Category: humanities

A discussion revisited: my exchange with Adam Gopnik about science, the humanities, and their ability to produce truth and knowledge

August 12, 2025 • 11:15 am

As I’m reading up on the issue of whether one can find “truth” in the humanities, and, if so, what that truth consists of, I had completely forgotten that four years ago I had an exchange with Adam Gopnik on this very issue. As you may know, Gopnik has been a staff writer for The New Yorker for many years, is a terrific writer, and not only has an expansive knowledge of art, literature, and music, but also knows a lot more about science than the average New Yorker writer.

The exchange was originally written for a column called “Letters”, which was designed to allow people capacious discussions by having two people write (e.g., argue) back and forth, each responding to what the other said in the previous letter.  I found that the exchange I had with Adam is still archived online, and in fact you can see it by clicking on the title below.

Our exchange comprises a series of eight letters, with four from each of us (I start; he finishes).  As you might guess, I gave a “yes” answer to the question below, while Adam defended the humanities as being just as capable of science of producing knowledge.  I’m rereading it now, and was impressed with our exchange. I worked hard on my piece, and Adam defended his views vigorously.

I am not going to summarize it, as it’s long and involved—but not, I hope, tedious.  If you read here you’ll know my views, but Adam’s are pretty much lost to history since they took the Letters page down. Fortunately, I found where it was archived, and you can read our back-and-forth if the question below interests you.

A call to expunge humanities from universities

August 10, 2025 • 11:45 am

The author of the article below kindly sent me a copy of his piece calling for separation of humanities instruction from that of science.  Such a tactic would even produce universities that taught one or the other but not both. The end result would be the death of universities offering a liberal education, and probably of humanities instruction as well.

This is a short but provocative read at The Dispatch, so click on the title below to read it. The author is Evan D. Morris, a Professor of Radiology Biomedical Imaging at Yale.

I’ve heard similar arguments from colleagues in the science, but I’m not sure I fully agree. The reason is that I had a fantastic liberal-arts education at The College of William & Mary in Virginia, an education that sparked a lifelong love of learning in the humanities, including literature, art, and philosophy (I am deficient in my knowledge of classical music). I am by no means a polymath or public intellectual, but I read tons of literature, go to art museums, and read a lot of philosophy for a scientist. I wouldn’t be doing that if I hadn’t studied these things in college.

Click below:

Morris’s main argument for separating science from the humanities is that the Trump administration is punishing science for the sins of people in the humanities, even if a few scientists do submit DEI-related grants.  Ergo, we should preserve science, with all its virtues, by keeping it away from humanities scholars. I put below some quotes, all indented (Morris was at the Heterodox Academy Conference in NYC a month ago):

The best argument I heard at the HxA conference in defense of the humanities in today’s university was: “We cannot afford to lose all of that important cancer research.” Come again? Translation: The humanities are going down and taking the rest of us—grant-funded scientists who focus on medical research or the physical sciences—with them. This begs the question: Do we scientists need them? Or, more to the point, must the fate of the sciences be tied to that of the humanities?

Since January of this year, the sciences have been hit with delays of some federal grants and cancellations of others; proposed reductions in indirect rate costs; and draconian budget cuts for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) going forward. Keep in mind, it is the humanities that have sinned: Why else would the Trump administration’s settlement with Columbia call for an internal review of Middle East programs or for adding new Jewish Studies faculty slots? But if the humanities have sinned, why has the government targeted the sciences for funding cuts? As Willie Sutton purportedly remarked when asked why he robbed banks: “Because that’s where the money is.” Most universities have divisions or departments of the humanities, social sciences, law, business, medicine, and hard sciences. But it is the latter two that bring in the bulk of federal dollars, in the form of NIH and National Science Foundation (NSF) grants.

. . . . Some will claim that scientists’ hands are not clean, that we endorse rampant DEI, that we misuse science funding for bizarre investigations. But such instances are a few fleas on the fur of a noble hound. We in the hard sciences do work that is largely apolitical, and we are more oriented toward much-needed objective evaluation of data and merit than many of our brethren in the humanities. Yet, the scientists, and all their life-giving and technology-producing work, are being punished for the sins of others because we all live under one roof. I cannot see a compelling reason for our continued cohabitation.

