Three modes of investigation in the human sciences: interpretive, experimental, and grammatical [#DH]

Three decades ago I prepared a report in which I proposed an interdisciplinary course that embraced what I took to be the three primary modes of investigation in the human sciences [1]. To write the report I needed terms for referring to those modes. That was a problem, for, as far as I could tell, standard terms didn’t exist.

The terminological problem remains, but I’ve reached a tentative decision about one-word terms: interpretive, experimental, and grammatical.

Interpretation, of course, can be used so broadly as to refer to just about any method. Everything requires interpretation, right? Well, yes, but that’s what I mean. I mean interpretation as it is practiced, perhaps most centrally, in literary criticism, in particular, in the practice of analyzing and interpretive individual texts. But critics can read texts spanning, say, a century and interpret what happened in the course of that century. Historians do the same thing; you amass a pile of evidence about some historical phenomenon or period and then you figure it what it all means. That is, you interpret it. And so with anthropology, and so forth.

By experimental I mean the type of work typically done in the behavioral and social sciences. One gathers data by some means – laboratory observation, survey instrument, public or privates records, whatever – and subject it to statistical analysis. The data and analysis constitute and experiment intended to test some hypothesis, though in many cases the only hypothesis on offer is the null hypothesis. Different data or different analytic approach, different experiment.

Grammatical thinking is perhaps the newest kid on the methodological block, though the idea of a grammar is quite old. I take linguistics as my core example, where I have in mind the formal and quasi-formal approach to linguistic phenomena that arose after World War II in the work of Chomsky and associates, computational linguists, and linguists of other schools. As it developed the grammatical approach extended to a wide range of perceptual, cognitive, and motor and behavioral phenomena. Some of the most interesting work of this kind involves the use of computer models.

Work in digital humanities has brought experimental methods to bear on phenomena which had previously been almost exclusively interpretive. Grammatical approaches are still rare within the humanities, and that includes most forms of cognitive literary criticism.

Ideally undergraduates majoring in any of the human sciences would be acquainted with all three approaches, though they would concentrate in only one or two. When such students then go on to doctoral work they would bring that breadth of acquaintance with them. Frankly, I think dissertations should employ two out of the three approaches. I note that much current work in digital humanities involves both interpretive and experimental approaches.

[1] William L. Benzon, Policy, Strategy, Tactics: Intellectual Integration in the Human Sciences, an Approach for a New Era, Working Paper, https://www.academia.edu/8722681/Policy_Strategy_Tactics_Intellectual_Integration_in_the_Human_Sciences_an_Approach_for_a_New_Era