Great read, thank you for sharing. While I agree with the spirit of your article and it seems to me there is certainly evidence for the effect of literature on theory of mind and other aspects of psychology, I think your confidence in statistical methods - and in particular significance testing - is misplaced.
Most of the problem with the replication crisis in science comes from misuse, abuse, and misunderstanding of the meaning of traditional frequentist statistics. It is not hard for researchers to find "significance" of some variables in their studies (whether it's what they were looking for or not), nor is it hard for them to arbitrarily adjust the N or other aspects to get over the 0.05 hump.
Id recomend reading Bernoulli’s Fallacy by Aubrey Clayton, not only a great history of the development of statistics and probability but also an eye opener to the fundamental flaws prevalent in scientific research.
It looks like an interesting book, but I probably won't read it because I'm not deeply invested in the issue. However, if you reviewed and summarized it, I would be very interested in reading your article.
I don't think I could pull off writing a review, at least not any time soon. I looked around at a few reviews and this one in particular I think captures it well and includes some good criticisms I hadn't seen before: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09332480.2021.2003642
Although the book is certainly directed towards researchers and there were many somewhat "boring" sections when he is going over mathematical examples (this considering I was listening to the audio book and I love math), as a curious mind and hobbyist philosopher I feel it has made me a better skeptic and more capable at criticizing of the 'Study shows X' headlines we are so bombarded with these days.
> However, I think the major reason for the hostility is deep and philosophical. I think that many people want to believe that they have souls that are non-physical, non-deterministic, and not amenable to scientific explanation. They feel that literature and other artistic works put them in touch with this soul and are therefore off limits to science. These people, therefore, regard scientific approaches to the study of the arts as a kind of blasphemous denial of the reality of their souls.
I'm not sure this goes far enough; this idea still makes it a question of propositional beliefs: either we have non-physical souls (as the literary people supposedly want to believe), or we don't (and then the scientists are right). But I think the real aversion that you're noting comes from something subtler. Not from yes/no beliefs about what mind and matter, but about entire dimensions of experience and sensibility. One of the major things art does (including literature and music) is to engage the reader/public/audience in subtle ways that have very little to do with belief, and which feel both profound and fragile. Profound because something happens there which feels valuable, and interesting enough to have spawned a the long tradition of the humanities and the entire discipline of art "criticism" (a badly chosen word if there ever was one). Fragile because it only takes a bit of hurry, worry, or mental closed-mindedness to lose access, and even worse, to mostly forget one ever had it.
So I'm not too surprised if those who value the humanities object to filling their social field with highly positivistic studies about word usage and mood analysis. Interesting as that can be, it immediately threatens to close off the access to the subtle realms, of which they (quite rightly I guess) see themselves as the guardians.
I don't understand why you think that science is the enemy of subtlety. The theory of mind theory of literature that I review could, it seems to me, be developed into some very subtle directions, and indeed has been in work like Why We Read Fiction by Lisa Zunshine, which examines the subtle ways in which particular literary texts develop elicit theory of mind processes.
Every case can be different, but analytic thinking can be quite incompatible with other mental modes that people value. I remember a professional musician telling me that their knowledge of music theory and their well trained ear meant that they were automatically analyzing the harmonic structure of the pieces they heard, and that actually impacted their enjoyment of the music.
I have experienced aversion to science among literary types, but I've seen others, especially fairly contemporary successful authors like DFW and McCarthy, exhibit a deep scientific curiosity. I imagine there are different reasons for this aversion and different ways it gets expressed.
Do we have any insights or polling on how widespread this aversion?
I have no objections to the ToM findings which seem intuitive and consistent with what is thought about narrative as a critical vector in gene-culture co-evolutionary history. However, I'm not sure it is necessarily a great justification for saying scholars of the Humanities have to embrace scientific thinking. I'm not sure how deeply aesthetic preferences, especially abstract ones, are rooted in our biology except as extensions of biopsychological proclivities, which can be changing and malleable.
I'm sure you'd demure from work constructing PGS scores for whether one prefers anti-heroes or unreliable narrators etc.
I don't believe that there is any polling on this issue. What I say is based on experience, plus on Steven Pinker's comments on hostility towards science among humanists in Enlightenment Now, which I should have mentioned in the article. As I say in the article, I don't believe that all literary commentary should be based on scientific theory, but I do think that literary scholars should be more open-minded about scientific research on literary questions and better educated about scientific method so that they can judge when this research is appropriate and productive.
I don't know what you're talking about in your last sentence. Could you link and explain?
In my next article, I'm going to go back to the foundations of modern aesthetics in Kant to show the religious dimension of our contemporary theory of art. Kant believed that art was one way that we gained awareness of a noumenal world outside the purview of scientific understanding. I think religious notions that are deeply embedded in our theory of art are the major reasons why literary people often think that science is incapable of explaining the aesthetic experience.
