faetal on 5/2/2014 at 14:26
Quote Posted by demagogue
Edit: I need to apologize to faetal or ask for his permission, since this is overtaking the thread. In my mind, the very happy occasion of faetal's thesis submission is a good chance to start talking about academia generally, and what all these theses mean in the big scheme of things, and his opinion is going to be really valuable on that. But others might not see it that way, so if it's better to cut the chitchat then I'll bow out with apologies.
Hey, it's a forum, ain't no one got to ask permission for anything :)
I would say that rather than say humanities is BS, there is more scope for reaching conclusions which are nebulous or specious if there are no experimental data to anchor them to, since it is perfectly possible to create a highly logical hypothesis which just fits because it joins dots and "makes sense". With natural science, you kind of need to show the lines that connect the dots actually exist the way you think they do and if you can;t show it conclusively, you have to state as much "more study is required to verify.." and so on. To my mind, this doesn't make the natural sciences worth more, it just raises the importance of independently generated consensus in the subjects which derive less from being able to empirically verify the details. It's all about what experiments you can do. This is why medical science is such a difficult subject, because for 99.9% of things you want to know, you can't experiment with humans, it's all about piecing together the stuff using animals and
in vitro methods and then projecting the findings on to any epidemiological data you might have, or the rare clinical study if you get the ethics for it.
In some ways, I think it might be tougher to do something which is less empirical. At least with a lot of my findings, I'm very confident that what I am saying is right because I got to test it in a lab setting and I'm not expected to make claims which go beyond the remit of what I found, other than suggest in my discussion what might make a useful body of work to follow on. I'm not sure how sure of my findings I'd be if I had to e.g. piece together a thesis from historical literature, knowing that there's not often a way to know the extent of how accurate it is.
Thirith on 5/2/2014 at 18:05
dema, not sure whether my own experience and, perhaps more importantly, views on the humanities are relevant here. I did a PhD on Salman Rushdie nine years ago (allow me to feel the distinct need to get drunk at realising it's almost been TEN FUCKING YEARS!!!), and while I consider myself a critic of a lot of what goes on in the humanities, I do think a) it's relevant and b) there is such a thing as intellectual rigour in it. It's often mixed up in politics and ideology and there are way too many windbags who like to hear themselves talk, and yes, there is a certain amount of orthodoxy in the field. At the same time, the longer I've been thinking about often decried (and in my opinion often misused and/or misunderstood) issues such as postmodernism, poststructuralism and deconstruction, the more I think that there's a lot to them. Too often they're bandied about by people who want to *appear* smart, erudite and relevant than by people who care about *thinking*, but while there are many phonies in the humanities, the concepts themselves are not phony.
I do think that applying scientific method to the humanities only works to a small extent, because so much of the field is about asking fundamentally different questions. If anything, the question is how relevant and valid these questions are.
Then again, as someone who'd like to get back into the academic world, perhaps I've drunk too much of the Kool-Aid and should be roundly pitied and ignored. ;-)
