Here’s some initial ideas:
Science does not lend itself to evaluating things as good or bad. The Humanities provide rich framework for discussions of value.
Science is limited to the natural world, but in the humanities one can transcend that realm by imagining all sorts of non-natural possibilities. A lot of powerful and, indeed, revolutionary ideas result.
What else can we add to the list? What should we modify or delete from the list?
I don’t think humanities are alone in going beyond the natural world. This is the realm of any applied science.
I do think that humanities such as philosophy can explore questions of value and of epistemology (what it means to know something) that science can’t directly address.
History is a special case, since it explores the real world, but can only apply its tests to things that have happened, so needs to use different (but equally valid) methods of obtaining knowledge than the scientific method.
Maths I would argue is a humanity not a science - it progresses from definitions to knowledge without real world test, such with logical rules. This is another method of obtaining knowledge that isn’t the scientific method.
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On the other hand, I think some of the “traditional” humanities have limited credibility as academic disciplines due to their lack of a conscious epistomology. How do post-modernist literature analysis “experts” claim to know what they know or validate their knowledge? I’m unconvinced that they even claim to do either.
Easy A’s?
More interesting coworkers
The problem with the humanities is not that they’re inherently worthless, but that they lack a focused raison d’etre and are currently flailing with no goal beyond getting tenure. The arts have the potential to enrich everyone’s lives by producing both appealing works of art and theories how how art can be made more appealing; however, they prefer to engage in a zero-sum “more-abstruse-than-thou” competition, scorning as “commercial” any art that the masses can appreciate.
Philosophy fares better, as some folks are seriously tackling the big questions. But again, the problem is that these disciplines both lack and vigorously oppose both concrete reasons for their existence, and objective measures on how well they are attaining that goal. And so, compared to the sciences, which have both, what you end up with is inchoate intradepartmental bickering.
Is there a point to anything? Why should we…
partake in stuff. Because it makes us happy probably. And whether something is inherently worthless, or not, is irrelevent when you make either claim. It may be essential to another person. Maybe humanities meet no physical demands of humanity. But imagine a world without humanities. If you watch movies, then don’t complain. Yes you can be very verbose and articulate your opinion clearly, but that doesn’t make it a fact. All you’re doing is indirectly proving you can put down a thought in an unnecessarily complicated way. It also doesn’t prove you know more than anyone else. In fact tackling the big questions is as inconsequential as pursuing arts, at least by your logic. The reason is because it gives no result. Its just continuing a long running debate on questions that cannot be answered. Same crap different name. But people have always done things because it makes them happy, or at least because they believe it will make them happy. Philosophers just try to describe a system for what they decide are the requirements to be met in order to achieve happiness. Same with science. It’s all crap. We don’t have to do any of it, we don’t really need to. We just want to. And everyone has their own opinion. Aesthetics are important for one reason. A bunch of people say it’s important. If people say it is than it is. Why? because they will partake in it, making it consequential in one way or another.
What makes you happy? Disliking humanities and expressing it?
Maybe it’s convincing yourself and other people that you are logical?
Why? Because you think logic makes you better in some way?
I’m not necessarily saying i disagree with you. What I am saying, is that no matter what happens, there only reason for anythign people do is that we say it has a reason. Otherwise you can go be a nihilist, which in itself is a contradiction. If you continue living while being a nihilist then your not a nihilist, you find meaning in being a part of some philosophical grouping. The way you think is important to you, otherwise you wouldn’t do it. If nihilism were true, and a person came to those conclusions, they would vanish. If to live is to have meaning and there is no meaning then nothing really exists. So POOF you’re gone. UNLESS YOU BELIEVE THE ILLUSION THAT YOU acknowledge is an illusion. TRALALALALAL on and on and on and on. So basically,
your wrong no matter what you say, because only you care about what you think
Well apparently it’s not for the well structured paragraphs or spelling.
Maybe I misunderstand what the OP and the previous folks are saying but I think the issue is about humanities as a formal discipline … as opposed to just something that exists and is appreciated for its own sake outside of college.
To give a wacky example, a friend of mine with 100% seriousness suggested that colleges should offer a “degree in football.” His thinking was that if there can be degrees in French literature (or whatever else artsy-low-job-prospect-topic offered by colleges) then there can certainly be a formal diploma awarded for the study of football (which would include game strategy, formations, recruiting, training, etc, etc.)
I actually had no good reason why there shouldn’t be a B.S. in Football or a P.h.D in Baseball. (My intuition of course says that such a degree is ridiculous but I had no way to articulate a consistent reason why I think that.)
I imagine that if somehow universities started offering such programs, somebody (like the OP) would eventually be asking,
“what do Football and Baseball degreed disciplines offer that scientific disciplines do not?”
…Of which we come full circle and justify it (like you have done) by saying, “But imagine a world without Football!”
