[lit-ideas] Re: The Boccaccian Sources of Shakespeare
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 20 Nov 2014 08:31:05 +0000 (UTC)
DM wrote: >this really is "scientifcally illiterate">
He should be made aware that this spelling of the adjective may be illiterate,
if he doen't alredy.
DMLdn
On Thursday, 20 November 2014, 8:27, Donal McEvoy
<donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the
standards of the
traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with
considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of
scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how
many
of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was
cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the
scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s? I now
believe
that if I had asked an even simpler question — such as, What do you mean by
mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you
read? — not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that
I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics
goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have
about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had."
We have seen this on the list, many many times. It is why I (at least) once
used the term "scientifically illiterate", which seems to me a fair counterpart
to the alleged "illiteracy of scientists" as termed by the "highly educated"
[or "half-educated" as Popper once dubbed them]. The response to a term like
"scientifically illiterate", from those to whom it applies, is that it is an
unfair term of mere abuse - yet clearly scientists are not literally
"illiterate" but when do the scientifically illiterate get up in arms when
scientists are described as illiterate? It is not merely "Two Cultures" but a
culture of arrogance and condescension that is widespread in the humanities,
both in its internal disputes and in its treatment of science as an external
body of knowledge that can be safely ignored.
Afair, the point which prompted my use of "scientifically illiterate" was that
someone seemed to think Newton's physics could be true even where it failed a
test because it nevertheless passed many other tests [so it was true for those
tests it passed] - this really is "scientifcally illiterate", for if a theory
fails a test it is false, and this falsity cannot be removed by pointing out
the numerous or even potentially infinite set of tests it otherwise passes.
[This is because the theory is describing laws with a universal character
rather than offering a mere description that 'fits' a specific set of data: but
even where a theory 'fits' a specific set of data it is "scientifically
illiterate" to conclude it must be true as an explanation of that data]. This
is "scientifically illiterate" in a way akin to thinking Shakespeare was a
sculptor - but actually it is more "illiterate" than thinking Shakespeare was a
sculptor. But far from being embarrassed at their illiteracy, people simply
take umbrage when it is exposed. In this they show, typically, an intellectual
arrogance that is not typical of scientists when accused of "illiteracy". This
arrogance is often unwitting and is partly due to people being trained in
disciplines where competing claims are made but there is an absence of severe
tests to decide between them - nor are they trained that they should bother to
develop tests that are as severe as possible to decide between competing
claims: so when it is argued that science is not merely 'JTB' they do not think
this dents their 'JTB-theory' but prefer to conclude that only means science is
not proper "knowledge". In effect they do not conclude that 'JTB-theory' fails
the test of science but that science fails the test of 'JTB-theory'. The sheer
dogmatism and obscurantism of this seems to entirely escape them. But then they
are scientifically illiterate....
No wonder they don't care much for Popper.
DnlLdn
It is more often 'there by absence', as when
On Wednesday, 19 November 2014, 14:43, "dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx"
<dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In a message dated 11/17/2014 2:20:52 P.M. Eastern Standard Time,
"Preferring the culture that produced Dante?", lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
quotes
from Frye,
“The First World War discredited the view that northern, liberal, largely
Protestant cultures of England and Germany were, with America, the
architects of a new world. Latin and Catholic Europe began to look like a
cultural
as well as a political ally. The essay on Blake in The Sacred Wood is full
of anti-Nordic mythology: Blake’s prophecies ‘illustrate the crankiness,
the eccentricity, which frequently affects writers outside the Latin
tradition.’ So although Eliot’s view of literature is ‘classical,’ his
Classicism regards Latin medieval culture and Dante in particular, as the
culmination of the Classical achievement. Dante’s greatness is partly a
product
of a time when Europe was ‘mentally more united than we can no conceive.’
At such a time literature achieves its greatest power and clarity: ‘there
is an opacity, or inspissation of poetic style throughout Europe after the
Renaissance.’ So Eliot explicitly prefers the culture which produced Dante
to that which produced Shakespeare", and comments: "We are dealing with
matters not conceived of by Dante. We are doing things with our minds we
never did before. Is the crankiness and chaos that produced Shakespeare really
such a bad thing?"