>I don't know what you're talking about in your last sentence. Could you link and explain?
I was offering a hypothetical scenario inspired by some of the ideas you raised. I was saying that I think you wouldn't find it salutary for the Humanities, if scientists started developing polygenic scores for predicting reading behavior and literary preferences and then Humanities professors started using those polygenic scores to guide pedagogy and taste-making. To my knowledge, no such efforts exist, but we certainly are witnessing scientists approach these questions in BG/psychiatric genetics. Here's an example -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6NrDP1_T8s - work by Abdel Abdellaoui. This was also something The Genetic Lottery by Paige Harden softly suggested may in helpful in education.
>In my next article, I'm going to go back to the foundations of modern aesthetics in Kant to show the religious dimension of our contemporary theory of art. Kant believed that art was one way that we gained awareness of a noumenal world outside the purview of scientific understanding. I think religious notions that are deeply embedded in our theory of art are the major reasons why literary people often think that science is incapable of explaining the aesthetic experience.
It seems you're suggesting that some variety of Dualism or Gnosticism is important to aesthetic philosophy and experience in the West. I think I'd be more friendly to an argument that aesthetics standards are downstream of status competition which are downstream of being the type of social species we are. I think religious systems have a role in that status game but that path is typically charted through esotericism rather than numinous emotional states (though it may exploit these tendencies).
"I think I'd be more friendly to an argument that aesthetics standards are downstream of status competition which are downstream of being the type of social species we are."
This sounds like a cultural capital perspective on the value of literary education, which is what made John Guillory as a heavy-hitting literary theorist. I think that this kind of perspective is illuminating, but begs all the deepest questions. Why is a humanities education important for cultural capital as opposed to say video game prowess? It's because of the perception of some deep value of literary education, and I'm trying to get at that value. https://a.co/d/cpyyTks
I'm not sure it is of deep value to our culture anymore. Those holding to it are perhaps behind the times, nostalgic hanger-ons, true conservatives, etc. I think the revealed preference by both a majority of Western elites and the people that reading literature is antiquated.
It's easy to support the above argument with available data including enrollment in Humanities, publishing industry numbers, trends in reading comp data, and polling on reading behavior.
The obsolescence of this form of cultural capital is part of Guillory's argument. He takes it to be one of the reasons for the crisis of the humanities. At least, I think so. I've never read the book, but I've read a lot about it.
Great read, thank you for sharing. While I agree with the spirit of your article and it seems to me there is certainly evidence for the effect of literature on theory of mind and other aspects of psychology, I think your confidence in statistical methods - and in particular significance testing - is misplaced.
Most of the problem with the replication crisis in science comes from misuse, abuse, and misunderstanding of the meaning of traditional frequentist statistics. It is not hard for researchers to find "significance" of some variables in their studies (whether it's what they were looking for or not), nor is it hard for them to arbitrarily adjust the N or other aspects to get over the 0.05 hump.
Id recomend reading Bernoulli’s Fallacy by Aubrey Clayton, not only a great history of the development of statistics and probability but also an eye opener to the fundamental flaws prevalent in scientific research.
It looks like an interesting book, but I probably won't read it because I'm not deeply invested in the issue. However, if you reviewed and summarized it, I would be very interested in reading your article.
I don't think I could pull off writing a review, at least not any time soon. I looked around at a few reviews and this one in particular I think captures it well and includes some good criticisms I hadn't seen before: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09332480.2021.2003642
Although the book is certainly directed towards researchers and there were many somewhat "boring" sections when he is going over mathematical examples (this considering I was listening to the audio book and I love math), as a curious mind and hobbyist philosopher I feel it has made me a better skeptic and more capable at criticizing of the 'Study shows X' headlines we are so bombarded with these days.
> However, I think the major reason for the hostility is deep and philosophical. I think that many people want to believe that they have souls that are non-physical, non-deterministic, and not amenable to scientific explanation. They feel that literature and other artistic works put them in touch with this soul and are therefore off limits to science. These people, therefore, regard scientific approaches to the study of the arts as a kind of blasphemous denial of the reality of their souls.
I'm not sure this goes far enough; this idea still makes it a question of propositional beliefs: either we have non-physical souls (as the literary people supposedly want to believe), or we don't (and then the scientists are right). But I think the real aversion that you're noting comes from something subtler. Not from yes/no beliefs about what mind and matter, but about entire dimensions of experience and sensibility. One of the major things art does (including literature and music) is to engage the reader/public/audience in subtle ways that have very little to do with belief, and which feel both profound and fragile. Profound because something happens there which feels valuable, and interesting enough to have spawned a the long tradition of the humanities and the entire discipline of art "criticism" (a badly chosen word if there ever was one). Fragile because it only takes a bit of hurry, worry, or mental closed-mindedness to lose access, and even worse, to mostly forget one ever had it.
