triplets” and other signs of inconsistencies, and instead return to a fundamentalist, inerrantist position on the Bible. I’m sure that would please some people.
No. Almost all of the quotations in Fashionable Nonsense were pulled from writings that address a humanities audience, and contain concepts from advanced mathematics and physics. Much of the time the authors quoted by Sokal and Bricmont clearly fail to understand the technical concepts they make use of. But hey, if you find important content in the following passage, then that’s your prerogative:
(Irigaray 1987b, p. 110)
Yeah, and don’t forget, you’re not the only person who knows somwthing about philosophy. Lots of professional philosophers think the book is superb. Lots of professional philsoophers think postmodernists are a bunch of windbags.
(Lacan 1977a, pp. 28-9)
No. Almost all of the quotations in Fashionable Nonsense were pulled from writings that address a humanities audience, and contain concepts from advanced mathematics and physics. Much of the time the authors quoted by Sokal and Bricmont clearly fail to understand the technical concepts they make use of.
Or, arguably, much of the time Sokal and Bricmont clearly fail to understand the authors they’re quoting. This is particularly apparent, as Gabriel Stolzenberg explains, when Sokal attempts to force Bruno Latour into the position of having ‘misread’ Einstein.
But hey, if you find important content in the following passage, then that’s your prerogative:
Actually, I don’t know what to make of it at all. That’s because I haven’t read any of Luce Irigaray’s works, let alone read that passage in context. Without having done so, I’m uncomfortable saying whether or not she was saying something important, trivial, or nonsensical.
Apparently you have no such qualms, despite the fact that the sources you choose to rely on are demonstrably ignorant of the very fields they’re critiquing!
Hmm… that is a familiar criticism!
Yeah, and don’t forget, you’re not the only person who knows somwthing about philosophy. Lots of professional philosophers think the book is superb.
And some of those professional philosophers, like Thomas Nagel and Paul Boghossian, don’t understand anything about postmodernism either.
Lots of professional philsoophers think postmodernists are a bunch of windbags.
I’m sure I’m not the only one who finds it ironic that you’re appealing to philosophy after having previously grouped it in with other disciplines like literary criticism and sociology that you claim lack “coherence”.
So what’s wrong with this? He’s clearly stating that he’s deploying mathematics in an analogical way, and where he does discuss it the discussion is fairly accurate, though he is clearly not more than an enthusiastic amateur. If Lacan is being dinged for being an amateur, or for creating an analogy in which zero is an imaginary number, then I think you’re being both unfair and fairly Whiggish in your approach to human knowledge.
The square root of -1 is clearly not a “real number”, unlike the irrational numbers, whole numbers, and fractions. Nor do I think that it’s inaccurate to say that the square root of -1 doesn’t correspond to any intuitive quantity. Nevertheless, Lacan recognizes that, despite its counterintuitive nature, the imaginary unit is useful and must be preserved for its functionality (e.g. simplifying certain formulas for the spacetime metric).
That’s funny; I don’t think even Roger Penrose would proclaim himself “an excellent mathematician”. You should not arrogantly assume that you understand all of physics, mathematics philosophy, biology, postmodernism, and everything else, whereas the rest of us are hopeless morons confined to only one specialty. I’ve made repeated attempts throughout my life to come to grips with postmodernism, and without exception I failed. There seems to be no starting point at which it isn’t either completely unintelligible or completely banal. The fact that I’m not formally trained in this area should be of relevance at all. Not to blow my own trumpet, but I have, with much greater success, taught myself to a decent extent in computer programming, biology, philosophy of mind, various topics in history, and pure mathematics. In all these subjects there is a well-defined path I can walk from the point of beginner to the point of decent competence. I’ve been searching for years and can’t even see such a path corresponding to postmodernism, let alone traverse it.
I have no idea why you keep going off on tangents like this. I didn’t say anything about Bruno Latour misreading Einstein. I didn’t claim Sokal and Bricmont were right 100% of the time. I wouldn’t be surprised if they weren’t, given the number of quotations in the book. They don’t “sneer”, as you implied, and are usually remarkably tame. For example, instead of calling Lacan out for his manifest fraudulent charlatanism, as exhibited by the quotation above, they say that he is “pulling the reader’s leg”.
The philosophy of Dan Dennett and a few others is most definitely coherent. Sad to say, I don’t believe this holds for the average academic philosopher.
Whoops. Hit “Post” before I was finished.
You’ve inadvertently provided a textbook example of what I found most irritating about Sokal and Bricmont’s book.
First, their obsessive nitpicking of analogies. Lacan in that passage says that he’s offering up an analogy. So when he says let’s consider a calculus in which zero is an imaginary number, what sort of ‘faking’ is this? Clearly he knows zero is not an imaginary number, so is it ‘faking’ to pretend as if it could be, for a moment? Am I not allowed to create counterfactual analogies? Will there always be a mathematical, scientific, or historical pedant waiting in the wings to criticize an analogy? To what purpose?
Secondly, I object to their tendency to drop the quoting just as it’s getting interesting. What does it mean to create an analogy for human life by positing a calculus in which zero is an imaginary number? Does it mean anything? Did he mean calculus as in Newton and Leibniz or the more colloquial term of calculus as in any form of calculation (e.g. the phrase “moral calculus”)?
I can continue reading S&B up, down, and sideways, and never get an answer to those questions because they just don’t address them. They want me to believe that this is mathematical fakery, but they never provide enough meat to make any such conclusion.
All I’m left with is a passage that is actually better in its treatment of mathematics than others I have read, like David Berlinski’s execrable A Tour of the Calculus, and the bewilderment of wondering Was I supposed to find something wrong with this.
I thought you’re an “excellent mathematian”. He said “calculus in which zero is irrational”. What the hell is this supposed to mean? An irrational number is a number that can’t be represented in the form n/m for integers n, m. He then says that by “irrational” he means “imaginary” (showing that he doesn’t understand trivially basic, high school mathematics). Again, I’m not sure what it means to speculate about a “calculus” in which zero is imaginary.
So I don’t even know what all this means. But how could it POSSIBLY be useful as an “analogy”? Later he compares the square root of -1 to the erectile organ. Do you think this is a helpful analogy?
Anyway, I’ve tried my best to interpret him charitably. It seems far most likely to me that he was just trying to impress and confound the humanities people he thought would be reading his work, who couldn’t be expected to know what he was talking about anyway.
Please tell…what’s that book actually like? Is Berlinski competent at anything other than writing?
You should not arrogantly assume that you understand all of physics, mathematics philosophy, biology, postmodernism, and everything else, whereas the rest of us are hopeless morons confined to only one specialty.
For someone who complains so loudly about being misrepresented by other people, you certainly don’t squander opportunities to throw out every sort of egregious misrepresentation yourself.
When have I claimed to have understood “all of physics, mathematics, [I assume you meant to put a comma there] philosophy, biology, postmodernism, and everything else”?
I certainly believe that I know more about postmodernism than you do, but that’s not such a terribly high hurdle to surpass. But did I not say that I was unable to determine anything about Luce Irigaray’s statements because I hadn’t read any of her works? That’s certainly not something that anyone with expertise in postmodernism or cultural theory would say. As far as postmodernism is concerned, I’m barely more than just started, but I’ve never found it perplexing and impenetrable when taken in light of previous 20th century philosophy, criticism, etc..
As for the rest of it, if any one person were capable of understanding everything in those respective fields, then they’d be pretty damned paltry and worthless in my opinion and I wouldn’t be bothering with graduate studies in biology (and sociology).
I have no idea why you keep going off on tangents like this.
Then maybe you ought to read what I wrote and it might provide a few clues (particularly the part where I introduce Sokal on Latour as an example of Sokal not knowing what he’s talking about).
They don’t “sneer”, as you implied, and are usually remarkably tame. For example, instead of calling Lacan out for his manifest fraudulent charlatanism, as exhibited by the quotation above, they say that he is “pulling the reader’s leg”.
I have the same feelings when I read Sokal and Bricmont—that they can’t possibly be as functionally illiterate as they appear to be and must be having a little joke.
The philosophy of Dan Dennett and a few others is most definitely coherent. Sad to say, I don’t believe this holds for the average academic philosopher.
However, you weren’t singling out specific philosophers, but entire disciplines.
I mean, that’s the impression you exude.
Well, all I can say is I think you’re either being intellectually disingenuous or are exaggerating the virtues of a few threadbare ideas.
I did read what you wrote; perhaps you didn’t read what I wrote. I admitted that Sokal and Bricmont’s interpretations might be wrong some of the time. I don’t really care if they’re wrong about Latour’s take on Einstein; I have no interest in debating that right now. Citing a single possible case in which Sokal and Bricmont got it wrong doesn’t vindicate the particular quotations I helped myself to in this thread.
Yes, my opinion of the discipline of academic philosophy is very low. I don’t think it’s doing much good at all, on the whole. That doesn’t mean I think all academic philosophers are windbags (far from it).
I thought you’re an “excellent mathematian”. He said “calculus in which zero is irrational”. What the hell is this supposed to mean? An irrational number is a number that can’t be represented in the form n/m for integers n, m.
This is the Whiggish tendency I’ve been talking about.
It’s like complaining about Kevin Willmott’s (KU film professor—Go, Jayhawks!) film CSA: The Confederate States of America, where he likens the current race relations in the U.S. to a country in which the Confederacy won the Civil War through the prism of a British documentary, shown in this modern Confederate America, split up throughout with advertisements for CSA products. A historical pedant could exclaim, “But the Confederacy didn’t win the war!” But would that address Willmott’s point or even be a relevant objection? I don’t think so.
He then says that by “irrational” he means “imaginary” (showing that he doesn’t understand trivially basic, high school mathematics).
No, it just shows that he’s not using “irrational” in its technical sense, but to mean something that resists an intuitive understanding. I can semi-intuitively understand an irrational number by thinking of geometry or calculus: the hypotenuse of a right triangle with two sides equal to 1 is irrational, the circumference of a circle divided by its diameter is irrational, by considering the Gregory-Leibniz series, etc. However, I’ve never found a way where I can intuitively think of the imaginary unit, no matter how useful it is.
Again, I’m not sure what it means to speculate about a “calculus” in which zero is imaginary.
Neither am I, and that’s a failing of Sokal and Bricmont that they don’t provide you with enough information so that you can deduce what Lacan is saying. They just want you to laugh at the idea that zero can be irrational or imaginary. But, again, I don’t find that an immediately laughable idea without being able to understand the context in which the analogy was being put to use.
So I don’t even know what all this means. But how could it POSSIBLY be useful as an “analogy”?
I don’t know, but I’m certainly never going to find out just by reading Sokal and Bricmont.
Later he compares the square root of -1 to the erectile organ. Do you think this is a helpful analogy?
I don’t know. It depends on the context.
Are you starting to see a trend here?
Anyway, I’ve tried my best to interpret him charitably.
Bullshit!
You’ve interpreted him through the distorting lens of Sokal and Bricmont without ever bothering to consult the original source material. That’s not any sort of attempt to read him charitably, because your vision (as well as mine when reading this) is constrained by the limited information that S&B choose to feed us. I don’t think there’s any discipline that could survive such scrutiny. Lord knows I’ve read stuff, some of it from eminent physicists, that looked like it might well belong in a book titled The Fashionable Nonsense of Modern Physics.
And if you scoff at the possibility, believe me that there are some people who would be very eager to write such a book and would claim to uphold the strictest standards of ‘rationality’ while doing so.
It seems far most likely to me that he was just trying to impress and confound the humanities people he thought would be reading his work, who couldn’t be expected to know what he was talking about anyway.
May I remind you of Arkady Plotnitsky again? He’s an expert in postmodernism and poststructuralism who got his master’s degree in mathematics. I don’t think it’s necessarily safe to assume that the humanities people can be so easily “confounded” by a few references to stuff I learned in high school.
David M:
Wrong! (USA is not the world, but neither is USA + France + Austria…)
More proximately, it’s a relic from the time the study of nature was called “natural philosophy”.
I’m a Master of Philosophy and a Doctor of Philosophy, both from a Faculty of Science…
Most grad students I know from the USA get no salary, except from TA:ing and lab grunt work and such. In Northern Europe most grad students (for a PhD) get a full-time salary nowadays. In Sweden you are often not even allowed to take on a PhD student if you don’t have 4 years of funding lined up.
Oh yes, because only an illiterate philistine wouldn’t immediately see the merits of a metaphor which equates the human penis with the square root of -1.
I mean, that’s the impression you exude.
Since this conversation has degraded enough already, I’ll leave off commenting on the impression that you exude.
Well, all I can say is I think you’re either being intellectually disingenuous or are exaggerating the virtues of a few threadbare ideas.
In that case, all I can say is that I don’t care what you think. For one thing, when did I claim to find “virtue” in the postmodernist approach, or even merit? I suppose not being completely opaque might be regarded by a virtue, but not one so exalted that I’d call it an exaggerated virtue.
Are you so limited? Just because you can’t understand it doesn’t mean that anyone else can? Sheesh!
I did read what you wrote; perhaps you didn’t read what I wrote. I admitted that Sokal and Bricmont’s interpretations might be wrong some of the time. I don’t really care if they’re wrong about Latour’s take on Einstein; I have no interest in debating that right now. Citing a single possible case in which Sokal and Bricmont got it wrong doesn’t vindicate the particular quotations I helped myself to in this thread.
But my point is that Sokal and Bricmont’s choices of quotations are not intrinsically damning because S&B often fail to understand what they’re critiquing or fail to read with charity. Instead, as the Latour treatment demonstrates, sometimes they go out of their way to manufacture ‘fakery’ where it doesn’t exist. They’re highly unreliable guides to postmodernism, poststructuralism, or even the philosophy of science.
Nullifidian,
The fact is, for all your bluster, that you cannot justify any of the examples of fraudulent mathematical charlatanism quoted above. All you can do is inform us that some guy with a Master’s in mathematics has happened to write something critiquing Sokal and Bricmont. It doesn’t cut the mustard. Postmodernism has done nothing to deserve the leap of blind faith you’re asking of me. I am not going to assume, in the face of all signs to the contrary, that Lacan has put to good use his “calculus in which zero is irrational” (oh no, wait, he means a calculus in which zero is imaginary!).
I wonder if you can also dream up some charitable context in which the following makes sense:
(Virilio, 1993)
Oh yes, because only an illiterate philistine wouldn’t immediately see the merits of a metaphor which equates the human penis with the square root of -1.
