In 2015-16, when I was still a PhD student, a friend and I had an email-exchange debate in which we argued about Science vs. the Humanities. This was in conjunction with a podcast we were attempting to launch, in which we would engage the same debate and which we titled "Science vs. the Humanities". This essay is an excerpt from an email I wrote during that debate. As such, it's more of a sketch than a rendered argument, but I thought it was interesting enough to publish here. Apparently I had quite the command of relevant ideas back then. Alas that I have since forgotten so much.
September 20,2015
Fundamentally, it's a question of epistemology: How can we know [X]? and How do we know [X]? ([X] is optional)
The basic distinction is between a rationalist epistemology and an empiricist epistemology -- the structuralists (Saussure, Levi-Strauss) and poststructuralists (Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard), as well as much philosophy deriving from Hegel (Derrida et al.) and Nietzsche (think "Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense," though it's questionable whether this was Nietzsche's truly considered opinion, since he did not publish the essay in his lifetime, though poststructural theorists love to point to that essay as proto-postmodernism) that influenced 20th century Continental Philosophy and has had an enormous influence on Theory (the term I will use to encompass the French Theorists and those concomitant with them: e.g. Butler, Spivak, even Fish, and even Knapp and Michaels in their "Against Theory" -- in other words, those perspectives influential in English Departments and the Humanities in general) espouse (even when tacit) an empiricist epistemology. That is, the Lockean "blank-slate" view of the human animal.
The contrary position, which I think is far more convincing, and which Chomsky insists upon, is a rationalist epistemology: that much of our knowledge of the world is innate to us.
You say that you agree with the things I say about this, but I still feel that there's an unobserved tension here.
A concomitant question to epistemology is metaphysics. There is a reason these have been attached for 2500 years of philosophical endeavor. We ask not only How can we know [X]? and How do we know [X]? but also What is [X] (in order that [X] can be known)?
Derrida tries to complicate that question with "the question of the question" -- what is it to "be"? but to me this is bizarre sophistry. There are things to be said about his line of inquiry, I think, but I'll pass them by for the moment. Ultimately, Hegel's "Absolute" consciousness (which seems to me to borrow a lot from Berkeley but leave behind some of the interesting stuff), Husserl's and Heidegger's concerns with Phenomenology and the bracketing of mind-external reality, which influenced the course of Theory (through the French Theorists et al.) have effectively erased the brackets and the mind-external reality within them. This is what lets Baudrillard write a book with such an obnoxious title as "The Gulf War Did Not Take Place," which, I know, makes a different argument than that something real didn't happen. But this is a common presumption when proponents of Theory talk about the world -- physical reality has no bearing on the interpretation of it. It's always about social construction (this comes strongly from Hegel, through Marx, and is important, but is not the full story) and interpretation.
Interpretation. One of the reasons the set of philosophical perspectives and assumptions appeals to English departments and the Humanities is because it privileges interpretation. Derrida's "il n'y a pas hors-texte" has been widely (and often tacitly even while denying it) construed to mean that everything in the world is a text that can be interpreted. This is Baudrillard's program in that Gulf War book. It's also the way in which critics (both textual and cultural) primarily operate: as interpreters. This leads naturally into so-called "Reader-response" methods and the assumptions of Fish of interpretive communities. We should always be wary when any philosophy declares that some elite have the power of interpreting the world, and that those who can master an opaque cant hold the key to the most appropriate or sound interpretations. This presumes the importance of said elite and in fact turns them into monsters who assume they must reconstruct ordinary people to see the world in the appropriate way, because after all ordinary people are blank slates that require some beneficent power to "inscribe" them so that they will interpret their surroundings according to appropriately selected received and acknowledged wisdom.
Social Construction. This is where the confusion about text and interpretation enters. This is also where Derrida's confusion about the real world arises. I pick on him because he addressed these things most directly, but all Theory adopts as assumptions many of his conclusions, though most often tacitly (e.g. Foucault, though he through Deleuze, who was doing similar things with the problem of "being"). It is true that social reality is a construct -- all we have to do is look at money to understand that its worth arises only from our acceptance of its having worth. Hence, if we want to interpret money in some way, we will find, as Theory does, that there is no fixed ground on which an interpretation of money can be made. It depends on shared assumptions. There is no foundational truth because there can be no foundational truth about how money is to be interpreted.
