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Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of New Books Network. This is your host, Morteza Hajizadeh from Critical Theory Channel. Today, I'm honored to have Professor Chris Hoff with us. Professor Chris Hoff is a professor of the humanities and the chair of... of the Department of Philosophy at Case West End Reserve University. He's the author of a wonderful book and a very timely book called Do Humanities Create Knowledge, which was published by Cambridge University Press.
in 2023. Chris, welcome to New Books Network. Thanks so much for having me. Let's just start with a very short introduction. Can you please briefly introduce yourself and tell us about your field of expertise? And more importantly, why did you decide to write a book about humanities and if they... The knowledge that humanities create really constitutes real knowledge. Sure. Well, I did my PhD in philosophy.
I've been working at Case Western since 2011. I mostly work on the history and philosophy of science. I started off focusing... kind of exclusively on evolutionary biology and, you know, just got more into other branches of science and mathematics. And, you know, that's kind of where I sit now. You know, I'm also interested in the philosophy of history and literature, but not as an expert, just as kind of a, you know.
curious onlooker. As far as how I came to write this book, I actually started off, you know, over the years, I... kind of started asking myself questions about there were differences between the humanities and the sciences, natural sciences that... didn't seem to have any good reason to be there um not really in terms of methodology but like you know for example i you know one thing i discuss in the book is
Why are there, you know, retractions in the natural sciences, you know, in publications, but it's not something you find in the humanities? Or, you know, these oakses that occur, why are they... uh common and sort of easy in the humanities but they don't happen in the natural sciences um you know and kind of more things at the more social level i guess uh for um
You know, there are like group practices that are common in the natural sciences, but not in the humanities. And I found that curious, I guess. For me as a philosopher of science, I knew that there was something important about those group-level practices for the production of scientific knowledge. My hypothesis was that one of the reasons that the humanities are kind of spinning their wheels culturally and intellectually is because...
They lack some of these important components of knowledge production. And so my plan was to write a book looking at a bunch of different group level. practices and how they function in the sciences and and how they're sort of absent in the humanities and why that that's a problem and as i started to do that i found that actually there was a much bigger story there. And that when I sat down to kind of describe to an outsider, you know, somebody outside science, outside philosophy of science.
what scientific practice actually looks like, I found that I could not do it accurately without talking a lot about the use of... individual expert judgment. And it just sort of dawned on me that, you know, the kind of differences between Natural sciences and the humanities with respect to the production of knowledge are the perceived differences. A lot of them come from the way that we've decided to describe science.
which is kind of devoid of the use of human judgment. And if you kind of reintroduce... the role of human judgment in your description of scientific practice, it ends up looking a lot more like what humanists do. So that's kind of where the book grew out of, that I had started off kind of with an axe to grind against the humanities, and I ended up seeing that it wasn't really...
the right angle and that I had ended up learning actually a lot about my own practice as a scholar and as a humanist. Let's start with... A misconception, let's say. Conventionally speaking, knowledge that is produced through a scientific method is knowledge, but knowledge that is produced through inhumanities is not really... considered to be proper knowledge or knowledge do you think that this is a flawed view yeah i think that um you know the first misstep in this idea is
The notion that if you follow the scientific method, the result of that journey is scientific knowledge. That is just not true. Okay, that's scientific knowledge is something that maybe, you know, even if it requires the scientific method. The scientific method's not going to be sufficient to produce scientific knowledge because it has to go through, your results as a scientist have to go through a massive... social filtration process in which other scientists scrutinize what you do.
And not just, you know, peers that review an article to be published, right? Talking about entire scientific communities weighing the significance of what you've done.
weighing the reliability of what you've done you know the fact that an article is published in a journal is never a sufficient reason for a scientist to accept it as you know a like hardened truth that they can rely on right i mean you know the the strongest reaction i mean it There are outliers, but, you know, the typical reaction you get to a journal article public, you know, a scientific journal article is, huh.