Perhaps Frye is oversimplifying things. After all, isn't there like a
recognised Boccaccian influence on Shakespeare.
Unless by Anglo-Saxon we _mean_ "Anglo-Saxon" (as seen by Tacitus, say, in
"Germania"), i.e., the Indo-Germanic stock _sans_ Roman influence, there
idea that there are two cultures, one that produces Dante (and Boccaccio) and
one that produces Shakespeare may have a Snowian* misimplicature about it!
Cheers,
Speranza
*The Two Cultures is the title of the first part of an influential 1959
Rede Lecture by British scientist and novelist C. P. Snow. Its thesis was that
"the intellectual life of the whole of western society" was split into the
titular two cultures — namely the sciences and the humanities — and that
this was a major hindrance to solving the world's problems. The talk was
delivered 7 May 1959 in the Senate House, Cambridge, and subsequently
published as The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. The lecture and
book
expanded upon an article by Snow published in the New Statesman of 6
October 1956, also entitled The Two Cultures. Published in book form, Snow's
lecture was widely read and discussed on both sides of the Atlantic, leading
him to write a 1963 follow-up, The Two Cultures: And a Second Look: An
Expanded Version of The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Snow's
position can be summed up by an often-repeated part of the essay: A good many
times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the
traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with
considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of
scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how
many
of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was
cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the
scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s? I now
believe
that if I had asked an even simpler question — such as, What do you mean by
mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you
read? — not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that
I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics
goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have
about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.
In 2008, The Times Literary Supplement included The Two Cultures and the
Scientific Revolution in its list of the 100 books that most influenced
Western public discourse since the Second World War. Snow's Rede Lecture
condemned the British educational system as having, since the Victorian era,
over-rewarded the humanities (especially Latin and Greek) at the expense of
scientific and engineering education, despite such achievements having been so
decisive in winning the Second World War for the Allies. This in practice
deprived British elites (in politics, administration, and industry) of
adequate preparation to manage the modern scientific world. By contrast, Snow
said, German and American schools sought to prepare their citizens equally
in the sciences and humanities, and better scientific teaching enabled these
countries' rulers to compete more effectively in a scientific age. Later
discussion of The Two Cultures tended to obscure Snow's initial focus on
differences between British systems (of both schooling and social class) and
those of competing countries. The term two cultures has become a shorthand
in certain academic circles for differences between two attitudes; Snow
himself, in a reconsideration, backed off some way from his dichotomized
declarations. In his 1963 book he talked more optimistically about the
potential
of a mediating third culture. This concept was later picked up in Brockman,
John (1995), The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution.
Introducing the reprinted The Two Cultures, 1993, Stefan Collini[7] has argued
that
the passage of time has done much to reduce the cultural divide Snow
noticed; but has not removed it entirely. The literary critic F. R. Leavis
called Snow a "public relations man" for the scientific establishment in an
essay published in The Spectator, which was widely decried in the British
press. Stephen Jay Gould's The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox
provides a different perspective. Assuming the dialectical interpretation, it
argues that Snow's concept of "two cultures" is not only off the mark, it is a
damaging and short-sighted viewpoint; and that it has perhaps led to
decades of unnecessary fence-building. Simon Critchley, in Continental
Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction suggests:[9] [Snow] diagnosed the loss of
a
common culture and the emergence of two distinct cultures: those represented
by scientists on the one hand and those Snow termed 'literary intellectuals'
on the other. If the former are in favour of social reform and progress
through science, technology and industry, then intellectuals are what Snow
terms 'natural Luddites' in their understanding of and sympathy for advanced
industrial society. In Mill's terms, the division is between Benthamites and
Coleridgeans. —Simon Critchley. That is, Critchley argues that what Snow
said represents a resurfacing of a discussion current in the mid-nineteenth
century. Critchley describes the Leavis contribution to the making of a
controversy as 'a vicious ad hominem attack'; going on to describe the debate
as a familiar clash in English cultural history citing also T. H. Huxley
and Matthew Arnold.[10][11] In his opening address at the Munich Security
Conference in January 2014, the Estonian president Toomas Hendrik Ilves said
that the current problems related to security and freedom in cyberspace are
the culmination of absence of dialogue between "the two cultures": "Today,
bereft of understanding of fundamental issues and writings in the
development of liberal democracy, computer geeks devise ever better ways to
track
people... simply because they can and it's cool. Humanists on the other hand
do not understand the underlying technology and are convinced, for example,
that tracking meta-data means the government reads their emails."
