Who is afraid of the humanities

Date

Who is Afraid of the Humanities?Gloria Origgi, CNRS-Institut Nicod, Paris & Italian Academy of Advanced Studies, Columbia University, NY

17th 2013, Mahindra Humanities Center, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA

lundi 21 octobre 13

lundi 21 octobre 13

When poems can produce vaccinations, I will rescind my argument against the focus of humanities in education

lundi 21 octobre 13

When poems can produce vaccinations, I will rescind my argument against the focus of humanities in education

When vaccinations can produce poems, I will rescind my argument against the focus of science in education

lundi 21 octobre 13

Old or New Debate?

✤ Wilhem Windenbald: Nomothetic vs. idiographic sciences

✤ Wilhem Dilthey (1884) Geisteswissenschaften (both Humanities and Social Sciences):

✤ “The human sciences as they exist and as they are practiced according to the reason of things that were active in their history … contain three classes of assertions” (Dilthey 1883). ✤ 1) descriptive and historical statements✤ 2) theoretical generalizations about partial contents and ✤ 3) evaluative judgments and practical rules.

✤ The human sciences are more obviously normative in nature than the natural sciences, where formal norms related to objective inquiry suffice.

✤ «Man prior to history and society is a fiction» (Introduction to the Human Sciences, 1883)

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First Round: 1930-60

Frontespice of A New Universal History of Arts and Science, 1759

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“ The mostominous conflict of our time is the difference of opinion

between…the so-called humanist, on the one side, and thescientists on the other”

G. Sarton (1931) The History of Science and the New Humanism

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“Literary intellectuals at one pole- at the other, scientists. Between the two, a gulf of mutual incomprehension”

C.P. Snow, 1959

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“History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now

possessed” T. Kuhn, 1962

“Literary intellectuals at one pole- at the other, scientists. Between the two, a gulf of mutual incomprehension”

C.P. Snow, 1959

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Second Round: 1970s

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Second Round: 1970s

✤ Against Sociobiology (Wilson 1975) and all reductionist and deterministic approaches to social sciences that:

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Second Round: 1970s


✤ «insistently tend to provide a genetic justification of the status quo and of existing privileges for certain groups according to class, race or sex» (NYRB, 13 nov 1975)

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Second Round: 1970s


✤ «insistently tend to provide a genetic justification of the status quo and of existing privileges for certain groups according to class, race or sex» (NYRB, 13 nov 1975)

✤ Gould & Lewontin (1979): «The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm»: Adaptationism is based on «on faith in the power of natural selection as an optimizing agent»

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✤ SCIENCE WARS:

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✤ SCIENCE WARS:

✤ Scientific realists against post-modernists:

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✤ SCIENCE WARS:


✤ P. Gross, N. Levitt (1994) Higher superstition: The academic left and its quarrels with science, John Hopkins UP

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✤ SCIENCE WARS:



✤ The Sokal’s affaire

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✤ SCIENCE WARS:



✤ The Sokal’s affaire

✤ Ian Hacking (1999) The Social Construction of What? Harvard UP

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Fourth Round, 2000/2013...

✤ The Two Obscurantisms:

Soft Obscurantism: French theory, post modernism, psychoanalysis

Hard Obscurantism: Economical models, game theory, statistical data analysis

J. Elster (2009) «Excessive Ambitions», Capitalism and Society, 4, 2.

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Is it always the same debate?

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✤ Two mainstream debates:

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✤ Scientism: the reduction of all questions to scientific questions

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✤ Scientism: the reduction of all questions to scientific questions

✤ Realism vs. relativism/historicism: The existence of a mind-independent reality where facts happen that is not a product of domination relations, historicity, gender biases etc etc.

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Being a realist without being a scientist: YES YOU CAN!

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✤ Realism about facts doesn’t imply the reduction of all questions to scientific questions

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✤ You can be a realist without accepting a ranking of disciplines à la Comte that ends up into a legitimization of scientism, that is:

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✤ You can be a realist without accepting a ranking of disciplines à la Comte that ends up into a legitimization of scientism, that is:

✤ Mathematics->Physics->Chemistry->Biology->Sociology..

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The Post-Modern Condition: Where Lyotard Went Wrong:

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✤ Are «Narratives» over?

