Once more into the breech: The problem with the humanities (not quite)

That’s a facebook post by Michael Bérubé. There’s a bunch of comments, which you’re welcome to read by scrolling over to Facebook. I’m putting my own comment right here:

I’m of two minds about this whole business, Michael, and by “whole business” I mean not only that report and your response – I’ve only glanced at both – but this whole “woe is the humanities” business. My trouble is that I am not a humanist. Oh, I’ve got a PhD in English from SUNY Buffalo, I’ve published in MLN, Semiotica, PMLA (but only a letter, about how boring deconstruction had become), I’ve even got a page and a half in the volume from that notorious 1966 structuralism conference, but I was kicked out of the club sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s.

There was never an official  “drumming out” ceremony, no written reprimand, no detailing of reasons, but it happened nonetheless. And I know why it happened. I took Lévi-Strauss too seriously, deciding that there was more to him than binary oppositions. That led me to cognitive science and – the horror! the horror! – to computational linguistics. Back at Buffalo in the mid 1970s, yes, I was in the English Department, but I also strayed over into Linguistics and studied computational semantics with David Hays. Now at the time it looked like I was venturing into new territory, you know, going boldly etc. and I was. But by the 80s it was clear that I had been walking over a bridge too damn far. And so I left.

As for the current fracas, I understand that it concerns this “ideological monoculture.” Well I can see that, and I do think there is an issue here. I also don’t think it’s as bad as all that.

But the computer and computation, now that’s a deeper issue, and more complicated. There’s been a lot of interesting work in the so-called “digital humanities,” which has been marginalized within the humanities. And the issue is deeper than cultural analytics, a somewhat newer term. The issue is right there in the Centennial Issue of MLN, published as a special issue in 1976. Northrup Fry headlined the issue, but it also had articles by Edward Said, Eugenio Donato, Stanley Fish, Walter Benn Michaels, and others, and me. My article was “Cognitive Networks and Literary Semantics.” It was full of diagrams, those cognitive networks, which I used to analyze Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129. That’s why I was ultimately kicked out, and that’s indicative of the issue the humanities are not at all facing. Oddly enough, it’s not so very far from the issue Susan Sontag raised in perhaps her most famous essay, “Against Interpretation.”

Which is why I tend to think this current business is just a tempest in a teapot. Very important if you’re at the tea party. But if you’ve been kicked out, not so important.

Bérubé: You realize that the report is basically saying "the trans bullies have shut down debate in philosophy" (at a time of extraordinarily peril for trans and gender-nonconforming people) and you're replying with "I was kicked out of the tea party fifty years ago for a completely unrelated thing," right? (And digital humanities are marginalized? Not in this timeline. :))

Me: Yes, I realize that. It's a complicated world we live in. I don't know what's to be done about the culture warriors. Either it gets worse and worse, or it doesn't. Either way this completely unrelated thing remains an issue and the humanities are not doing a very good job of dealing with it. Not sure what future the humanities can have without dealing with this unrelated issue.

Indulge me with a little more, Michael. You're a decade and a half younger than I am. For most purposes and in most contexts that's irrelevant. Not not when it comes to sports, where you've got the advantage, and not in the context of English lit. Those 15 years mean you faced a very different discipline from the one I faced. For you the structuralist moment was a thing of the past, all settled and done. For me it was very different.

I saw an opening into a new way of thinking, whatever it was that Lévi-Strauss was doing with myth. And right around the corner we had Chomsky in linguistics and then the cognitive sciences (the term wasn't coined until 1972). That's what interested me. But the fact of the matter is that by the time I published that essay in MLN, the opening that I'd seen was closing rapidly. Jonathan Culler was touring around on his book, Structuralist Poetics, but that's as far as it got, which is not as far as I'd already gone. And as you know, Culler himself abandoned structuralism for deconstruction.

Well, the type of thinking that I was doing back in the 1970s, that could prove very fruitful in the current intellectual environment. But that has been so thoroughly closed off that, well, I'm wasting my time and yours for even bothering to comment, aren't I? Sorry about that.

Bérubé: No worries, Bill. I'm just saying ... perspective, my friend. Nobody is arguing that there have never been disciplinary orthodoxies in the various disciplines in the humanities, or that people didn't prefer certain lines of inquiry to others. All I'm saying is that the report's account of the Tuvel / Hypatia is wrong-- and a really indefensible way of implying that the trans folk and their allies have shut things down. But is it true that there are people in academe who can't abide the idea that other people think differently from themselves? Why, yes! And Paul Boghossian is apparently one of them.

The Discipline of Literary Criticism: A Quixotic Essay about Thinkers, Methods and Authority

New working paper. Title above, links, abstract, contents, and introduction below.

Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/164963582/The_Discipline_of_Literary_Criticism_A_Quixotic_Essay_about_Thinkers_Methods_and_Authority_A_Working_Paper 

SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=6352618 

ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/401591370_The_Discipline_of_Literary_Criticism_A_Quixotic_Essay_about_Thinkers_Methods_and_Authority

Abstract: This working paper examines the intellectual status of literary criticism as an academic discipline in the United States. Beginning from a playful prompt inspired by Tyler Cowen’s book GOAT: Who Is the Greatest Economist of All Time and Why Does It Matter?, the essay initially sets out to identify the “greatest” literary critics. Very quickly, however, the exercise reveals a deeper problem: unlike economics, the population of figures who count as literary critics is difficult to define, and the criteria by which they might be evaluated are far from clear. The project therefore shifts from ranking critics to examining the boundaries, origins, and intellectual ambitions of the discipline itself.

The essay traces the emergence of contemporary academic literary criticism to the mid-twentieth century, using Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren’s Understanding Poetry as a marker of the New Criticism’s institutional consolidation within American universities. From there it examines the crisis that arose in the 1960s when disagreements about interpretation raised doubts about whether literary criticism could claim the status of cumulative knowledge. The 1966 Johns Hopkins structuralism conference serves as a pivotal moment, bringing figures such as Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Derrida into the orbit of literary studies and helping to catalyze the rise of “Theory”—a broad set of interpretive approaches drawing on philosophy, psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism, and other disciplines.