Well then I must be an illiterate philistine, because I don’t immediately see the merits of that metaphor either. In fact, that’s been my entire point. It’s impossible to pass judgment on the worth of such an analogy without reading the context in which that analogy was deployed and trying to understand not only the analogy itself but also its context. I haven’t done it, but most importantly neither have Sokal and Bricmont, or if they have they certainly don’t show it.
hmm. disjointed response to #554 coming up (cracks fingers)
(1) Is there really a need for this mob-like piling on? Surely if my arguments are as bad as people are implying, then only a few of you will be needed to refute me.
You would have thought so, but you appear not to have listened. I’m only here to provide some variety to the critique, from an angle which can’t be portrayed as that of an offended humanities-educated intellectual. Besides, just because lots of people disagree angrily with you, it doesn’t mean you’re right: Swift’s dictum about dunces is overused IMHO.
(2) One noteworthy thing about this thread is the impressively large number of times I have had to write “I didn’t say that”, or equivalent, in order to negate someone’s false attribution. Such persistent misrepresentation can only be a sign of deep-seated insecurity.
The fact you can’t be bothered to replace “can only” with “is surely” does not give me confidence. Again, just because you annoy people, it doesn’t mean they’re arguing in bad faith. If one can’t be bothered to use precise language, then one might expect to be repaid in kind.
(3) Dismissing me as an ignoramus is begging the question.
No, it’s an inference; possibly unfair, but it’s an inference from what you write. The wisdom that might be there in your head is not manifesting itself here.
(ibid.) If I’m right, then there is very little of substance to be known about lit crit, fine arts, etc. If I’m right, then I’m an ignoramus about lit crit in exactly the same way as most of us here are ignoramuses about theology.
And to quote Ruud Gullit among many, many others, if my aunt had balls she’d be my uncle. If you were right then there would be little of substance to be known about lit crit and art crit. Since there seem to be decent arguments that there is significant substance, reductio ad absurdum would suggest you might not be wholly correct.
I’ll skip the Erasmus (Darwin) stuff as I think that there some of your critics misread or over-reached. Though much as I like what I’ve read of Gould’s writing, I’m not sure how many pinches of salt need to be taken with his reading of sources. The history of ideas is notoriously difficult, cf. the evolution from Newton’s fluxions to Weierstrass-epsilon-delta arguments, as Newton seems to have got a mention upthread.
What I said is that I can’t understand why, in the humanities, original sources get priority over ideas. Instead of telling me what’s so good about Kant, philosophers prefer to refer me to Kant. Scientists usually don’t tell me to read Newton or Darwin or Einstein; they just tell me what it is these great men said.
But this reflects a difference in modes of study – and if you claim there is basically only one mode of study I’m afraid I don’t quite buy that. The differences I can see between maths and physics attest to that, even before we get onto history, historiography, lit crit, moral philosophy or “whatever”.
Put crudely, if you want to learn real analysis, or even calculus, or optics, there is probably no incentive or great benefit in going back to Newton’s works. If you want to understand how Newton and his contemporaries were thinking — how their ontology informed their methodology, if it did — then one surely has to read the original. Similarly, the issue of what exactly the ancient Greeks thought of irrational quantities, then one has to read the original or close textual analyses thereof, not just skim over the proof that the square root of 2 is irrational.
… to be continued …
Half-time over, we kick off once more…
Anyway: in response to my first comment here, you say
But I’m not advocating abolishing only lit crit research; I would like the state to stop supporting whole departments. Most universities have departments of Media Studies, Eng Lit, Women’s Studies, and other subjects I don’t feel meet the appropriate standards of academic rigour.
You’re not doing much to convince me, or by the looks of it others on this thread, that “what you feel meet the appropriate standards of academic rigour” means a damn. What exactly in a media studies course do you disapprove of? or an Eng Lit degree? We know it is of no relevance to solid state physics, but solid state physics is of no use in examining the internal/external psychological/political pressures under which terrorist organisations thrive. And neither is my own work. So what’s “useful” here?
(Seeing as I’m on solid state physics, which I brought up as you alluded to it upthread in a burst of “useful things my area has given us” – try taking your POV over to Uncertain Principles and see how you fare there.)
I don’t know why you would assume that the swipes by “science types” that I alluded to were desultory, unthinking swipes.
I didn’t say they were desultory or unthinking; I said they were lazy, because I believe they are. That’s my judgment of that kind of comment, not on the intellectual juggernauts who shared them with you. Inferring from egregious examples the futility of a whole enterprise is shoddy reasoning in *any* academic discipline. The sort of unreasoned reflex that a university degree might hopefully inoculate one from.
Actually I’ve been joking about “Mickey Mouse subjects” with a number of my close friends for years now (and they aren’t idiots, by any measure). We send one another emails detailing the latest hilarious snippet of obscurantism. It’s all very funny.
And this is evidence of what, precisely? I’m well aware of the phrase, but its use doesn’t make it any more valid in meaningful debate.
Also, distinguished intellectuals like Noam Chomsky, Richard Dawkins and Steven Weinberg have publicly expressed contempt for major, whole branches of study, like postmodernism, deconstructionism, post-structuralism, the strong program, and whatever.
I’m sure there’s something in The Blind Watchmaker — an excellent book, in style and in content — about appeal to authority. Citing Dawkins as a distinguished intellectual is a bit rich; I think I’d have more respect for Maynard Smith’s opinion on politics than Dawkins’ for example. (To clarify my personal opinion: Dawkins is an excellent communicator, and is often more in the right than some of his vehement critics.)
Your reasoning thus far seems to be: “I think it’s all hogwash, and some people I respect have given arguments for it being hogwash, but since I can’t recall the details I’ll just use their names as an appeal to authority.” In scientific contexts that would be bullshitting, and it’s not smelling much rosier here.
a rough-and-ready, pragmatic Englishman
Oh, gods. Bounderby, eh?
Regarding “truth” — as someone who works in an area whose own notion of “truth” is pretty restrictive and exacting, I think that the issue is complicated in the humanities and social sciences (by which I’m trying to include history, but also political philosophy, say). I still don’t see why this justifies sweeping whole disciplines aside as “obscurantist”.
It all seems like obscurantism, and all seems to hinge on the essentially the same few miserable ideas. So I dismiss the whole rotten edifice with a pejorative “whatever”.)
Ah, politeness will get you everywhere. Look, my general feeling is this: when one gets reasonably competent in an academic area, at the stage when one realises that the “expertise” one has painstakingly accumulated and internalized is dwarfed by what the *real* talents know and can do, I thought one usually learns some humility and respect for things outside one’s immediate ken. Clearly, since you are presumably really competent in your domain, I’m mistaken.
Nonsense. You’re taking it on blind faith that they haven’t checked out the contexts. They’re the guys who found many of those quotations, so a priori your idea appears unlikely.
But why are you so sure I haven’t researched the contexts myself? I’m writing from home and I don’t have access to relevant references other than Fashionable Nonsense, so at the moment I’m taking my quotations mostly from that. But I’ve checked out the deeper context on quite a few occasions, mostly years ago at my university library (and I found some treasures of my own, as well). I have never come across a single instance in which I was misled by Sokal and Bricmont (though I’m not denying that there might be some). Hence I can’t agree with your characterization at all. What annoys me most about their work is not that they’re too harsh, but too lenient. Sometimes the quotation in question appears to be an obvious, unmistakable case of the most vile charlatanism — and they will wave it off with “pulling the reader’s leg” or “seems unclear”.
TooMuchCoffeeMan:
Well, take that rule to its logical conclusion and we have to nod our heads, smiling in respectful agreement (without privately articulating “What a wanker”) when someone says he’s a Professor of Theology.
I have a lot of respect for mathematicians, because I can see why the seemingly arcane notation is useful in mathematics. I have a lot of respect for people who can go back and forth fluently between ten different languages, because we can easily see how and why their knowledge is meaningful. Same goes for historical scholars, computer scientists, psychologists, and so on. When it comes to lit crit or postmodernism, though, I have no idea what their “expertise” is supposed to mean. Despite repeated attempts I can’t even find a starting point, and I can’t even grasp a rough layman-level explanation (which isn’t utterly banal) of what they’re hoping to achieve.
Anyway, this thread has reached the point of diminishing returns for me. My posts are going to start tapering off now.
Last retort to “Erasmus”, for the moment:
Lastly, why is it all the experts you cite (`I don’t think even Roger Penrose would proclaim himself “an excellent mathematician”‘ – what the hell is that “even” doing in there? Mathematicians would think of him as *good*, but not a nonpareil; and not a professional mathematician) seem to have been plucked off the popular science or “popular philosophy” bookshelf? Gould, Dawkins, Chomsky, Dennett, les auteurs d’<> — all smart people who’ve usually done their homework. But what makes you think they’re better equipped than the *other academics in their home institutions* to pronounce on these? And where do any of them advocate taking a chainsaw to academia in the way you intially – in your original “we’re mates down the pub, we all know that’s bollocks don’t we” comment – espoused? (Speaking of which, I’ve heard better arguments down the pub, in the name of dodgier premises, than you’re offering here.)
P.S. Please continue to explain, or not, how a French psychologist and philosopher’s (mis)use of mathematical jargon for his own ends, is evidence for getting rid of English Lit or Women’s Studies.
P.P.S. Apologies to our host for clogging up the thread like this. But sometimes the wordy response is the only substitute at hand for loud swearing and repeated
The fact is, for all your bluster, that you cannot justify any of the examples of fraudulent mathematical charlatanism quoted above.
No, the fact is that for all your bluster, you have utterly failed to demonstrate any “fraudulent mathematical charlatanism” quoted above or anywhere else.
Let’s take Lacan again. You complain that zero is not an irrational or imaginary number. Lacan knows that, otherwise he wouldn’t need to invite us to consider such a possibility; he’d just take that zero was irrational or imaginary for granted.
You then complain that you can’t figure out what sort of use this analogy is for anything, but that’s because neither Sokal nor Bricmont have felt obligated to provide you with sufficient information to judge the analogy for yourself! You can’t even answer my question, based on their partial quote, as to whether Lacan is referring to calculus as invented by Leibniz and Newton or to a less restrictive sense referring to any sort of calculation (as in the phrase “moral calculus”).
So whose failing is it that you cannot tell me these things: Lacan’s or Sokal and Bricmont’s? I’d say it’s the latter.
All you can do is inform us that some guy with a Master’s in mathematics has happened to write something critiquing Sokal and Bricmont.
No, I am telling you that several people have written things critiquing Sokal and Bricmont, and some of them have graduate degrees (including doctorates) in the very fields that Sokal stakes out a claim to expertise in. I am also telling you that their criticisms center around Sokal and Bricmont’s failure to understand the thought of the people they’re critiquing. This goes right to the heart of Fashionable Nonsense‘s thesis: if these poststructuralist or postmodernist authors are deploying these terms to obscure their thought in a haze of technical jargon, then those with background in mathematics and physics should be able to clear away the jargon and understand their thought. Sokal and Bricmont clearly fail at doing just that, as do Gross and Levitt, so to the extent that they’ve shown themselves unable to understand the authors they claim to be addressing, their thesis fails, and they certainly cannot be relied upon to provide an accurate guide to postmodernist thought.
Postmodernism has done nothing to deserve the leap of blind faith you’re asking of me.
What leap of blind faith? If anything, I’m asking you to go read the goddamn sources before you condemn the entire field based on a few mined quotes. But in reality, I’m not asking you to do anything because I know that asking you to do something approaching scholarship would be a vain request.
I am not going to assume, in the face of all signs to the contrary, that Lacan has put to good use his “calculus in which zero is irrational” (oh no, wait, he means a calculus in which zero is imaginary!).
What “signs to the contrary”? The only “sign” available is the fact that Sokal and Bricmont make light of it, which isn’t a necessary indication of the original quote’s worth.
I wonder if you can also dream up some charitable context in which the following makes sense:
…it now seems appropriate to reconsider the notions of acceleration and deceleration (what physicists call positive and negative speeds).
(Virilio, 1993)
Sadly, I cannot, because your failure to cite sources properly means that I cannot consult the original work, and the quote is, again, too brief to determine any meaning from it. All it does is hint at the possibility of reconsidering some kinematic concepts, but I don’t know in what context they’re supposed to be reconsidered. I certainly have no reason to believe that he’s asking physicists to reconsider them.
What a remarkably stupid statement. Do I really need to answer that? We have our respective specialties — mine happens to be theoretical physics. Then there’s the common ground, namely popular intellectual culture. Why would we refer to obscure academics that nobody outside of our specialties has heard about, when we can talk about pretty much universally respected figures like Chomsky and Dawkins, that we’ve all heard about?
Of course this is a misrepresentation. I did not say they went as far as I do. What I said is that they publicly expressed contempt for postmodernism. I’m right about that, and I will provide the references if you really don’t know how to use Google.
It’s not. I cited it as an amusing example of vintage obscurantism. One particular poster elected to fight over this tooth and claw.
Of course I could mention Alain Connes, but then nobody would know what I’m talking about, which is undesirable. Anyway, I think your statement is rather silly (maybe pure mathematician snobbery?). Penrose is Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at Oxford. It’s hard to get a more respectable post as a mathematician than that.
Nonsense. You’re taking it on blind faith that they haven’t checked out the contexts.
No, I’m inferring from their incompetent treatment of the authors they cite that they’ve failed to understand the context.
They’re the guys who found many of those quotations, so a priori your idea appears unlikely.
Sokal has said that he was inspired to write Fashionable Nonsense by reading Gross and Levitt’s Higher Superstition, meaning that not only some of the Gross and Levitt cites get recycled, but the Gross and Levitt treatment of mockery rather than analysis is exported from their book to Fashionable Nonsense
So in that sense, what does it really mean that they “found” these quotes if their methodology was flawed from the first? Should Darwin on Trial get a pass for its use of quote mining just because Johnson may have likewise “found” the quotes himself?
But why are you so sure I haven’t researched the contexts myself? I’m writing from home and I don’t have access to relevant references other than Fashionable Nonsense, so at the moment I’m taking my quotations mostly from that. But I’ve checked out the deeper context on quite a few occasions, mostly years ago at my university library (and I found some treasures of my own, as well).
What does it mean that you “checked out the deeper context”? That you pulled a book on the shelf and found the quote there? I never denied that these quotes were there in the first place. That you read more of it already primed to find this material ridiculous? If so, then that’s a failure of methodology.
I have never come across a single instance in which I was misled by Sokal and Bricmont (though I’m not denying that there might be some).
Since you’ve already admitted to not understanding postmodernist or poststructuralist writings, you’re hardly the most reliable person to judge if you’re being misled! I would suggest reading some of what Gabriel Stolzenberg has to write and Arkady Plotnitsky’s book, as well as the commentary of experts from the humanities critiquing Sokal’s book, if you want to figure out how you may have been misled.
