Here's a Greek manuscript. There's a lacuna in the text. What is the most likely correct emendation? If you use a statistical method to answer, explain how you compiled your corpus of comparisons.
>explain a) Why, if science cannot be done with these questions, is anything else worth doing?
Oh my yes, just like football and gourmet cooking are worth doing. Besides which, your science labs are going to need industrial designers and lawyers, and at least a couple historians of science to warn you away from past methodological errors. Which means you also need at least a few scholars of rhetoric, fine arts, philology, general history and archaeology to train them.
>Try putting forward a psychoanalytic theory (not to keep stomping on that already crushed horse)
And yet you do. Why do you guys always use psychoanalysis for your examples? Why not numismatics? Why not 16th century Dutch history? Why not philosophy of mathematics, Meso-American archaeology or Song-period Chinese textual criticism?
>Try putting forward a psychoanalytic theory…in front of chemists and physicists and see what you get. They will have no trouble at all shredding it.
Or try putting it forward in front of social anthropologists. They will have even less trouble - and they were on to Freud a couple of decades before the alleged scientists in the medical profession caught on.
As a humanities academic I find myself leaning toward Coyne's side.
Yeah, he goes too far. There are areas involving qualia that could probably be handled by science eventually but the tools at our disposal are too crude for the moment so the humanities get them. There are also ought-questions in ethics and aesthetics that science isn't built to answer. They ought to stay in humanities too, chiefly because humanists are good at poking holes in arguments for certitude.
Most importanly, /we don't want/ the kinds of Big Why questions Hughes is laying on us. Humanities academics are busy toiling away on little subspecialties and trying to be as methodologically rigorous as possible given the limitations of the subject matter.
We do not want the responsibility of answering why people exist or proving that someone's religious fantasies are true. We can give you a historical tour of thinkers who tried to do so, or point out weird side-effects of some of their arguments, or point out some major religious traditions that don't actually care very much about those two questions - we can do all that and more, and I'd argue that's valuable stuff, but we are not going to be errand boys for crypto-creationists.
So, one demerit to Coyne for being a little too dismissive humanities. Infinity demerits to Hughes for trying to make humanities something it doesn't want to be and shouldn't be.
Here's a Greek manuscript. There's a lacuna in the text. What is the most likely correct emendation? If you use a statistical method to answer, explain how you compiled your corpus of comparisons.
>explain a) Why, if science cannot be done with these questions, is anything else worth doing?
Oh my yes, just like football and gourmet cooking are worth doing. Besides which, your science labs are going to need industrial designers and lawyers, and at least a couple historians of science to warn you away from past methodological errors. Which means you also need at least a few scholars of rhetoric, fine arts, philology, general history and archaeology to train them.
>Try putting forward a psychoanalytic theory (not to keep stomping on that already crushed horse)
And yet you do. Why do you guys always use psychoanalysis for your examples? Why not numismatics? Why not 16th century Dutch history? Why not philosophy of mathematics, Meso-American archaeology or Song-period Chinese textual criticism?
>Try putting forward a psychoanalytic theory…in front of chemists and physicists and see what you get. They will have no trouble at all shredding it.
Or try putting it forward in front of social anthropologists. They will have even less trouble - and they were on to Freud a couple of decades before the alleged scientists in the medical profession caught on.