Through discussions of figures such as Coleridge, Frye, Girard, Derrida, and Harold Bloom, the essay explores competing conceptions of literary criticism: as pedagogy, as cultural guardianship, as theoretical inquiry, and as personal commentary on great works. Bloom’s eventual retreat from academic criticism toward a more public and personal mode of literary judgment is treated as emblematic of the discipline’s ongoing uncertainty about its intellectual foundations.

Contents

Introduction: The Formation of an Academic Discipline 3
1. The search for GOAT Literary Critics 6
2. A discipline is founded: Brooks & Warren, Northrop Frye, and S. T. Coleridge 23
3. Structuralism and its aftermath: Girard, Lévi-Strauss, and Derrida 32
Character in the Age of Adam Smith [GOAT economist], an interlude 56
4. What’s up with the Bard? [Bloom, Cowen, and Girard] 59
Harold Bloom and Hillis Miller on the Demise of Literary Studies 71
5. Harold Bloom, the one and only 73
Appendix 1: The Chatbots Comment on this Essay 94
Appendix 2: Commentary on the Profession 98
Appendix 3: Open Letters about Literary Criticism 100
Appendix 4: Naturalist Literary Criticism 101

Introduction: The Formation of an Academic Discipline

I started this project on a whim, as I often do. Tyler Cowen had just announced his book, GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time and Why Does it Matter, and I thought: Why don’t I do the greatest literary critics? And that’s what I set out to do.

But I had no plan, just a vague intention. When I began this project I had no idea, for example, that I would end it with a discussion of Harold Bloom, giving him more attention than any other critic or that I would deposit a longish piece about Susan Sontag in the middle of my Bloom discussion. No, I didn’t plan that, I hadn’t even anticipating discussing Bloom at all.

Once I got started, however, whole thing evolved more or less organically and is something of an opportunistic hodge-podge of various kinds of intellectual materials, prose that I’ve written (the biggest single chunk of material), lists from Wikipedia, queries to ChatGPT, charts from Google Ngrams, and topic model charts. Why don’t we agree that its form is an exercise in avant-garde criticism intended to mime the jagged and fuzzy state of the discipline?

This diagram depicts the argument that has emerged during this exercise. Read it as moving from the past, at the left, on through the present to the future, at the right:

I locate the beginning of the contemporary academic discipline of literary criticism in the mid-20th century pedagogical anthology, Understanding Poetry, edited by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warran, which I discuss in some detail later in this essay. Commentary on literature shades off into the past back through Samuel Johnson in the modern world and through Aristotle in the ancient world, and both classical and vernacular literature was studied in the nineteenth-century German universities that provided the model on which American universities were established, but the contemporary academic study of literature is based on interpretive methods and ideas that crystalized in the middle of the 20th century. Brooks & Warren are a convenient marker of that activity. It was known as the New Criticism, a term still in use for a certain body of work.

By the 1960s, however, that interpretive activity had become problematic. Some critics became bothered by the fact that different critics arrived at different interpretive conclusions about the same texts. “How,” they came to wonder, “how can we count this as knowledge if we can’t agree on meanings?” And so, some scholars at Johns Hopkins invited a group of Continental thinkers, mostly French, but not entirely, to a symposium in the Fall of 1966. The symposium was organized around structuralism, an interdisciplinary movement of the human sciences that emerged in Europe at the middle of the century. A French anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss was the nominal head of the movement. He was invited to the symposium, but couldn’t make it. As it turned out, however, the star of the conference was a young philosopher, Jacques Derrida, who skewered Lévi-Strauss with his contribution, thus sowing the first seeds of poststructuralism. Note that neither of them is a literary critic, but they have had as much if note more influence on literary criticism than anyone who was and is primarily a literary critic.

And so I have indicated them at the middle of the diagram, with one of them pointed toward the future and the other pointing toward the past. The direction of those arrows reflects my judgment, but it should by no means be considered as reflective of the discipline. The discipline would come to reject Lévi-Strauss, but an increasingly large portion of it would come to at least accept, if not embrace, the insights of Derrida. I have a great deal to say about that later in the essay. And I want to say a bit about my own position in this – I was a student at Johns Hopkins when the French landed – just a bit later in this introduction.

Derrida’s method, deconstruction (a word he coined), opened the floodgates to a variety of interpretive methods that came to be collectively known as “Theory,” with a capital “T.” Theory is the application of some approach to the study of the human mind and/or society that is used as a vehicle for interpreting literary (and other) texts. Psychoanalysis and Marxism were the first through the door followed by feminism, African-American studies and so on and so forth.

Understandably many (older) critics resisted these new dispensations, none more forcefully than Harold Bloom. While he spent a few years trying to go along with the program, during the 1980s he broke ranks and not only abandoned poststructuralism but he pretty much abandoned academic literary criticism in favor of addressing himself to the general educated public in through edited collections and a variety of books, including one on American religion (which I’ve read), and big fat books on The Western Canon and Shakespeare. I’ve given over the last 20 pages of this essay (excluding the appendices) to Bloom, with a diversion into Susan Sontag, though it becomes 35 pages if you include the immediately preceding remarks on Shakespeare’s position in the canon, a reasonable inclusion given that Bloom is Bardolator in Chief.

That accounts for the position of Bloom on the chart, right of center at the apex of a triangle trailing off into the past. He abandoned the modes of thought ushered in by Brooks & Warren and retreated into a more personalistic mode of criticism, one that allowed him to luxuriate in his own opinions as amplified through his tremendous, but ultimately narrow, erudition. Bloom became an empire unto himself.

As for me, as I said, I was a student at Johns Hopkins when the structuralism conference took place. I didn’t attend it, didn’t even know it was happening, but I was introduced to structuralism and semiotics by Dr. Richard Macksey, a book-collecting polymath who did much of the organizational groundwork for the conference. Without going into detail, I decided that the natural progression from Lévi-Strauss was into cognitive science and computational semantics, which I pursued with David Hays in linguistics while getting a Ph.D. in English at The State University of New York at Buffalo. And that effectively took me well beyond the disciplinary boundaries of literary criticism.