Hence I can’t agree with your characterization at all. What annoys me most about their work is not that they’re too harsh, but too lenient. Sometimes the quotation in question appears to be an obvious, unmistakable case of the most vile charlatanism — and they will wave it off with “pulling the reader’s leg” or “seems unclear”.
The key phrase being “appears to be”. “Appears” to whom? And why? And how? These are all critical considerations one has to make before leaping on an out-of-context quote and declaring it a sign of intellectual fraud.
It’s not. I cited it as an amusing example of vintage obscurantism. One particular poster elected to fight over this tooth and claw.
No, one particular poster decided to speak up saying that he didn’t know why he was supposed to find this “amusing example of vintage obscurantism” all that bad in the first place.
I have no reason to assume that by “calculus” he means the mathematical discipline, rather than a colloquialism for any sort of calculation, I have good reason to assume from the text provided that by “irrational” he meant non-intuitive, and as far as his uses of the words “imaginary” and “real” go, they are supportable though amateurish treatments of mathematical concepts.
So what am I left with? As far as I’m concerned, I’m left with an unclear analogy. Whose fault is it that the analogy is unclear? Again, as far as I can tell, the fault lies with the secondary source material that didn’t treat Lacan’s thought in the appropriate depth to allow the reader to conclude if this was a meaningful analogy.
Why didn’t it treat Lacan’s thought with the sufficient depth? Here my answer is more controversial, but it is that the authors—judging by their incompetent and polemical treatment of other thinkers whom I am more familiar with, plus the fact that the lead author was inspired to write this book by another polemical book—probably didn’t understand the work being written and didn’t care enough to correct their state of ignorance.
This is an judgment made independent of any claim to find merit in Lacan’s or any postmodernist’s work. As far as I’m concerned, I cannot judge Lacan without understanding his thought, and after having read Fashionable Nonsense I don’t think I’m a jot closer to understanding his thought.
I see that progress has been made. We’ve moved from “the humanities are a waste of my tax dollars” to “some of the social sciences are okay” to “really I just don’t like postmodernism”.
Fair enough: I said, rather intemperately,
and Erasmus responded, quite rightly
On reflection my statement about “professional mathematician” was at best clumsy and pretty incoherent. Though I still think that, excellent work notwithstanding, he is not as pre-eminent as the pop-science world might suggest. (You could have mentioned Connes, but that would just be like me mentioning Witten; cheap in both cases. But I doubt anyone would benefit if I reeled off a pointless list of excellent mathematicians, pure or applied, past and present.)
My problem was in your use of “even X wouldn’t…” as an attempted to putdown to Nullifidian’s offhand self-assessment as “an excellent mathematician”. It doesn’t make rhetorical sense, and strikes me as an odd reflex: why think of a name, and why make it a name you think those reading will think is eminent?
But anyway, other than pointing out my own gaffe, this isn’t the main issue …
TooMuchCoffeeMan:
It does make rhetorical sense, I was merely pointing out that even an eminent mathematicial physicist like Penrose wouldn’t call himself “an excellent mathematician”. Could have used another name if I wanted to; it was just a sort of “dummy variable”. Unless Nullifidian has published papers and made great mathematical discoveries, his statement was extremely arrogant, especially on a board where there are professional, published mathematicians reading these posts. But you’re right, this isn’t the main issue.
colloquium:
I didn’t say anything vaguely like that. You might want to consider getting your eyes examined.
My problem was in your use of “even X wouldn’t…” as an attempted to putdown to Nullifidian’s offhand self-assessment as “an excellent mathematician”. It doesn’t make rhetorical sense, and strikes me as an odd reflex: why think of a name, and why make it a name you think those reading will think is eminent?
Quite so.
I can only conclude that he simply wanted to find some basis on which to attack me personally. Obviously I’m not a professional mathematician, as I said earlier, in the very post he quoted, that I never wanted to do pure mathematics and so wound up giving myself a choice between physics and biology (picking the latter). Therefore mentioning the name of any professional mathematician was irrelevant and only served to highlight his lack of ability to read with charity.
Right, while Erasmus has in my view not addressed some of the rambling points I made, I’d just like to respond to one point (while broadly agreeing with the gist of Nulfiddian’s efforts).
I said:
to which Erasmus responded
Because it is not clear that these people’s opinions on the things in question should be respected. Surely that’s not too unreasonable? To use a strained analogy, if I had got into a debate over the lack-of-worth-of, oh, something I don’t know about like the Annales school of historical writing and research, it would make more sense to refer to someone like Richard Evans – who is hardly wishy-washy and relativist when it comes to the notion of “truth” – rather than someone like BHL.
I guess that, since you believe “postmodernism and whatever” to be bunk, you would deny my initial premise that it is possible to gain some expertise in reading, gauging and critiquing it, and in that case it would suffice to find some bright people shouting “the emperor has no clothes”.
What I meant, with my pop-science / pop-intellectualism query, was that it smacked of an appeal to simplistic assessments. However, now that you’ve explained it was a deliberate attempt to find common reference points, I understand the choice. I don’t think it’s a good one, mind, but that’s probably something where we fundamentally disagree anyway.
It does make rhetorical sense, I was merely pointing out that even an eminent mathematicial physicist like Penrose wouldn’t call himself “an excellent mathematician”. Could have used another name if I wanted to; it was just a sort of “dummy variable”. Unless Nullifidian has published papers and made great mathematical discoveries, his statement was extremely arrogant, especially on a board where there are professional, published mathematicians reading these posts. But you’re right, this isn’t the main issue.
So what if these professional, published mathematicians reading these posts think of themselves as “excellent mathematicians”? Does that mean that they’re arrogantly putting themselves above Roger Penrose, whose own self-assessment we only have your word for? Does everybody have to judge themselves according to where they fit on the Erasmus Scale of Arrogance?
And if there is such a thing as an Erasmus Scale of Arrogance, is your own performance here meant to establish the top limit of your scale, similarly to how absolute zero is the base limit for the Kelvin scale?
No, I wasn’t trying to attack you, and that’s besides the point. I knew you probably didn’t consider yourself an excellent mathematician by professional standards. But for your future consideration, unless you want to go around infuriating mathematicians and physicists, note that mathematician is often seen to mean “professional mathematician”.
Hence we hear all the time that Einstein was a bad mathematician. Compared with most people, this is clearly not so; his theories were dense with masterfully crafted advanced mathematics. What’s meant is something like, “Einstein didn’t know much about the intricacies of professional mathematical rigour”.
Anyway, I will have to drop this, because it’s entirely out of place. All that stuff about Erasmus of Rotterdam was bad enough.
I’m still waiting for a syllabus for an actual Eng Lit course or a Women’s Studies course, in the UK since that is the zone of contention, which will justify the opinion that, to paraphrase, `this kind of stuff is hogwash, or obscurantist, or both’.
And no, I will not be impressed if an outlier is presented. The original contention seemed to take the view that we (society? scientists? the taxpapyers?) would be better off if humanities as a whole experienced heavy cuts and closures. So I want evidence, please. Unless you’re going to open a Russell Group can of worms, but even that would be preferable to the way this thread’s being going lately.
You’ll not receive anything more than what I’ve provided. You won’t be persuaded, whatever argument I set before you. It’s always possible to perform the mental gymnastics required to work out some extravagant “charitable” interpretation. After Nullifidian’s risible attempts to justify Lacan’s patently fraudulent bollocks, you “broadly agree[ed] with the gist of Nulfiddian’s efforts”. So I have no hope of getting through to you. If I can’t even convince you I have a point when it comes to a penis being equated to i, then I have no hope of bringing you to my side when it comes to university courses like “Dante’s Inferno II”, “Women: Madness and Sanity”, “Advanced Feminist Theory”, and “Self, Identity and Society”. You’re trying really hard to believe I’m wrong, and I can’t see any reason to carry this on.
After Nullifidian’s risible attempts to justify Lacan’s patently fraudulent bollocks
You say this despite the fact that I clearly explained that I was simply looking at this from the perspective of a dispassionate observer, not someone trying to justify anything.
Frankly, as far as I know, Lacan’s work may be utterly worthless. But if it is, it’s by no means a condemnation of everything swept under the broad term “postmodernism”, let alone a condemnation of the humanities generally. And the worthlessness of Lacan’s work can only be demonstrated by a synoptic approach to his whole body of work, not a few mined quotes from some people without expertise in the field who may not have understood what they were reading.
If I can’t even convince you I have a point when it comes to a penis being equated to i, then I have no hope of bringing you to my side when it comes to university courses like “Dante’s Inferno II”, “Women: Madness and Sanity”, “Advanced Feminist Theory”, and “Self, Identity and Society”. You’re trying really hard to believe I’m wrong, and I can’t see any reason to carry this on.
What’s wrong with “Dante’s Inferno II”? You have some objection to students reading Dante? I notice that there’s a Goethe II as well. Should students give up on him too? How many classic authors should we throw out of university?
And what’s wrong with “Advanced Feminist Theory”? I can only imagine such a title would be objectionable to someone with a problem with feminism qua feminism.
As far as “Self, Identity, and Society” it sounded like a sociology class to me, which it turned out to be. The boundaries between self and society have been an issue sociologists have covered for hundreds of years. Durkheim’s classic study on suicide was a demonstration of how suicide rates, then assumed to be the most personal of all possible decisions, could be predicted from the type of society. You might like it; it’s the birth of quantitative sociology.
In this case, the short term of the class, its apparent absence from subsequent school years, and the content of the syllabus suggests to me that it’s probably a seminar. I couldn’t help but notice a familiar theme: “To what extent have contemporary genetic-technological developments destabilised understandings of ‘the human’?”
Wow, we discussed that to an extent in my philosophy of science class. Send in the Curriculum Police!
And lastly, “Women: Madness and Sanity” is not a course at a UK university, as far as I can tell, but one at San Diego State University. It’s a women’s studies course devoted to understanding the way that gender roles influenced the notion of madness and sanity in women over times and cultures.
I see nothing wrong with this. Women were defined by male psychoanalysis for the convenience of other men, and this goes back to the Hippocrates with his diagnosis of “hysteria”. He believed that it was a form of madness that arose in women whose uteri had become light and dry from too little sexual intercourse and compressed the heart, lungs, and diaphragm.
So for the first psychiatric diagnosis specifically aimed at women, Hippocrates prescribed getting a good fuck. Doesn’t that sound like it might have been inspired by male obsessions just a little bit?
Much later in the 1950s, middle-class women received electroshock, lobotomy, powerful drugs, etc. often simply because they were bored and stressed out over the cultural expectation that they should be the perfect little homemaker.
Women, whose minds had always been derided as less purely rational than men’s, were also apt to be misdiagnosed with a more severe problem when they were admitted with a milder psychiatric condition. Case in point: Janet Frame, the New Zealand writer, who suffered from a mild anxiety disorder but was misdiagnosed with schizophrenia (!), was held in a series of insane asylums for eight years, and subjected to over two hundred electroshock treatments as well as insulin treatments.
This hellish period is covered in her autobiography, the movie (based on her autobiography) An Angel at My Table, and in her autobiographical novel Faces in the Water.
All these sound like legitimate scholarly subjects to me, and would only seem “weird” and “flaky” to anyone predisposed to find the entire humanities “weird” and “flaky”.
Erasmus, I am going to make an attempt to explain what you’re doing, here: you’ve condemned the humanities — entire fields of study — because of the degree to which you were impressed by a book-long rant patronizing flaky romantics that nobody takes seriously anyway.
The humanities certainly have their wishy-washy types (as do the natural sciences, for that matter), but don’t dismiss the empirical and statistical labours of the social sciences — or the philosophical labours of the humanities in general — simply because you’re offended by a bunch of eccentrics.
Erasmus, I think you’re being uncharitable when you say I can’t be persuaded, though we’ve established that is unlikely.
Since I didn’t bring his stuff up, let’s leave aside Lacan, jouissance and all that, which — if you want my personal opinion — sounds a bit daffy, but about which I’m not going to spout off. Not before doing some homework beyond Argument from Personal Incredulity…
The course titles you mention seem quite innocuous (as did the seminar abstracts you cut and pasted upthread from your friend’s email message). Trying to analyse or engage with complicated things leads to awkward phrasing and jargon-of-the-trade, but that proves little. I’ve been to plenty of (mathematics) seminars with jargon in abstracts, or which have seemed like pointless technicalities glued together by jargon, making simple examples special instances of ugly pseudo-generality. Hell, I’ve been responsible for at least a couple. I’d be amazed if things were all that different in the applied or life sciences.
(Right now, I think anything which might help us understand constructs of identity is pretty damn interesting and maybe important, but that’s just me.)
I mean, I don’t know if there’s any mileage in a feminist look at accounts of the Marian martyrs, and am predisposed to doubt that it casts much light on Anglo-Spanish relations in the late 1500s. But that doesn’t lead me to advocate that one should axe departments in lit crit or fine arts which think such a tack might be useful. More pertinently, a feminist perspective could lead to a fresh reading of old sources, which could generate some unanticipated new insights. And trying to understand the past, be it 1608 or 2008, strikes me as both valuable and human.
Back to purportedly pointless courses. Is it really not possible for you to find some examples that you can share easily? Where are the forces of PoMo menacing the Proper Subjects? Manchester? Central Lancashire (aka Preston Poly)? Reading? Leeds Met (aka Leeds Poly)? Brighton? Oxford? Northumbria aka Newcastle Poly? Cambridge? Edinburgh? Warwick? Keele? Exeter (who’ve lost their Chemistry dept IIRC)? Should I be digging through HEFCE funding allocations? EPSRC policy documents?
And before you exhort me to Google, I’m not the one who arrived on this thread saying:
and I think the onus is on proponents of such an idea to make the case for it, with their own selection of damning examples. Not “everyone knows that’s the case”, but examples.
(I’m also not sure what “knowledge production” is meant to be, and why that’s the purpose of a university. One could argue — though it’s not an argument I agree with — that since the majority of students attending universities in the UK do not go on to research, university curricula should be tailored to them rather than to the demands of academic researchers; and I suspect that would actually mean most universities suffer cuts in the sciences (cf. chemistry) and a growth in media studies, sports sciences or speech therapy, and such other vocationally-inclined courses. Which is the opposite I guess of what you want, and not what I want either.)
Actually, I don’t have to try at all. I still think my null hypothesis (there is worth in studying X) is more natural and robust than yours (there is no worth in studying X). It’s largely your reluctance to specify what X is, which I find trying.
So, recapitulating, PZ writes that
No-one seems to be disputing that. (Note: “the country” is clearly PZ’s country, but since the crisis is global it can be extrapolated).
Then Erasmus offered an opinion that
This contention clearly says there’s fat there to be trimmed, but it’s essential tissue that’s being cut (IOW, resources are being misallocated).
