On Dec 12, 2008, at 3:11 PM, George Herbert wrote: > I don't think he's trying to diminish the role of humanities. Just > acknowledge that some of it is less fact based than the hard sciences. > Literary criticism, while well founded, is not as fact-based as > Chemistry or Physics.
Well, I wouldn't say it's not as fact-based. I think that's an over- simplification of the issue, in that it suggests that there is no normative force to literary criticism. There is. > I know professional, academic literary critics focused on popular > culture and science fiction, for example - there's at least one major > annual conference of speculative fiction literary critics, whose > papers are peer reviewed and do serious analysis. But those people > know that they're based on intellectual constructs and opinion, not > underlying physical truth. Sure. I am one of those academic literary critics. But I don't think that "intellectual constructs and opinion" quite captures what's going on there. I know of no literary critics who do not firmly believe that their views are correct, and who do not base this on the marshaling of evidence rather than on some blind religious faith. I think it is more accurate to say that, in literary studies, there is the practical expectation of disagreement, and an acceptance of the virtue of argument and debate as a mode of discourse. > I would happily accept any of their appropriate and topical work as > commentary to put into a Wikipedia popular culture article. But > neither they nor I would assert that it's as unambiguous as say a > chemistry experiment. I certainly wouldn't say it's as unambiguous as a chemistry experiment. But that is more often because of the fact of disagreement than anything else. There is a wider variety of perspectives out of the humanities than there is out of chemistry. But that is not equivalent to research in the humanities being opinions. I mean, I suppose it's a problem if you look to academic research to provide absolute and irrefutable knowledge. But that's a pretty weird way to approach NPOV. -Phil _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