While I have continued my interest in literature and have written both practical commentary and theoretical and methodological studies, I have also pursued other intellectual interests – cultural evolution, cognitive science, music, film, graffiti, this and that. The upshot is that I am not as widely and deeply read in literary criticism as I would have been had I decided to mind my Ps and Qs for the last 40 years.

That’s an obvious disqualification for writing a longish essay intended to do for literary critics what Tyler Cowen did for economists, identify the GOATs (Greatest of All Time). But that, as you will quickly see, that’s not what I ended up doing. Rather, I used that objective as a vehicle for examining the origins and boundaries of the academic discipline of literary criticism, which I have depicted in that diagram. And that, I would argue, is a task for which my outsider status suits me well. I can see what’s going on in a way that those in the middle of it cannot.

You be the judge.

Have at it.

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Note: I’ve included appendices listing various articles I’ve written about the profession. The last one is about the opportunities opened up by computing, both as a conceptual model and a practical tool.

Exploring the Nature of Creativity with ChatGPT

 I think a lot about creativity and my current series about intellectual creativity and AI has me thinking about it specifically and in some detail. In this effort I decided to take a look at an article recommended by my colleague, Ramesh Viswanathan, Rick Mammone, Will AI Ever Think Like Einstein or Create Like Picasso?—Imagination is All You need, The Quantastic Journal, July 7, 2025. The article is interesting, and I agree with the premise. 

But Mammone offered a simple model for creativity that seemed dubious to me, one based on a phase of divergent thinking followed by one of convergent thinking. It’s a common idea, but I find it problematic because it assumes that one has a specific objective in mind, something for which you are seeking a creative idea. That I don’t think we always have a specific goal in mind when we begin a process that has a creative result. The process might begin with an open-ended search that has no specific goal. Coming up with a specific goal, then, becomes an objective. Once you have that, then you can set about achieving the goal.

So I decided to put the question to ChatGPT. Here’s the resulting dialog.  Major topics:

Creativity in Science    
Arts and Humanities    
Kubla Khan    
Engineering and Architecture    
Limitations of the divergent-convergent model    
AI and Benchmarking    

I’ve highlighted my prompts in light orange.

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Creativity in Science

I’ve taken the following characterization of creativity from a recent article by Rick Mammone (Will AI Ever Think Like Einstein or Create Like Picasso?—Imagination is All You need):

“Creativity is often described as involving two distinct modes: divergent and convergent thinking. Divergent thinking is the process of generating a wide range of ideas and possibilities, for example by brainstorming, while convergent thinking is about focusing on and evaluating those ideas to arrive at a solution. By combining these two approaches, individuals and teams can effectively harness their creative potential to solve problems and generate new ideas.”

Do we have any documented cases of creativity in any intellectual field that look like that? Such cases would explicitly list the ideas and hypotheses under consideration and then trace the process by which one idea finally won out.

Yes, there are documented cases of creativity in intellectual fields where a combination of divergent and convergent thinking is explicitly visible—though not always in such a neat or schematic form. The clearest examples come from fields like mathematics, science, and sometimes literature or philosophy, especially when thinkers have left behind detailed notebooks, correspondence, or retrospective reflections. Below are some instructive cases:

1. Charles Darwin – The Origin of Species

Domain: Biology
Documentation: Darwin’s notebooks and correspondence

·       Divergent Thinking: Darwin explored a broad array of hypotheses about variation, inheritance, species divergence, and extinction. His notebooks are filled with sketches, alternative explanations, and speculative ideas—including the now-famous “I think” evolutionary tree sketch.

·       Convergent Thinking: Over time, he evaluated these ideas through systematic observation (e.g., pigeon breeding), empirical data from the Beagle voyage, and Malthusian population theory. He gradually rejected alternatives and synthesized natural selection as the core mechanism.

·       Traceable Process: The transition is well-documented in his notebooks and later works. Scholars like Howard Gruber (Darwin on Man) trace these steps carefully.

2. Albert Einstein – Special and General Relativity

Domain: Physics
Documentation: Einstein’s letters, memoirs, and drafts

·       Divergent Thinking: Einstein entertained multiple lines of reasoning about simultaneity, reference frames, the ether, and gravitation. His thought experiments (e.g., chasing a light beam) are examples of conceptual divergence.

·       Convergent Thinking: He eventually focused on the constancy of the speed of light and the equivalence principle, using rigorous mathematics to formalize his intuitions.

·       Traceable Process: Many stages of this process are documented in his correspondence (e.g., with Michele Besso) and in secondary studies such as Abraham Pais’s Subtle is the Lord and John Stachel’s editorial work.

3. Claude Shannon – Information Theory

Domain: Mathematics / Electrical Engineering
Documentation: Shannon’s master's thesis and 1948 paper, plus interviews and Bell Labs memos

·       Divergent Thinking: Shannon drew on a wide range of fields: Boolean algebra, cryptography, thermodynamics, telephony, and symbolic logic.

·       Convergent Thinking: He honed in on the mathematical formulation of entropy and channel capacity, rejecting less rigorous or less generalizable approaches.

·       Traceable Process: His writings and the intellectual context at Bell Labs allow for reconstruction of his thinking. Notably, his master's thesis already foreshadows key concepts.

4. Barbara McClintock – Jumping Genes

Domain: Genetics
Documentation: Laboratory notebooks, experimental records, and Evelyn Fox Keller’s biography (A Feeling for the Organism)

·       Divergent Thinking: She explored non-Mendelian patterns of inheritance in maize, testing and discarding various mechanistic explanations.

·       Convergent Thinking: Eventually, she identified the phenomenon of transposable elements (jumping genes), a radically new idea at the time.

·       Traceable Process: Keller’s account highlights how her experimental reasoning combined divergent hypotheses with a keen intuitive feel for patterns.

5. Poincaré – Mathematical Discovery

Domain: Mathematics
Documentation: Poincaré’s own reflections in “Mathematical Creation”

·       Divergent Thinking: He describes producing a wide range of possible function forms and transformations during conscious work.

·       Convergent Thinking: He claims the final successful combination came to him in a moment of unconscious insight, followed by conscious verification.