That's interesting. You know, it's not like, wow, now we know this and now we can move on to do this. I mean, that does happen, but it's not the typical reception of an article, right? And it's that moment where... A practitioner looks at a result and is like, huh, right? That starts another level of social filtration where people are kind of judging.
as individuals, whether the result that's been published is something that they can use, they feel confident to sort of use as a platform for moving forward in their own work. You know, so, and the scientific method doesn't mention any roles of the scientific community at all, right? It's just... It's like it's not even part of science. But I mean, as a philosopher of science, I feel confident in saying that it is the most important part of science. This is what distinguishes.
modern science from its predecessors, right? This is what distinguishes the natural sciences from, you know... other lesser forms of inquiry, that they have a very well-functioning community that scrutinizes and weighs the results.
published by individuals um and you know if you if if that's not part of your understanding of how science works um you know you have zero understanding of how science works as far as i'm concerned um and you know the the when we look at the humanities uh at the social level what we've find historically as a very similar dynamic. Somebody publishes a book or, you know, an article, you know, traditionally it's been books.
And, you know, the community of humanists is the ultimate arbiter in terms of whether the content of that publication...
survive several generations of scholarship. It's not going to... The method by which the humanists arrived at that conclusion isn't... going to matter um i mean it might matter you know kind of contingently but uh what matters is whether the community has judged it to be valuable enough to retain and you know reflect on for future generations and i think that's when we're when we think about
scientific knowledge per se right not the scientific method or or kind of the process or whatever but the the product that is scientific knowledge right um this is what shares for me, a lot of similarities with kind of what exemplary humanist works produce, right? They produce kind of like a platform. or a framework that future generations of scholars use to push their own inquiries forward. And I really like that idea of human judgment that you mentioned.
When I was doing my PhD, I was studying humanities, of course, and I had a friend who was doing evolutionary psychology, which is kind of halfway between science and humanities. We were good friends, but we rarely agreed on anything. And he always had this idea that it's pure science, purely objective, which I think... Yeah, and I was somehow plagued with this idea, but I've been doing a lot of podcasts and I've talked to some really, really prominent scientists and science promoters of science.
They just said you need to disabuse yourself by this idea that science is purely objective, but there is still, of course, a method. And I like that idea of human judgment. There are very few things that are as far from pure science as evolutionary psychology. That's not an exemplary exercise in scientific inquiry. Yeah.
But yeah, I mean, this is the problem. I mean, I think, you know, one of the things that really kind of pushed me forward as I was writing this was the social power of the term science. And, you know, or like the cultural power of that term. And it's for reasons that I, you know, don't hold any. scientific community responsible for, you know, the second people hear that something is scientific or that, you know, it's a science or this or that.
it immediately elevates that practice in people's minds, right? So if somebody hears that evolutionary psychology is a science, then... They're like, wow, OK, well, we should believe whatever, you know, an evolutionary psychologist tells me. And it's just all total garbage. I mean, but the fact that they call it science is like it doesn't matter that it's garbage because.
It's associated with science, and science has like a cultural authority that kind of encourages you not to ask any follow-up questions, right? It's just like science said it, so you should believe it. And it's just not a good policy. And like I said, I studied humanities. Even in humanities, there has been this push to... if that's the right way to use it, literary studies. And I think Franco Moretti was one of the first people who did that, the math lab, literary lab in Stanford.
We have mathematical and big data analysis of literary texts and also evolutionary psychology has entered humanities as well. And some of those critics are humble people. I say, look, this is only one way to look at the literary text, but it doesn't really mean it's the only way. It's an interpretation. But I only have a beef with those who simply say, look, we don't believe in cultural differences and this is what science tells us and that's why this book or this story is a product of.
our evolutionary impulses or whatever it is very few literary critics do that of course i mean the professionals won't really make such authoritative judgments. But anyway, you talk about discipline and knowledge that is a product of humanities and human experience. Can you talk about that concept, please? Yeah. So I guess I think when I, you know, I think of scientific knowledge as a manifestation of disciplinary knowledge. And what I try to do in the book is.
Kind of extract a, I don't know, you could call it like a general model or a general framework of what disciplinary knowledge looks like. And then... show the reader how much of this corresponds to the way things work in the humanities. And I think that kind of at the core of disciplinary knowledge is... kind of the use of a, you know, a common stock, like a common core of ideas, approaches.
you know, approaches to inquiry and so forth that practitioners in the discipline draw on, either to, you know... frame their own inquiries or investigate the problems that they're interested in or that they choose to investigate, right? This to me is all part of kind of a disciplinary culture. that kind of set some guardrails on how knowledge production works in that discipline. And so, you know, within this common stock or common core of ideas, problems, approaches, you have exemplars.