So I'm not too surprised if those who value the humanities object to filling their social field with highly positivistic studies about word usage and mood analysis. Interesting as that can be, it immediately threatens to close off the access to the subtle realms, of which they (quite rightly I guess) see themselves as the guardians.
I don't understand why you think that science is the enemy of subtlety. The theory of mind theory of literature that I review could, it seems to me, be developed into some very subtle directions, and indeed has been in work like Why We Read Fiction by Lisa Zunshine, which examines the subtle ways in which particular literary texts develop elicit theory of mind processes.
Every case can be different, but analytic thinking can be quite incompatible with other mental modes that people value. I remember a professional musician telling me that their knowledge of music theory and their well trained ear meant that they were automatically analyzing the harmonic structure of the pieces they heard, and that actually impacted their enjoyment of the music.
I have experienced aversion to science among literary types, but I've seen others, especially fairly contemporary successful authors like DFW and McCarthy, exhibit a deep scientific curiosity. I imagine there are different reasons for this aversion and different ways it gets expressed.
Do we have any insights or polling on how widespread this aversion?
I have no objections to the ToM findings which seem intuitive and consistent with what is thought about narrative as a critical vector in gene-culture co-evolutionary history. However, I'm not sure it is necessarily a great justification for saying scholars of the Humanities have to embrace scientific thinking. I'm not sure how deeply aesthetic preferences, especially abstract ones, are rooted in our biology except as extensions of biopsychological proclivities, which can be changing and malleable.
I'm sure you'd demure from work constructing PGS scores for whether one prefers anti-heroes or unreliable narrators etc.
I don't believe that there is any polling on this issue. What I say is based on experience, plus on Steven Pinker's comments on hostility towards science among humanists in Enlightenment Now, which I should have mentioned in the article. As I say in the article, I don't believe that all literary commentary should be based on scientific theory, but I do think that literary scholars should be more open-minded about scientific research on literary questions and better educated about scientific method so that they can judge when this research is appropriate and productive.
I don't know what you're talking about in your last sentence. Could you link and explain?
In my next article, I'm going to go back to the foundations of modern aesthetics in Kant to show the religious dimension of our contemporary theory of art. Kant believed that art was one way that we gained awareness of a noumenal world outside the purview of scientific understanding. I think religious notions that are deeply embedded in our theory of art are the major reasons why literary people often think that science is incapable of explaining the aesthetic experience.
>I don't know what you're talking about in your last sentence. Could you link and explain?
I was offering a hypothetical scenario inspired by some of the ideas you raised. I was saying that I think you wouldn't find it salutary for the Humanities, if scientists started developing polygenic scores for predicting reading behavior and literary preferences and then Humanities professors started using those polygenic scores to guide pedagogy and taste-making. To my knowledge, no such efforts exist, but we certainly are witnessing scientists approach these questions in BG/psychiatric genetics. Here's an example -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6NrDP1_T8s - work by Abdel Abdellaoui. This was also something The Genetic Lottery by Paige Harden softly suggested may in helpful in education.
>In my next article, I'm going to go back to the foundations of modern aesthetics in Kant to show the religious dimension of our contemporary theory of art. Kant believed that art was one way that we gained awareness of a noumenal world outside the purview of scientific understanding. I think religious notions that are deeply embedded in our theory of art are the major reasons why literary people often think that science is incapable of explaining the aesthetic experience.
It seems you're suggesting that some variety of Dualism or Gnosticism is important to aesthetic philosophy and experience in the West. I think I'd be more friendly to an argument that aesthetics standards are downstream of status competition which are downstream of being the type of social species we are. I think religious systems have a role in that status game but that path is typically charted through esotericism rather than numinous emotional states (though it may exploit these tendencies).
"I think I'd be more friendly to an argument that aesthetics standards are downstream of status competition which are downstream of being the type of social species we are."
This sounds like a cultural capital perspective on the value of literary education, which is what made John Guillory as a heavy-hitting literary theorist. I think that this kind of perspective is illuminating, but begs all the deepest questions. Why is a humanities education important for cultural capital as opposed to say video game prowess? It's because of the perception of some deep value of literary education, and I'm trying to get at that value. https://a.co/d/cpyyTks
I'm not sure it is of deep value to our culture anymore. Those holding to it are perhaps behind the times, nostalgic hanger-ons, true conservatives, etc. I think the revealed preference by both a majority of Western elites and the people that reading literature is antiquated.
It's easy to support the above argument with available data including enrollment in Humanities, publishing industry numbers, trends in reading comp data, and polling on reading behavior.
Thanks for the book link.
The obsolescence of this form of cultural capital is part of Guillory's argument. He takes it to be one of the reasons for the crisis of the humanities. At least, I think so. I've never read the book, but I've read a lot about it.
Interesting. I shall have to take time this week to look back at the whole thread of articles.