Do the Humanities Create Knowledge? (II)

The Knowledge that Matters

We saw in the first part of this review that the social processes of the community of practitioners –humanists and scientists– that lead to consensus around new notions, are an essential part of the generation of new knowledge, that is, knowledge that provides a better understanding of the objects of study. The importance of the salience of the aspects of reality that are considered worthy of research was also emphasized.

In fact, although it is tempting to think that the endorsement given to a hypothesis by its empirical verification is the sieve that must be passed for it to be automatically considered scientific knowledge, things do not work exactly like that. Because the opinion of specialists about the hypothesis and its verification is crucial. In other words, to know when something is knowledge that matters, you have to look at what that something looks like to the experts. And this works in the same way for the sciences and for the humanities.

It is clear that scientific research is not guided by whims, lucky guesses and coincidences. Nor is it plausible to think that the only thing that matters for the production of scientific knowledge are experimentally verified claims that have achieved a certain consensus. In fact, from a purely logical point of view, empirical data alone cannot tell us what to believe, because there is an infinite set of theories that are consistent with any given set of data. This is something that may come as a surprise to many scientists, but that is because we accept rules and take for granted notions of which we are only exceptionally aware. We do not need to be conscious of those rules amd notions to perform our work.

There is something in between, something that is identifiable and that causes scientific progress but cannot be articulated. That something is tacit knowledge, an indispensable and trustworthy form of knowledge. And it is that form of knowledge that allows experts to decide when that verified hypothesis is knowledge that matters; in other words, we make the decision based on "how things look to us."

That "how things look to the experts" is essential for productive scientific work. Mere empirical data do not indicate which problems are important; nor do they indicate when to open or pursue a worthwhile line of research. Nor do they serve, by themselves, to determine whether an experimental device is correct a or not. Nor can they tell when to stop using circles to describe planetary orbits. Data must be supplemented by an expert sense of how things look for science to get anywhere.

This sense is the manifestation of scientists' knowledge of the rules governing what matters in their discipline. It is acquired through the normal channels through which members of a culture usually acquire their knowledge of norms: immersive experience and intense engagement with examples.

These ideas were formulated by the Hungarian-British chemist and polymath Michael Polanyi, who realized that the fact that we know more than we can clearly articulate allows us to understand why much knowledge is acquired through non-explicit methods – tacit knowledge or implicit knowledge– by observing and, later, acting under the guidance of the teacher.

On the other hand, in the natural sciences, when we generate expectations about how the world should be if a theory is correct, we do so because we believe that the theory has causal implications, and those implications inform our expectations about what we should find. We would hesitate to claim that some fact about the world supports our theory if we did not think that the mechanism described by the theory is somehow causally responsible for that fact.

Similarly, in various humanistic disciplines, knowledge of norms –what I have called "knowledge of what matters"– is acquired through interactions among members of the community of practitioners by means of exemplars. Once acquired, its practitioners attempt to develop articulations of it, which they submit to the community for scrutiny. The success of an attempted articulation –a theory– is determined by (1) how well it fits the salient features of the exemplars and (2) whether the phenomena that conform to it are able to avoid provoking judgments of unacceptability; put less ambiguously, whether those phenomena do not contradict it.

The "fit" between the philosophical theory and the "data" –that is, the intuitive judgment that the exemplary case is an instance of knowledge– is, we believe, evidence that the theory is a good articulation of the content of the concept.

In short, according to the author, one should seek evidence for a theory by looking for facts that are causally implied by the truth of the theory, and that is why the humanistic disciplines seek judgments of unacceptability, judgments that are caused by our knowledge of the rules governing certain practices.

The humanities enable us to gain knowledge of ourselves by providing us with the means to read what is within ourselves. Knowledge of ourselves is not scientific knowledge. It never will be. It is composed of facts related to what we implicitly consider valuable. Knowledge of ourselves is a special kind of "knowledge of what matters". It is knowledge of what matters to us.

The demands of daily life, with its exhausting complexity, rarely leave us room to investigate so deeply the content of our professed commitments. Daily life does not reward nuance. It does not reward depth. Only in rare cases does it reward self-knowledge. Generally speaking, a life untouched by humanistic inquiry has neither the resources nor the motivation to separate the signal of moral acceptability from the noise.

The humanities, following Haufe, represent a set of mechanisms for eliminating different sources of noise, moving us toward a relatively contaminant-free environment so that we can more clearly discern our normative commitments and their implications. Humanistic research in its various forms helps to foster the relative detachment from our normative commitments that is essential to honestly judge their acceptability.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the humanities have a demonstrated power to get people interested in this kind of exploration, to draw us beyond the constraints of everyday life, or personal preference or cultural background, encouraging us to look at these constraints as merely a sample among a wide range of possible alternatives. The humanities make knowledge of what matters to us matter to us.

Title: Do The Humanities Create Knowledge?

Author: Chris Haufe

Ed. by Cambridge University Press, 2023.