26 Comments
Jun 2, 2023Liked by Étienne Fortier-Dubois

This was such a fascinating piece to read; I learnt a lot from this! Thank you so much for writing this! Is it true that paradigm shifts are often made by those who are from a completely different background/field of study to the one they make the paradigm shifting discovery in? If true, what could be contributing to this pattern?

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May 4, 2022Liked by Étienne Fortier-Dubois

Hello,

Bonjour,

What do you think about Karl Popper’s falsification criteria for science ?

For me, it draws a useful restriction of science to what can be « predicted », either logically, differentially or statistically, thus excluding most of humanities, dealing with humans that can actually want to game the predictions.

Moving from science to predict,

to conscience of what you want to predict.

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May 4, 2022Liked by Étienne Fortier-Dubois

Man the hair on my neck stood up when you said, "Art and literature wouldn’t be interesting if they were too complex and abstract." And then I felt silly when I realized you were building up that argument just to knock it down.

This is an excellent article. I could mince terms here and there, but there are two places where I take issue.

First: "Some philosophical questions, for instance around morality, are extremely difficult to answer. But there should always exist some true answer if you define the question precisely enough."

I don't know if this is an argument you're making or you're establishing the common argument in this vein of thinking, but I would challenge the idea that there is always a *true* answer if you define the question precisely enough.

Second: "Maybe philosophers, historians and theologians should focus a bit more on making their field progress towards truth rather than write an ever-increasing amount of commentary on the old thinkers."

I think most theologians would be indignant to find someone thinks their work is anything other than pursuing the truth. And I think most philosophers would question (as I immediately did), "what is truth?"

I just started reading your Substack, so I can dig into this a bit later, but it seems to me that this article is written with the presumption that people are reading it are scientists. I think that the above two points reveal the greatest rift between science and humanities. To wit, many scientists think that if you refine a question to an exact enough frame, there is an empirical truth underneath it, and their work is refining their empirical measurements until they can approximate that truth as closely as possible.

I haven't thought about this long enough to offer the alternative view that people in the humanities have--and I can't definitively say many people in the humanities don't share this worldview. I can say that much of the humanities is about approximating truth *while also* questioning the nature of truth. I don't think that most practitioners in the humanities would agree with the statement, "if you refine a question well enough, there is a single empirical truth." I don't think that they'd necessarily disagree either, so much as they would say it's an impossible or poorly formed statement.

I think both sides of the chasm are trying to approximate truth in their own way. Whereas scientist believe that is best done empirically, the humanities believes that other tools are more important. As writer Tim O'Brien said, "That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth." Rewriting this, you might say, "That's what the humanities are for. They're for getting at the truth when empiricism isn't sufficient for the truth."

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Apr 22, 2022Liked by Étienne Fortier-Dubois

I think that you missed one other important difference between science and the humanities. Science is evidence-based. This includes astronomy and cosmology, where experimentation has proven difficult, and is also true of mathematics, where proofs are the evidence required.

It also provides an argument that history should be classified with the sciences. Theology, the antithesis of science, on the other hand does away with evidence completely.

Your point about the classics may show that the humanities value opinions more than evidence. The opinions of people who lived thousands of years ago are still relevant and important, precisely because they have influenced humanity's opinions in general for so long.

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Apr 21, 2022Liked by Étienne Fortier-Dubois

Very fascinating, thank you! It seems to me that the arts have been able to exist in an experimental vein - numerous examples abound of painters, musicians, poets, etc. whose work is considered "experimental", and who devote their careers to the pursuit of one narrowly-defined set of stylistic tendencies (Mark Rothko in painting; Steve Reich and La Monte Young in music; Frank Lloyd Wright in architecture). Perhaps the fight between the "hard" sciences and the humanities occurs because the humanities are acting more like arts than sciences, and the sciences resent / disapprove of that?

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May 4, 2022Liked by Étienne Fortier-Dubois

Thanks for that! About reading the classics, though, I feel that it's more of a cliche than the reality that today's philosophers read the classics. I know many professional philosophers who have never read a line of Plato or Aristotle, but have built thriving careers on Gettier problems and such. The language barrier is also a problem. Almost no non-specialist philosopher today can read ancient Greek or Latin (if they don't happen to be Greeks or Italians, for whom it's a bit easier).

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Music theory in the 20th century made a huge lurch toward math. I spent some time as a math/music double major so after reaching grad school in music it was hilarious to watch about 2/3 of my classmates recoil in horror upon first encountering the work of David Lewis and his use of group theory. “It’s maaaaaaath!” And 1/3 would shrug and say “it’s just math…”

(OTOH music/math is a pretty common combination overall. And music studies are not always about “reading the classics” in terms of history/theory, but boy does it involve playing/studying the classics. And there are a whole slough of digressions I could go on here).

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