This is a term that, well, I mean, it's a term of common parlance, but, you know, its relevance in science was popularized by Thomas Kuhn. I, you know, so I, what I try to do is show how the same, you know, the, the use of exemplars and the humanities functions in very much the same way. Right. that humanists perennially go back to these exemplary works just as scientists, you know, in training or, you know, even...
Working scientists perennially go back to Newton's, you know, theory of physics. Right. And they're doing that not because they believe it's true, but because. It's a helpful, powerful, generative way to push inquiry forward. It kind of has the right...
moving parts that, you know, scientists or humanists need to kind of develop their own ideas. And that's why these exemplars... persist generation after generation long after their kind of like the substance or their content has been superseded by other you know other work so the you know the example i give in in the book is the fact that you know people in
Political theories still read Leviathan, right? I read Leviathan when I was a freshman in college, not because the professor wanted us to all know, like, look, you should... you know, you are kind of rationally compelled to submit to the rule of a sovereign, but because it presents a certain style of how to think about... the organization of political systems and kind of the rationale behind political activity and, you know, political legitimacy.
And it's a tradition that is, you know, still alive today in, you know, in a variety of different forms. But you can recognize the elements of it in Leviathan, right? And so it kind of introduces you to this language through which political theorists communicate, you know, kind of like a... I don't know, like a lingua franca for political theory, right? I mean, again, we're not drawing substantively on Leviathan. We're probably not even drawing, I mean...
We're just not really drawing on it at all, but there's something about it that orients you in the space of ideas. that experts still find very valuable for, you know, teaching students, for getting them to understand the kind of mechanics of the discipline that they've... um encountered that they've um happened upon um and you know so it's it's for me these are the these exemplars and the canons that they form um
whether in science or in the humanities, is what is kind of the substance of disciplinary knowledge. And I... And earlier you talked about this community in science, also in humanities, especially in science these days, because sometimes it's difficult to tell the difference between science or pseudoscience or anti-science. And at the end of the day, we need to...
rely on consensus, community consensus. And you discussed this epistemically like-minded community generating knowledge in natural sciences. In a way, maybe not to that extent, but we in humanities, you also have this sort of consensus, but maybe it's not as rigorous as it is in science. So can we say in this way humanities function more or less the same way as science does? I mean, I think at that social level, that there are a lot of similarities. You know, I think it's important.
One important factor for understanding the similarities is the knowledge that scientific consensus doesn't really work by people voting. or even like coming together and agreeing like this is what we're going to believe or this is what, you know, we're going to adopt. I mean, that does happen, but it's not the typical.
kind of object of consensus does not arise to that status through a explicit discussion and vote or whatever right um it's it's like a cultural it's like a cultural trend right that that that just percolates up and you know the It's not just a fad in the way that any old cultural trend might arise. Things only really percolate up to that level in the natural sciences if they satisfy a bunch of, you know...
important criteria for scientific knowledge. So it's not just anything that's going to be able to rise to that level. But when it does, it does so in, I think, very much the same fashion. It's highly uncoordinated, right? It's just individuals. It's something resonating with individuals. satisfying the criteria that they, you know, insist upon for their own work, and then moving forward with it. And I think that, you know, broadly speaking...
This is how things become exemplars, right? How things rise to a certain kind of very general level of acceptance in the humanities. We're employing different criteria, of course. I don't care how many decimal places a result in philosophy or an argument in literary criticism has. I have different criteria that I use to govern my acceptance or my interest in a result. But I do employ some criteria.
I guess, I would assume, I inherited much of those criteria from my training and my inclusion as a member of this discipline. And, you know, so it's just not an accident, I think, that when something, some major work, say, in philosophy is published and gains very, very broad acceptance. that it has done so because it resonates so powerfully with so many different members of the community.
And, I mean, fundamentally, that is what the process of scientific consensus looks like. There is this beautiful quote in your book, this sentence that I really love. Scientific knowledge is the science as canonical texts are to the humanities. Could you talk about that, please? Sure. Yeah.
So I think of something like Newton's mechanics or, I mean, even contemporary quantum mechanics as... you know, a set of, a stable set of ideas that are not there for the purpose of being believed by other scientists. but are there for the purpose of generating new pathways for inquiry that the current generation of scientists will move down. That, to me, is what scientific knowledge is. It's a stock that generates further inquiry.