·       Traceable Process: Though not as structured as a lab notebook, his account shows a clear sequence: generation, incubation, insight, and evaluation.

Bonus: Thomas Edison’s Invention Process

Domain: Invention / Engineering
Documentation: Lab notebooks, business records, and biographies

·       Edison's labs ran on a kind of industrialized divergence: many variations on filaments or circuits were tested.

·       Then came convergence: systematic evaluation of durability, cost, and manufacturability.

·       This process is documented in Edison’s notebooks and the work of Paul Israel and others at the Edison Papers project.

Summary

In all of these cases, we find:

·       Divergence: A documented stage of idea generation—often experimental, speculative, or exploratory

·       Convergence: A subsequent process of testing, evaluating, selecting, and refining

·       Traceability: Enough documentation (notebooks, letters, essays, retrospective accounts) to reconstruct the creative trajectory

So yes—while creativity is often messy and retrospective, there are empirically rich, traceable cases that match the divergent/convergent model, particularly in the sciences. Would you like a comparison table of these cases or more from the arts/humanities side?

Ted Underwood: Why AI Needs the Humanities as a Partner

Wolf Humanities Center
2024-25 Forum on Keywords
Wednesday, October 23, 2024

It is not hard to convince humanists that the field of artificial intelligence ought to be listening to us. What is not as widely recognized is that AI researchers know this and are seeking guidance. The tools produced by generative AI are effectively models of culture, and they fail to solve important problems without a model of cultural pluralism. After explaining why these problems matter—even to tech companies—Professor Underwood will explore the institutional conditions we would need for humanists and computer scientists to work together on them as partners.

Ted Underwood is Professor of Information Sciences and English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of three books on literary history, most recently Distant Horizons: Digital Evidence and Literary Change (Chicago, 2019), but also publishes papers in venues like Sociological Science and the Association for Computational Linguistics. His current project involves building language models that incorporate viewpoint diversity and cultural change as central principles.

Style Matters: Intellectual Style

This is another repost from The Valve (check out the discussion), lightly revised. The difference between Continental and Anglo-American philosophy is, in part, sylistic in the sense of this post, which is about how an individual thinker likes to think. I originally posted this to New Savanna in June of 2012 and I'm bumping it to the top in view of my recent discussion of critical cognitivism (See second addendum).

March 18, 2017: And yet again. These matters are much on my mind these days, cf. my recent post on Derrida and Writerly Criticism.

Feb. 9, 2024: Another bump to the top, this time as an adjunct to my current series on great moments in literary criticism (aka GOAT literary critics).

When, some 35 years ago, I turned toward the cognitive sciences and away from structuralism and post-structuralism, deconstruction, and the rest, the turn was driven as much by intellectual style as by epistemological conviction. No, I didn’t have much affection for the predicate calculus, which I learned in a course in symbolic logic (it fulfilled my math requirement), but I did like the intellectual style I found in linguistics books, the sense of rigor and explicit order. I also liked the diagrams. A lot.

There were large sections in my dissertation—"Cognitive Science and Literary Theory"—where the major burden of the argument was in the diagrams. I’d work out the diagrams first and then write prose commentary on them. That modus operandi pleases me a great deal. In the preface to Beethoven’s Anvil (the book had some diagrams, but not many) I refer to my thinking in that book as speculative engineering. I like that term: speculative engineering.

There are other intellectual styles, obviously. Some very different from my diagrammatic and speculative engineering style.

Take New Historicism (in literary criticism) for instance. I’ve not read much in that vein, but I’ve read some, and some of that I’ve found quite interesting and delightful. If New Historicism is, as I’ve been told, the closest thing literary studies currently has to a dominant methodological practice, I can’t help but thinking that is as much about intellectual style as about epistemological conviction.

It is, or can be, a very writerly style. One gathers a pile of stories, vignettes, and passages from various writers, literary and not, and arranges them more according to rhythm, surprise, and repose than for logical progression and finality — though such matters come into play as well. It is a style that can be a bit like literature itself, at least prose fiction, though one can sneak in some lyrical passages here and there, and maybe even a bit of insistent rhythm.

* * * * *

I’ve got two suspicions about style matters:

1.) In anyone’s intellectual ecology, style preferences are deeper and have more inertia than explicit epistemological beliefs.

2.) Some of the pigheadedness that often crops up in discussions about humanities vs. science is grounded in stylistic preference that gets rationalized as epistemological belief.

* * * * *

Diagrams (Addendum 2012)

On the importance of diagrams it is worth recalling a remark by the linguist Sydney Lamb about the importance of visual notation (Pathways of the Brain, 1999, p. 274): “. . . it is precisely because we are talking about ordinary language that we need to adopt a notation as different from ordinary language as possible, to keep us from getting lost in confusion between the object of description and the means of description.”

Note that Franco Moretti has made a similar remark with respect to "distant" reading, where one frequently deals with charts and diagrams.

 

Take a look at my working paper, Description 3: The Primacy of Visualization.

Discursive Thought (Addendum 2015)

I believe that one reason that literary critics have been assimilating the newer psychologies in the way that they have, which is discursively, is that that is how they like to think. It's not merely that they haven't been trained in the experimental or computational conceptual ways of the newer psychologies, but that they have no real desire for such training because they don't particularly like those conceptual styles. They are thus between a rock and a hard place.

They went into literary studies because they liked to think discursively and had little or no interest in thinking in diagrams, computer simulations, or experimental design. Literary critics of an older generation didn't have that problem when the turned to psychoanalysis, Marxism, phenomenology, and so forth. Those are discursive disciplines. But these newer psychologies, NOT.

I don’t give a crap about science

Time for another bump to the top of the queue, on principle. (9.2.2022)

* * * * *

I originally published this in The Valve, 25 March 2010. I republished it once before at New Savanna and I think it's worth republishing again, this time in the context of my extensive posting on digital humanities, which is sometimes subject to an unproductive discussion of humanistic vs. scientific method. In these discussions the opposed methods are ideological formations more than actual procedures real people use to arrive at more or less reliable knowledge.