The discussion seems to have drifted onto the topic of the merits of and justification for retaining the “soft” sciences and the humanities, but unless I’ve missed it I don’t see where the implicit assumption that university funding is a zero-sum situation, and that resources are being diverted from the “hard” sciences to these other disciplines is justified by Erasmus.
Well sure. To you “Dante’s Inferno II” sounds innocuous. To me it is outrageous and exasperating: it means that certain faculty are paid to teach two courses on something as frivolous as fiction. I would love it if they paid me to teach fiction I enjoy, such as Sherlock Holmes. But of course they won’t do that, because the fiction I enjoy doesn’t happen to be part of a long-standing, snobby cultural tradition.
You’re bending over backwards here to find some reading that goes in their favour. The fact is, we can all see why mathematical and scientific jargon is necessary. It deals with concepts that don’t come easily to us, that are far removed from everyday life. It isn’t like that in social science and lit crit, so let’s not pretend otherwise. They’re being pretentious. I’m not trained in the subject of psychology, either, and yet I can almost always come away with at least a rough grasp of what psychologists (though not psycho-analysists) on about, even when I read professional-level papers.
Demonstrably you don’t understand: I’m arguing that much of the humanities is flawed from ground up. Not just postmodernism. My Dante’s Inferno example illustrates this well. I’m outraged, through and through, that indulging in fiction(surely, almost by definition, supposed to be read for entertainment?) is seen as a respetable profession. I’ve long been of the opinion that we should make a distinction between one’s pastimes and one’s trade. Sometimes they coincide, but in the case of the lit crit squad, they’re guaranteed to coincide. I think it makes just as much sense to pay staff for teaching “students” video games. (And I really mean that: if you’re not convinced, consider the growing popularity of “Film Studies”.)
Well my null hypothesis is that humans are selfish, and people in power like to stay in power. My null hypothesis is that if a group of people can get away with being paid to indulge in pure hedonistic frivolity, then they will. So I would require an academic discipline to prove its worth — especially if it’s being financed out of the taxpayers’ pockets.
Now excuse me. I have to go collapse in exhaustion .
Erasmus, I note that you ignored all but one point and still missed that one, but…
I said I’d read a book by Gould in which Erasmus features prominently. I have no idea why you would profess to surety when you cannot POSSIBLY be so certain. Gould was a great scholar and wrote on many diverse themes; how could you know that the Erasmus in question had to be Erasmus Darwin?
You mentioned reading about Erasmus in a book by Gould, you didn’t mention the title of the book, only that you read about him and found him interesting, so again, if you work on your reading comprehension, nothing I said in that statement was a lie.
Not for the first time, it turns out you’re wrong. The book is called The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox: Mending and Minding the Misconceived Gap Between Science and the Humanities. As I said, Erasmus of Rotterdam is discussed in that book, and at some length. Now enough of this irrelevant, pedantic BS about my pseudonym.
The problem is you referred to him as the author of an encyclopedia and wrongly claimed that he avoided the humanistic debates of his day. To make matters worse you appeared not only ignorant of the many great writings of Erasmus, you were also quite dismissive of the very idea of reading an original piece, a position you’ve supported multiple times. Erasmus Darwin, on the other hand, did write a number of pieces that could be considered encyclopedia. The combination suggests that you have Desiderius Erasmus mixed up with Erasmus Darwin.
To compound this position, you dismiss the reading of primary sources as “arrogant” and and then (arrogantly and ironically enough) as somehow beneath you, but, let me address that:
What I said is that I can’t understand why, in the humanities, original sources get priority over ideas.
No, that isn’t what you said, this is what you said:
This perverse obsession with original texts is yet more indication of the intellectually lightweight status of the humanities.
Note, you said “the humanities,” which includes all of the areas you claim to respect. You might want to avoid broad sweeping, insulting statements like this if you don’t want to be “jumped on.” You also refer to the field’s emphasis of the importance of primary sources as “perverse,” rather strong language for someone who now claims they just don’t understand a strawman construct of their own creation.
Instead of telling me what’s so good about Kant, philosophers prefer to refer me to Kant. Scientists usually don’t tell me to read Newton or Darwin or Einstein; they just tell me what it is these great men said.
First, yet again, you seem to assume that your methodology is the only viable one.
The reasons the humanities look at the original documents are really quite simple. First, there is the matter of veracity. I could tell you anything about Kant I wanted to. If I presented a reasonable argument, odds are good, from what you’ve said here, you’d accept my statement with little or no question. You look at Kant, or Erasmus, or Einstein, as simply information to be added to your own “theoretical work.” You seem to minimize or downright ignore their works in anything greater than a mechanical value. Second, their work in context with the work of their contemporaries, competitors, detractors, etc., establish the context of their discoveries. Often you can’t truly comprehend the genius of their discovery, the bravery of a stance, or the gravity of the situation without knowing these factors. Each of these can be seen, respectively, in a more complete understanding of the accomplishments of Darwin, Galileo, and Copernicus. But you would, it appears from your comments, dismiss all of this for the utilitarian use of their data.
People who support the arguments you’ve been making are often the victims of sloppy pseudo-history. Here in the US authors like David Barton and people of his ilk have convinced right-wing Christians that the founding fathers were all devout evangelical Christians and that the country was founded as a “Christian nation.” These claims are patently false, but because these people accept his authorship and scholarship without bothering to look at the original documents, they follow your philosophy and accept his presentation of the “facts.”
You’ve also made comments like the one where you were dismissive of social history while at the same time supporting history, which again suggests you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. This is especially obvious when social history involves high level statistical analysis, how do you think they manage to study large groups of people and their choices? That you dismiss the field while at the same time making numerous references to mathematical models and methodology being the superior (some might suggest you argue the only valid) method of analysis is yet another reason why an historian or other humanist would question your very understanding of the field.
You’ve referred to the humanities as “perverse,” “soft-sciences,” “intellectual lightweights,” etc. Yes, you’ve regularly made comments that you limit these arguments to a number of sub-fields that you consider a waste of time and effort, but quite often you have expanded those “meaningless” fields and regularly make comments that have suggested to a number of us that you are only slightly less dismissive of your so called “respected” social sciences than you are of these areas that should be eliminated.
Finally, I noticed a couple of comments, for some reason some of your comments appear to be delayed, that while consistently insulting and dismissive, made a few key mistakes. I wasn’t bragging, being arrogant, or dismissive, “pulling out my dick” as you put it, or anything else of the sort. I generally leave that to you. I was, when I mentioned primary sources that I’d read, original works, etc., providing evidence (you’re familiar with evidence, right?) to disprove your “soft science” and “intellectual lightweight” comments. In order to teach my students about 19th century intellectual history, I read Darwin, Marx, Freud, etc. That isn’t boasting, it is a simple fact. What you make rather clear you consider an inferior area of study requires a breadth and depth of understanding that you have basically admitted you have never even tried to accomplish.
You could attempt to argue that I was being arrogant, or bragging, were I guilty of dismissing your field, or any of the scientific fields. I have done no such thing. You on the other hand have done so early and often.
I’m outraged, through and through, that indulging in fiction(surely, almost by definition, supposed to be read for entertainment?) is seen as a respetable profession.
Ah, now we reach the crux of the matter.
@Nullifidian,
In a semi-defense of Erasmus, this is simply another example of his extreme scientism rather than necessarily being a sign of intellectual incuriosity.
I can see this argument but I’m not sure I’m willing to accept it or, if one does except it that there really is, substantively, much of a difference between the two. Does it really matter if someone doesn’t care about humanistic scholarship because they are too caught up in “scientism” or they just don’t give a shyte? I can concede that part of Erasmus’ problem is that he has difficulty in the style of analytical thinking necessary for many of the humanities, but I would argue that, based on statements made here, quite frankly he doesn’t give a damn about many of those disciplines whether he is capable of understanding them or not. Really, the end result is the same, isn’t it?
And don’t be so elitist about digging ditches or working in factories.
My apologies, I reread my comment at that point and saw how it could be construed as elitist, it wasn’t intended to be. My point was simply that, when it came to some disciplines, Erasmus shows a lack of intellectual curiosity normally present in those who truly aspire to and enjoy occupations that don’t challenge or tax one’s cognitive abilities. You don’t normally see statements similar to those we’ve seen amongst people who are seekers of advanced degrees.
I’ve done both in my life to get myself to this point in my college education where I’m poised to enter academia. I had a very dull two weeks shoveling gravel at a drained fishing lake, prior to its reopening, and I worked several months in a factory making pet kennels before I graduated from KU.
I too worked in a number of occupations that were quite dull and downright miserable while pursuing my degree, a summer shingling roofs comes to mind, again to clarify, my point wasn’t to denigrate anyone, their occupation, etc., simply to show concern(for want of a better term) for the displayed lack of curiosity when it came to numerous fields of study by someone who attempts to present himself as a brilliant intellect and academic.
F**k me, I thought Bitzer was meant to be a caricature, not prophesy. So much for me finding the characters too untrue to life on the most recent reread. And I’m sure one could find a course on the tropes and subtexts of Sherlock Holmes in a university curriculum somewhere, so your rhetorical invocation of Those Snobby Bastards doesn’t seem too fruitful to me.
Did my bit earlier along the lines “first they come for the useless humanities, then the useless social sciences, then the useless mathematicians, then the useless theoretical physicists, then the useless high energy physicists, etc.” not cause any pause for reflection? Because they will do that, and as PZ’s post points out they are already doing it. Sooner or later one runs out of Undeserving Professions to interpose between one’s self and the firing line, so Worthier-Than-Thou-a-thons seem remarkably selfish and short-sighted to me.
But I’ve just realised I’m attempting to debate with someone who claims to see no justification for public spending on the *study* of literature, or who segues from “video games” to “film studies”. I guess I might as well be talking to a Dalek, really.
To anyone else moved to respond: good night, and good luck.
I love these combinations as you read through. Erasmus throws around insults, claims he’s being misrepresented and that his opponents are lying, etc., but here are a few of his gems:
I’m arguing that much of the humanities is flawed from ground up.
and…
No idea why they’re axing science departments. Get rid of English Literature, Fine Arts, and all that other nonsense. It’s not like any knowledge is actually being produced in those fields.
I love this one…
The fact is, we can all see why mathematical and scientific jargon is necessary. It deals with concepts that don’t come easily to us, that are far removed from everyday life. It isn’t like that in social science and lit crit, so let’s not pretend otherwise. They’re being pretentious.
So really, if you put it together, social sciences, the humanities, are pretentious, flawed from the ground up, and should be eliminated because no actual knowledge is produced in any of those fields.
Maybe we can all sit around and think about how the universe works and maybe do a little math now and then to support our hypothesis? You know, something of critical importance that the world couldn’t function without. [/obvious snark]
TooMuchCoffeeMan @601, my first thought was Swift, but yeah.
And even were all fiction nothing but entertainment, any fictional work represents a snapshot of the cultural and technological milieu in which it was created.
I doubt Erasmus holds similar opinions for media other than writing – surely no-one would consider art worthless unless it’s intended for other than entertainment?
Not necessarily, although that’s an understandable interpretation since the zoology remark made no sense. But, Gould’s book says (you can look inside it on Amazon)
“Erasmus of Rotterdam … wrote virtually nothing about zoology as we understand the subject today, but who compiled, in his Adagia, the most complete book of proverbs ever assembled” – including proverbs about animals – and Gould goes on to say that Konrad Gesner used these proverbs in his book on animals – it was the latter who was the compiler of zoological knowledge.
So looks like our Erasmus might not have mixed up Rotterdam and Darwin, instead something went terribly backwards in his reading of Gould.
And I don’t mean to pile on, but how does “much of the humanities is flawed from ground up” square with the sub-title of Gould’s book?
Windy @604
Thanks. Even with that quote I have a hard time seeing Erasmus’ work referred to as an encyclopedia.
…pssst …. also, but don’t tell anyone, Erasmus is actually left-handed and has been known to punch puppies when it rains. Oh, and no one can categorically deny that that stuff in his left pocket is not heroin….
Look: these comments about the guy’s moniker are ad hominem. Even if everything you say on that topic is true and even if he did subconsciously mix up some facts in choosing his pen name, the arguments he offers concerning some humanists being free-loading hangers-on need to be addressed on their merits. Even if you manage to show that Erasmus is an ignorant git, it’s an accidental and not an essential property of his arguments that they are being offered by an ignorant git. Next time ’round they may be offered by someone else. And so you need better reasons to fight them.
The ‘first they came for’ counter-argument is a good attempt. Unfortunately, it’s an instance of a slippery slope with echoes of an argument from authority (Pastor Niemöller). I just don’t buy that if we were to boot the literary critics, film theorists, and their type, that the number theorists would somehow be next. Can you offer any reasons to suppose that this sort of domino scenario would come to pass? (And for ten bonus points, please explain why is Thailand not currently communist?) Here’s a reason why it would not: mathematics is uncannily useful in building scientific theories. Places that tried to restrict the teaching of mathematics to applied mathematics (France after the revolution, Maoist China) came off remarkably badly compared to places that did not (here the contrast is with 19th century Germany in the first case and the USA in the second). History, economics, philosophy and other such hybrid disciplines too are safe. They too contribute important insights into public policy planning, biomedical ethics, etc. etc.
Next argument. Erasmus’ “indulging in fiction” argument may well be “the crux of the matter.” But so what? Why does saying that (@599) in a particularly knowing tone of voice somehow count as a rebuttal?
Then there’s the interesting point by Erasmus concerning primary sources. Well, when you ask a physicist, mathematician, economist, or psychologist what they are working on right now, they typically explain the problem they are trying to solve. When you ask a litCrit type, they either offer up something hopelessly vague or a pastiche of names; as in: I’m working on striated planes of intensity in the work of Deleuze and Francis Bacon. Or: I’m working on world literature as it pertains to the literature of India. Yes: but what does that mean? I mean, if someone can’t explain to you, in plain English, what problem they are trying to solve, or at least outline it for you convincingly, then plausibly they are not trying to solve problems. And since the advancement of knowledge proceeds by the articulating and resolving of problems, if they are not trying to do that, they are not trying to advance human knowledge. Perhaps they should be funded by rich patrons or by art galleries but I see no reason yet why they should be funded by universities.
Oh, and one might respond by saying that clear self-expression and the posing and solving of problems is a symptom of a lack of depth. The poetic revealing of Dasein can only be accomplished in suitably garbled vernacular — preferably in German, Sanskrit or Greek. Notice however that that argument was offered by a fascist theologian who had nothing but contempt for democracy, science, freedom, and the Enlightenment. Theologians are masters of the pyramid scheme; they’ve kept theirs going for millennia. The fact that litCrit is now imitating their methods hurts rather than helps its case.