From my perspective, this is always the way in which canonical texts have functioned in the humanities, right? They're not there as a... a stock of ideas to be believed and, you know, like accepted into one's heart rather. What they're there for is to... kind of get scholars to reflect on, you know, what is important in this arena and to frame new inquiries.
on the basis of those reflections, right, on the basis of those kind of norms of importance or value that they've inherited, that are reflected or exemplified in those canonical works. Right. So, you know, a new Newtonian mechanics. You know what it's really, really useful for. I mean, it's very accurate. I don't want to discount that.
But, you know, when you're learning physics, the accuracy of Newtonian mechanics is not what is stressed. Its ability to structure problems and make them... solvable through calculation is what is stressed and that is what is learned right um and that's what you're tested on um and i think that that's its primary value i think that you know historically um you know even shortly after um newton's book was published uh you know
Within a couple of generations, there's a lot of results in the Principia that are just not correct and that, you know, the subsequent generations of scholars. did not accept and knew were wrong. But they accepted the value of Newton's approach to the study of nature.
they were not going to give that up no matter what. I mean, even if every result that Newton had published was wrong, that it didn't, it wouldn't have matter. I mean, it was just such a powerfully... well-organized, well-conceived way to structure problems, that the specific claims that Newton makes weren't where the action was. And that's why we're still using it, even though we know that, you know, strictly speaking, the claims are not true.
And with respect to canonical works in the humanities, I think it's broadly the same picture. We're using, we use them. as platforms for structuring thought for kind of, uh, acquiring the, the norms of inquiry, um, our disciplines, um, then they kind of. the values that are unique to our disciplines and that are exemplified in those canonical works. And probably there's no other way to really do that effectively.
In much the same way that it would be impossible to learn how to write well by just reading a set of instructions on how to write well. You just have to read good writing. There is another really interesting part of your book, which is about paradigm shifts. We've had several paradigm shifts in science, but I was curious to know how that works in humanities, because... Do we have similar phenomena in humanities where there is a shift in culture, people's values? How does it impact?
knowledge production in the humanities. Yeah, I think we do. I mean, I discuss the John Rawls theory of justice in the book as an instance of this. Saul Kripke's naming and necessity is another example of a similar moment. You know, you find them here and there in... in the history of philosophy even recent philosophy right so these would be relevant to my you know my own journey as a philosopher but um you know descartes uh um
you know, first philosophy or meditations, right? These books, I would count as books of the humanities for sure. And, you know, it's kind of like once they appear, nothing's the same afterwards, right? It's either you're doing things within this framework or you're just not part of. what we do anymore. The history of philosophy is a history of those kinds of events, right? And that is what paradigm shifts are in science. They're moments in which what it is to do science is redefined.
If you do not adopt the new definition, you're just not part of the scientific community anymore. You know, I think that there are... good reasons why things work in this way. You know, I think it goes back to the idea of knowledge as a product of communities.
You could sort of tell the extent to which there is a functioning intellectual community, whether it's in the sciences or the humanities, by... uh measuring you know the degree to which they go through these paradigm shifts um you know communities things where there's no community to be had they cannot They won't go through these shifts. It's diagnostic of a community of inquiry that is looking for a framework to...
help them move forward. You have used two other expressions in your book, let's say. Emergence of salience and knowledge of what matters. Can you describe these and tell us how do they function in humanity in terms of knowledge production? Sure. Yes, I think that, let me see. Much of what we're trying to, you know, what I'm trying to teach students anyway, say, is to get them to, you know, you have them read a text and it's just kind of, it all...
has kind of the same level of interest or importance for them. And I think part of the process of educating them is getting them to pay attention to... some things and not to others, right? Getting them to see what the really important parts of a text are and, you know, what the lesser or kind of ignorable.
You know, parts of a text are just kind of getting them to training them to see where the action is in a text. And I think, you know, the way I. describe this in the book, is to get them to kind of look at things in such a way that certain things are salient to them and certain things are... Right. And, you know, I'd be as a member of a discipline, you know, an academic discipline or a research discipline. Right. Much of what goes into that is.
kind of these shared understandings of what the important things are and, you know, what's worth focusing on and worth exploring. And, you know, if you, the more that the perception of what's important sort of comes naturally to you, you know, the stronger of a researcher you end up being, the more significant of a contribution you're able to make. You know, there's a term that, you know, you hear knows for a good problem, right?