Let me repeat that: I don’t give a crap about science. And again, just so you know I mean business: I don’t give a crap about science. Though just what kind of business I mean, well...

From which it follows, as the night the day, that I’m not interested in making the study of literature more scientific. I certainly want to see literary studies change in certain ways, use new ways of thinking—and of organizing and publishing our work. But making it “more scientific” is not part of the program.

Still, when I say “I don’t give a crap about science,” what do I mean? Anyone who has more than a casual acquaintance with my work knows that I frequently cite work in, e.g. cognitive science, neurobiology, and actually use those ideas in the body of my text. Until few years ago I only got three academic journals, PMLA, Science, and Nature. Then I dropped PMLA (not all that interesting), a year later I dropped Nature (too expensive), and finally, alas, Science (not as expensive as Nature, but still too much). It thus seems unlikely that I intend “I don’t give a crap about science” to have its most obvious meaning, that is: I don’t give a crap about science.

I mean something else.

 

Most intimately, most closely at hand, I mean that I don’t worry about whether or not my work is sufficiently scientific. I worry about whether or not it is interesting, about rigor and coherence, about whether the prose is clear and, as appropriate, elegant. But is it scientific? Not an issue. Nor is it an issue I worry about in the work of others.

Another thing I worry about is objectivity. Something I find deeply obscure.

As I walk about my apartment there are all these things that clearly are objects, existing apart from me. Much philosophical ink has been spilled on that issue, but it is not that ink and its intended meanings that I mean to evoke here and now. Just the ordinary experience and those real objects out there in the world. So that is one thing.

Then there is scientific objectivity, over which much philosophical ink has also been spilled. I believe such objectivity is real, though our understanding of it is obscure and contested.

What about the objectivity of journalists? That is different from the objectivity of scientists. How does it work? Some might wonder whether it is possible at all. Can the notion of “objectivity” be given useful meaning with respect to the situations on which journalists must report?

I also recognize that some matters are ineluctably subjective. Among those, some may be relentlessly idiosyncratic and specific to individuals. But I’m not sure that beauty is among those. Nor the good. It is often possible to reach substantial intersubjective agreement on matters that are subjective. Society would be impossible without such agreement. And we may well mistake widespread intersubjective agreement on subjective matters for objectivity. Or is that a mistake? Sometimes, often, always, never?

Objectivity, how to achieve it, that has perhaps been my main methodological concern in literary studies. These days I am particularly interested in the ways in which we can extend the reach of objective analysis and description of literary works (cf. this post on how "Kubla Khan" kicked my intellectual training into oblivion, of this article on literary morphology).

What about intersubjective agreement on subjective matters? What role does it play in literary studies? Note that I believe genuine critical activity, aesthetic or ethical evaluation of texts, is subjective and so criticism in this sense is about securing intersubjective agreement.

I further suspect that in many cases where we talk of humanistic knowledge being subjective we really mean something more like informal or unformalized.

(What about objectivity and intersubjective agreement?)

* * * * *

Ergo, I tend to regard much-most humanities vs. science discussion as ideologically-driven wanking and I regard Snow’s Two Cultures and its spawn as children of the Devil.

The deciine of the humanities in college majors

Here's the raw size of all the fields (just BAs). The downtick in cultural, ethnic, and gender studies is notable--those had been the only fields *not* to get pulled down by the collapse of humanities majors. Also sharper-than normal drops in English, Comp Lit, languages... pic.twitter.com/cbecOnl8Ls

— Benjamin Schmidt (@benmschmidt) August 23, 2022

Here's the slightly longer term shifts from 2011-2021. The total outlier of computer science's explosion is really clear here: so is the concentration of growth in fields that have clear career prospects. pic.twitter.com/Pq5nuZveqH

— Benjamin Schmidt (@benmschmidt) August 23, 2022

The downtick in humanities this year pushes up the ETA for when CS is larger than all humanities degrees together to one of the classes currently in college. pic.twitter.com/muaYNhDIe4

— Benjamin Schmidt (@benmschmidt) August 24, 2022

Virtual Reading: The Prospero Project Redux [#DH]

I'm bumping this 2017 post to the top of the queue because, 1) I think the concept of virtual reading proposed here may be of some use in thinking about and evaluating the written output of large language models, such as GPT-3, and 2) the concept of literary form implicit the section, "In search of a small-world net," is relevant to my arguments about the value of symbols as being, in part, a vehicle for moving about in mental space in a way that "outside" the "standard" landscape of mental space (see my post earlier today, Why Are Symbols So Useful to Us?).

 

* * * * *

 

I've uploaded another working paper. Title above, abstract, table of contents, and introduction below. Note that it's a long way through the introduction, but there's some good stuff there.

Download at:

SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=3036076

Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/34551243/Virtual_Reading_The_Prospero_Project_Redux

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Abstract: Virtual reading is proposed as a computational strategy for investigating the structure of literary texts. A computer ‘reads’ a text by moving a window N-words wide through the text from beginning to end and follows the trajectory that window traces through a high-dimensional semantic space computed for the language used in the text. That space is created by using contemporary corpus-based machine learning techniques. Virtual reading is compared and contrasted with a 40 year old proposal grounded in the symbolic computation systems of the mid-1970s. High-dimensional mathematical spaces are contrasted with the standard spatial imagery employed in literary criticism (inside and outside the text, etc.). The “manual” descriptive skills of experienced literary critics, however, are essential to virtual reading, both for purposes of calibration and adjustment of the model, and for motivating low-dimensional projection of results. Examples considered: Heart of Darkness, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, The Winter’s Tale.

Contents

Introduction: Prospero Redux and Virtual Reading 2

In search of a small-world net: Computing an emblem in Heart of Darkness 8

Virtual reading as a path through a multidimensional semantic space 11

Reply to a traditional critic about computational criticism: Or, It’s time to escape the prison-house of critical language [#DH] 17

After the thrill is gone...A cognitive/computational understanding of the text, and how it motivates the description of literary form [Description!] 23

Appendix: Prospero Elaborated 30

Introduction: Prospero Redux and Virtual Reading

In a way, this working paper is a reflection on four decades of work in the study of language, mind, and literature. Not specifically my work, though, yes, certainly including my work. I say in a way, for it certainly doesn’t attempt to survey the relevant literature, which is huge, well beyond the scope of a single scholar. Rather I compare a project I had imagined back then (Prospero), mostly as a thought experiment, but also with some hope that it would in time be realized, with what has turned out to be a somewhat revised version of that project (Prospero Redux), a version which I believe to be doable, though I don’t alone posess the skills, much less the resources, to do it.