So here again is the gold standard: please explain in 500 words or fewer a problem you are now trying to solve? Please mention no names and as few technical terms as possible. For bonus points please articulate the desiderata on a successful solution. If you cannot, then please ask yourself whether you belong in a university or whether you are taking up a chair that would be put to better use by someone else.
I can concede that part of Erasmus’ problem is that he has difficulty in the style of analytical thinking necessary for many of the humanities, but I would argue that, based on statements made here, quite frankly he doesn’t give a damn about many of those disciplines whether he is capable of understanding them or not. Really, the end result is the same, isn’t it?
I suppose so. The symptoms are similar, but the aetiology is different. I only said that because I was hoping that if he could concede that there are legitimate uses to what he currently regards as disciplines unworthy of pursuit, he might then evince a little curiosity about them.
After his latest response, I don’t hold out hope for either of those.
My apologies, I reread my comment at that point and saw how it could be construed as elitist, it wasn’t intended to be.
Apology accepted. :-)
I was almost certain that you didn’t mean it as it sounded, but I hoped you would clarify it yourself. Thank you.
I did understand what you meant, but it’s also been my experience, some of it firsthand and some of it coming from a working class family, that long-term employees in intellectually undemanding jobs are often “stuck there” for want of a more intellectually stimulating job in the area and little to no time or opportunity to train for another. Half family hails from Appalachia, most of them worked all day in the mines, but they had their own forms of intellectual stimulation. They might not seem much compared to an academic life, but learning and playing instruments, passing down of songs as oral tradition, reading, the radio (I even spent my youngest years without a TV), etc. are all forms of intellectual stimulation that they couldn’t get in their jobs.
I too worked in a number of occupations that were quite dull and downright miserable while pursuing my degree, a summer shingling roofs comes to mind,
You have my sympathies.
Although I actually enjoyed my factory job. It was an evening shift job from 3-12 (with an hour’s lunch), I could do my work at KU, leave for my job, come back home and sleep and be awake and refreshed the next morning, all while maintaining an income sufficient for me to pay for school and eat. I wasn’t always so fortunate so I clung to that job with both hands until it came time for me to leave.
again to clarify, my point wasn’t to denigrate anyone, their occupation, etc., simply to show concern(for want of a better term) for the displayed lack of curiosity when it came to numerous fields of study by someone who attempts to present himself as a brilliant intellect and academic.
I find it bewildering, especially the scorn for these “soft” subjects when so many physicists have taken part in them. Philosophy is rife with the speculations of physicists, like Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schroedinger, Leo Szilard, etc.; there’s James Jeans and his interest in music; Richard Feynman’s interest in Mayan history; Murray Gell-Mann’s status as an expert linguist; etc. Likewise contributions from philosophy have come from biologists like Theodosius Dobzhansky, Ernst Mayr, etc.; Patrick Geddes was also an urban planner and sociologist; Jacob Bronowski, an atheist from a Jewish background, was a recognized expert in William Blake, publishing several books on his works which involve both theology and literary criticism; etc.
I don’t think it’s an accident that some of the most creative thinkers in the sciences either had serious sidelines in the humanities, fine arts, politics, or were known to be well-read (e.g. Darwin, although he slipped out of the habit of reading later in life and profoundly regretted it).
I’m not sure I get the bewilderment. You cite cases of academics who solve legitimate problems and who also, as it happens, find it tremendously rewarding to do some other thing, call it X. Why does it follow that people who spend all of their time on X but who pose and solve no problems are therefore legitimate academics? Seems backwards to me.
We need some independent reason to think that X is a worthwhile academic pursuit. When X = math, history, classics, sociology, philosophy, etc, such reasons may well be forthcoming. When X = litCrit or theology, I don’t think they are. Perhaps I’m wrong.
So far though it seems to me that we should be cutting out those two departments and sparing geology.
I just don’t buy that if we were to boot the literary critics, film theorists, and their type, that the number theorists would somehow be next. Can you offer any reasons to suppose that this sort of domino scenario would come to pass?
PZ’s post that sparked this whole discussion, perhaps, combined with academic reality as it exists today? The humanities and fine arts have already been cut to the bare bones, and now they’ve run out of things to cut but science and maths departments.
(And for ten bonus points, please explain why is Thailand not currently communist?)
CIA involvement in the region and the propping up of a military junta where ‘need’ be.
Here’s a reason why it would not: mathematics is uncannily useful in building scientific theories. Places that tried to restrict the teaching of mathematics to applied mathematics (France after the revolution, Maoist China) came off remarkably badly compared to places that did not (here the contrast is with 19th century Germany in the first case and the USA in the second).
Do you think that historical precedent is going to stop anybody? If so, then I would hazard a guess that you don’t know too many university administrators.
History, economics, philosophy and other such hybrid disciplines too are safe. They too contribute important insights into public policy planning, biomedical ethics, etc. etc.
That explains, of course, why Thatcher spent so much time attempting to shut down philosophy departments.
Next argument. Erasmus’ “indulging in fiction” argument may well be “the crux of the matter.” But so what? Why does saying that (@599) in a particularly knowing tone of voice somehow count as a rebuttal?
Because it means he doesn’t have an argument, just his grievance that people he perceives as having more fun than he is are getting paid to do so. Frankly, I’d recommend a change of career if he’s so bored at his own work that he feels the need to lash out out at people he thinks are enjoying their work more. Lord knows that I don’t begrudge scholars in the humanities their fun because I’m having plenty of fun myself in biology (as well as sociology).
Then there’s the interesting point by Erasmus concerning primary sources. Well, when you ask a physicist, mathematician, economist, or psychologist what they are working on right now, they typically explain the problem they are trying to solve.
And how many economists would scoff at the idea of reading Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations or Marx’s Capital?
When you ask a litCrit type, they either offer up something hopelessly vague or a pastiche of names; as in: I’m working on striated planes of intensity in the work of Deleuze and Francis Bacon. Or: I’m working on world literature as it pertains to the literature of India. Yes: but what does that mean?
Why don’t you ask them?
I’d interpret the latter to mean that the person is pursuing research in world literature with a specific focus in Indian literature. Is that so hard to understand? If I’m a lit major with an armful of Goethe, Schiller, Mann, Böll, etc. is it too hard to guess that I’m pursuing a specific focus on German literature?
I mean, if someone can’t explain to you, in plain English, what problem they are trying to solve, or at least outline it for you convincingly, then plausibly they are not trying to solve problems.
Well, that rules out most of modern physics, and a great deal of chemistry and biology (particularly at the molecular level). I mean, sure, if you have half an hour sometimes it might be possible to explain to a layperson, but the areas of research are so finely detailed these days and so dependent on a raft of what has gone before that it is often impossible to concisely explain it to laypeople.
And since the advancement of knowledge proceeds by the articulating and resolving of problems, if they are not trying to do that, they are not trying to advance human knowledge.
Yup. All those researchers in loop quantum gravity who find their discipline difficult to encapsulate into a bumper sticker are not advancing human knowledge. Let’s get rid of them.
Perhaps they should be funded by rich patrons or by art galleries but I see no reason yet why they should be funded by universities.
I don’t know how to say this except what part of “university” are you failing to understand? The whole point of universities is that they provide a comprehensive arena for knowledge shared among both researchers and students. Otherwise you erase the distinction between a university and a trade school.
John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University is probably still the best defense of the purpose of a university.
Oh, and one might respond by saying that clear self-expression and the posing and solving of problems is a symptom of a lack of depth. The poetic revealing of Dasein can only be accomplished in suitably garbled vernacular — preferably in German, Sanskrit or Greek. Notice however that that argument was offered by a fascist theologian
Heidegger is a theologian now? I always thought he was a philosopher.
who had nothing but contempt for democracy, science, freedom, and the Enlightenment.
Shame! Shame! Boo! Hiss! Bad philosopher! Bad! Bad!
Hey, I’m sure those overly emotive, loaded words are all fine and dandy, but weren’t you the one complaining about argumenta ad hominem?
Theologians are masters of the pyramid scheme; they’ve kept theirs going for millennia. The fact that litCrit is now imitating their methods hurts rather than helps its case.
Really? Theology has come up with some of the most interesting approaches to reading the Bible that have challenged inerrantism and fundamentalism generally. Surely things like the Documentary Hypothesis are worthwhile, no?
So here again is the gold standard: please explain in 500 words or fewer a problem you are now trying to solve? Please mention no names and as few technical terms as possible. For bonus points please articulate the desiderata on a successful solution.
Well, in sociology my field of interest is the socialization undergone by med students at a teaching hospital. By observing “rounds” at a teaching hospital and conducting interviews, I hope to observe an effect on the interns’ attitude towards patient care, the medical field itself, etc. In this way I hope to come to an understanding of how social processes operate during internship to integrate the interns within the medical discipline and create “efficient” doctors. This is sociological research in the “laboratory studies” tradition, like Latour and Woolgar’s Laboratory Life.
According to my word processor program, that comes in at 90 words.
Now as to my biology research….
No. No way can I explain at a layman’s level what I’m doing and what I hope to be a successful outcome in only five hundred words. I don’t think I could even explain the basics of the discipline in 500 words.
I guess that means that sociology is a more valuable discipline than biology. Of course, I’ll get a pass since biology is “practical”, even if my research is not going to lead to any new biotechnology, pharmaceutical, or other applications.
I’m not sure I get the bewilderment. You cite cases of academics who solve legitimate problems and who also, as it happens, find it tremendously rewarding to do some other thing, call it X. Why does it follow that people who spend all of their time on X but who pose and solve no problems are therefore legitimate academics? Seems backwards to me.
So exactly how do you know that there are people “who pose and solve no problems” in subject X?
The posing and solution of problems may be different from discipline to discipline, but it’s still there as much as in lit crit and theology (and the combination of the two that yields us such things as the Documentary Hypothesis) as it is in other disciplines.
We need some independent reason to think that X is a worthwhile academic pursuit. When X = math, history, classics, sociology, philosophy, etc, such reasons may well be forthcoming.
Not according to Erasmus. Sociology, philosophy, and classics would all be among the disciplines he’d damn.
When X = litCrit or theology, I don’t think they are. Perhaps I’m wrong.
Maybe you should try to ask someone involved in those disciplines what they’re doing then, or take a reading of these fields. The Documentary Hypothesis, for example, is well covered in Richard Friedman’s Who Wrote the Bible?
So far though it seems to me that we should be cutting out those two departments and sparing geology.
And then what happens when you’re still left with a deficit?
Cactusren already pointed out the economics of the decision:
With tuition making a bigger and bigger slice of the budgetary pie, you don’t cut disciplines that bring in students and only negligibly contribute to overhead. Literature classes bring in students. Geology classes don’t. Literature classes need only a professor, paying students, a few books in the library or stocked in the university bookstore, and a whiteboard. Geology departments need much more.
As Morsky pointed out above, cutting entire disciplines out to save a little money is going to lead to scientists getting the “Invisible Finger” well before humanities scholars.
I’ve had the pleasure of spending time around a few Deans and some administrators. On reflection, I think you’re right: the administrators should be first up against the wall when the revolution comes. ;-) I bet that would save us some real money.
I have asked them. I recently asked that very question of a friend of mine (DPhil from Oxford in literature). No reply.
It’s not hard to understand what they do — if by ‘do’ we mean what I do when I read Agatha Christie novels. But as some courageous man whose name starts with E pointed out earlier, we don’t expect to get paid for pondering fiction but rather for posing and solving problems about reality. And it’s in that sense that I don’t know what they DO. Nor can they tell me.
False. I know a chemist, cosmologist and neurophysiologist. Each of them can explain to me what they do. Of course the details are beyond me. But I understand the point of their research.
Yup. Key word: knowledge. Since there’s no knowledge to be had in LitCrit or theology, they are not welcome in that arena.
The business about trade schools is just a red herring. I’m being very specific about which faculties I’d like to see go. I have no other candidates on my list.
False. There is no god and so the most interesting approach to reading the bible, koran, torah and similar blatherings of nomadic schizophrenics is not to read them at all. Or perhaps to leave them to historians after suitably labeling them with a haz-mat tag.
ZK – stop reading the Daily Mail. It’s bad for you.
Perhaps some liberal arts training would have made you more aware of the tricks that paper uses to influence you.
Just for the record: I have a Master’s degree in LitCrit from an top program. So let’s stick to the arguments and leave the personal attacks for some other time.
I have asked them. I recently asked that very question of a friend of mine (DPhil from Oxford in literature). No reply.
I had guessed that it was based on a real question, because it was the only one of the two that looked remotely real.
It’s not hard to understand what they do — if by ‘do’ we mean what I do when I read Agatha Christie novels.
You tease out Agatha Christie novels for subtle references, allegories, allusions, investigate their place in the evolution of the detective novel, and scrutinize them for what they indicate about the social and political life of pre-War Britain?
Wow. That’s a lot of work that goes into your reading of Christie novels. Maybe you should apply for a job as a professor of literature.
I’m being facetious, but there is an obvious point here: the reading that literary critics do is of a different and more involved type than you do just lazing on the couch, reading a “cracking good yarn”.
But as some courageous man whose name starts with E pointed out earlier, we don’t expect to get paid for pondering fiction but rather for posing and solving problems about reality.
Who’s we, paleface?
As far as I’m concerned, much of what’s best of literary criticism and theology is a problem about reality. Who wrote the Bible? Well, you could say God, but is that any sort of answer? No, but the Documentary Hypothesis is. What was the social life of everyday people like during the Trecento? Well, you could try to piece it together archaeologically, or you could read Boccaccio. And so on.
And it’s in that sense that I don’t know what they DO. Nor can they tell me.
Maybe you should start reading their work more. I’ve found many literary critics to be intriguing and insightful, and some of them are no great fans of postmodernism (to bring up a common bête noir here) like Terry Eagleton (The Illusions of Postmodernism).
Here’s a quote of his in Figures of Dissent (p. 87-8):
I must put it to you, would it be a better world if these words had not been conceived and written? I don’t want Eagleton doing anything else than what he is doing, engaging and expanding the intellectual heritage he’s chosen to be a part of.
False. I know a chemist, cosmologist and neurophysiologist. Each of them can explain to me what they do. Of course the details are beyond me. But I understand the point of their research.
So my statement is false because you know three people whom you admit cannot bring you to understand the details of their research? The point of research is understanding. That’s simple to explain. However, the specific area of engagement is where the details matter. That’s what I was responding to. I don’t think I could adequately provide anyone with enough of a background that they could understand my research in 500 words. They can certainly understand the point: scientific progress. But I’d be hard pressed to explain how my research contributes to scientific progress in any more than several pages.