I’m an English teacher, and I got my start tutoring at a community college. Most of the students I worked with were computer science students from foreign (non-English speaking) countries. They were brilliant within their specialized field, but none could write a declarative sentence or convey simple information (directions to a house, or the contents of a college transfer essay) to speakers of English. Exposure to the humanities enables them to do things beyond writing code. They can ask a girl out to dinner, order food at a restaurant on a date with this girl, make connections to a larger circle of contacts than their immediate co-workers, distinguish between the values of multiple candidates for public office. And none of this will diminish their ability to write code.
Although I do not think much of the justification that your friend gives, I would be rather surprised if such degrees (or, at any rate, degrees in something like Sports Management) do not actually exist.
Quite apart from that, many American universities, including most of the ‘best’ ones, appear to spend a lot more on football than they do on the humanities.
What they need is intensive instruction in the rules of English grammar and pronounciation, similar to the way they are learning programming languages. They do not need to study the Lake poets or the history of Slovenia to do that (though they probably already know more about the history of Slovenia than the average American-educated high school grad). ESOL is not a humanities program any more than an electrical or plumbing class would be. Apart from that they need exposure to speakers of idiomatic English (like watching television with the closed captioning on).
I grew up in Pakistan in the 1979s and 80s. My ancestors were originally from Goa in southern India, and we spoke English at home, and no other language. My best friend was from a Gujrati speaking family. The government didn’t recognize either Gujrati or English as a “mother tongue” for students born in Pakistan, so we were put into the native Urdu track in school. Basically we were assumed to be fluent in Urdu and jumped straight into studying literature. So while I can still (23 years after leaving the country) read and write a critical appreciation of Urdu poetry or essays, I can only do this in English. If I went back to Pakistan now, I couldn’t even give the taxi driver directions to my hotel in Urdu. My friend is still in Pakistan, and he still can’t speak Urdu.
The humanities are useful because our brains work in analogies and metaphors: the most effective teachers are the ones that use analogies, who show how new information is in some way or ways like this other thing you already know and understand. What a thorough grounding in the humanities gives you is a huge, varied catalog of information and relationships that allows you to more quickly and deeply process and use new information. A deep understanding of science and math does the same thing, which is why a well educated person needs all of them.
I teach AP English Rhetoric to juniors and AP Macroeconomics to the same children as seniors. The most successful kids in the more pragmatic economics class (which, yes, is technically a humanity) are the ones who understand how the world works–and they were the ones with a passion for the earlier class. They have more of a basis for comparison and make connections more quickly.
Yeah, as more time passes, a humanities student learns less and less about more and more things.
At the end, s/he knows almost nothing about almost everything.
What’s this got to do with computer science students? They’re non-native speakers of English; of course they have trouble writing an idiomatic sentence in English. Would you expect any different outcome if the CS students had been replaced by foreign sociology students?
Both making value judgments and thinking beyond the natural world are focused raisons d’etre. No goal beyond getting tenure is an empty charge refuted by the wide range of excellent intellectual work produced post-tenure in the humanities. Studying low and middle brow cultural artifacts has been very hot for a long time now.
In the second paragraph, you just sound as if you are trying to judge the humanities by objective scientific measurement. This thread is about how they are different from the sciences, so such a metric is not pertinent.
Post-modernists are extremely obsessed with epistemology, so I do not understand what you mean here.
Regarding applied science and going beyond the natural world:
Humanities still rate special distinction because it is not as if applied sciences go so beyond the natural world as to engage in things like metaphysics.
Perhaps you could provide some examples of work done post-tenure in these fields by true academic leaders that you think provides some demonstration of the worth of such departments to people outside of academia.
It’s perfectly fair to ask how well the humanities are aligned with their stated goals. Do they help us to make value judgments? Do they inform our knowledge of the human condition? Is current work still helping in those directions? How well does the body of humanistic knowledge reach outside of the academy? The answers to those questions certainly matter.
I disagree
Yeah, lots and lots of *discussion *- and precious little result of value. We’ve had philosophers since the Greeks, and still no answers. We’ve had real science for a few centuries, and lookie here - real answers to all the big questions -who we are, where we’re going, why we should be nice to each other while we get there.
Not really, no. Science deals with speculative realms all the time.
Such as?
ETA - let’s not make the mistake of saying “Science” when we mean “The most common Scientific Method”, OK?
Fair point. I’m a TESOL teacher now; back then I was just a tutor trying to help students write papers in English lit classes, though, and those were humanities programs.
Probably not, but passing a benchmark level of English classes was a requirement for getting a Comp Sci degree. Whether this was fair or not, and I’ll entertain arguments that it wasn’t, I never had occasion to meet any foreign sociology students. I met several Nepali Comp Sci students who, while generally quite fluent in English, had no concept of synonyms, and this particular blind spot held them back.
I tutored foreign students who pursued degrees in other fields, like Nursing or Business, and they had their challenges as well (mostly involving articles and subject/verb agreement). But they were very different challenges, and seemed to me to be of a much lesser degree. These are my anecdotal observations, not an attempt at a cheap Dilbert joke.