From: ogil@ellis.uchicago.edu (Brian W. Ogilvie)
Subject: Re: Any Humanities Grads out there?
Reply-To: ogil@midway.uchicago.edu
Organization: Morris Fishbein Center for the History of Science and Medicine
Date: Wed, 15 Apr 1992 23:04:14 GMT

In article <1992Apr14.204928.15176@colorado.edu> ejh@khonshu.colorado.edu (Edward J. Hartnett) writes:

>Fine, but how is that any different from the above? You read some more,
>you discuss some more. I guess what I'm trying to say is that you do not
>have to learn entirely new patterns of thought. So you go into the history 
>and the staging, and the sources, but how is that any more difficult than
>reading the play? It's just more of the same.

It's more difficult in two ways.  First of all, you have to do the
digging in primary sources in order to answer the questions.
Secondary literature is helpful, but since the types of questions
asked in humanistic inquiry tend to change from time to time, a lot of
the work has to be done by the scholar.  This doesn't apply to lecture
classes, obviously, but it does to better discussion classes and of
course to seminars (in history, my own field).  Second, you have to
realize that Elizabethans (or whoever) didn't think the same way that
we do.  As a professor of Italian Renaissance history said a few days
ago at the end of a lecture on the constitutional structure of
Renaissance Venice, it is extraordinarily difficult to imagine
thinking the way an aristocrat does--to have the "noble's mindset."
Insofar as history involves understanding the way in which actors
perceived their world, it is hard to do well.

>I'll grant you that, but I'm not talking about Cililization 101, I'm talking
>about graduate level courses in history (I took several). I'm not saying
>they were easy (they weren't). What I'm saying is that advanced engineering
>is harder.

Depends on what you mean by "harder."  There is more terminology
involved, and more mathematics (unless you are taking a course in
quantitative history), which means that those who haven't been
appropriately socialized can't participate.  The converse isn't
immediately true for the humanities--since most humanities courses in
the US involve readings only in English, there isn't the same language
problem.  And since there is a large factual emphasis in many courses,
especially lecture courses, it is possible for someone from another
field to get quite a bit out of the course.  But that doesn't mean
that the course's content is all that he or she gets out of it.
In courses with both graduate and undergraduate students, the
undergrads (for the most part) are concerned with figuring out what
happened, while the graduate students want to know _why_ it happened,
and the historiography of the question.

>Not to get too personal, Brian, but at what level did you drop out of
>the sciences. If you tell me you got past tensor math, or partial
>diff. eq., then I will conclude that you are right. I've taken grad-level
>courses in history, which is why I drew these conclusions; can you
>say that you've experienced both sides?

Fair enough question.  I did three years of undergraduate physics at
the University of Chicago, through classical statistical mechanics and
beginning QM.  Partial differential equations but no tensor analysis.
I've forgotten most of the math since then--like language, if you
don't keep practicing it, it goes away.  I could _follow_ the math if
it were presented to me and I spent a few minutes sweating over it,
though, I hope.  The fact that I have lost the math is important,
because it disqualifies me from taking graduate physics classes.

I have attended biology department colloquia, listening to papers on
cladistic analysis and evolutionary models, and read, comprehended,
and analyzed papers on those subjects (mostly dealing with early- to
mid-twentieth century genetics).  Again, I've forgotten much of that
since my own research interests have turned to the Renaissance.  But I
have dealt with real, twentieth-century professional science.

>Also, I would have to admit that this easy/hard stuff varies so much
>from person to person that it's pretty stupid to argue about. But I
>do believe that there is a qualitative difference between the two, and
>that engineering courses demand more from the student in terms of new
>ways of thinking, which are so different and alien to everyday life 
>(for non-engineers) that it means a whole new set of problems in 
>school. 

I would argue that doing sensitive, contextual analyses of problems in
the humanities require "new ways of thinking" which are "different and
alien to everyday life" for non-humanists.  Major theoretical works in
the humanities--even leaving aside analytical philosophy, which can be
more equation-ridden than QM--pose difficult questions in difficult
terms.  I just got out of a class where we discussed Pierre Bourdieu's
_Outline of a Theory of Practice_, and my brain is mush.  I think that
any systematic attempt to account for phenomena, whether "natural" or
"social," is difficult.  Good science is hard, good philosophy is
hard, good history is hard.  We don't need to waste our time arguing
about which one is harder.

By the way, Ed, I probably won't respond to this thread again, since I
have a lot of work piling up.  Thanks for the reasoned argument, which
is always nice to see on Usenet!
-- 
Brian W. Ogilvie           "Find a need and fool it!"
b-ogilvie@uchicago.edu              --Zippy the Pinhead