comprehension finds most social scientists on one side and most hu-
manists on the other.
Interpretative and Empirical Disciplines
Humanists often define interpretative skills as quintessential for the
production of high-quality scholarship. Social scientists, especially
those who champion empiricism, more often deride interpretation
as a corrupting force in the production of truth. This basic distinc-
tion directly affects how humanists and social scientists evaluate
proposals. Some humanists rank what promises to be “fascinating”
above what may turn out to be “true.” An English professor describes
a proposal in the following terms: “I was just compelled by the sort
of careful way in which she mapped this out, and my thing is, even if
it doesn’t work, I think it will provoke really fascinating conver-
sations. So I was really not interested in whether it’s true or not.”
Another panelist, a literary scholar who also supported this pro-
posal, put originality above empirical soundness, explaining, “You
can never prove anything.” Such skepticism toward the concept of
truth is more rarely voiced in the social sciences. Several panelists
from political science, for instance, stressed traditional standards of
positivism. One, noting that he thinks of himself as “a scientist, but
in a very broad conception of that term,” offers this description of
the standards he uses to evaluate scholarship:
Validity is one, and you might say parsimony is another, I think
that’s relatively important, but not nearly as important as validity.
It’s the notion that a good theory is one that maximizes the ratio
between the information that is captured in the independent vari-
able and the information that is captured in the prediction, in the
dependent variable. [Also g]eneralizability across different histori-
cal epochs, not across extraordinarily different societies...sys-
tematic knowledge I think is important, too, so that you can beOn Disciplinary Cultures / 61