A discourse request, mostly directed at @slatestarscratchpad –
Can we not casually equate “fuzzy / empathy-oriented / non-systematic thinking” with “the humanities?”
“The humanities” is a field of intellectual inquiry. Practiced properly, it involves rigor and clear logic – not experiment, not quantification (usually), not empirical data (usually), but definable principles and arguments that proceed cogently from those principles. The people who are good at it are not that different, in ability or in temperament, from the people who are good at science.
[…you know that philosophy counts, right? That High Holy Utilitarianism itself is a product of the humanities?]
If you want to point out that we live in a world in which humanities scholars and humanities departments often seem to prefer feelings to reason, well, I can’t really argue with that. But making a bad-thinking totem out of “the humanities” in the abstract…cedes a lot of ground, unnecessarily, to people who don’t deserve it. And insults a lot of people who do good work.
I staunchly maintain that math belongs with the humanities and not with the sciences.
…heh. So you can model this as a circular spectrum, right? On the “right” of math, it shades into physics, which shades into chemistry, etc. etc. On the “left” side, math shades into analytic philosophy, which shades into continental philosophy, which shades into critical theory, which shades into comparative literature…
(The join-up on the other side is presumably somewhere around psychology, right where the humanities start to become social-science-y.)
This is a fun game! Categorizing ideas and methodologies is great.
But it is worth remembering that the people at every point on the spectrum, as a rule, have vastly more in common with people at any other point on the spectrum than they do with, say, healing-power-of-crystals people or Donald Trump. Or, for that matter, with most engineers and surgeons.