My interest here is not in solving the various crises in the humanities so much as exploring the dimensions of these disciplines in ways that de-emphasize, even ignore, conventional departmental, disciplinary identities.

For fun, we can move temporally through the university in terms of objects of study.

• Physical Sciences
• Life Sciences
• Human/Social Sciences
• ….

So why aren’t the humanities also a kind of science? Partly because the humanities and fine arts already existed when the scientific method and its empiricism was invented. The humanities have materialism instead.

The difference between materialism and empiricism is basically that the former is an ontology and the latter is an epistemology. Logically an empiricist, who claims knowledge only arises from observation, would also be a materialist and claim that reality is material. Alternately to be an empirical idealist one would be claiming that knowledge can only be produced through the observations of one’s conscious.

Anyway, the “empiricism” of modern science is weird. How is one observing subatomic particles in an accelerator? What is one seeing in digital images downloaded from a telescope in orbit? Or even through glass lenses? What about AI simulations/data analysis? And DNA? fMRI? And so on.

So is there a way to angle the humanities so as to emphasize materialism. Today materialism in the humanities is more than different flavors of Marxism. The point is that it isn’t just about being a materialist but what kind of materialist and investigating the histories of these kinds. Arguably, materialisms are ultimately narratives about reality, and those stories create boundaries within which empirical observations (i.e., experiences) occur. Though those experiences add to and change the materialist story.

For example, as I have been writing about a lot recently, there is a story of understanding, a material story about what it is. Even if it is a story about qualia, in the end it must be a material story so that it can be recreated in a machine. The humanities are well-suited to studying these questions. And they are crucial to how we deliberate on questions like AI development.

And the knowledge we produce in our studies of materiality are as true as any empirical method. And they are as reproducible. Maybe the question is are they usable? Are they practical? Maybe. Do you mean as practical as smashing subatomic particles into each other to see what happens? That kind of practical?

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Maybe the answer is in finishing my journey across the campus. After the humanities are the fine arts and beyond that are the practical/professional arts like medicine, engineering, and business (i.e., where all the students are). Maybe students, like our culture in general, value procedural knowledge (know-how) over propositional knowledge (know-that). We can draw the links between physical sciences and engineering, life sciences and medicine, and even human/social sciences and business.

What about the humanities? Are we so resolute in our resistance to being applied? While there are relations between the humanities and the fine arts, it isn’t one of practical application of humanities “know-how.” So what is our know-how? What is it that we know how to do?

The answer is fairly obviously the communication arts.

• The physical sciences and engineering build the technological world.
• The life sciences and medicine care for the biosphere.
• The social sciences and business manage the social-institutional world.
• The humanities and communication professionals…

You tell me.