From: Daniel C. Dennett
Date: 4.20.02

I'm happy to join in the Third Culture victory dance, and I agree with most of what you have to say in your essay, but I also share some of the misgivings expressed, and would like to add a few of my own.

As Nick Humphrey urges, you should drop the paranoia. You've-we've-won. And as usual, there's a danger of squandering the spoils, and ignoring some of the problems created or exacerbated by victory. As Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi notes, many of the problems in the humanities these days are due to misplaced science-envy, misbegotten attempts to make the humanities more like the natural sciences. And as Marc Hauser says, your essay does contain some self-congratulatory caricatures.

Contrary to what you say, there are "systems" and "schools" in science every bit as ruthless in the suppression of heresy as their counterparts in the humanities. Science abounds in received doctrines and authorities that one questions at the risk of being branded a fool or worse, and for every young humanities scholar writing fashionably formulaic drivel about one deservedly obscure poet or critic or another, there are several young scientists uncritically doing cookbook science filling in the blanks of data tables that nobody will ever care to consult. I'm told that "Sturgeon's Law" is that 95% of everything is crap, and while I would be inclined to adjust that percentage to about 50% (I'm a softie, I guess) so far as I can see, the percentage—whatever it is—is not markedly lower in neuroscience than it is in literary theory. Don't make the mistake of comparing some of the best examples on one side with some of the worst on the other. Hebb's rule, that if it isn't worth doing, it isn't worth doing well, could put a lot of scientists out of work along with their makework colleagues in the humanities.

A comment about misleading labels, which have been around for centuries: The seven "liberal arts," with their quadrivium and trivium, have been mispigeonholing thinkers since medieval times. The sciences/humanities division is a more recent taxonomy that is only marginally more useful. Indeed, the term "humanist" is an uneasy compromise at best.

Many years ago, the National Endowment for the Humanities had to come up with a term to refer to its clientele, and it chose what I think was a neologism at the time, "academic humanist," to refer to those professors and researchers in literature, history, and philosophy departments, along with "humanistic" psychologists and "cultural" anthropologists and the like. The idea was to exclude artists (NEA, not NEH) but not art historians, fossil-hunters (physical anthropologists) but not rite-interpreters and archaeologists, etc. So it's a grab-bag formed by excluding the "hard" sciences and the performing, creating arts—leaving mainly, the "humanities" departments in colleges and universities.

Obviously the term has hardly anything to do with Renaissance Humanism or with the secular humanism so feared by the religious right. Perhaps the confusions sown by these overlapping terms makes "New Humanists" a gratuitously contentious label. But perhaps not. The term reminds me of a remark made by a wonderful physics teacher I had in high school: "Science taught right is one of the humanities!" What that teacher had in mind is exactly what you are celebrating in your essay: the deep appreciation of how scientific thinking enriches our perspectives on the world we live in–all our perspectives, not just our narrowly scientific interests.

But it's a two way-street. When scientists decide to "settle" the hard questions of ethics and meaning, for instance, they usually manage to make fools of themselves, for a simple reason: they are smart but ignorant. The reason that philosophers spend so much of their time and energy raking over the history of the field is that the history of philosophy consists, in large measure, of very tempting mistakes, and the only way to avoid making them again and again and again is to study how the great thinkers of the past got snared by them.

Scientists who think their up-to-date scientific knowledge renders them immune to the illusions that lured Aristotle and Hume and Kant and the others into such difficulties are in for a rude awakening. One of the ignoble pleasures provided to philosophers by the current wave of enthusiastic scientist/authors offering their shoot-from-the-hip solutions to the problem of consciousness, for instance, is watching all the eminent pratfalls. The hard part is to keep from saying "we told you so." Intrepid poaching is to be applauded, and some of the best ideas I have encountered "in the humanities" in recent years were blurted out by imaginative amateurs interloping from the sciences, but genuine curiosity and humility is part of the package.

And finally, science could make better use some of the traditional scholarly talents and habits of the humanists. As digitized texts become the sole medium of research, there are thousands of valuable experiments hiding modestly in thousands of old journals, swiftly fading into oblivion. There is valuable data mining to be done—by hand, the old-fashioned way, by people who can read German and French and Russian in addition to knowing the latest theories—but I wonder if the scientific establishment will reward such scholarship. It should.

DANIEL C. DENNETT is a philsopher at Tufts University and the author of Brainchildren: A Collection of Essays. [more....]