social vs literary scientia

[poldy]

"Literary studies characteristically teach complexity and respect for minute particulars, where psychology in the past sought hard statistical facts and universals. Respective methodologies have been marked by these aims. Psychologists, then, often suspect the literary workers of complexifying unnecessarily, where the latter remain suspicious of

Comments

[perpetua_redux]

van der Rohe may have been right, then, positing God (or at least the metaphysical) in the details.

[poldy]

What? You listen to architects?

[elricmelnibone]

I do hope that it was a psychologist who charged literary workers with "complexifying."

[poldy]

I was at a "two cultures" debate once where a scientist was complaining that the jargon in contemporary literary studies made them impenetrable. A classics professor, after listening to the long rant, responded that he cannot understand what is written in most scientific articles.

[elricmelnibone]

It's "jargon" only when you don't understand it.

What was the purpose of the debate?

[northrop_fried]

If I wrote "complexifying", my supervisor would write in the margins, "Let's not be makin' that into a word."

[epistolarysmack]

statistical pseudo-evidence?!!? as the designated curmodgeonly reductionist in the crew, I have to ask what's pseudo about it exactly...

[epistolarysmack]

but scientists don't purport to tell us something accurate and correct. the only honest way to represent a statistical claim is "if the world looked like P, the probability of getting the results that we have would be Q." Given appropriate specification of P (which, yes, is hard) and a sufficiently low number for Q, we've learned something that we didn't know before