I have an answer, but it isn't one that the author of the blog would like.

My answer goes back to Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn described what he called a paradigm. And described the difference between science and non-science as the emergence of a paradigm that is so compelling that basically everyone winds up agreeing with it. The emergence of this agreement is visible outside of the field, and it becomes a science.

Unfortunately, Kuhn never defined a paradigm very well. And used it in contradictory ways. But I think that the right way to define a paradigm is, "A story about how to understand the subject." When the story, evidence, and results are compelling enough, the result will fit everything that Kuhn described. (This will be a future topic in my blog, but not one I'll get to for months.)

However later work in library science adds to Kuhn's theory. I'm basing this in large part on https://www.arl.org/wp-content/uploads/2001/12/in-oldenburgs....

When something becomes a science, it meets up with other areas of science. The specific story for that field can become part of a larger shared story across fields. Which is part of a larger story and so on, until we get to overarching stories across all of science. These overall stories allow us to compare, at least roughly, how important different discoveries are across very different areas of science. This allows the new field, with its journals, to fit into an overall structure revealed by the Science Citation Index. This structure has each field following a trail up from field specific journals to ever more prestigious journals shared across ever bigger areas of science. Until, finally, we get to Nature. Which is where everyone, in every area of science, would most like to publish. This structure allows for a fairly objective measure of the value of a journal.

As publishers uncovered this, they were able to take advantage of it. Knowing which journals were more important, let them know which they could charge more for. They also noted that prestige and distribution are connected. So they offered package deals where you'd get a discount on the top journals if you got a standard package of journals. Which naturally boosted the prestige of the lower tier journals in the package. Allowing their prices to also be boosted.

The result is called the serial pricing crisis. (Why "serial"? Librarians call journals that come out on a regular basis, serials.)

Here is where Kuhn got vindicated. The serial pricing crisis only can happen in science. The humanities are divided into lots of schools of thought. Each school centers on an identifiable paradigm - a story about how to understand that field. Within each school there are prestigious and non-prestigious journals. But when publishers tried to raise the price, that school did not have enough support to make libraries pay. So the journal could get dropped. (By contrast it is pretty much impossible for any university library to refuse to subscribe to Nature - all of the sciences would object to losing it.)

This citation structure reveals an underlying epistemological structure. Which in turn reflects the structure of the paradigms. People in the humanities, just like those in the sciences, have paradigms. Thus they know (or at least believe) that they know things. But people in the humanities have not achieved agreement on their paradigms. Therefore there is no overarching set of stories about how to understand which can be studied. That doesn't mean that the humanities doesn't have lots of good and compelling stories about how to understand. They do. They just haven't agreed on what they are.

So, for example, a professor of women's studies who subscribes to Critical Race Theory and a professor of theology who subscribes to Catholic postliberalism will both say that they know what they know. And they'll be able to talk at length about it. But it is hard to say much that is useful and concrete that connects how they are thinking about the world. And while both have knowledge and values, the amount of shared knowledge and shared values is going to be fairly limited.

What, then, can be usefully said philosophically to make sense out of the cacophony from the humanities? By contrast the broadly shared agreements across science gives us something to talk about!