The rest of this working paper is devoted to Prospero Redux, the revised version. This introduction compares it with the 40 year-old Prospero. This comparison is a way of thinking about an issue that’s been on my mind for some time: Just what have we learned in the human sciences over the last half-century or so? As far as I can tell, there is no single theoretical model on which a large majority of thinkers agree in the way that all biologists agree on evolution. The details are much in dispute, but there is no dispute that world of living things is characterized by evolutionary dynamics. The human sciences have nothing comparable (though there is a move afoot to adopt evolution as a unifying principle for the social and behavioral sciences). If we don’t have even ONE such theoretical model, just what DO we know? And yet there HAS been a lot of interesting and important work over the last half-century. We must have learned something, no?

Let’s take a look.

Prospero, 1976

Work in machine translation started in the early 1950s [1]; George Miller published his classic article, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two” in 1956; Chomsky published Syntactic Structures in 1957; and we can date artificial intelligence (AI) to a 1956 workshop at Dartmouth [2]. That’s enough to characterize the beginnings of the so-called “Cognitive Revolution” in the human sciences. I encountered that revolution, if you will, during my undergraduate years at Johns Hopkins in the 1960s, where I also encountered semiotics and structuralism. By the early 1970s I was in graduate school in the English Department at The State University of New York at Buffalo, where I joined the research group of David Hays in the Linguistics Department. Hays was a Harvard-educated cognitive scientist who’d headed the mamachine translation program at the RAND Corporation in the 1950s.

At that time a number of reasearch groups were working on cognitive or semantic network models for natural language semantics. It was bleeding edge research at the time. I learned the model Hays and his students had developed and applied it to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129 (which I touch on a bit later, pp. 21 ff.). At the same time I was preparing abstracts of the current literature in computational linguistics for The American Journal of Computational Linguistics. Hays edited the journal and had a generous sense of the relevant literature.

Thus when Hays was invited to review the field of computational linguistics for Computers and the Humanities it was natural for him to ask me to draft the article. I wrote up the standard kind of review material, including reports and articles coming out on the Defense Department’s speech understanding project, which was perhaps the single largest research effort in the field (I discuss this as well, pp. 20 ff.). But we aspired to more than just a literature review. We wanted a forward-looking vision, something that might induce humanists to look deeper into the cognitive sciences.

We ended the article with a thought experiment (p. 271):

Let us create a fantasy, a system with a semantics so rich that it can read all of Shakespeare and help in investigating the processes and structures that comprise poetic knowledge. We desire, in short, to reconstruct Shakespeare the poet in a computer. Call the system Prospero.

How would we go about building it? Prospero is certainly well beyond the state of the art. The computers we have are not large enough to do the job and their architecture makes them awkward for our purpose. But we are thinking about Prospero now, and inviting any who will to do the same, because the blueprints have to be made before the machine can be built. [...]

The general idea is to represent the requisite world knowledge – what the poet had in his head – and then investigate the structure of the paths which are taken through that world view as we move through the object text, resolving the meaning of the text into the structure of conceptual interrelationships which is the semantic network. Thus the Prospero project includes the making of a semantic network to represent Shakespeare’s version of the Elizabethan world view.

But a model of the Elizabethan world view was “only the background”. We would also have to model Shakespeare’s mind (p. 272):

A program, our model of Shakespeare’s poetic competence, must move through the cognitive model and produce fourteen lines of text. [...] The advantage of Prospero is that it takes the cognitive model as given – clearly and precisely – and the poetic act as a motion through the model. Instead of asking how the words are related to one another, we ask how the words are related to an organized collection of ideas, and the organization of the poem is determined, then, by the world view and poetics in unison. [3]

We declined to predict when such a marvel might have been possible, though I expected to see something within my lifetime. Not something that would rival the Star Trek computer, mind you, not something that could actually think in some robust sense of the word. But something.
 

What we got some 35 years later was an IBM computer system called Watson that defeated humans in playing Jeopardy [4]. Watson was a marvel, but was and is nowhere near to doing what Hays and I had imagined for Prospero. Nor do I see that old vision coming to life in the forseeable future.

Moreover, Watson is based on newer kind of technology that is quite different from that which Hays and I had reviewed in our article and which we were imagining for Prospero. Prospero came out of a research program, symbolic computing, that all but collapsed a decade later. It was replaced by technology that had a more stochastic character, which involved machine learning, and which, in some increasingly popular versions, was (somewhat distanctly) inspired by real nervous systems. It is this newer technology that runs Google’s online machine translation system, that runs Apple’s Siri, and that is behind much of the work in computational literary criticism.

Before turning to that, however, I want to say just a bit more about what we most likely had in mind – I say “most likely” because that was a LONG time ago and I don’t remember all that was whizzing through my head at the time. We were out to simulate the human mind, to produce a system that was, in at least some of its parts and processes, like the parts and processes of the mind. One could have Prospero read and even write texts while keeping records of what it does. One could then examine those records and thus learn how the mind works. Ambitious? Yes. But the computer simulation of cognitive tasks is quite common in the cognitive sciences, though not on THAT scale. In contrast, Watson, for example, was not intended as a simulation of the mind. It was a straight-up engineering activity. What matters for such systems, and for AI generally, is whether or not the system produces useful results. Whether or not it does so in a human way is, at best, a secondary consideration.