I can!  Well, I can so long as humanities are taught in a way to stimulate thinking rather than propagandize students. We all know that much of the humanities is morphing into ideological “studies” programs, but I still have confidence that somewhere in this great land English literature, music, and art are being taught in a way to stimulate students rather than propagandize them. Further, there is cross-pollination of the disciplines. Philosophy, for example (a “humanities” field) can help us straighten out our thinking about science (Dan Dennett is one example), while science can instill an attitude of doubt into studies of humanities, training students to meet assertions by saying, “How do you know that?”

I do, however, agree with Morris, as I did when I spoke at the conference, that the ends of science studies differ from those of much of the humanities:

 In the university, we also see a clash of cultures. Scientists at research universities run labs that are funded by government grants. To secure those grants, the scientist proposes a circumscribed set of experiments with verifiable (or more correctly, rejectable) hypotheses. Objective truth as it applies to such narrow lines of inquiry is attainable. But objective truth cannot be achieved in the humanities—nor is it the point. Professors in the humanities are trained in a completely different paradigm and culture. Writing about art or history or religion seems to elude any possibility of objectivity that is central to the scientific process. If you are a Calvinist, there may be only one proper way to read the Bible. But that is not the same as there being one objective meaning of the Bible for all of us.

There’s a lot more to be said about this, and I hope to say it in a longer written explication elsewhere.  I do agree that in most of the humanities (not all, for they include sociology and economics), the aim is not finding truths about the world, but to stimulate reflection and the realization of subjective “truths” (well, ways of thinking) that are specific to the reader, viewer, or listener. But those subjective truths are also important: imagine a world without novels, paintings, or music!  How can we teach liberal arts without such subjects?  Even Morris agrees with me here, but would reorganize universities to have the humanities taught by instructors:

Does this mean that scientists should strive to be illiterate or ahistorical? Of course not. We need to be able to read and write and absorb lessons from history and politics and ethics. But we don’t need to be part of a larger university to do so. For those topics that students need to learn but for which no scientist professor is prepared to teach, our Institute of Technology and Medicine can hire qualified instructors. But they need not be the world’s expert on Shakespeare or Poe to teach writing or English literature to undergrads. And for those polymathic students who want to learn their physics from a famous physicist and their Hobbes from a leading Hobbesian, there can still be such a thing as cross-registering at the nearby Institute of Humanities.

I disagree here.  First of all, as scientists we should strive not to unyoke ourselves from humanities, but to improve the teaching of humanities so that they become places of inspiration, stimulation, and arguments, even if there is no objective truth to be found (I have to add that we can learn how to view paintings, read novels, and listen to music from experts so that we get more out of them. Even if humanities can’t give us “objective truths”, they can show us what we’re missing.

This unyoking is really a recipe for the death of the humanities, for students, as my friend Luana is constantly reminding me, now go to college to get jobs, not to learn, and you can’t get good jobs if you’re a humanities major.  She doesn’t like this trend, but has always told me that this presages the death of liberal-arts colleges: one conclusion from Morris’s article. He ends this way:

We are at an inflection point in the public’s valuation of the academy. For good or ill, we  academics must each make our own best case for our continued existence and for whatever resources we seek from the public. There is an efficiency and a clarity that can come from unyoking the sciences from the humanities. Let the market of public opinion assess each discipline on its own merits and let the practitioners of each discipline be allowed to make their own case for their continued value. That seems only fair. I am confident I can make my most persuasive case for a university of science, engineering, and medicine, if the humanities are not housed under my roof.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be buying so blithely into “the market of public opinion”, but making the case for a liberal education.

Now I have considered that my opposition to this unyoking may derive from my own history: the fantastic education I got at the liberal-arts, teaching-specialized College of William & Mary. But I haven’t given up hope that this kind of education could still be proffered to students now.

