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.
Hi there. I don't mean this is a criticism, but I'm just wondering from reading what you've written here how much you know about their history of critical theory. I assume you probably know it all so what I'm going to say here is not going to be new to you.
After The failure of Communism in Russia, Communists had to go back to the drawing board and work out why communism had failed. As best I understand, critical theory is basically the reincarnation of Communism in order to address these issues. The idea is that the reason communism fails is because the minds and the hearts of people have been won over to capitalism. According to this theory, people don't support communism because their minds have been polluted by capitalist ideas.
Science in general is understood by click critical theorists to be a vassal for capitalist ideas, shrouded in a cloak of the 'white coat' representing authority that cannot be challenged. Fundamentally critical theory sees science as an attempt to promote capitalist ideas via the means of feigning intellectual authority over other ideas. Critical theory concentrates on showing the biases in science in order to undermine its supposed authority.
I'm sure you know all this. However, you don't seem to have mentioned this central point in your analysis of what's going on here.
Brilliant question that you're exploring here. I love this kind of exploration!
I think you're right that criticism of the sciences has often come from the left with a political motive. But I don't think that this is the case here, as Oliver doesn't seem to be a leftist. I'm glad you're getting something out of my work!
Hi there! Interesting. Basically as far as I understand, the humanities have all been set up on the basis of critical theory. So the whole thing is designed to expose what is believed to be inherent bias in any perspective. And the whole thing is sceptical about science because it just sees science as a bias that needs to be exposed. Even if someone is not a leftist this is still the tradition of the humanities which they will have been brought up in.
As far as I understand, initially it was believed that the Bible held truth. Then in the enlightenment, When they started abolishing religious belief, they needed new texts from which to establish truth. And so they chose the corpus of English traditional texts as representing humanity's cumulative wisdom. But then critical theory reacted against this because they said that traditional British texts basically endorse capitalism. So as I understand, the humanities are designed to expose capitalist bias within texts. Whether or not you're a leftist, That's the tradition you're working within if you study humanities. The whole thing is set up for that purpose, even if you're not directly a leftist. However, I believe about 97% of academics are left leaning. In fact, the whole of academia tends to be set up leaning left.
Glad I stumbled on this article! As a sixth-year PhD candidate in English and a lover of science and the scientific method, I couldn’t agree more with the description of the problem and the diagnosis of it that you offer in the last paragraph. The rest of the article makes me somewhat ambivalent, as I’m very skeptical of the branch of ToM research that you cite throughout. (This article, for example, suggests part of why I’m skeptical: https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/ssol.4.2.01bis )
Anyway, ambivalence aside, I just wanted to say that you’re not alone! I wish more people in the humanities were open to drawing from and contributing to the sciences, but also, part of me kind of understands why they don’t: the cognitive and behavioral practices of empiricism are foreign and scary to them (and they even evoke some envy and ressentiment, I think, given their relatively higher social and economic capital); at the end of the day, I think that humanities scholars just want to be liked and respected for being well-read, and feel threatened by anything that suggests that being well-read isn’t good enough for making academically legitimate contributions.
As you can see, I have a lot of thoughts about this stuff, so I’ll stop my comment here, but if you’re ever looking to chat or collaborate, feel free to DM me! :]
I'm glad that I was able to address the problems you're facing. I actually wish that I had abandoned my PhD in comparative literature and done something else. Six years in is not too late! As far as the ToM studies go, the real point isn't that they're certainly true, but that Oliver is so biased in his discussion of them. Anyway, good luck!
Yeah, extremely fair: the fact that they support Oliver’s conclusions only suggests the extent to which his bias against them is based in a larger, anti-science standpoint.
As far as getting out is concerned, yeah, I often ask myself if I’m simply falling prey to the sunk cost fallacy. But I also, consistently, find myself answering “No.” I love what I’m working on for my dissertation (the psychology of expertise in creative writing), I’m not betting on nor intending to end up in an academic position anywhere, I’m an aspiring novelist, and I don’t have any debt, so there are a lot of good (albeit personal) reasons to stay in and very few reasons (beyond extrinsic reasons like finances, social status, impact, etc.) for me to get out. So, for now, in I stay! At least until I’m done with my dissertation. At which point, I may run for the hills lol
> 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.
You're asking too narrow a question, I think. Territorial behavior like this is by no means limited to literary people: there's no shortage of software engineers who hate math, biologists who hate physics, economists who think historians are innumerate, historians who think economists can't read, etc. This is if anything probably worse among the merely academia-adjacent.
If there's some excess literary defensiveness left over once the general trend is explained, it might be reasonable to start reaching for the "deep and philosophical" - but it should not be the default.
