Education: Between Two Cultures

"The hard sciences, however, seem to have more difficulty using "superseded" frameworks for generating new understandings."

Yep, and that it seems to me IS a significant general difference between at least some of the science and some of the humanities. One tends to presume that earlier stories are subsumed in current ones and hence needn't be given explicit attention. The other tends to presume that an acquaintance with earlier stories is an essential background to current story telling. Maybe this is another place where the "two cultures" could each learn something from the other's experiences?

We've already established that I'm not a "typical" scientist (is anyone? or a "typical" humanist?) but I'll readily admit that I've previously been called on the carpet about my greater interest in contemporary as opposed to older stories. More accurately, a friend in philosophy (yes, much more inclined to the Continental as opposed to the Analytic branch) took issue with my aspiration to "get it less wrong", or at least with my preference for the contemporary over the older ....

"What would be more surprising, after all, than finding novelty in the seemingly identical repetition of old ideas? Coming from philosophy, i surely experience this in Heidegger reading the Greeks, Deleuze reading Leibniz, or Derrida reading pretty much anything. There is great potential in encountering wrong ideas that persisted stagnantly as wrong for centuries. an idea's being repeated can be as generative as any other wrong movement."

Davey's specific point makes sense to me. All ideas (stories), including contemporary ones, are "wrong", and one can derive new stories from old ones as well as contemporary ones if one puts ones mind to it. More generally, science does, I think, seriously under-represent its historical dimension, with serious costs both to science itself and to its ability to participate in public discourse. Relevant to both is that the historical amnesia of science contributes to a misunderstanding of contemporary scientific stories as representing eternal verities rather than, as they actually are, particular responses to particular somewhat arbitrary problems and opportunities that occurred in the past. In lieu of more attention to the historical context, students have trouble getting clear in their own minds the significance of particular contemporary observations and stories and end up either puzzled or bored, or taking the significance as simply part of an acculturation process. And practicing scientists themselves tend to neglect older texts which, when rediscovered, frequently contain observations and/or stories that redirect the scientific enterprise, moving it in directions it almost certainly wouldn't have gone based solely on contemporary work. Individual scientists, and whole fields, often get "stuck" using particular lines of advance when the foundations of more productive lines are sitting in older texts.

In short, I think science would benefit from borrowing some of the historicity of the humanities. And, I suspect, the humanities could benefit from borrowing some of the contemporary/future orientation of the sciences. The preoccupation of the humanities with foundational texts tends to put it in the same position of appearing to represent eternal verities as does the ahistoricity of science. And, I suspect, has the same effect of puzzling or boring students as to their significance, unless they are willing/able to take this on faith as part of an acculturation process. Finally, just as both individual scholars and whole fields can get "stuck" by ignoring old texts, so can they get stuck by getting preoccupied by them. The need and consequences of having to find connectedness and authority by reference to foundational texts has clearly created problems for both psychoanalysis and marxist thought, problems not entirely dissimilar from those associated with fundamentalist religion and strict interpretations of the Constitution.

No, I'm not advocating a fusion of the sciences and the humanities; their differences are beneficial to both and to the larger intellectual task (the incommensurable can be an asset rather than a threat to understanding, understood as an ongoing process rather than a final state). But perhaps the sciences and the humanities could make better common cause by each in their own way making clearer their aversion to eternal verities, to insularity, and to navel gazing? By clarifying their respective commitments to generating, sharing, and revising stories that have the potential to prove engaging to everyone?