It's been several months since Michael White invited me to blog here at Scientific Blogging.  I think the immediate occasion for his invitation was a conversation we had about Douglas Hofstadter's 2007 book I Am a Strange Loop.  I don't remember the details of what I said in that conversation, but I guess something in it made Mike think that I had something to offer here.  That conversation was one of many we've enjoyed over the past year on topics at least potentially relevant to the bloggers and readers on this site:  science fiction, science books written for a general public, the academy, the relationship between science and the humanities.

  But despite Mike's generous encouragement, I've felt afraid to post anything. I thought that instead of pretending I wasn't, I might begin by just exploring that trepidation a little bit here, partly in the hope that my trepidation doesn't stem only from my unique set of neuroses, but actually bears in some ways on the reason for being of Scientific Blogging.

I'm a university professor, but not a scientist.  I've been teaching courses in literature and philosophy at the University of Michigan since 1992.  My relationship to science during that time might be characterized as one of ignorant curiosity.  My formal education in science is limited to the bare minimum required to graduate high school and college (with a BA, not a BS) in this country.  But while in graduate school, I came across the book Chaos by James Gleick.  Along with a few of my peers, we were fascinated by the suggestiveness of chaos theory, but its interdisciplinary potential, and, perhaps most of all, by the metaphorical richness of the field. 

Other humanists -- I'm thinking of N. Katherine Hayles, Cary Wolfe, and William Paulson -- have pursued these connections with more rigor, and in a far more informed way, than I ever have.  But from that time, I have at least tried to keep up with what scientists are saying (at least when they talk to non-scientists), and to incorporate some understanding of that into my own research and writing.

I've found in the course of those efforts that academic humanists in the US tend to veer between two poles in relating to the sciences.  On the one hand, they like to assume an air of philosophical superiority in offering what they seem to think are devastating critiques of the epistemological underpinnings and institutional frameworks of modern scientific practice.  Scientists, such a position might hold, are naive about the objectivity of the truth claims they make for their work, ignorant of the ways in which language and other representational media shape those claims, and blithely unconcerned with the social conditions underwriting their research as well as with the social consequence of their work and the way they do it.  On the other hand, humanists have a kind of science envy. 

In this vein, humanists envy the ability of science to make statements about the way the world works that are taken as truths, the relevance of scientific research to such real world institutions as technology, the economy, and policy, and the relatively privileged position that the sciences -- especially as related to technology -- hold in the economy of academic prestige and spoils.  Sometimes we poach and borrow from scientific research to make our statements about the world seem more legitimate.  We humanists wish our universities would brag on their web pages and in their commercials about the latest piece of literary criticism we'd written.  Come to think of it, what I'm characterizing as two poles probably have a more subtle and complex relationship to one another.  Perhaps we critique because we envy.  Just a thought.

My own stand here is that I've known too many scientists (and read too many books about scientific research) to feel that the critique of scientific practice holds much water.  Another way to put this would be to say that I think that by and large the humanist critique of scientific practice is based on an inaccurate portrayal of just what it is scientists mean when they say they know something.  My own sense is that when scientists say they know something -- let's say that "x works in y ways" -- they just mean that, for now and until proven otherwise, "x works in y ways" is the best explanation we have for how "x works".  I'm sure that there are second rate scientists, like there are second rate lawyers, doctors, musicians, and literary critics.  But I doubt that any serious scientist would be interested in trying to make stronger claims for the truth-value of their discoveries than what I just, very reductively, described.  And this leads me to the question of envy. 

I'll say straight out that I do envy the position of scientists within the culture of the American university.  If nothing else, they get better offices and new buildings!  But they also enjoy the benefits of the university's desperate desire -- particularly in tight economic times -- to appear to be delivering something relevant to its public constituency. 

Mostly, though, I admire science.  I admire the simplicity and rigor of the method.  I admire the modesty with which science tackles seemingly small problems in detail.  I admire the collaborative nature of the discipline, the ways in which scientific research really can seem to be an ongoing attempt to know more, undertaken as an infinitely unfolding conversation.  And I admire the strong sense of wonder about the real world that seems to animate science.  I know there are many problems with the way in which scientific research is conducted and supported, but I'm not as interested in that. 

I'm more interested in the ways in which a fundamental curiosity about some bit of the way the world works animates a research practice that is rigorously harnessed to a time-tested methodology.  And I'd like to think that those of who think about the world of arts and ideas, about books, paintings, music, and culture more generally, could not only see ourselves as in partnership with the efforts of our scientific colleagues, but could also find constructive ways to mutually influence each others practices, to learn from one another, not only the facts of our respective disciplines, but even, perhaps a very basic level, the methods and the intellectual and emotional stances that drive those methods.

But I'm not here only as a humanities professor.  I'm also here, I think, as "the public" to whom the many expert bloggers on this site would like to communicate.  That is to say, I'm here as a curious dabbler, a dilettante, and an amateur.  Those last two words are important, in a way that we people from "word land" like.  Dilettante has its roots in "delight" and "amateur" has its roots in "love."  The now long-since unfashionable literary critic R. P. Blackmur once said that all criticism is an act of love.  Life can be awfully difficult and hard to enjoy for me, but at my best I love and delight in the world and at those moments I don't divide it up into books and trees, say, but I find that all these things swirl together in mysterious and complex ways that raise a seemingly endless string of questions for me. 

Some of those questions are taken up by scientists. I'm interested in this site, among other things, because of the effort on the part of scientists to translate the very specialized sounding questions they are addressing in their research into the language I might use to wonder about things.

I see that none of this has really led me to be able to discover or state very clearly what I'm doing here or what I might contribute to the site.  Unless it is to say I'm here with great admiration for the work of scientists, with an amateur's interest in the ways they work, the things they find interesting, and the things they say about the world, and with the public's bafflement about how it all works.

Note: Front page 'I heart science graphic' from Zazzle.