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Confabulation in the humanities

matthewlincoln.net

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Re: Confabulation in the humanities

#41

Post by scottbot »

scottbot wrote: post #29
pron wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with everything you say (although I read this article differently), but historians should be careful to steer away from Hayek's "scientism". History's underlying mathematical assumption -- an assumption that is almost surely correct -- is that society is a complex system, and therefore cannot be subject to predictions (or very few, qualitative predictions) in the long run. If historians feel quantitative anal…

This is true, but not entirely relevant. Life-based complex systems often share a propensity for punctuated stability specifically due to their own nature, because of the same circularity inherent in evolution (those that can survive to replicate, do). In this case, systems whose parameters tend towards stabilization persist specifically because they tend towards stabilization. The least self-undermining regularities…

Pron, as a historian who has come up with quantitative models and resisted the urge to call them predictive, yes, I think that sort of restraint is within humanit(y|ie)'s capable grasp. =]

Re: Confabulation in the humanities

#42

Post by pron »

ajuc wrote: post #39
pron wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are doing nothing but generating noise if you try to treat this knowledge the same as hard scientific knowledge. You generate something very valuable if you treat it as a different kind of knowledge. I like to give this example: the statement, "the moon is made of cheese" is false when treated as a scientific statement of fact. It can -- and, in fact, has -- been falsified. On the other hand, if taken as a litera…

> On the other hand, if taken as a literary statement, it can hold some truth -- or maybe many truths. Except that is a different kind of truth. We can learn from people telling stories, we don't need to call these stories "truths" to do that. No need to muddle up the terminology. There's a hilarious proverb about kinds of truth BTW, but I can't manage to translate it to English, idioms just work differently. > It wo…

> We don't need to call these stories "truths" to do that. No need to muddle up the terminology

And what is that terminology? Even math and physics have different definitions of truth; why can't literature ( literature's use of the word is closer to math's definition rather than physics)? I think most people are capable of accepting different definitions in different contexts.

> I think you misunderstood. It's not that it's not worth knowing. It's that you don't really know it if you can't quantify it.

You don't really know even when you can. The consequence of the Gettier problem[1] is that we cannot define "knowledge" in a way that is both completely satisfactory yet still applies to anything other than math. That is, if we define knowledge narrowly enough to be rigorous and in accordance of our ideal of what knowledge is, we find that we don't know anything. Hence, all knowledge is knowledge to a degree.

> You're just slapping together some explanation to feel better.

Isn't that what understanding means? Suppose we could simulate the entire universe from the Big Bang on extremely fast, and move forward and backward in time in an instant. That would be very useful indeed for some purposes, I guess. Some would even call it knowledge. But would anyone call it understanding? All understanding is meant to make us feel better. :)

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettier_problem

Re: Confabulation in the humanities

#43

Post by pron »

scottbot wrote: post #41
scottbot wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true, but not entirely relevant. Life-based complex systems often share a propensity for punctuated stability specifically due to their own nature, because of the same circularity inherent in evolution (those that can survive to replicate, do). In this case, systems whose parameters tend towards stabilization persist specifically because they tend towards stabilization. The least self-undermining regularities…

Pron, as a historian who has come up with quantitative models and resisted the urge to call them predictive, yes, I think that sort of restraint is within humanit(y|ie)'s capable grasp. =]

I would love to see them. And I have great faith in historians' own abilities to resist that urge -- they are well trained at that; I am not so sure how others would fare.

Becoming a "quantitative historian" used to be a dream of mine (before I abandoned an academic career in either math or history). But then I realized that I enjoyed reading a transcript of a German witch trial no less than a Marc Bloch epic narrative, and found it to no less educational. :)

Re: Confabulation in the humanities

#44

Post by InclinedPlane »

scottbot wrote: post #38
InclinedPlane wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Creating a seemingly meaningful justification for behavior isn't science, it's just folk wisdom. Scientific theories need to be falsifiable, they need to have predictive value.

This ain't actually how science works, it's just an idealized account. Special relativity wasn't technically falsifiable compared to its competing theory by Lorentz, because both produced mathematically equivalent predictions. If you pick up a random science paper these days, odds are you'll find all sorts of unfalsifiable claims. Does this mean modern scientists are doing it wrong? No, but even if you think it does,…

You can call activities which work outside of the framework of science whatever you want, but they aren't science. The foundation of science is testing theories against evidence, which means falsifiability.

Relativity is a perfect example because it made very specific and testable predictions such as gravitational lensing, frame dragging, gravitational redshift, and gravitational radiation.

Re: Confabulation in the humanities

#45

Post by scottbot »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #44
scottbot wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This ain't actually how science works, it's just an idealized account. Special relativity wasn't technically falsifiable compared to its competing theory by Lorentz, because both produced mathematically equivalent predictions. If you pick up a random science paper these days, odds are you'll find all sorts of unfalsifiable claims. Does this mean modern scientists are doing it wrong? No, but even if you think it does,…

You can call activities which work outside of the framework of science whatever you want, but they aren't science. The foundation of science is testing theories against evidence, which means falsifiability. Relativity is a perfect example because it made very specific and testable predictions such as gravitational lensing, frame dragging, gravitational redshift, and gravitational radiation.

If you define science as anything that's falsifiable, then of course anything that isn't, isn't science. And hey, free sciencecountry, that's your prerogative.

That said, the philosophers of science who originally discussed falsifiability have gone on to say its inadequate, and a huge chunk of work that's published and funded as science these days isn't strictly falsifiable.

Science is a word like any other, that we all agree on to make meaning. Right now lots of practicing scientists work on a definition that includes but isn't limited to falsifiability, but of course the great thing about it is you're welcome to decide what criteria is most comfortable to you. I like to think that the work Einstein did on Special Relativity before 1915, that wasn't mathematically distinct from Lorentz or Poincare, was scientific even though it wasn't falsifiable.

Re: Confabulation in the humanities

#46

Post by tonyarkles »

mdlincoln wrote: post #20
tonyarkles wrote: post #7

Not sure if the author is around here, but the style sheet on this seems to be broken on an iPad 2 in landscape mode. It seems to be right on the edge of a CSS breakpoint, and flips back and forth between two different layouts every time I scroll. Makes it very very hard to read...

blerg, sorry about that! Will fix when I'm done with the dissertation.

Good luck on the dissertation!
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