I have had this experience. Perhaps I’m a poor communicator, and granted that the object of my explanation was a creationist, but it took several tries and pages and pages of text to explain why evolution was relevant to proteomics (the study of the properties of proteins, e.g. protein folding).
Yup. Key word: knowledge. Since there’s no knowledge to be had in LitCrit or theology, they are not welcome in that arena.
So the question of who wrote the Pentateuch is not knowledge? The question of how the Gospels were written (e.g. Is the two source hypothesis of Mark for the timeline of events and Q for the sayings correct?) not knowledge? Is there textual evidence for an earlier, perhaps oral, tradition stretching back to the time of Jesus? Is Christoph Luxenberg’s thesis that much of the Qur’an consists of borrowed words from Syrian and Aramaic correct?
As far as lit crit goes, prior to literary criticism it was assumed that language was always transparent and interpretation was always ideologically neutral. How can someone with revolutionary sympathies want to dismiss a whole field that has provided people with the tools to “unread” and critique a way of looking at texts that supported the existing power structure?
The business about trade schools is just a red herring. I’m being very specific about which faculties I’d like to see go. I have no other candidates on my list.
You might not, but other people certainly do.
False. There is no god and so the most interesting approach to reading the bible, koran, torah and similar blatherings of nomadic schizophrenics is not to read them at all. Or perhaps to leave them to historians after suitably labeling them with a haz-mat tag.
Unless you have already engaged with theology enough to know and demolish the arguments for the existence of a deity, then abandoning theology will be the equivalent of a purge designed to enforce atheism as the dominant ideology. You can do that, of course, but recent history teaches us that it comes at a very high human cost.
Just for the record: I have a Master’s degree in LitCrit from an top program. So let’s stick to the arguments and leave the personal attacks for some other time.
So if you thought it was so worthless, why pursue it to the master’s degree level?
If you didn’t think it was worthless then, what changed?
Nullifidian,
Yes, I get that Harding is trying to give a kick in the pants with her rape manual. What I contend is that a kick in the pants may be perceived as an assault, particularly of the target of said kick is unprepared. What is more, to those of us who are receptive to some of the feminist criticism and who fervently wish to make physics more hospitable to women, Hardings comments merely make her seem ignorant. Most physicists actually realize that you will not achieve a deep understanding of nature unless you have a deep respect for it. Their attitude is the opposite of Harding’s characterization.
Yes, there are extreme cases like Erasmus, who claim that the only things of value in human experience are those that can be reduced to differential equations. There are also aggressive Type A’s (quite amusing in a nerd, really). Then there are the rest of us.
Consider this: Most physicists study the same subject throughout a 30 year career. Their goal is not conquest but understanding. That’s not rape or even seduction. That’s commitment. Hell, that’s marriage. Successful physicists even set out with a goal of reproduction (grad students and post docs).
So I don’t agree that the fact that physics came to be in a patriarchal environment necessarily means that it is inherently patriarchal. It seems more likely to me that science prepresented a step away from patriarchy. Certainly, that is what I see in the best practitioners of the art, male or female.
Ray Ladbury @ 616: I’m now reading this book. I think you’d probably like it. As far as I can tell, it offers a really balanced treatment of science and has some smart things to say about its critics too. :-)
LeftJab
Why does saying that (@599) in a particularly knowing tone of voice somehow count as a rebuttal?
It isn’t meant to. I can’t even begin to formulate a rebuttal to someone who just implied they consider the entirety of human culture to be merely a distraction that impedes ‘serious professionals’ from getting on with their work.
Re #618
A doctor, a lawyer and a physicist were discussing over beers whether it was better to have a wife or a mistress.
The doctor said, “It’s much better to have a mistress. You can just drive around with her in your sports car until you get tired of her and then dump her.”
“Whoa,” said the lawyer. “That’s dangerous. You could get hit with a palimony suit and lose half of everything you own. It’s much better to have a wife. It’s a legal arrangement. You each know what is expected. Much better.”
The physicist looks at them both slyly and says, “You’re both wrong. It’s better to have both.”
“Dude! You dog!” say the doctor and lawyer together.
“Yeah,” says the physicist. “That way, when it’s 11:00 at night and you aren’t home. Your wife thinks you are with your mistress. Your mistress thinks you are with your wife. And you can be at the lab getting some work done!”
It would be funnier if it weren’t so true.
Anon, thanks for the recommendation. If I have time, I’ll check it out. I am a bit leary of schemes for directing scientific inquiry other than “curiosity driven”. Usually, the experts in the field are the ones who best understand where progress is to be made. Redirecting them toward more “socially desirable” avenues usually only slows progress. See for example Richard Rhodes “Dark Sun” for an example of how Politburo direction to chemists to study relevant topics almost derailed the Soviet nuclear weapons project.
I trust scientific consensus over social consensus in this regard.
Don’t have time at the moment (and might not until tomorrow) to reply to LeftJab’s points, which I accept in good faith and find rather more interesting and cogent than some of what’s upthread. I appreciate the specific questions (re 500 words) and the specific contentions (lit crit & theology vs geology, as a particular example). I still have slight but definite reservations, though.
Oh, and yes I know invoking the tones of Niemoller was cheap and a bit lazy; but unfortunately I couldn’t think of a more neutral way at phrasing the sliding slope when I wrote that post. Actually, my own misgivings aren’t so much about a sliding slope per se, but about sorites-like problems of “what is worthwhile” and “what is productive”?
But yes, back later I hope.
I have to admit that some of the posts, especially Nullifidian’s #614, are starting to put a dent in my cynicism. I’m not sure how to respond yet — and, unfortunately, I urgently need to go work on a paper.
I too will try to come back later tonight or tomorrow with something more to say. :-)
dogmeatib and Windy:
Windy has it right. I got a little muddled and misremembered something in Gould’s book, thinking Erasmus wrote an encyclopedia when in fact it was some other scholar. Oh well. Usually I would check, but this is such a trivial topic that I didn’t see the need.
If you think that’s a fair characterization of physicists, then you don’t know the first thing about the subject. You sarcastically comment that
And I suppose this is meant to imply that physics isn’t of critical importance, necessary for the functioning of the modern world. Well, I listed above a few things my discipline has given humanity: electricity, generation of EM waves, flight, the semiconductor (necessary for virtually all electronics), the laser, nuclear power, diagnostic radiology, radiotherapy, and fiber optics. I would add eyeglasses and the mass spectrometer. All these are major technologies that the world depends upon, and the influence of physics on these is direct. We would be here all day if we were to list lesser technologies, or technologies indirectly influenced by physics.
And yes, physicists are required for the maintenance of many of these technologies. So your snarky comment bespeaks only ignorance, sorry.
For the last time, I have nothing but respect for the subject of history. I am not dismissive of original sources and have looked into quite a few myself. It is unsupported slander to say I lack “intellectual curiosity”. Now enough of this bullshit.
TooMuchCoffeeMan:
That, in my opinion, is the only decent argument you’ve raised in this whole thread. Even still, it’s superficial and fairly ignorable. You could just as well replace “useless humanities” with “useless Theology” or “useless Film Studies” or “useless Football studies“. Your slippery slope argument, taken seriously enough, would preclude any criticism of any subject whatsoever.
My point all along, clearly, has been that I believe there are objective differences between the sciences and the humanities. For instance, I’m convinced that (a) a substantial portion of what’s taught in conventional humanities courses is gibberish or overelaboration of fairly mundane stuff, and (b) humanities majors tend to do far less work than science majors. Lots of people with degrees (even PhDs) in humanities subjects would agree with me. (And I should know, having spoken to a number of them.) I believe that a rigorous, unbiased study would bear this out.
Actually, I think the occasional philosophy course can be helpful for students, while they major in more substantial fields. Philosopher Daniel Dennett is of the same opinion. Quoting from his department website:
Sociology could be a productive and interesting discipline, if sociologists weren’t so obsessed with overcomplicating everything. The classics? Well, forgive me for my intolerant attitude, but I see the world as having moved beyond the pure education in the classics. Maybe a few courses in the classics would be nice, as a sort of treat to hard-working students. But a major? Nah, I can’t condone that.
I have to admit that some of the posts, especially Nullifidian’s #614, are starting to put a small dent in my cynicism. I’m not sure how to respond quite yet — and, unfortunately, I urgently need to go work on a paper.
I too will try to come back later tonight or tomorrow with something more to say. :-)
One point I should make before this thread dies off is that education in science also isn’t perfect, by any metric. I have very strong opinions about what I perceive to be the woeful inadequacy of much science teaching (including physics teaching). It doesn’t help that people who aren’t going to become biologists, chemists, or physicists are taught in university courses exactly how you would teach students with ambitions to pursue professional careers in those sciences. It would be nice if students could do a courses in physics and take away from it the problem solving skills, the approximation techniques (e.g. estimate the number of hairs on a dog), and a general overview of the state of the subject. But it isn’t like that in almost every university.
That being said, I think the most obvious first step to take that would improve higher education, is to abolish the widespread obscurantism and the frivolous fiction-reading masquerading as profound scholarship. University isn’t about indulgent games, it’s about buckling down and learning. Sitting around nodding, coming up with whatever interpretation strikes your fancy — that’s not learning, in any serious sense.
I was thinking back to what made me change my mind about litCrit (it’s been a while). It brought me back to my days of reading Bourdieu…
…. and, actually, I do have one other thing to add: I have observed (and this is partly anecdotal so correct me if I’m wrong) that the further a discipline is removed from empirical evidence gathering or rigorous formal proof, the greater a role ‘pedigree’ plays in hiring decisions. So it’s possible to get hired as a physicist coming from a no-name department if one’s work is sufficiently ingenious. But in the softer disciplines, committees essentially make their decisions based on whether the candidate comes from Oxbridge, Berkeley, Yale, and a few dozen other similar schools. After all, what other criteria could they possibly use? It’s not like there are objective standards to be had…
Worse yet, since double blind review these days is a myth, even publication decisions are starting to be made on the basis of pedigree. (I *know* this is the case in the soft fields. I don’t know whether it happens in the sciences also.)
If this is correct then what we have here really is a pyramid scheme that amounts to a perpetuation of class privilege. At its core, it involves soft jobs for those wealthy and savvy enough to buy the right sort of cultural capital, and to buy it early. And yes, I’m quite sure (as Nullifidian at #614 insists) that the cultural capital is exquisitely intricate and involves all sorts of baroque twists and turns so as to exclude the uninitiated (read: the working class, foreigners, etc.). But that’s all in the nature of cultural capital isn’t it? The point is that it’s difficult to acquire and that the uninitiated never even realize that they are making a mis-step when (for instance) they admit to preferring Strauss’s waltzes to Brahms’ concertos.
Well, I think all that is gross. I see no need to have class privilege maintained in that manner. Perhaps from now on, the door to the academy should bear a sign that reads: let no one ignorant of geometry enter here. Or somethin’ like that.
Some of the researchers on our group do biomedical research work that is so specific that even if you took their name off the manuscript, it would be clear who wrote the paper. And when we get reviews back, although we don’t know for sure who wrote the reviews, we’re pretty confident that we know at least some of the reviewers, because it’s such a small world in our subdiscipline. I can’t imagine that we’re the only ones for whom that’s the case. Just doing the best we can, and trying to make it double-blind, seems to be the best way currently to proceed.
Yeah…what I find interesting is that it can sometimes be a case of turning into your own worst enemy. If the institutional situation is that bad–and I am taking you at your word; I do not know that for myself–then it’s another irony, since Foucault’s and other’s methods of analysis are being used to examine covert and overt perpetuation of race, gender, and class privilege in arenas such as access to health care, and the resulting effects on objective determinants such as lifespan, infant mortality, morbidity, and other markers.
I’m not at liberty to disclose the contents of two papers I just reviewed, since they’ve been provisionally accepted for publication, but have not appeared yet. In very broad strokes, I can say that they examine institutionally-privileged discourse around health-care access in the United States, comparing the stated goals to real-world outcomes, and looking at embedded assumptions in the text that may impair effective action toward those goals on the part of implementers.
Kind of the opposite of what you describe there, so I find it ironic if certain proponents of addressing injustice in this way have begun to embody what they once opposed.
Arriving *very* late to this thread, but throwing my 2 cents in anyway.
Having gone through university education in both humanities and science — I am a PhD chemist and also have undergraduate and graduate degrees in German language and literature — my experience is that Erasmus is right. The rigor of my humanities studies was negligible compared to what was demanded by my chemistry studies, and I did both at large research universities.
A lot of this is due to the weak subjectivity that pervades much of humanities education. True, there can be more than one interpretation of a particular work of art, or of fiction — that’s not the problem. The problem arises when there is no standard for judging whether or not a particular interpretation may be valid. Then “anything goes” and the *absence* of critical thought or analysis masquerades as an academic pursuit. Is there *evidence* for finding homoerotic imagery in a particular author’s work? Or is it a legitimate thesis topic just because the student thinks it is? Should the master’s thesis on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Goethe’s Werther (yes, that was a real thesis, and it was nonsensical bullshit that was thrown together in less than a week) be viewed as just as valid as the thesis on Calvinism and Goethe’s Faust — all because there can be “different interpretations” to works of fiction? These aren’t just eccentric outliers in humanities education — this sort of thing happens often and is justifiably met with ridicule.
Now, I don’t think studies in humanities fields necessarily have to be weak or fluffy. But the way humanities are taught and “researched” in US universities today allows for weakness and fluffiness, and sometimes even encourages it. If a student wants to, he or she can augment the minimalist programs by learning more languages, studying classical philosophers in their own languages, or finding other ways to adopt a more rigorous curriculum for him- or herself. But the point is, you don’t *have* to choose rigor in order to get most humanities degrees today. Those who *do* choose rigor usually gravitate to other fields, and it’s not just for economic reasons.
More dangerously, this tolerance for fluff and unjustified subjectivity often engenders fuzzy-headed thinking in students that influences the decisions they make in other areas of life, making them more susceptible to woo, phony political rhetoric, equivocation, and (big surprise) religious nonsense. It’s not a coincidence that the creationists have appropriated many of the postmodernists’ rhetorical devices about “different ways of knowing.”
LeftJab and Madam Pomfrey:
Great posts. I’m not just saying that because you agree with me (or at least agree with me to a greater extent than the others). You raised many excellent points that I never thought of myself. Also, you’re considerably more informed and “streetwise” about the humanities than me, so people will take your opinion much more seriously.
Everyone else:
I especially recommend posts #627 and #629, above all others in this thread.