But let's for a moment draw a distinction between interpretation and understanding. Textual scholars (literary and cultural critics) claim interpretation as their ultimate goal, while science, and scientific method, I think, claim understanding as their ultimate goal. For the most part, I think that the ordinary usage of these terms will suffice for this analysis, so I don't think I need to define them in any technical sense.
The metaphysics of these two goals differs slightly. For Theory, which intends interpretation, the assumption is that the status of the thing in the world does not matter or may as well not be mind-external. This is left over from Husserl's bracketing and Hegel's idealism. Science, which intends understanding, accepts 1, that physical reality exists; and 2, that human beings are part of physical reality. Science (this is not monolithic, but I'll keep the term for ease in this essay) rejects solipsism, while Theory's only natural resting place becomes solipsism, because of its assumptions. Reject those assumptions, and the physical world becomes accessible.
Understanding of the physical world is brought about by the rationalist epistemology: human beings are physical creatures in the physical world, on whom physical forces have worked to shape a mental capacity. That mental capacity is 1, an aspect of the property of being human; and 2, capable of apprehending the physical world. Although we will never encounter a perfect triangle in the physical world, the mental capacity to understand triangles allows us to understand things in the world as triangles. It is not that the thing in the world is a triangle -- it is that we construct a mental understanding of the thing in the world which applies the innately determined properties of triangles to that thing. Ultimately, this process makes no claims about the things in the world, only about our understanding of the things in the world. This is how things in the world become intelligible to human mental capacity, and it is primarily reflexive. Science is the application of these processes in a non-reflexive way to expanding our reflexive understanding of the world. Being non-reflexive, this kind of understanding requires a different kind of learning experience, but still relies on innate mental knowledge.
That is the answer to the epistemological question: How can we know [X]? and How do we know [X]? -- by the application of innate assumptions about the world (a kind of innate knowledge shaped by evolution) upon things in the world. Chomsky analyses language in these terms. We learn language because we have an innate knowledge of language. Hence, infants hear spoken language and apply particular assumptions about language so that they can learn the explicit properties of the language spoken around them without first having to learn the generalized properties of all potential languages.
This is true of all aspects of language -- that it is based on innate assumptions about the world provided to our mental capacities by evolution and our genes. Hence, Words.
Words are labels for particular assumptions about the physical and social world provided to our mental capacity. The application of words to the world shapes our understanding of the world. This is not an interpretive task, but a task of understanding. When I say that my desk has been "fabricated," I'm not interpreting the social circumstances of this object, but I'm offering my own understanding of the object based on a particular perspective I take on it, including its social relation to me (intentional agency and deliberation -- i.e. the presumption of another mind). Other perspectives are available. They might shift my understanding. But they do not change the object. And they do not require themselves.
Consider the word "Ground" -- This word encompasses a particular perspective on some aspect of the world. I can go outside my house and stand on the "ground." Then, if a sinkhole opens up beneath me, I can fall several hundred feet and come to rest on the "ground" again. But the deployment of these words is based on my perspective and my understanding of my circumstances. It is not the word itself that refers to anything, but the specific use of the word that refers to some perspective on particular circumstances in the world. Science does not seek to understand everything in the world, but abstracted properties by which things in the world behave. Things that allow, in principle, predictions about abstracted behavior (in the same way I can intuit and predict the way sand or a stone or water will fall from my hands because of an innate knowledge of physics).
Likewise, we can take a perspective on the world about things that do not actually exist in the world. This is true of "God" and of "Money." One way to think about this is to realize that there is no difference between abstract uses of words and concrete uses of words. When I'm standing on the "ground" outside my house, that's relatively the same thing as the "grounds" of my argument. Or when you and I both read the same book by Chomsky, even though we have different copies of that book, we've read the same book. That sounds like gibberish until we recognize that "book" is a deployment of a way of thinking about a mental thing, whether or not that thing has a (momentary) physical referent or not. The same is true of god and money and media.
So, although understanding and interpretation do seem both to rely on mind, they in fact rely on contrary versions of mind. Whereas the rationalist privileges the mind as means of apprehending/understanding the world; the empiricist privileges the world (despite its non-existence) as shaping the mind (technically, the social world does the shaping, not the physical world). Despite the name, reader-response theory is still about the text, not the reader. And poststructuralism is still about the structure. Theory-based critics (literary and cultural) insist on spinning out interpretations, but these do not seem to touch on understanding. Equally, it's not clear what is to be done with an interpretation -- if the social world shapes the way in which we interpret it, is offering an alternate interpretation just another way to shape human minds? What is the goal?
