It makes me smile to see programmers having the same arguments about language that philosophers have been having about stories for three thousand years.
@Mainebot I suspect that many programmers would consider philosophy the least relevant branch of the humanities.
Kind of a real shame.
The humanities in general get endless amounts of shit from other disciplines, but then you see shockingly immoral silicon valley 'disruption' and then suddenly "oh no how could we ever have foreseen this no one could have predicted this," but seriously, a philosophy student, an English major, or even just a rhetorician could have fixed your problem before it started.
@Mainebot @starbreaker Yeah, but humanity majors have basically run the world for the past hundred years. Don't most politicians have backgrounds in Poli sci and law?
From my experience, Poli sci and law are pretty well-removed from what traditionally passes for the humanities.
When I was in school, the only time we had anyone from either discipline in a class was because it was a firm requirement to graduate. Non-participatory, simple classes, in it for the grade. In the same way I had science prerequisites, so I took weather science and statistics.
I am not a meteorologist, nor am I a statistician.
@Mainebot @starbreaker My frustration when I took most history classes was there was no way to prove if you are right, so what is the point? If I disagree with another scientist, I can go into the lab and figure out which one of us is right. Whereas when I took Science, Technology And the World, a history class, it basically felt like every essay was an opinion piece.
@starbreaker @Mainebot I think that class was invaluable and gave me new ways of thinking about science and the world, but also confirmed my opinions that there isn't much rigour required outside of STEM. I tired to put in citations to prove I was right and whatnot, and was told by my TA to focus on my arguments.
@Mainebot @starbreaker (Now, that wasn't true of all the history classes I took: When I took Early Medieval and War in the West essay writing and proper citations were a big part of it, but did also talk about how hard it was to prove anything in history in War in the West.)
For me, I was in writing and rhetoric, literary theory, and discourse analysis.
A lot of what I did was extremely rigorous. The rhetoric of style yields factually 'correct' ways to present text in the simplest, clearest way. Doing so, in the wrong context, destroys it and renders it useless.
Outside of objectively true measurements, the argument and interpretation is valuable.
@Mainebot @starbreaker Right, but that should be done as a science. Write the same arguments in multiple styles, present to large numbers of people and do a blind study of how many people are persuaded each way.
but then what? Just do the one that works on the broadest audience? That basically says that art isn't real. That says poetry is false. That is a totalitarian push towards a homogeneity of style and that if it isn't the "best" then it's nothing.
@Mainebot @starbreaker Arts != humanities. I'm talking about stuff that humanities people keep claiming they can do better then science, like provide better models for how scientific discoveries get wide adoption, or how we decided on a consensus of the best way to think about a concept.
@Canageek @starbreaker
For me, it isn't about generating proof in the sense that I can say that a thing is factual. History isn't a factual recording, it's an interpretive act. Focusing on your arguments is how you can strengthen an interpretation.
I can say fire is hot. I can say Fire will boil water. But if I can't demonstrate a context, and argue it, where that's valuable, those facts are true, but meaningless.