However, maybe I’m naive and unrealistic.

Is there “truth” to be found in the humanities?

August 3, 2025 • 11:30 am

I pose the question above because, in my readings about freedom of speech and academic freedom, I repeatedly came across two claims:

1.)  Freedom of speech as per the First Amendment is construed by the law as essential for allowing the “clash of ideas” considered necessary to get to the truth.  No idea nor speaker is privileged, and the purpose of the clash in a democracy is to let everyone knows what other people think, and also to let government officials know what the people think.  Note that there seems to be some contradiction here, as clashes of ideas about things like abortion don’t necessarily produce any “truth” if there are religious beliefs or subjective preferences behind those ideas.  There is no clash of ideas, for example, that will produce an answer to the question, “Is abortion immoral?”, but it is still important to have this clash so that elected officials can run the our democracy.

2.) In contrast, the “clash of ideas” in academia is seen as absolutely essential to get at the truth.  Further in academia some people (those with expertise) and some ideas (evolution) are privileged. So, in contrast to public discourse, in which individual views take precedence and there is no a priori meritocracy, academic discourse is meritocratic and somewhat authoritarian.  But in both cases, à la John Stuart Mill and Oliver Wendell Holmes, clashes of ideas are seen as capable and essential in getting at truth.

In the discussion below at the Heterodox Academy in NYC, I riled up some people by claiming that some areas of the humanities, like art, music, or literature, are taught not to arrive at truth but for other reasons (self-reflection, etc.).  (Readers should know by now that I see all humanities as essential components of a good liberal education.)

Now some of what we call “humanities”, like economics and sociology are what i call “quasi-scientific” in that they do use the empirical methods of science and there is are truths that can be gleaned.  Do prices tend to rise, for example, when supply decreases?  But, I maintain, there’s not these kind of truths to be gleaned from art, music, or literature.

What “truth” there is in art, music, literature, and so on, turn out to be empirical truths, like “how accurate is Joyce’s depiction of Dublin in Ulysses?”,  or, as Louis Menand says below about Jackson Pollock, “How did he influence the history of art?”  Yes, those are also questions that could in principole be answered. But you’d be hard pressed to maintain that there is “truth” in theology, or even in philosophy. Philosophy can correct logical errors in our thinking and clarify difficult areas of inquiry, but even philosophers maintain that their mission is not to provide truth.  For example, is pulling the switch in the trolley problem the right thing to do? No clash of ideas can resolve that.  Further, in my view ethics is simply working out the consequences in society of a set of subjective preferences; and if that’s the case there are no ethical “truths”.  You can ask whether “allowing abortion will have effect X on society,” but that is an empirical question and not an ethical one, for it does not say whether abortion is right or wrong. Further, you can determine whether a fetus can survive outside the womb, which may affect one’s opinion about abortion, but that doesn’t tell you whether discarding frozen embryos is wrong.

Below is the the panel discussion in which I riled people up by raising the question: “Is the clash of ideas in non-empirical fields of the humanities—fields like art, literature, and music—designed to produce truth? If so what kind of truth?  This is the question I now pose to readers of this website, and I’m crowdsourcing it as I’m thinking of writing something about this. But it’s a sticky topic.  Just think of it this way: “If you are teaching the history of art, what kind of truth do you claim exists in the paintings of Van Gogh?” (Or any other artist, for that matter.)

The video of the discussion is below (one hour of palaver and 15 minutes of questions.) I wish I had done a better job, but so be it: blame insomnia. Also, remember that I am but a scientist, not a big-gun person in the humanities and public intellectual like John McWhorter or especially Louis Menand, a Harvard professor who writes for the New Yorker. The participants are me, Menand, McWhorter, and Jennifer Frey (Dean of the Honors College andProfessor of Philosophy & Religion at the University of Tulsa).  The moderator was Coleen Aren, Associate Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice at William Paterson University, and the person who introduced Coleen was Alice Dreger, well-known author and now senior scholar of the Heterodox Academy.