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.
IMO “the humanities” is an ambiguous term in much the same was as, say, “intellectuals,” or (in a more obvious/straightforward way) “theory” – terms that can semantically cover vast swaths of human mental activity but carry a lot of more specific connotations/implicatures
Consider “intellectuals,” for instance – the word is often casually used to just mean “people who think a lot” or even “smart people,” but because of its history, my prototypical image of an “intellectual” is something like one of the New York Intellectuals, while my imagine of a “person who thinks a lot” or a “smart person” are much vaguely and less tied to specific historical circumstances
Likewise, “the humanities” has a history of use in recent conversations about the American academy, which lends it a whole cloud of associations.
It’s important not to conflate the broad meanings with the narrow ones, but this doesn’t require (say) critics to take the pose of “the current narrow meaning is a corruption of the good, broad concept.” Perhaps the very idea of the broad concept is a-historical (just a succession of narrow concepts we may not want to lump together), etc.
True, as far as it goes. But I am actively asserting that – what’s the phrase the kids love these days? – the usage of “humanities” that we see here fails to carve reality at the joints, and leads to confusion (and in fact to concrete harm).
My social circle contains mathematicians, physicists, biologists, philosophers, scholars of literature, and historians. These are basically the same people, culturally and temperamentally, with random very-granular differences in the distribution of their talents and interests. They read the same stuff and play the same games. If you hung out with the lot of them for an hour, and didn’t ask domain-expertise-specific questions, I very much doubt you’d be able to sort them by field.
And yet we live in an age when “STEM” (ugh) and “the humanities” are basically at war. When someone like @slatestarscratchpad, who talks all the time about how he’s not a doer-of-math, who is famous literally for writing critical essays about culture and society, apparently finds it intuitive to use “the humanities” as the umbrella for the group of people containing crystal-healers, Islamists, and Trump.
The much-ballyhooed negative consequence here is “there’s a reputation war, the humanities lose hard because Science is the Future, a lot of worthwhile scholarship gets unfunded and a lot of kids never learn Valuable Humanities Things.” Maybe that actually bothers you, maybe it doesn’t; speaking for myself, I’m not thrilled about this outcome.
The less-ballyhooed-but-worse consequence is that it drives people mad. Science folks are repeatedly told that nothing worthwhile is ever generated on the other side of the academy, and so they fall prey to ancient errors, or waste huge amounts of time and effort reinventing intellectual wheels. Humanities folks know perfectly well how hard they’re losing the reputation war, and so they manage to simultaneously (a) debase their work in a frantic futile attempt to look as “hard” and “sciencey” as the next-hardest-and-most-sciencey discipline, and (b) despair, and come to view logic and reasoning as the enemy, and put ever more resources into the once-miniscule Actual Worthless Gibberish sub-branches of their fields.
I am not prepared to let this usage shift go without a fight.