Some people are sort of blessed with this. Some people are able to develop it, but it takes a while. And I think that the... What you're developing when you're developing a nose for a good problem or a good research problem is you're developing kind of the intuitive ability to detect. when something's worth exploring and when it's um you know best left uh best left alone uh and you know the the the idea
that I use in the book to frame this process is the emergence of salience. So, you know, at some point, things just sort of jump out at you. as significant, whereas, say, 10 years prior, that wouldn't have been the case. Yeah, it's very... It's really important for us as educators to, I think, remember or try to put ourselves in the shoes of somebody who's never seen any... say work of philosophy or any um you know work of of political theory uh because the the
The works just read very differently to somebody who's never picked one up before versus, you know, a seasoned expert. And if you're not sensitive to that difference in... what is salient to a reader versus what is salient to me. You know, it's going to be very, I...
You know, I used to find myself getting very frustrated, like, why don't they get this? I mean, it's just, it's right there, you know, but it's like, it is right there, but you're not trained to see it. You know, you don't have those instincts. I mean, I can't, it's... It's no different than, you know, if you open the cupboard and you're like, you know that, I don't know, the mustard is like right there on the shelf.
and you know i i'll ask my wife like where's you know the salsa she's like it's right there in the cupboard so i open the cupboard and i'm looking at it and i like i know she's right she always knows where everything is and it's I know it's in front of my face. I cannot see it. I literally can't see it. And then she walks over and she's like, ah, you know, and like she pulls it out right from, you know, in front of my nose.
That's the kind of dynamic or the kind of difference that we have vis-a-vis our students or vis-a-vis kind of uninitiated readers. that uh that kind of intuitive sense of certain things are salient um certain things that you know jump out at us as worth paying attention to, and not so much for the uninitiated. And, you know, this is what defines you as... a member of a research discipline, right? You have this capacity. You know, without that capacity...
I mean, you can still write and, you know, you could still write and publish and whatever, but it's like you're not participating in the discipline's communal search for knowledge, right? You are kind of... off doing your own thing um and you know that that's i mean there couldn't be a better description for um you know the develop one's development as a as a as a practicing science you know natural scientists um this is another thing that that kuhn talks about a lot right that um
You get to see, I mean, not just Kuhn, another number of people have mentioned this, right? You know, you could see some, say you're working with images, you know, of some, I don't know, some galaxy or something, right? And... You know, as a first year astronomy student, it's just going to be, you know, a bunch of dots and, you know, smudges and streaks. But the... The professional astronomer will literally have a different visual experience, right? Her eyes are drawn to certain things.
Her kind of visual field will parse the image in ways that just don't happen for the first year student, right? So things jump out at... to her as salient in a way they don't to the first year student. And, you know, the training, the development of one's capacity as a researcher is kind of marked by this. emergence of, you know, things that the discipline recognizes as important, those emerge as salient to the professional.
You also discussed the idea of... I'll ask that one later. There's this... On page 165 of your book, you say that... You list some weaknesses in the humanities, and then you also discussed that there is this diminished capacity to produce disciplinary knowledge. How do you think there is a diminished capacity in humanities to produce that? disciplinary knowledge. Yeah, I mean, I think that there's been a conscious attempt to move away from the use of canons.
In general, there's been a conscious attempt to move away from specific canonical works. And, you know, I understand... that, you know, the impulses behind that project, many of them I agree with in principle, but... There are costs to doing that. And, you know, it's not an unmitigated benefit to just completely flatten.
the research landscape and treat everything as if it's of equal value, right? You know, a disciplinary community... exists on the kind of substrate of canonical works, whether that's in the humanities or in the natural sciences. If you take that substrate away, you just don't have a disciplinary community anymore. You have a group of people, but it takes more than that to make a... a discipline, you know, or a scholarly community. And, you know, I think that the, the evident there's, you know.
Philosophically, historically, I think it's the case for the idea that scholarly community inquiry requires... a substrate of canonical texts or canonical ideas is very solid. So I think that, you know, in terms of our... contemporary situation uh the the more we distance ourselves from the idea of having a canon at all um the weaker
our own scholarship is going to be, the less culturally relevant we're going to be. I mean, I think you can see that. I think that... you know, our, you know, much of our irrelevance as a cultural, you know, as a component of culture right now. You know, part of it is the scientism that sort of plagues civilization generally. But it's like we...