Why didn’t Prospero, or anything like it, happen? For one thing, such systems tended to be brittle. If you get something even a little bit wrong, the whole thing collapses. Then there’s combinatorial explosion; so many alternatives have to be considered on the way to a good one that the system just runs out of time – that is, it just keeps computing and computing and computing [...] without reaching a result. That’s closely related to what is called the “common sense” problem. No text is ever complete. Something must always be inferred in order to make smooth connections between the words in the text. Humans have vast reserves of such common sense knowledge; computing systems do not. How do they get it? Hand coding – which takes time and time and time. And when the system calls on the common sense knowledge that’s been hand-coded into it, what happens? Combinatorial explosion.

The enterprise of simulating a mind through symbolic computing simply collapsed. In the case of something like Prospero I would specially add that it now seems to me that, to tell us something really useful about the mind, such a system would have to simulate the human brain. Hays and I didn’t realize it at the time – we’d just barely begun to think about the brain – but that became obvious some years later in retrospect.

Public representation of the humanities as revealed in a corpus 147K recent news articles

Fantastic new piece in @CulturalAnalyt by @lindsaycthomas and @abigaildroge that studies the public representation of the humanities across a collection of 150K newspapers. https://t.co/Q6RNqqw0vD

— Journal of Cultural Analytics (@CulturalAnalyt) January 20, 2022

Abstract of the linked article:

Academic defenses of the humanities often make two assumptions: first, that the overwhelming public perception of the humanities is one of crisis, and second, that our understanding of what the humanities mean is best traced through a lineage of famous reference points, from Matthew Arnold to the Harvard Redbook. We challenge these assumptions by reconsidering the humanities from the perspective of a corpus of over 147,000 relatively recent national and campus newspaper articles. Building from the work of the WhatEvery1Says project (WE1S), we employ computational methods to analyze how the humanities resonate in the daily language of communities, campuses, and cities across the US. We compare humanities discourse to science discourse, exploring the distinct ways that each type of discourse communicates research, situates itself institutionally, and discusses its value. Doing so shifts our understanding of both terms in the phrase “public humanities.” We turn from the sweeping and singular conception of “the public” often invoked by calls for a more public humanities to the multiple overlapping publics instantiated through the journalistic discourse we examine. And “the humanities” becomes not only the concept named by articles explicitly “about” the humanities, but also the accreted meaning of wide-ranging mentions of the term in building names, job titles, and announcements. We argue that such seemingly inconsequential uses of the term index diffuse yet vital connections between individuals, communities, and institutions including, but not limited to, colleges and universities. Ultimately, we aim to show that a robust understanding of how humanities discourse already interacts with and conceives of the publics it addresses should play a crucial role in informing ongoing and future public humanities efforts.

Crisis Among HUMANITIES DISCIPLINES in the Twenty-First Century

I've posted a new working paper. Title above. Access here:

Academia: https://www.academia.edu/49499060/
Crisis_Among_HUMANITIES_DISCIPLINES_in_the_Twenty_First_Century
SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3878413
ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/352889160_Crisis_Among_HUMANITIES_DISCIPLINES_in_the_Twenty-First_Century?_sg=Laf0czucfCXXnkmYbLk587b52jeBZW5r4vy4yzyL-loD3AhmzUp-1FOxZNI9vqACdAm_4JZ8k_iARLK8giKDQfvz5DSIlhpSN1u6qFbc.9Vs5efO7P439dL2HDU_CFGCrQPVwQtd711fH3CnHSxgXWmp85PImLB1qcmMbE_dF9kx1zXdxEA2hRIV94WJEkQ

Abstract, contents, and introduction below:

Abstract: In Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age, Reitter and Wellmon have provided a timely account of the nineteenth century debates in the German academy that shaped the structural armature of the modern research university. Discord and discontent are inherent in the institutional culture of the humanities, making humanists exquisitely tuned to see attacks coming at them on all fronts. The argument is illustrated and extended by observations from J. Hillis Miller, an eminent literary critic, and opportunities literary critics have missed in using the Internet to reach citizen-humanists and enrich civic life. I use Plato’s The Crito and Goethe’s Faust as two examples of core humanities texts that have enriched and guided my own life.

Contents

Adrift in the twenty-first century 3
Permanent crisis among the humanities [Afterthoughts on an essay-review] 5
A perverse sense of intellectual honor is driving humanities scholars to disciplinary seppuku: Some personal reflections on the book, Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age 9
The changing terms of my Socratic bargain with the American Academy [and the larger search for truth] 20
Appendix: A short chronology of career events 27

Adrift in the twenty-first century

“Crisis Among HUMANITIES DISCIPLINES in the Twenty-First Century” is oriented toward this book:

Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon, Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age, The University of Chicago Press, 2021.

It unfolds in two phases stretched roughly over three sections. The first phase is about the academy and encompasses the whole of “Permanent crisis among the humanities” and most of “A perverse sense of intellectual honor is driving humanities scholars to disciplinary seppuku” (pp. 3 to 15). The second phase is about me and my relation to the academy and continues through last major section of the paper, “The changing terms of my Socratic bargain with the American Academy” (pp. 15 to 26). One might well ask why that second phase exists at all as it is only about me and not the academy. I will get to that shortly.

Reitter and Wellmon argue that the institutional shape of the modern research university took shape during the course of debated in the German academy during the nineteenth century. Those debates organized the intellectual field into two divisions for the first time, the sciences and the humanities. The humanities were charged with achieving an impossible intellectual unity in pursuit of knowledge for knowledge’s sake while at the same time producing citizens for the nation-state, all based on knowledge inherent in ancient texts. I illustrate these contradictory requirements with several recent quotations by the late J. Hillis Miller, a distinguished literary critic. I then point out that one consequence of continuing to fight an imaginary enemy grounded in the nineteenth century is that literary academics have missed many opportunities to advance the disciplines of literary criticism through the technology of the Internet. Because the institutional mission of the humanities includes skepticism about science and technology it was more important to question and oppose this technology than to use it to advance humanistic understanding.

In then go on to illustrate the value of ancient texts by discussing the importance of Plato’s The Crito to me, first in resisting the war in Vietnam – The Crito is a classic text of civil disobedience, but then in defining my relationship to the academy after I’d been denied tenure and was unable to secure another academic post. In time, however, I came to more or less reject the academic itself, which I explain in some detail in “The changing terms of my Socratic bargain with the American Academy.”

