Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 39, No. 239.
Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
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Date: 2025-11-28 21:03:58+00:00
From: Tim Smithers <tim.smithers@cantab.net>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 39.237: consensus
Dear Willard,
Humbly I'd like to add to the insightful thoughts and
experiences from Ken and Domninique.
The way I see things, from doing research and teaching
foundations of research practices course to PhDers from all
the disciplines, truth is not arrived at with consensus making
and attempts at consilience. Truth, I would say, is
approached, and only sometimes arrived at, by discovery.
Discovery requires sufficient and effective exploration. In
practice, given the inevitably limited and often fragmented
perspectives of the different researchers doing this needed
exploring and discovering, debate and disagreement and doing
things different are more useful in building shared, and
sharable, knowledge and understanding, than is some
superficial consensus making or consilience. An unstable and
changing state of some agreements and some disagreements is
thus the usual, and the most productive kind of state in our
collective knowledge building and truth seeking efforts.
Exploration is not well conducted under the roof of some
overarching "grand theory of knowing." This may keep us
"dry," but we won't discover much of what's really out there.
Exploration, as I understand it, needs detailed local work in
real places as we find them, is best done incrementally, and
must be free to go where our discoveries enlighten us to look.
We may travel far, but we will know how we got to where we
arrive, and we will learn much along the way, and thus have
better and more useful conversations and arguments with others
who arrived in different ways, or discovered quite different
places to be. It's hard to tell what we know we know and
understand, rather than think we know and understand, without
plenty of good differences and argument.
Grand schemes (a la E O Wilson) and grand assertions (a la
"Father of AI" Hinton) are more to do with the arrogances of
old men, I'd say. In my experience, being around more years
than most doesn't give us more insight, and certainly not
necessarily more knowledge and understanding, but it may help
us better see what we still don't know and understand.
-- Tim
> On 28 Nov 2025, at 06:52, Humanist <humanist@dhhumanist.org> wrote:
>
>
> 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)
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