How We Know What We Know

Lorraine Daston

Why is there no epistemology of the humanities that is even remotely comparable to the epistemology of the sciences? Why is it that humanists can gesture to only a handful of seminal works by philosophers (Wilhelm Dilthey on understanding in the humanities versus explanation in the sciences; Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur on hermeneutics; R. G. Collingwood on history), whereas great swathes of philosophy are devoted to the epistemology of the sciences? Even leaving the philosophers aside, the sciences have an impressive tradition of practitioners philosophizing about their own practices – practices such as controlling experiments, making measurements, distinguishing correlation from causation, estimating personal equations, sampling populations, and constructing mathematical models. It is not as if the humanities lack for their own refined ways of knowing, from source criticism in philology to close reading in literary studies, not to mention critical commentary in philosophy and anachronism-spotting in history. Yet despite the remarkable sophistication of these tools, each with its own history and all honed by decades if not centuries of disciplinary scrutiny, there is very little systematic reflection among humanists (much less among my own tribe of historians and philosophers of science) about how we know what we know. Why not?

This question has been nagging at the fringes of consciousness for some time now, but it shoved its way to the center of my attention twice in the past year. The first time was an international commission (yet another) on the state of the humanities. There was a great deal of furrowed-brow discussion over waning public support, declining student enrollments, philistine university administrators, downright hostile politicians, the imperialism of STEM disciplines, and a wretched job market, all genuinely concerning topics. But there was little appetite for discussion about why the humanities found themselves in this predicament, about why they were evidently losing their status as a form of learned inquiry that made contributions to knowledge. Why, after centuries of defining what knowledge was worth having and modelling how to go about getting it, were the humanities perceived even within the university as being no longer about knowledge at all? Why were the disciplines that invented the research ethos (and the research seminar) now viewed as ever more peripheral to the pursuit of knowledge?

The second time was the fiftieth anniversary of this journal and a request from the editors to write a short piece for the occasion. This gave me the very welcome excuse to spend an agreeable day perusing the online archive of Critical Inquiry, reading articles from this or that year (and also essays and translations and even testimonies, manifestos, and reminiscences). This cosmopolitanism of genre mirrored CI’s cosmopolitanism with respect to authors and topics, well beyond the anglophone province of the Republic of Letters. My reading was entirely unsystematic; I followed only fancy. Although some pieces had staled with time, a surprising number of them still richly repaid the reading: Frank Kermode on “Novels, Recognition and Deception” (1974), Nancy Fraser on “Sex, Lies, and the Public Sphere: Some Reflections on the Confirmation of Clarence Thomas” (1992),  Peter Galison’s “Ontology of the Enemy” (1994), Carlo Ginzburg’s “Family Resemblances and Family Trees: Two Cognitive Metaphors” (2004), Jean-Pierre Vernant’s “Semblances of Pandora: Imitation and Identity” (2011), Marjorie Garber’s “Over the Influence,” (2016), and many more.

Although the departure point for most articles was a detailed examination of something – a work of art or literature, a historical episode, a myth, a public event, a philosophical idea – none of them were only that. By no means all of them were high-theory (indeed, those that were had aged worst), but all were high-concept: intensely alert to the treacherous depths beneath the surface of apparently innocuous assumptions; seismometer-sensitive to the faint vibrations of words and images; indefatigable in making the implicit explicit and the taken-for-granted suddenly surprising, even shocking. On display were not only the raw materials for an epistemology of the humanities but also the analytical acuity needed to create one worthy of the name. Yet once again, there seemed to be no impetus to do so.

Will this change, should it change? In the past decade a new field called the history of the humanities has been assembled out of pieces previously belonging to the history of learning, disciplinary histories, the history of science, and intellectual history. The new specialty tends to be more widely cultivated in languages that had never narrowed their vernacular cognates of the Latin scientia to refer only to the natural sciences, such as those of Dutch and German. So far, its practitioners have not been particularly interested in questions of epistemology. But just as the history of science has long served as a stimulus and sparring partner to the philosophy of science, perhaps the history of the humanities will eventually engender a philosophical counterpart. Even if it did, though, the question would remain: What would be the point? Just as many scientists query the need for an epistemology of science, many humanists may find an epistemology of the humanities superfluous: we know how to do what we do, and we’ll just get on with it, thank you very much.

I’m not so sure we really know how we know what we know. And even if we did, a great number of intelligent, well-educated people, our ideal readers and potential students, even our colleagues in other departments, wonder why what we teach and write counts as knowledge. The first step in justifying our ways of knowing to these doubters would be to justify them to ourselves.

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Lorraine Daston is Director Emerita at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and regular Visiting Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. She is also in the editorial board of Critical Inquiry.