Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 37, No. 286.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
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        Date: 2023-11-02 14:03:28+00:00
        From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
        Subject: the divide

In his magisterial, indeed magical essay, "Clues, roots of an evidential
paradigm", Carlo Ginzburg charts the history of the disciplinary divide,
between the natural sciences and those other qualitative, indirect, 
presumptive, conjectural disciplines of the humanities, the human 
sciences and medicine. "For the natural philosopher as for the philologist 
the text is a profound, invisible entity", he writes, "to be reconstructed 
independently of material data", leaving behind e.g. all those aspects of 
a physical book the careful analytic bibliographer strives to record.

Here he quotes Galileo, from Il Saggiatore, on the "figures, numbers and 
movements" that the natural philosopher considers worthy of 
attention, "but not smell, nor tastes, nor sounds, which I do not believe 
are anything more than names outside the living animal." "With these 
words", Ginzburg comments, "Galileo set natural science on the anti-
anthropocentric and anti-anthropomorphic direction which it would never 
again abandon. A gap had opened in that world of knowledge, one 
destined to enlarge with the passing of time. And, to be sure, there could 
be no greater contrast than between the Galileian physicist professionally 
deaf to sounds and insensitive to tastes and odors, and his contemporary, 
the physician, who hazarded diagnoses by placing his ear on wheezy 
chests or by sniffing at feces and tasting urine." 
(Ginzburg, Clues, Myths and the Historical Method (Johns Hopkins, 1989), 
pp. 107f)

Is it any wonder that digital scholarship is so profoundly difficult--and 
so worthy of our closest, most critical attention? With it, practiced as 
a vocation, not merely a job, we can follow the spoor of the uncountable. 
Potentially, at least, this scholarship also gives us the mental tools to see 
through the worrying fog of delusive, self-interested promotional dreaming 
reported in this morning's news from the gathering of experts and leaders at 
the recent meeting in Bletchley Park over the dangers of 'AI'. How powerful 
that ill-defined term has become through inattention and over-use.

Comments?

Yours,
WM
--
Willard McCarty,
Professor emeritus, King's College London;
Editor, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews;  Humanist
www.mccarty.org.uk


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