Erasmus, Left Jab and Madame Pomfrey,
I do not buy the argument that because some folks produce crap in Lit Crit or other fields that the entire field must therefore be crap. I can find crap produced in the natural sciences as well–e.g. the execrable paper purporting to disprove the greenhouse effect by Gerlich and Tscheuschner, which finally tunnelled through the peer-review barrier and made it into publication after 2 years.
It really doesn’t demonstrate much to hold the ridiculous up to ridicule. It is much more informative to seek out the best a field has to offer. Admittedly, objective standards are a lot softer in the soft sciences, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. I rather doubt a thesis on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles will garner much respect in academic circles even if it does earn a Masters degree.
The fact of the matter is that not all of our experience reduces to differential equations, correlations and rigorous analysis. Humans are more rationalizing than rational, and good criticism can reveal that. I’ve been on my way to being a physicist since age 12, but I have looked around me and wondered why so few of my colleagues are women or minorities. In my attempts to understand that, I’ve read a lot of stuff that was transparently crap, some that was downright misguided and ignorant, but a few studies that were helpful.
If we do not judge human endeavors by the best fruits they can produce, I fear no human activity can be judged worthwhile.
Ray Ladbury:
I know you mean well, and your open-mindedness is admirable. The argument you just made, however, is not very good. A few welcome papers is not enough to justify the costs of a whole department in hundreds of different universities. We need to weigh the pros against the cons.
It’s worth noting, by the way, that the “best fruits” of the field of theology is pretty respectable stuff: scholarly analysis of religious texts and religious history, without metaphysical baggage. Yet I doubt anyone here believes the occasional spot of praiseworthy work by theologians is reason enough for a state-supported Department of Theology.
Ray: that was not my argument. If it had been, I’d have been moving from some individual instances to a universal conclusion. And I’d have been wrong.
My post didn’t say anything about ‘crap’. I did say that standards in LitCrit are not objective. By this I mean that they are essentially arbitrary and do not reflect an independently existing reality. What they do reflect are the tastes of a particular economic class. I should add that this does not make them any easier to learn; the genre constraints on penning a graduate-level paper in LitCrit are actually pretty hard to discover. Indeed, that’s the point. (Let me concede that the Sokal hoax was a one-off affair and that a thesis on TMNT would not pass at many schools. None of this affects my point.)
Much of the cultural production which occurs in LitCrit is exquisite and requires a great deal of sophistication to savour. My point was merely that all this is done in the service of something other than the setting and solving of problems about reality. And that’s why I suggested that posh art galleries and wealthy patrons pay for it; it sure doesn’t seem to square with the project of the academy.
Let me add that I’m not confident that I’m being completely consistent. Orwell was an exceptional literary critic, and he was not a professor of anything. I’m not sure that’s a good thing. He probably would not have died at 47 if he had been. And we might have more of his wonderful essays. But perhaps that’s the price we should pay for abolishing the priestly caste in our colleges. I don’t know.
I think you are right about this. Take a look at Dennett’s Consciousness Explained. There’s lots there about the nature of experience. But, as Erasmus pointed out, Dennett is neither a literary critic nor a theologian. ;-)
I mentioned Longino, Antony, and Okruhlik earlier. Take a look. They discuss this problem. Again though, they are not literary critics.
What I contend is that a kick in the pants may be perceived as an assault, particularly of the target of said kick is unprepared.
Here’s the crux of what I think is your misunderstanding: physicists are not the target of the kick.
She’s addressing her comments to the historians of science. That her comments have been deviously bandied about by Gross and Levitt and then ignorantly bandied about by Richard Dawkins and others, following G&L’s lead, is not really her fault.
What is more, to those of us who are receptive to some of the feminist criticism and who fervently wish to make physics more hospitable to women, Hardings comments merely make her seem ignorant.
Did you read her article from Science that I quoted above? How on earth could you regard her as ignorant after you’re claiming to want to achieve the very thing she recognizes is happening and praises a victory for social justice?
That’s what Harding is like when she’s addressing scientists. The Science Question in Feminism, while it can be profitably read by scientists (that’s why I read it), is not intended for them.
Most physicists actually realize that you will not achieve a deep understanding of nature unless you have a deep respect for it. Their attitude is the opposite of Harding’s characterization.
Again, Harding is not attempting to characterize the views of present-day physicists. If she were, it would be pretty bizarre to appeal to names like Bacon, Machiavelli, and Newton.
So I don’t agree that the fact that physics came to be in a patriarchal environment necessarily means that it is inherently patriarchal.
I really don’t know how any fair reading of Harding could possibly sustain such an interpretation. At most, I think she would point out that science arose in a patriarchal environment and therefore has some clinging remnants of patriarchy about it, which you have already conceded, and that to a certain extent the silence surrounding these violent gendered metaphors represents an entirely creditable embarrassment with their outright misogyny. However, by remaining silent on the gendered roots of scientific inquiry, she might argue that it does create hurdles for overcoming the remnants of patriarchy in the present.
But she does explicitly recognize that science has contributed to social justice by making more opportunities for women, and that science is leading the way, inspiring women seeking equality in other careers.
Again, you really should read this article:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/281/5383/1599
That’s Harding speaking to scientists. The Science Question in Feminism is Harding speaking to her colleagues in the humanities, and it is really necessary to disentangle the one from the other in order to correctly read her work.
Arriving *very* late to this thread, but throwing my 2 cents in anyway.
Having gone through university education in both humanities and science — I am a PhD chemist and also have undergraduate and graduate degrees in German language and literature — my experience is that Erasmus is right. The rigor of my humanities studies was negligible compared to what was demanded by my chemistry studies, and I did both at large research universities.
I don’t even know how you would even begin usefully comparing the two disciplines for an equivalent level of “rigor”. Is Robert Merton’s Social Theory and Social Structure as rigorous as Einstein’s “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”? It might sound like a flippant question, but in principle we should be able to make such an assessment assuming one can compare intellectual rigor between the two disciplines.
A lot of this is due to the weak subjectivity that pervades much of humanities education. True, there can be more than one interpretation of a particular work of art, or of fiction — that’s not the problem. The problem arises when there is no standard for judging whether or not a particular interpretation may be valid. Then “anything goes” and the *absence* of critical thought or analysis masquerades as an academic pursuit.
I really do have to question how much of humanities is really steeped in this kind of mindless relativism. If it were, then there would be little point in the competitive dialogue between academics in which one person advances a reading, philosophical claim, historical interpretation, or what have you and others try to tear it down. It certainly sounds to me as if there is some recognition that there’s a way of judging the validity of ideas, or at least pretending that there is.
Is there *evidence* for finding homoerotic imagery in a particular author’s work? Or is it a legitimate thesis topic just because the student thinks it is? Should the master’s thesis on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Goethe’s Werther (yes, that was a real thesis, and it was nonsensical bullshit that was thrown together in less than a week) be viewed as just as valid as the thesis on Calvinism and Goethe’s Faust — all because there can be “different interpretations” to works of fiction?
Speaking entirely for myself, sure! If the author can make the case, why not? Of course, a thesis advisor’s role would be to quash such a ridiculous idea before it got started, but if the student persisted then why not allow him or her to spectacularly fail the thesis defense and leave university without a master’s degree? There are many ways of determining intellectual rigor aside from the crap that lazy, unthinking, and unmotivated students patch together. No disrespect intended to my institution or many of my students (as a grad student TA), but I’d be damned worried to find someone judging biology by the examples of lazy thinking and slapdash work of my worst students.
Now, I don’t think studies in humanities fields necessarily have to be weak or fluffy. But the way humanities are taught and “researched” in US universities today allows for weakness and fluffiness, and sometimes even encourages it. If a student wants to, he or she can augment the minimalist programs by learning more languages, studying classical philosophers in their own languages, or finding other ways to adopt a more rigorous curriculum for him- or herself.
Do you realize that your idea of rigor is completely at odds with that of Erasmus (the pseudo-intellectual, not the humanist), who has stated that reading primary sources is evidence that the person is an intellectual lightweight, and that reading it in the original is a waste of time since translations abound?
But the point is, you don’t *have* to choose rigor in order to get most humanities degrees today. Those who *do* choose rigor usually gravitate to other fields, and it’s not just for economic reasons.
I doubt very much if that’s true at all. If someone genuinely has an interest in the humanities, and a rigorous mindset, why would they “gravitate to other fields”? I left the humanities for science as an undergraduate but that was because I just wasn’t as interested in the major I was pursuing as I was in science. Now I’m back, as a graduate student, in a different humanities subject in addition to science (sociology instead of Classics—and yes I already know that I’m crazy) and I’m not finding any cause to abandon it just because of some supposed “squishiness” in humanities subjects. Indeed, I’m having to work hard to keep up, as some sociologists that my fellow students learned about as undergraduates are new to me.
More dangerously, this tolerance for fluff and unjustified subjectivity often engenders fuzzy-headed thinking in students that influences the decisions they make in other areas of life, making them more susceptible to woo, phony political rhetoric, equivocation, and (big surprise) religious nonsense.
Erasmus’ ‘solution’ to the above problem is to gut the humanities, which seems to be the root of everyone’s problems with his statements.
Even assuming such a plan could be implemented, the practical effect would be to drive students away from university entirely, perhaps abroad or to trade schools, rather than put them in the position of taking “hard science” classes. Speaking for myself, while I’d like to see more general knowledge of science, not everyone is cut out for a career in science, or even as an undergraduate science major (this is particularly apparent among some of the pre-med students, who nevertheless feel entitled to an “A” because otherwise it will interfere with their grand plans).
It’s not a coincidence that the creationists have appropriated many of the postmodernists’ rhetorical devices about “different ways of knowing.”
Creationists have also appropriated the words of scientists from peer-reviewed papers, but the solution is not necessarily to stop publishing.
LeftJab, #627
…. and, actually, I do have one other thing to add: I have observed (and this is partly anecdotal so correct me if I’m wrong) that the further a discipline is removed from empirical evidence gathering or rigorous formal proof, the greater a role ‘pedigree’ plays in hiring decisions. So it’s possible to get hired as a physicist coming from a no-name department if one’s work is sufficiently ingenious. But in the softer disciplines, committees essentially make their decisions based on whether the candidate comes from Oxbridge, Berkeley, Yale, and a few dozen other similar schools. After all, what other criteria could they possibly use? It’s not like there are objective standards to be had…
Yes, I do believe that is a bit of a misapprehension. Now it’s my turn to be a little bit pessimistic and cynical.
In truth, pedigree plays a huge part in how science operates, although in a more nuanced form. Naturally, if someone won a Nobel Prize for their doctoral dissertation, they could probably land a job anywhere, but the last person to do that was Louis de Broglie.
Otherwise, it’s mainly about who you know in the field, as opposed to where you went to school, although the most ‘elite’ schools will try to land a substantial number of professors. The graduate student today is required to navigate a byzantine system of personal politics with a long-term view of where they want to go in their career. If you want to get into a postdoc research program with X, you have Y, a former collaborator with X, as your doctoral thesis advisor. Mentioning that you studied under Y will kick down doors with X, but not Z, because Y published a widely cited paper that absolutely demolished the pet theory that represented twenty years of Z’s intellectual labor.
Worse yet, since double blind review these days is a myth, even publication decisions are starting to be made on the basis of pedigree. (I *know* this is the case in the soft fields. I don’t know whether it happens in the sciences also.)
As was mentioned, given a sufficiently small sub-field and judging by the type of journal one submitted it to, one can usually tell who the reviewers are on a paper.
If this is correct then what we have here really is a pyramid scheme that amounts to a perpetuation of class privilege. At its core, it involves soft jobs for those wealthy and savvy enough to buy the right sort of cultural capital, and to buy it early. And yes, I’m quite sure (as Nullifidian at #614 insists) that the cultural capital is exquisitely intricate and involves all sorts of baroque twists and turns so as to exclude the uninitiated (read: the working class, foreigners, etc.). But that’s all in the nature of cultural capital isn’t it? The point is that it’s difficult to acquire and that the uninitiated never even realize that they are making a mis-step when (for instance) they admit to preferring Strauss’s waltzes to Brahms’ concertos.
I’m not sure how “soft” a job anything academic is anymore. With the rise of adjunct faculty, there’s very little job security, intellectual freedom, and adjuncts are on a treadmill where it is almost impossible to become tenured. You need publications to get tenure. If you’re in the humanities, it helps to have published at least one book. But if you’re an adjunct, you have teaching responsibilities that cut into your lab time, or even no lab access, or you can’t complete your book because your time is eaten up simply trying to survive on what they pay you. I’ve known adjuncts who had to take second jobs. And thanks to the rise of the adjuncts, those who are tenured or in tenure track positions have to work doubly hard at what they’re doing to justify their position to the administration.
But this is part and parcel of the business model that has overtaken universities and has led, in this case, to the proposed elimination of the geology department.
Well, I think all that is gross. I see no need to have class privilege maintained in that manner. Perhaps from now on, the door to the academy should bear a sign that reads: let no one ignorant of geometry enter here. Or somethin’ like that.
And here comes my unalloyed, Pollyannaish optimism:
If a fight has to be made against the perpetuation of class privilege, then it has to be made within the university itself, and I don’t see how that is accomplished by splitting off parts and turning them over to posh art galleries and wealthy patrons, since what remains is no less bound up in class privilege than what disappeared. Unfortunately, the university has not thoroughly shaken off its feudal roots, nor is the situation helped by people like John Silber who apparently like to think of themselves as lords of the manor. Still I hold out hope that the situation can be changed, otherwise I wouldn’t be bothering.
Thanks for your thoughtful reply Nullifidian.
“I really do have to question how much of humanities is really steeped in this kind of mindless relativism. If it were, then there would be little point in the competitive dialogue between academics in which one person advances a reading, philosophical claim, historical interpretation, or what have you and others try to tear it down… ”
The humanities *are* in fact steeped in this mindless relativism, as you so aptly put it. The “competitive dialogue” you refer to doesn’t occur in the humanities the same way it does in the sciences, because the objective standards for assessing basic legitimacy simply aren’t enforced for the most part. Now, I myself do not advocate eliminating the programs. I would prefer strengthening them by returning to intellectual rigor and objective standards. But I suspect that would be met with extreme resistance, and the postmodernist argument that I would be trying to force “scientism” or “just another worldview” on the humanities. They are very dedicated to their relativism.
“Speaking entirely for myself, sure! If the author can make the case, why not? Of course, a thesis advisor’s role would be to quash such a ridiculous idea before it got started, but if the student persisted then why not allow him or her to spectacularly fail the thesis defense and leave university without a master’s degree? There are many ways of determining intellectual rigor aside from the crap that lazy, unthinking, and unmotivated students patch together.”
