Why humanities degrees need a compulsory theory of knowledge course

Not much is compulsory in humanities degrees now days, but something that needs to be is some training in the theory of knowledge. The theory of knowledge, also known as epistemology, scares some people; they’d rather be like: ‘woah dude, that is some intense analytical philosophy; I’d rather just sit over here and make untestable assertions from my moral high horse’.

Yet there are four critical reasons why humanities students need to be given training in the theory of knowledge.

The first is that the raging trends of postmodernism and blank slate fundamentalism (which has no scientific basis) give people the impression that there is no such thing as knowledge, only subjective, relativistic values. That’s wrong, both as a reading of postmodernism and as an understanding of rationality. Cogency in the theory of knowledge will help people to understand why. Rather than supplicating in guilt-ridden awe before someone’s unassailable ‘beliefs’, they will be able to analyse the logic of those beliefs, the factual basis on which they sit and the validity of their axiomatic foundations.

The second reason is that humanities graduates (including myself for a long time) struggle to comprehend how many of their claims and questions are empirical rather than theoretical in nature. For example, I recall a piece about users of pornography that claimed ‘the vagina stands in for the enigma of the feminine’. That might seem literary at first, but it’s actually an empirical claim. You could, for example, interview consumers of pornographers and ask them whether they are interested in better understanding women, and whether symbolic interaction with images of the vagina helps them do that.

The third reason is that humanities students can be easily hoodwinked with statistics. The most obvious example is polling data. If there is a 2% swing in the polls then the swing is less that the standard deviation of the poll. Ergo, the poll is essentially meaningless. Yet thousands of words are written every time such a swing occurs. Some elementary training in relevant skills would make humanities grads much more savvy users of data.

The last reason is that the most common problem you see among humanities students writing theses is an inability to come up with an analytical framework. There’s all this theory and no way to pin it down into a form that you can step through with an argument and demonstrate a fact. The theory of knowledge helps to train the mind to execute that process. 

So what would be contained in such a course? Let me give a rough outline.

You would start with the definition of a proof, including a discussion of the burden of proof. You could then move quickly to the difference between induction and deduction (i.e. empirics vs. logic), with some discussion of the usefulness of formal mathematics for ‘proving’ things.

Next up would be the problem of induction from Hume—just because you drop an egg on the floor a million times and it breaks every time doesn’t mean that on the million and 1st time it won’t float up towards the ceiling. Maybe your sample is just not big enough.

At this point, we’d be ready to discuss Karl Popper’s philosophy of science, which effectively does away with the problem of induction by balancing proof and refutation. Along the way we would learn the definition of a hypothesis and a test, the difference between fact and truth, and the reason why presenting a theory in a mathematical form doesn’t make it more scientific.  

From here we could move on to logic for a bit. We could cover basic prepositional logic, the notion of a non-sequitur (that’s when b does not follow from a) and how to build an argument. Here we could also learn about the logical fallacies (including every conservative and censorious lefty’s favourite: the slippery slope), which are in abundance in Australian opinion commentary. Perhaps the most famous example is Senator Cory Bernardi’s argument that legalising gay marriage would lead to legalising bestiality—they’re two different issues and would attract two different sets of arguments.

Next up might be a discussion of the difference between empirical and normative statements. This stuff is the focus of much of contemporary linguistic philosophy, which is the basis for much of the more outlandish claims of postmodern humanities faculties. The main thing students need to understand is that science is about how things are not how they ought to be. When you do research the goal is to discover facts, not to complain that the facts don’t fit your moral prejudices and so everyone who accepts the facts is evil.

Finally, we must do some basic training in statistics and consider the role of statistics in building an evidence base. What is a mean and what is variance?  What is the central limit theorem and what constitutes a ‘large sample’? What is the basic idea behind a regression (fitting a line), and how can you read regression output? What are some of easiest ways to spot the fallacious use of data?

One of the most important outcomes of such learning would be that humanities students would stop trying to find the one cause to rule them all—it’s class warfare! It’s patriarchy! It’s neoliberalism! It’s the quest for being! It’s the flying spaghetti monster!—and would instead understand that there may be several factors working together with different magnitudes of effect.

There isn’t a single undergraduate student in the world that wouldn’t benefit from this course, and it could be fun and fascinating if taught well.  I suspect it would also markedly improve the quality of our political commentary (and tutorial discussion), which would be welcome.

This article was originally published by Woroni with the title 'Why CASS* Needs a Compulsory Theory of Knowledge Course'. CASS is the Australian National University College of Arts and Social Sciences.