From my point of view, the rationalist account is far more robust, though it's an open question on whether it can offer a complete or sufficient alternative to interpretation (though I'm basing my phd on the assumption that it can).
***
Think of a truism as a tautology. "Night" is contrasted with "Day" by the presence/absence of the sun and of light. To say that the night is dark is to utter a truism. To say that the night evinces a proclivity for umbral manifestation is a truism dressed up in fanciness. Maybe this is profound. I don't see the point. But if Theorists want to truck in definitions, then I'll call out inappropriate definitions. On the other hand, when definitions are used as premises, then it's important to ascertain the validity of the premises in order to determine the force of the conclusions. That is most often the case when Theory analogizes language with other phenomena in order to draw conclusions.
I don't think Foucault was entirely wrong, as I think there are some important things going on there, and obviously Marx was on to something apropos of 19th-century Europe. But both are incomplete. I think it's ok to steal what we can, but overall, I prefer a more robust and complete account. I know Theory derides foundations and Descartes, but Descartes's cogito is a good foundation, even if his immediate next step (God) was a misstep. See, I can both dismiss and embrace people at the same time -- because it's not people I'm interested in, but ideas.
By the way, I agree with Chomsky that what we usually call language in ordinary discourse, that is, the stuff that spills out of our mouths, is merely an externalization of a mode of thought -- hence, I would call it "Language" that process within the mind that as a consequence of its activity produces verbalization. We can notice that most of the use of this process is not for externalization or for communication, but for internal cogitation. Think of it as your own internal narration of your own ideas -- i.e. thinking (at least in one mode, which can be contrasted with visual thinking or other modes of thought). From this analysis, the conclusion can be drawn that communicating with other people is merely a use to which language is put when it is externalized in particular contexts. It also arises from this analysis that no two people have identical language-processes in their minds, and that the understanding (theorizing) of another person's intentions by reconstructing according to one's own internal rules what that other person might have intended by vocalizing in some particular way must be based on one's internal processes without access to the other person's processes and hence will be imperfect and incomplete. By the mere fact that some level of communication is possible at all we can conclude that all human beings share features within these internal processes, and that if we really want to communicate something with the intention of it being understood, we should speak simply and try to abide by community standards. Judith Butler's defense of bad writing be damned. If the idea is ascertainable by a human being, then it is expressible in ordinary language (being an externalization of thought, as Aristotle noted).
Truth is a complex thing. In general, I would say that truth is a religious concept, not a scientific one, and I would elaborate that science is concerned with understanding, not with truth. However, I will acknowledge that science and scientific people use the word "truth" when talking about scientific discovery, so there is something there. Truth may be an evaluative concept: is evolution True? Is it True that money has value? Is what she said True? In this way, it might be an evaluation of understanding -- in other words, is our understanding apropos; does it apply in a large subset of contexts? In this way, whether or not the truth can change depends on what sort of truth you're talking about. So it's not an analysis of the truth, but of the thing (or mental representation of the thing). Maybe money will one day have no value, though at present it does. Truisms seem to be things that are true by definition (the night is dark), although definitions are likewise complicated. If a definition can change, then maybe that truth can change as well, but I don't think that's the case -- something else is going on there. Whether or not truth and belief are connected is a function of the thing that is or is not true, not of truth as an evaluative claim. I can believe that the night is not dark, but then I'm wrong: the night is still dark; but an Amazon tribesman can believe that paper currency has no value, and he can be right, even if were I to believe such a thing, I might be wrong. Here there seems to be an epistemological/metaphysical difference between the night and the money. I may want to think about that more.
You claim that the difference is between things that matter and things that don't. And the things that matter are intrinsic to "the functioning / fabric of society / culture." I think that night functions in society just as much as money does (though obviously in different ways), and both matter to culture. In fact, in some ways, the fact that night is dark may have been more important to the development of culture than money has been. I don't think I need to say anything more about that. I expect an obvious rejoinder would involve some aspect of interpretation rather than understanding.
Which of course is what you point out: "This is basically the rift in method."