Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 39, No. 237.
Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
Hosted by DH-Cologne
www.dhhumanist.org
Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
[1] From: Ken Friedman <ken.friedman.sheji@icloud.com>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 39.235: consensus? (83)
[2] From: Dominique Stutzmann <dominique.stutzmann@irht.cnrs.fr>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 39.235: consensus? (44)
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2025-11-26 18:22:21+00:00
From: Ken Friedman <ken.friedman.sheji@icloud.com>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 39.235: consensus?
Dear Willard,
This is an important question.
There are probably several answers, depending on your perspective. If we believe
that all knowledge is consilient, then there must ultimately be some kind of
truth that we should be able to agree on, even if we cannot always find it.
But in many of the debates on consilience, natural scientists and those who feel
their disciplines related to natural science tend to accept the concept of
cosilence. In contrast, many who see themslves as humanists tend to argue
against the concept of consilience.
The Victorian polymath William Whewell coined the term — along with such words
as “scientist,” “physicist,” or “linguistics.” Edward O. Wilson made one of the
major recent arguments for consilience in his 1999 book Consilence: The Unity of
Knowledge.
One consequence of the argument against consilience is that there are many kinds
of knowledge, theoretically separate from one another. This would suit many who
adopt the postmodernist position.
It is certainly possible for any person or even a group of people to argue
against comsilience. But it’s also possible for anyone to believe that the moon
is made of green cheese, or to argue that the earth is flat. I suspect that all
things are joined up in some way, as hard as it may be to understand the details
or the how of it. Despite this, it is also the case that each of us may see or
understand things differently depending on our location in the whole, our
experiences, our perspectves.
On the whole, I’d say that Galison and Feynman are right.
Ken Friedman
> On 26 Nov 2025, at 10:07, Humanist <humanist@dhhumanist.org> wrote:
>
>
> Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 39, No. 235.
> Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
> Hosted by DH-Cologne
> www.dhhumanist.org
> Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
>
> Date: 2025-11-26 06:15:44+00:00
> From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
> Subject: consensus
>
> Especially in collaborative projects, such as Peter Galison et al., The
> Black Hole Initiative, achieving consensus among all involved is
> crucial. A quite dramatic presentation of this process is in his
> documentary film, "Black Holes: The Edge of All We Know" (2020), on
> Netflix. For a philosophical view of this work see his Yip Lecture,
> "A Philosophy of the Shadow" (2019),
> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BofWFoiKARQ>.
>
> Galison has been working on consensus for a long time, for
> which see his How Experiments End (Chicago, 1987). In the context of our
> discussions, what interests me particularly is the assumption made, that
> there exists a single result or truth to be agreed upon, even if we
> cannot be absolutely sure of it. Feynman playfully compared physics to a
> game of chess played by the gods, to which humans have only partial
> access. Again that assumption: we cannot be sure, but in the physical
> sciences we proceed in the belief that the best we can do is on course
> to reach something as real as rocks.
>
> A fair formulation?
>
> Compare this with the human sciences (humanities, social sciences). In
> principle is it not the case that the assumption I've described has no
> place in what we do?
>
> Comments?
>
> Yours,
> WM
> --
> Willard McCarty,
> Professor emeritus, King's College London;
> Editor, Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts,
> Sciences and Humanities (Berghahn); Humanist
> www.mccarty.org.uk
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2025-11-26 15:59:20+00:00
From: Dominique Stutzmann <dominique.stutzmann@irht.cnrs.fr>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 39.235: consensus?
Thank you for this stimulating conversation.
I was confronted with this problem in a specific case: organizing
international competitions in computer science for the analysis of
medieval sources (document dating, script classification, writer
identification). These competitions require a "ground truth" (that is a
set of images and corresponding target annotations).
In a seminar analyzing the results, with participants from both Computer
Science and the Humanities, we arrived at the concept of "negotiated
truth," not a general "consensus," but an agreement on a limited version
of truth constrained by the Aristotelian principle of non-contradiction:
that a thing cannot both be and not be at the same time and in the same
respect. In this instance, 'in the same respect' should be understood
as: within the same analytical framework, the same ontology, and set of
critical tools. When these underpinnings change, the reference dataset
or "ground truth" necessarily differs.
First: establishing a reference dataset and annotations according to the
theories of one of the "paleographical schools", training ML models
accordingly, and analyzing their performance proved to be an efficient
method for revealing the limitations of the ontological framework,
thereby contributing to a more reflexive historical analysis of the corpus.
Then: It also helped make explicit some underlying divergences that had
not been previously articulated in the literature, because traditional
scholarly practices allowed them to remain ambiguous or because
terminological overlaps were masking differences.
This explicitation process served both as diagnostic tool and as input
for scholarly debate about the theoretical foundations of paleographical
classification. Or, in short, on the humanist side, the use of a
formalized 'ground truth' as a way to express a 'negotiated truth' and
to make a set of expertise available to another community, combined with
our willingness to agree to disagree, helped us to better define the
diverging criteria and their weighting.
Best regards,
Dominique Stutzmann
-- Prof. Dr. Dominique Stutzmann
Directeur de recherche (Institut de Recherche et d'Histoire des Textes -
CNRS)
Honorar-Professor (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
_______________________________________________
Unsubscribe at: http://dhhumanist.org/Restricted
List posts to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
List info and archives at at: http://dhhumanist.org
Listmember interface at: http://dhhumanist.org/Restricted/
Subscribe at: http://dhhumanist.org/membership_form.php