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✤ Post-modernism has become a narrative in itself about domination and social-construction of everything

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✤ Scientism is in itself a narrative

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✤ Scientism is in itself a narrative

✤ Evolutionary and game theoretic explanations of society are explicit narratives (i.e. they are conceived as a narrative on «the emergence» of society)

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Two Main Narratives in Science and Humanities:

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✤ Evolution

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✤ Evolution

✤ Genealogy

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Evolutionary Explanations:

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✤ An evolutionary explanation of a human attitude, such as a moral value, a cognitive disposition or a social behavior, conceptualizes this attitude as a selected trait, a darwinian adaptation.

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✤ It retraces its history in terms of the selective pressure that may have stabilized this trait in a population.

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✤ It retraces its history in terms of the selective pressure that may have stabilized this trait in a population.

✤ One of the major contributions of Darwin’s theory of natural selection is population-thinking: evolution through natural selection can be explained only at the level of a population.

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Genealogical Explanations:

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✤ A genealogical explanation of a human attitude, a moral value, a cognitive disposition or a social behavior is a way of tracking back the social and institutional pressures that have shaped, in a precise historical time and geographical location, the form of that attitude, value etc., as well as our awareness of them and our self-ascriptions of them in describing ourselves and our social world.

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✤ it is not just a “thicker” reading of a phenomenon, which simply adds an historical dimension to its understanding,

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✤ it is not just a “thicker” reading of a phenomenon, which simply adds an historical dimension to its understanding,

✤ it is a way of investigating “the political stakes in designating as origin and cause those categories that are in fact the effects of institutions, practices, discourses with multiple and diffuse points of origin”

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The advantages of narratives:

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✤ They are catchy for the larger audience

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✤ Easy to memorize

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✤ Easy to transmit

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✤ Easy to transmit

✤ Third culture debate: transforming science into «pop science» narratives in a «struggle» for intellectual hegemony in the public sphere.

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The risk of narratives:

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The risk of narratives:

✤ Genetic Fallacy: Even if a claim on the origins of an issue is true, it is irrelevant for justifying the issue.

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Beyond Narratives: A third way

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✤ How to become a «true» post-modernist (or late-modernist?):

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✤ Against narratives

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✤ A plea for «vectorial» explanations

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✤ A plea for «vectorial» explanations

✤ Interdisciplinarity as true multilingualism (not just for a humanist to lear a law of thermodynamics and for a scientist to quote a Shakespeare’s sonnet)

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Research Ambitions: Curb Your Enthusiasm...

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✤ Avoid excessive ambitions:

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✤ The critique of society doesn’t always imply a total debunking of the very basic categories on which this society is built

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✤ The critique of society doesn’t always imply a total debunking of the very basic categories on which this society is built

✤ The causal mechanisms that explain a complex scientific fact are heterogeneous, don’t reduce to one another, are not encompassed by a unique model of reality (Climate Change Sciences are in this sense paradigmatic)

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My own social epistemology:

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✤ How do we know? Why do we trust an expert, a peer-review process, a ranking or a rating system, a charismatic authority, a honest person?

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✤ How our personal motivations for trust connect to our image of knowledge?

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✤ How our personal motivations for trust connect to our image of knowledge?

✤ How do we take into consideration other people’s, things’ and ideas’ reputations to evaluate them?

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A «critical» epistemology»:

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✤ Epistemology as a «critical theory» of the society of knowledge

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✤ How our everyday knowledge connects to our moral, social and cognitive practices

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✤ Epistemic responsibility: to be aware of the motivated or unmotivated acts of trust we make when we believe in something.

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✤ Epistemic responsibility: to be aware of the motivated or unmotivated acts of trust we make when we believe in something.

✤ Case studies: «unpacking» these acts of trust (wine, web, academic reputation, financial ratings, etc.)

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Interdisciplinarity as a Style of Thinking

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✤ Lower ambitions: vectorial explanations (mosaic)

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✤ Tolerance

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✤ Tolerance

✤ Multilingualism

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✤ Tolerance

✤ Multilingualism

✤ Global networked communication

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✤ Tolerance

✤ Multilingualism


✤ Complex problems

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✤ Tolerance

✤ Multilingualism


✤ Complex problems

✤ Problems-driven questions

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Why I am a Humanist?

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✤ I am interested in how people make sense of their knowledge of themselves and of the world

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✤ Making sense means to build a coherent image of oneself, to recompose, in a reassuring way, the scattered pieces of our experience.

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✤ Making sense means to build a coherent image of oneself, to recompose, in a reassuring way, the scattered pieces of our experience.

✤ Making sense is not only a cognitive attitude: it is also an evaluative attitude: to be able to distinguish between what is worth knowing, seeing, tasting, and what is not.

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Education

Who is afraid of the humanities