What is the connection between my personal story and the larger story? It is clear that one of the difficulties I had in securing another academic post is the fact that I made extensive use of the cognitive science in my research, that put me on the wrong side of the humanities-sciences divide decreed in those nineteenth century debates. Contemporary students of the so-called digital humanities face resistence to their work for the same reason, not to mention the many literary critics who have come to call on cognitve and evolutionary psychology.

And what are we to make of the many junior faculty who are admonished to play it intellectually safe until they get tenure, assuming that they are on tenure track? That of course is not a practice confined to the humanities. It exists across the board. As does the extensive use of “permatemp” adjuncts in undergraduate teaching. And then we have the fact that more and more basic research – knowledge for knowledge’s sake – is taking place outside the academy, especially in the computational sciences. And then we have all those citizen-humanists who are creating reference works of various kinds on the web.

All of which is to say that the academy is fraying, and has been for some time. And at least some of the difficulty can be attributed to the impossible terms of that bargain struck in the nineteenth century. In that context my personal story is simply at the extreme end of one axis defining the space of institutional decay. What will be required to transform this arena of decay into the emergence of new institutions, ones suited to the intellectual and civic demands of the 21st Century? Surely that will require a clear recognition of the inadequacy of traditional institutions. And that is where my story belongs, for it tells how I came recognize that existing intellectual institutions are no longer adequate to free and unfettered inquiry in search of truths as yet unknown.

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I have been working on another document while completing this one, “The road to Xanadu led to Mars: I went one way, you all went another,” which is about ideas the forced me away from the professional mainstream. I have included an appendix that contains a short chronology of events common in the two stories (p. 27).

Summer Ramble 6.26.21: Literary Studies, Mind Models, Seinfeld, Joyful Nature

First I list the projects currently at the top of my to-do list. Then I discuss them by subject area.

Specific projects on deck

Three working papers in late stages of development:

The road to Xanadu led to Mars: I went one way, you all went another: I figure out how it is that structuralism led me through cognitive science and computation to a new approach to literary studies.

Crisis Among HUMANITIES DISCIPLINES in the Twenty-First Century: Built around the book, Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age, in which Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon argue that the institutional culture of the humanities is grounded in discord and discontent that follows from 19th debates about the nature of the university.

To Model the Mind: Speculative Engineering as Philosophy: Built around the book, Models of the Mind: How physics, engineering and mathematics have changed out understanding of the brain, by Grace Lindsey. I’m interested in an engineering approach to understanding both the human mind and AIs.

Big intellectual project on deck: To Model the Mind: A Primer on Attractor-Nets: It’s time to dust off the notes on Attractor-Nets which I made in the mid-2000s and get something in a form that other people can understand. Why? Because those notes speak to current debates in artificial intelligence about artificial neural-nets and symbolic computing.

Book project: Playing for Peace: Reclaiming our Human Nature, which is Volume 3 in the peace series I’ve been working on with Charlie Keil: Local Paths to Peace Today. This consists of various papers, by Charlie, me, and others, on the importance of music and play in life.

Seinfeld working paper: A working paper based on my current series of analyses of bits from his book, Is This Anything?

Literary criticism and the academy

While Crisis Among HUMANITIES DISCIPLINES is about the humanities in general, I concentrate on literary criticism because that’s the discipline I know the best. It turns out that much of the discussion centers on the difficulties I have had defining my relationship to a discipline that has, in effect, rejected me. The road to Xanadu led to Mars is about ideas, how mine evolved from structuralism, while the profession ultimately was unable to accommodate structuralist insights and was forced to deconstruction and post-structuralism (which doesn’t go beyond structuralism, but rejects it). Here’s a short chronology that encompasses events mentioned in both working paper:

1972: Finish my master’s thesis on “Kubla Khan” – The thesis was structuralist in conception and spirit, but moved to structuralism’s farthest edge and sent me toward computation and cognitive science. Central to Xanadu/Mars.

1976: Publish my article “Cognitive Science and Literary Semantics” in MLN’s Centennial Issue in 1976. I’ve now gone beyond the boundaries of literary criticism as those boundaries would evolve into the 1980s, but that wasn’t obvious at the time. At the time those boundaries were fluid. Central to Xanadu/Mars.

1985: I was denied tenure at RPI and unable to secure another academic post. Sometime in the wake of that I negotiate (with myself) a Socratic bargain with the profession. That bargain is modeled on The Crito. I discuss this extensively in Crisis.

1995: I begin reconsidering the nature of my intellectual enterprise in relation to literary criticism as critics become interest in cognitive science, but not the cognitive science that informed my work. I decide that I had all along been interested in form. I discuss this extensively in Xanadu/Mars. 

2001: I begin corresponding with Mary Douglas. She gets me interested in ring-form composition. In 2003 I send her a long post about ring-form in “The Nutcracker Suite” episode of Fantasia. Relevant to Xanadu/Mars. 

2010: I renegotiate the Socratic bargain. I am no longer loyal to the profession, but simply to the free and unfettered pursuit of truth in an international community of scholars. Again, central to Crisis.

2021: Make sense of it all: Crisis and Xanadu/Mars.

Modeling the mind

Finishing the working paper, To Model the Mind: Speculative Engineering as Philosophy, should be relatively straightforward, though tricky. The main task to be accomplished is to talk in a meaningful way about all the kinds of mind-like entities, artificial, real, and hybrid, that we are currently dealing with. I’m not talking about a thorough discussion, just an indication of the range along with some sense of the kinds of issues involved.

The attractor net primer is perhaps the most important item on my current agenda. I’m guessing the primer is going to run 40 to 50 pages or more and will have lots of diagrams. I have to get it into the current arena of discussion about AI and the mind.

Joyous nature book

I’m currently editing Playing for Peace: Reclaiming our Human Nature. I need to write an introduction, finish the guide-to-contents, and tell Charlie (Keil) what help I need from him to finish it up.

Working Paper on Jerry Seinfeld

Provisional title of the working paper: Seinfeld’s Comedy: Jokes are Intricately Crafted Machines. I need to do analyses of three more bits, two of which I’ve already done, though in another form, and write an introduction.