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.
Hi there. I don't mean this is a criticism, but I'm just wondering from reading what you've written here how much you know about their history of critical theory. I assume you probably know it all so what I'm going to say here is not going to be new to you.
After The failure of Communism in Russia, Communists had to go back to the drawing board and work out why communism had failed. As best I understand, critical theory is basically the reincarnation of Communism in order to address these issues. The idea is that the reason communism fails is because the minds and the hearts of people have been won over to capitalism. According to this theory, people don't support communism because their minds have been polluted by capitalist ideas.
Science in general is understood by click critical theorists to be a vassal for capitalist ideas, shrouded in a cloak of the 'white coat' representing authority that cannot be challenged. Fundamentally critical theory sees science as an attempt to promote capitalist ideas via the means of feigning intellectual authority over other ideas. Critical theory concentrates on showing the biases in science in order to undermine its supposed authority.
I'm sure you know all this. However, you don't seem to have mentioned this central point in your analysis of what's going on here.
Brilliant question that you're exploring here. I love this kind of exploration!
I think you're right that criticism of the sciences has often come from the left with a political motive. But I don't think that this is the case here, as Oliver doesn't seem to be a leftist. I'm glad you're getting something out of my work!
Hi there! Interesting. Basically as far as I understand, the humanities have all been set up on the basis of critical theory. So the whole thing is designed to expose what is believed to be inherent bias in any perspective. And the whole thing is sceptical about science because it just sees science as a bias that needs to be exposed. Even if someone is not a leftist this is still the tradition of the humanities which they will have been brought up in.
As far as I understand, initially it was believed that the Bible held truth. Then in the enlightenment, When they started abolishing religious belief, they needed new texts from which to establish truth. And so they chose the corpus of English traditional texts as representing humanity's cumulative wisdom. But then critical theory reacted against this because they said that traditional British texts basically endorse capitalism. So as I understand, the humanities are designed to expose capitalist bias within texts. Whether or not you're a leftist, That's the tradition you're working within if you study humanities. The whole thing is set up for that purpose, even if you're not directly a leftist. However, I believe about 97% of academics are left leaning. In fact, the whole of academia tends to be set up leaning left.
Glad I stumbled on this article! As a sixth-year PhD candidate in English and a lover of science and the scientific method, I couldn’t agree more with the description of the problem and the diagnosis of it that you offer in the last paragraph. The rest of the article makes me somewhat ambivalent, as I’m very skeptical of the branch of ToM research that you cite throughout. (This article, for example, suggests part of why I’m skeptical: https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/ssol.4.2.01bis )
Anyway, ambivalence aside, I just wanted to say that you’re not alone! I wish more people in the humanities were open to drawing from and contributing to the sciences, but also, part of me kind of understands why they don’t: the cognitive and behavioral practices of empiricism are foreign and scary to them (and they even evoke some envy and ressentiment, I think, given their relatively higher social and economic capital); at the end of the day, I think that humanities scholars just want to be liked and respected for being well-read, and feel threatened by anything that suggests that being well-read isn’t good enough for making academically legitimate contributions.
As you can see, I have a lot of thoughts about this stuff, so I’ll stop my comment here, but if you’re ever looking to chat or collaborate, feel free to DM me! :]
I'm glad that I was able to address the problems you're facing. I actually wish that I had abandoned my PhD in comparative literature and done something else. Six years in is not too late! As far as the ToM studies go, the real point isn't that they're certainly true, but that Oliver is so biased in his discussion of them. Anyway, good luck!
Yeah, extremely fair: the fact that they support Oliver’s conclusions only suggests the extent to which his bias against them is based in a larger, anti-science standpoint.
As far as getting out is concerned, yeah, I often ask myself if I’m simply falling prey to the sunk cost fallacy. But I also, consistently, find myself answering “No.” I love what I’m working on for my dissertation (the psychology of expertise in creative writing), I’m not betting on nor intending to end up in an academic position anywhere, I’m an aspiring novelist, and I don’t have any debt, so there are a lot of good (albeit personal) reasons to stay in and very few reasons (beyond extrinsic reasons like finances, social status, impact, etc.) for me to get out. So, for now, in I stay! At least until I’m done with my dissertation. At which point, I may run for the hills lol
> 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.
You're asking too narrow a question, I think. Territorial behavior like this is by no means limited to literary people: there's no shortage of software engineers who hate math, biologists who hate physics, economists who think historians are innumerate, historians who think economists can't read, etc. This is if anything probably worse among the merely academia-adjacent.
If there's some excess literary defensiveness left over once the general trend is explained, it might be reasonable to start reaching for the "deep and philosophical" - but it should not be the default.