Contrasting scientific and humanistic knowledge is a repetition of the
Methodenstreit of 1890 German universities. In the social sciences it is also
commonly
proposed as the quarrel of positivism versus interpretivism. See also[edit]
Culture war, The Third Culture, Science wars, Aldous Huxley, Consilience:
The Unity of Knowledge, a 1998 book written by biologist Edward Osborne
Wilson, as an attempt to bridge the gap between "the two cultures" Lyman
Briggs College, a college of Michigan State University with a curriculum
specifically designed to address the problem of "the two cultures", Lewis
Mumford,
Michael Crichton
Gerald Heard. References: Snow, Charles Percy (2001) [1959]. The Two
Cultures. London: Cambridge University Press. p. 3. . "The hundred most
influential books since the war". The Times (London). 30 December 2008. Snow
2013.
Snow, Charles Percy (1963). "The Two Cultures: A Second Look". The Two
Cultures: and A Second Look. Cambridge University Press. "Across the Great
Divide". Nature Physics 5: 309. 2009. doi:10.1038/nphys1258. Jardine, Lisa
(2010). "CP Snow’s Two Cultures Revisited" (PDF). Christ's College Magazine: 48
–57. Retrieved 2012-02-13. Jardine's 2009 C. P. Snow Lecture honored the
50th anniversary of Snow's Rede Lecture. She places Snow's lecture into its
historical context, and emphasizes the expansion of certain elements of the
Rede Lecture in Snow's Godkin Lectures at Harvard University in 1960. These
were ultimately published as Science and Government. New American Library.
1962. Collini 1993, p. lv. Kimball, Roger (12 February 1994). "The Two
Cultures' today: On the C. P. Snow–F. R. Leavis controversy". The New
Criterion. Critchley 2001, p. 49. Critchley 2001, p. 51. Collini 1993, p.
xxxv.
Ilves, Toomas Hendrik: "Rebooting Trust? Freedom vs Security in Cyberspace"
Opening address at Munich Security Conference Cyber 31 January 2014.
31.01.2014. Brint, Steven G (2002), The Future of the City of Intellect: The
Changing American University, pp. 212–3, "positivism-versus-interpretation
language [...] these fractal distinctions are generally quite old. Most of
them
have been around at least since the celebrated Methodenstreit of the German
universities in the late nineteenth century. CP Snow's "two cultures"
argument captures a later instantiation of them. [...] In negotiating the
complexities of social scientific and humanistic knowledge, it is extremely
helpful to have a dichotomy like positivism versus interpretation, because it
saves our having to remember the exact degree of positivism of any scholarly
group. [...] Every single social science discipline has internal debates
about positivism/interpretation, arrative/analysis, and so on. The
narrative/analytic debate may look very different in economics, anthropology,
and
English. But underneath all the surface differences it is quite similar."
Bragg, Melvyn, The Two Cultures (discussion), UK: BBC Radio 4.
Critchley, Simon (2001), Continental Philosophy: A Very Short
Introduction, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-285359-2. Collini, Stefan
(1993),
"Introduction", in Snow, Charles Percy, The Two Cultures, Cambridge
University Press, Ferris, Timothy (13 October 2011), The World of the
Intellectual
vs. The World of the Engineer, Wired. Griffiths, Phillip (13 September
1995), 'Two Cultures' Today, UK: St Andrews.
Precht, Richard David (2013), "Natural Sciences and Humanities: Genesis of
two Worlds" (Webvideo), ZAKlessons, Google You tube. Snow, Charles Percy
(Jan 2013), "The Two cultures", Cultural capital, The New Statesman. Are We
Beyond the Two Cultures?, Seed, 7 May 2009. Categories: 1959 booksBritish
culture Science and technology in the United KingdomScience studies Science
books Dichotomies Scientific revolution
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