Um, we injected scientism with like a very powerful steroid, um, by, uh... ensuring that whatever it is we are providing to the culture is as kind of unrecognizably important as possible by kind of diffusing.
scholarship across like you know as far and as as broadly as possible right um you know once once you once the discipline sort of ceases to be oriented by you know, a set of exemplary works that scholars are drawing on, very difficult for them to have any sort of intellectual coherence, you know, vis-a-vis one another. And if everybody's just doing their own thing, it very much looks like the group itself is not really doing anything. Kuhn had this great quote.
where he said basically anybody who looks at the science of optics before Newton will see that there were... a number of people working productively, people whose work that we still draw on, those men were scientists. Yet somehow then... net result of their cumulative activity amounted to something less than science because they were able to take no sort of common body for granted.
uh, and work, you know, on similar projects in similar ways, um, the, they ended up as a group, not really moving forward. Right. You get, you know, this interesting thing here, this interesting there, over hundreds of years, but you don't have a discipline that, you know, continually pushes the boundaries of understanding. And I think that that dynamic can be clearly detected in the humanities today. At the beginning of this interview, when I asked you...
why you wrote this book. You made a reference to some of the folks in Humanities. And I think one of the most famous ones was back in 1990s allen circle hoax but again we had the more recent ones which because of social media i guess they went more viral and the people who did those hoaxes actually became kind of public celebrities they started writing books I'm talking about the grievance studies. Right, yeah. Let's talk about hoaxes. Do you think these hoaxes undermine the legitimacy?
of the knowledge that is produced in the humanities, and what sort of problems do they expose in humanities? Well, yeah. I mean, honestly, I think they do. I just... We have to recognize that this is not something that happens in every discipline and that it's not even possible in a lot of disciplines. You just wouldn't be able to get away with it. you know, kind of trying to sound ridiculous, you know, is not something that can normally result in publication. So...
I think that, you know, that should be a moment of reckoning for, you know, disciplines who get hoaxed. You know, I think that you just... It's the time to look inward and see what is it that makes us susceptible to not being able to distinguish between real research. and somebody trying to sound ridiculous. You know, if you've arrived at that point, something has gone horribly wrong with kind of the disciplinary culture.
in your scholarly community, because that just should not be happening. You know, this is not something that happens in the natural sciences, period. I mean, people lie about... you know, stuff they've done, but not as a hoax, right? I mean, they lie with the intention, often successful, of convincing... you know, people of the truth of the other things they're saying, which makes sense. They just don't have the data. So, I mean, that's not really a hoax.
I mean, it could rise to the level of a hoax. And I mean, some of the grievance studies hopes actually kind of skate.
along this edge right i mean some of the stuff i i don't like that term grievance studies um you know the the more recent hoaxes uh one of them made this like ridiculous claim about having examined, like, 10,000 dogs or something, which, you know, should be... uh like a red flag for any referee uh just like you know what i'm not sure that you did examine ten thousand dogs it's a lot of dogs um And, I mean, it's just so ridiculous, right? But it didn't catch the eye of any referee.
And, you know, I think that if you're making really absurd claims about the evidence that you've collected, that should jump and will jump out to any. potential referee i mean i've even i remember being dinged in a in a grant proposal for saying that i was going to look at something
And the referee was like, there's no way that he even has access to that. Which wasn't true, but it was surprising enough that I could understand why the referee... thought that right so it's like if you're making obscene and absurd empirical claims um that should jump out and typically does jump out to a referee but You know, apparently in these hoax cases, it just didn't, no one batted an eye. So, you know, I think that...
The hoax there is trying to, you know, you're kind of testing the functioning of peer review. If you can make absurd claims. about how much evidence you've collected and it doesn't register as problematic with anyone, that's a sign in the weakness.