Obviously students put together low-quality work in every discipline while they are in the process of learning. That’s a no-brainer. The problem is when low-quality work is *accepted* and even *encouraged* by the professors, advisors and academic culture because of the stultifying effects of fluffy relativism. A student can easily get through most humanities degree programs with intellectual weakness and fuzzy-headedness intact.
“Speaking for myself, while I’d like to see more general knowledge of science, not everyone is cut out for a career in science, or even as an undergraduate science major (this is particularly apparent among some of the pre-med students, who nevertheless feel entitled to an “A” because otherwise it will interfere with their grand plans).”
I agree with you here. Not everyone wants to study science, and not everyone is willing to put the effort and discipline into earning a science degree. The unpleasant fact is that humanities programs have been weakened to such an extent in the US that they have become havens for the intellectually lazy.
Pre-meds and other pre-healthcare students are another ball game. I could start a completely new thread on that one, as I teach pharmacy (PharmD) students. One sees 300-400 people in first- and second-year chemistry classes die out to 30-40 in third- and fourth-year classes, because science is now seen by so many students as nothing but a temporary hurdle one must pass to get into a lucrative healthcare field. Could say a lot more, but I’ll save that topic for another day.
“Creationists have also appropriated the words of scientists from peer-reviewed papers, but the solution is not necessarily to stop publishing.”
Ah, but you’re missing the point here. Creationists can quote-mine scientists, but they *do* no science, and the scientific process itself reveals the vacuity of their assertions. On the other hand, creationists *use* postmodernist relativism because it *enables* the advancement of their nonsense as “another valid viewpoint” or “way of knowing.”
@606
Look: these comments about the guy’s moniker are ad hominem. Even if everything you say on that topic is true and even if he did subconsciously mix up some facts in choosing his pen name, the arguments he offers concerning some humanists being free-loading hangers-on need to be addressed on their merits.
Leftjab,
First, let me state quite clearly that I am not continuing the argument over Erasmus’ chosen name, I just wanted to point out that, when the question being considered includes a very realistic debate over whether the person in question has a proper appreciation or even understanding of the disciplines being discussed, the fact that he appeared to have little or no understanding of the source of that name (and the associated irony), are legitimate avenues for such a discussion, not ad hominem attacks.
It would be one thing if his name were, oh say, “leftjab” and I were to argue, “you’re a boxing fan, you couldn’t possibly understand underwater basket weaving, you have no heart.” On the other hand if my name were “Randian” and I were to argue against Libertarianism, most people who know anything about political and economic ideology would have a legitimate series of questions about what the hell I was thinking. That’s what happened in this discussion. Erasmus made a number of statements, not limited to
“some humanists being free-loading hangers-on need to be addressed on their merits. “
If you actually read through the thread, you’ll see that Erasmus contradicts himself quite often. He has also had historians, paleontologists, anthropologists, and others within the humanities who seriously and honestly question his overall perspective and his arguments because of these contradictory comments. Quite often he claims that he is only referring to “Lit-Crit,” which I personally abhor for some of the very same reasons he lists, but then he continued with fine arts, the humanities in general, various fields of history, sociology, etc. In one of my posts I provided a sample, note it was merely a sample, of quoted comments he made throughout this thread contradicting himself and suggesting that he has little or no respect for the humanities in general, not just one or two obscurantist sub-fields. In comment 602 I made a joke about this:
So really, if you put it together, social sciences, the humanities, are pretentious, flawed from the ground up, and should be eliminated because no actual knowledge is produced in any of those fields.
This joke was a summary of those sample quotes, simply reorganizing those quotes into a single statement that, while extreme, wasn’t beyond reasonable interpretation. I finished with a clearly noted snark, a joke comment about theoretical physics being the only “important” area of study. He confirmed his lack of a sense of humor and questionable interpretive skills by jumping on it as if it were an actual attack on his field.
Erasmus says, “Yet I doubt anyone here believes the occasional spot of praiseworthy work by theologians is reason enough for a state-supported Department of Theology.”
Theology, no. Religious studies, yes. What is more, I dispute the notion that the sole purpose of a department is the production of “welcome papers”. I know entirely too many scientists and engineers who leave University trained rather than educated. Hell, most of them can’t even diagram a sentence. The mere presence of humanities departments on campus increases diversity of ideas, and that is what the University is supposed to be about.
I agree that subjectivity of criteria poses problems for many fields, but the Bayesians have taken the weakness of subjectivity and turned it into a strength. Much of economics also lacks objective standards, and many economic studies are transparent crap. However, this has not stopped many economists from producing invaluable insights into human behavior and the human condition.
I presume you have read C. P. Snows “The Two Cultures”. We are now in a state of cultural balkanization. More and more I find myself unable to communicate basic science to laymen–even educated laymen with advanced degrees. I could blame them and say that they are ignorant and should have taken science classes, but is that productive? The fact is that there are a helluva lot more nonscientists than scientists, and if we lose the ability to communicate with the lay public, I’ll guarantee you it will not be to our benefit.
So if the price of the “welcome paper” that allows me to connect and spark an interest in science in an alienated teenager is wading through a river of post-modernist crap, then maybe that is worthwhile.
I totally agree that many of these fields are in desperate need of better standards. I also think that many of the practitioners in these fields need to grow a spine and not be afraid to publicly excoriate the purveyors of crap that pose a real threat to the viability of their fields of study. That will take time, however, and the product may well be worth the investment of time and tolerance.
@611
Yup. Key word: knowledge. Since there’s no knowledge to be had in LitCrit or theology, they are not welcome in that arena.
Again LeftJab, while Erasmus has stated a number of times that Lit-Crit is the focal point of his argument, he has made numerous comments that provide firm evidence that he questions the funding/existence/legitimacy of numerous areas of studies in the humanities including segments of core social scientific disciplines.
False. There is no god and so the most interesting approach to reading the bible, koran, torah and similar blatherings of nomadic schizophrenics is not to read them at all. Or perhaps to leave them to historians after suitably labeling them with a haz-mat tag.
Actually you’re quite wrong here, very very wrong. While I agree with you that these religious concepts are, at best, a load of manure, and at worst a toxic impact upon humanity, you have to study them in order to properly develop the skills necessary to interact with the adherents to these beliefs. I would think that the fiasco that is the war in Iraq would drive home the danger of political/military action in a region when you have virtually no understanding of the socio-political dynamic of the region. The fact that Bush & co. had no idea that there were three factions in Iraq and that two of them had very serious religious disagreements based on their religious factions, all of which would play a major impediment to establishing a peaceful post-war government.
You don’t have to agree with theology, like I said, I don’t, but studying the different theological belief systems can be critical to understanding people.
Mme Pomfrey: I made sure to be pretty specific about which departments I was referring to earlier because I don’t think what you say here is true. There are vast areas of the humanities where objective standards of rigour do exist and are scrupulously enforced. History is one good example. Any areas of philosophy that border on physics, economics, pure mathematics, generative linguistics, computer science, or neuroscience are pretty good too. Postmodernism was vigorously resisted by those folks; their work is typically either proof or evidence-based.
dogmeatib: points well taken. I think I actually agree with you about religious studies even though my school’s ‘Dean of Religious Life’ is exceptionally vapid and nauseating. The price we pay, I guess.
Oh, and I should clarify that I’m not much of a boxing fan; more of a Bourdieu fan. ;-)
“There are vast areas of the humanities where objective standards of rigour do exist and are scrupulously enforced. History is one good example. ”
LeftJab, you are quite correct. I should be more specific. By “humanities” here I am referring to literature and language departments. Note, however, that the other fields you mention that “vigorously resisted” postmodernism probably did so because they embraced at least part of the scientific process and rejected relativism.
Nullifidian,
Yes, I read the essay. Very nice. Celebrating gains. Not one mention of physics, though, and strikingly different in tone from some of her other writing–including the comments on The Principia.
Suppose you had a male colleague who had always shown respect for women. One day, you see him talking to “some of the boys” and you overhear him make a rape joke. An isolated incident, but still, wouldn’t it change your perception of the man? Wouldn’t you be a little more reluctant to confide or ask advice?
The thing that strikes me most is that Harding really doesn’t seem to take much interest in physics or how it is done. Moreover, her contempt for the field does not seem to be isolated to a single comment:
In her intro to “The Racial Economy of Science” she seems to contend that physicists are nothing but stooges of the military. Does she really think that physicists (most of them Jews) should have foreseen the horror of nuclear weapons (most did, in fact) and withheld cooperation on nuclear research?
Her Chapter “Why ‘physics’ is a bad model for physics,” in Whose Knowledge… demonstrates some very deep misunderstandings of the motivations of physicists and of how the subject is studied in practice.
For the record, it is not the “feminism” in Harding’s ouvre that I object to. I object even more strenuously to Feyerabend and his anti-science idiocy masquerading as “reform”. Is it really too much to ask that critics of science have at least a passing familiarity with how science is done?
Note to all:
Do not listen to any of Dogmeatib’s statements about me, in this thread or elsewhere. Almost always when he attributes a position to me he has twisted it to one essentially of his own design. He is a pathological liar, evidently incapable of distinguishing his fantasies from events in the real world. Let us hope he gets the medical help he so obviously requires.
For example, even after all his time, he claims, astonishingly:
That is of course bullshit. All along I’ve been saying I’m speaking of “much” of the humanities. I said, in no uncertain terms, that I believe much of the humanities is “flawed from ground up”. I’m not necessarily speaking about ALL of the humanities, and I allow exceptions, as I said unmistakably. For example, historical scholarship often impresses me with its high level of attention to intellectual rigour. (I pointed this out above, several times.) But at no point in this thread did I claim I was only talking about lit crit or postmodernism.
All this is very simple, and I don’t see why it should prove too subtle for anyone to grasp.
Erasmus,
I read back through the thread, and have to admit, while you did occasionally make placating gestures to try to convince people that you weren’t assaulting all of the humanities, you were, at the core of it, an arrogant, self-important douche-bag who believes himself to be qualified to determine which areas of knowledge are valuable or not while at the same time admitting that many of his objections revolve around the fact that he doesn’t “get it,” or isn’t interested, and who shows quite clearly he isn’t capable of understanding even some of the most basic concepts of the fields. What I also noticed is that you are often a whiney little bitch, griping about people insulting you, piling on, avoiding your questions, misrepresenting your position and lying, while you, at the same time, insult people, avoid the majority of questions, misrepresent their positions, and flat out lie. Your greatest strength appears to be hypocrisy.
Overall, the amusing thing is, the same demand for justification that you make of the humanities, some “bean counters” could quite legitimately make regarding your own personal work. What have you actually produced that has some marketable value. See, while I, unlike you, value learning, not everyone does and, has been pointed out, once you start eliminating programs, who establishes what is eliminated. If it is contribute or perish, how do you justify your existence? Quite literally, for people who follow your lead and “logic,” other than sitting around patting yourself on your back for how brilliant you believe yourself to be, how challenging you believe your work to be, and how the universe revolves around you and your field, what have you actually done? Now note carefully, I said you, I didn’t say physicists, I didn’t say scientists, the question is, what have you contributed to make your place at the university worth your funding? Justify yourself since you consider yourself worthy of demanding this of others. Don’t worry, I know you wont bother.
To continue, another point you wont bother to respond to, but another amusing thing is that you exhibit all of the stereotypical faults, flaws, and inadequacies of a comedy sketch of a theoretician. You completely miss obvious references to jokes, even when they are pointed out to you. You miss irony even after it is explained to you. You have effectively admitted that, if a piece were written in a field that you were unfamiliar with, you could quite easily fall for quote-mined pseudo studies and would apparently blindly accept their arguments. These all point to the value of the studies that you don’t understand and don’t value. Quite simply you don’t appear to be able to discern when someone is pulling your intellectual leg. You don’t seem to be able to tell when someone might be misrepresenting, or adjusting an original work to fit within their own position. That’s rather sad really, especially considering the fact that you will then, quite arrogantly, make unfounded comments about a subject based solely upon second hand sources and, when called on that, ignore your own lapse in academic and intellectual judgement, and blame the author you blindly accepted as an authority. Very sloppy. While I teach in fields that you respect, what I can’t get through to you is that the obvious weaknesses in your character and intellect, make it so that you could be easily misled in my field. You don’t understand, or seem to care, about basic skills and concepts that are integral to those fields and, while I personally don’t care for some of the fields you deride, involve similar patters of evaluation and study.
As has been pointed out and discussed, you seem to be locked into “scientism” and either ill prepared, ill equipped, or ill suited to other forms of analysis. The problem is that while there are very valid times and places for hard and fast scientific processes, there are also times and places where those processes will fail to give you a viable answer, and can even result in false or at least “false positive” results.
You don’t see the value, you don’t understand or follow the process, you are jealous, frustrated, annoyed, angry, and then pass judgement. Perhaps something has changed since I took my last class in the “hard sciences,” but since when has emotion replaced reason?
I’m done replying to you Erasmus, you are, as has been pointed out, simply a troll bellowing about your self-worth and self importance while at the same time belittling things and people you simply don’t understand. If you weren’t such an arrogant, ignorant, dismissive little twerp, I could actually agree with you on some of your arguments. I don’t happen to care for lit crit, I find theology to be tedious and, as PZ puts it, “filled with woo,” but really, I’d take an honest Lit-crit major over you any day of the week.
dogmeatib: points well taken. I think I actually agree with you about religious studies even though my school’s ‘Dean of Religious Life’ is exceptionally vapid and nauseating. The price we pay, I guess.
Unfortunately that appears to be the case. It’s strange though, just when I am ready to utterly dismiss all clergy as vapid and nauseating (I’m not sure there is a much better way to put that), I run into one who presents a totally refreshing outlook on life, people, faith, etc.
Oh, and I should clarify that I’m not much of a boxing fan; more of a Bourdieu fan. ;-)
*chuckle* I figured the boxing reference would be an ad hominem example that few would miss. ;o)
Erasmus @646:
You do yourself no favour, and I will not be patronised.
I will read (“listen to”) any and all posts, I will make my own decision as to whether anyone is misrepresented, and I will come to my own conclusions about something.
I could be an absolute bungler, a crank physicist, the last person in the world who’s worthy of academic funding — and my above arguments wouldn’t be affected a jot.
You cannot seem to separate ad homs from concepts. You told me what you think of me, so briefly I’ll reciprocate. You come off as a superficial pedant, far more obsessed with proving others ignorant than with making progress in finding the truth.
When I accused you of misrepresentation, lying, etc., I supported all my claims. You do no such thing. Once again, I’m going to assume this is only because you can’t.
You should stop babbling, Erasmus. It’s too late to vindicate yourself and your stupid views. Brilliant work in particular by the always brilliant Nullifidian.