That's a sign of weakness in the peer review system, for sure. I'm glad you discussed the case of science as well, because that was my next question. We know that a lot of data application or plagiarism happens in science, but... yeah maybe that's not a hoax really um i have another it's maybe an observation or not so much question i'm keen to know your ideas so you know that there is this culture of publish or perish which pushes a lot of academics to
just publish an article, even if we know it's not really great knowledge. And that also makes humanities more vulnerable to such hoaxes. But again, I'm also keen to know why why these hoaxes become really really viral go viral with humanities we have seen like examples of weird cases of science articles which are called out and retracted anyway
But that doesn't really make the headlines. And I guess there's also this idea that there's this backlash against humanities all the time, especially these days where the universities are trying to make money and governments are defunding humanities. such hoaxes are actually used as an excuse to justify defunding humanity. So I'm guessing there is this kind of antagonistic atmosphere against humanities in general, especially after COVID and financial crisis.
Yeah, I mean, there might be something to that. I mean, I think that the hoaxes and data fabrication in the natural sciences... to me, show very different things. The hoaxes, you know, are a strong indication to me that there's no real inquiry or expertise or scholarship going on in a lot of these cases i mean if you can't distinguish between an expert and a non-expert there's just nothing to the notion of expertise in that discipline. You know, data fabrication... Data fabrication...
is not something that an expert is necessarily going to be able to detect, right? There can be things that will jump out to them as odd. But, you know, and the motivations for fabricating your data are totally different. You know, the motivations are just to get something published.
right um because you need um you need to publish whereas uh you know the the publications that were um that that resulted from the hoax were not for the purpose of publication right it was the purpose it was for the purpose of sending another message um you know so i guess the i think the backlash towards disciplines that get hoaxed is appropriate. The backlash towards...
When data is fabricated, the backlash is not towards the discipline, but it's toward the fabricator, right? Now, that's an interesting asymmetry. Maybe if... fabrication were like much much much more rampant and like widely detected then it would become a disciplinary backlash problem but It's normally just treated as a, you're a bad person, you lack scientific integrity for having fabricated. I mean, that kind of stuff can be very hard to detect.
Very hard. You know, I mean, if somebody is going to lie about stuff that they did, it would have to be a very surprising set of claims to even. trigger the suspicion that um the data has been fabricated you know i mean if you're if i say like yeah i went out and i measured you know the depth of This, you know, the roots of grass in my lawn at various places. And here's what I came up with. You know, no one's going to care.
uh even if i did if i you know i didn't do it it's just not something that's gonna register with people as wow that's a really surprising result i mean i guess if i said something like you know and they were all 30 feet long or something um that would that would jump out as as not possible right But if I'm making claims within kind of the neighborhood of accepted measurements, it's just not going to be easy to...
to detect fabrication in those cases. One final question. So we have this popular idea of how knowledge is produced through science. And it's correct. You have a hypothesis. You test it. You can replicate it. There's this consensus as well. But do you think that this understanding is sort of obscures? the way that both humanities and natural sciences have historically produced knowledge, sometimes in similar ways?
Absolutely. I mean, I wish that, you know, when, you know, I have children in school, I wish that when they were learning about what science is, what they would learn is. how the scientific community produces knowledge, or how the scientific community comes to accept certain ideas for a time. as kind of solid enough to move forward on the basis of. Because that, to me, is the defining feature of scientific inquiry.
You know, scientific methods change. You know, approaches to inquiry change. You know, even since... The emergence of modern science. I mean, statistics is a perfect example of that. You know, a tool that every scientist now recognizes as essential, but, you know.
150 years ago no one had even heard of um so or you know i guess just starting to hear about it um uh and and certainly nothing was judged on the basis of whether it was statistically valid or not right um and uh so you know there's an evolutionary sort of process to the development of scientific methods. But, you know, the essence of science is not those methods, you know, in my perspective. The essence is the community level.
you know, engagement with results and the development of inquiry on the basis of those. And yeah, I mean, I would say that... You can understand a lot about the humanities if you look at it at that level, that sort of same communal level, right? Ideas are going to change. Methods are going to change. Approaches to the production of scholarship are going to change.
But there will always be, you know, so long as there's a discipline, there's going to be like a community level engagement with certain ideas and a subsequent. kind of um unfurling of new kind of versions of inquiry on the basis of that community engagement Professor Chris Holtz, thank you very, very much for talking with us about your wonderful book. The book we just discussed was Do Humanities Create Knowledge? published by Cambridge University Press in 2023. Really enjoyed talking to you.
thank you so much this was really fun i really appreciate it