2. The Objects of the Humanities

To a first approximation, the objects of the humanities, in contrast with the objects of the natural sciences, are objects that ‘have meaning’. This needs unpacking.

One large class of objects of the humanities are texts, i.e. items composed of sentences, which in turn are items composed of words, which in turn are composed of letters. Words, sentences and entire texts have meaning. They are the objects of humanistic study, not objects of scientific study. Another large class of objects of humanistic study are material artefacts such as paintings, statues, musical compositions (both scores and performances). Artefacts are objects with meaning in one of the multiple senses of ‘meaning’ that I shall present below. Yet another large class of objects is sequences of events that have taken place in time and space such as wars, elections, and the building of nation states. Of course, it isn't that just any sequence of events is the object of humanistic study, it is only allegedly meaningful sequences of events – again in one of the senses of ‘meaning’ to be explicated below. Generalizing we may say that the objects of the humanities are objects that have, or carry, or embody, meaning. What I am saying, then, as a first approximation, is that the humanities study meaning. Meanings are the objects of the humanities. And this in sharp contrast to sciences.

This is only a first approximation. For many objects of the non-humanities, such as physics, biology and the medical sciences, can also be said to ‘have meaning’ – but, I aver, not in the sense in which the objects of the humanities have meaning. Let me explain. The trail of hooves imprints means that, say, recently horses have passed by; the trail means something. When the mercury column in the thermometer has gone up, this means that it has become warmer; the rising of the column hence is a meaningful event. Certain kinds of speckles on a person's skin mean measles – the speckles hence have meaning. Must we conclude from these examples that being directed to objects with meaning does not mark a contrast between the humanities and the sciences? No, for we should not equivocate. When we say that the items just mentioned (the trail, the mercury column, the speckles) ‘have meaning’, what we say is that they are signs or indicators to us of something else. But when we say that ‘“to procrastinate” means “to put things off”’, which is the sort of thing that a linguist could say, we don't mean to say that ‘to procrastinate’ is a sign of, or indicates, ‘to put things off’. Likewise, when we say that vanitas paintings mean to convey the idea that many earthly pursuits are idle, we aren't saying that those paintings are signs of idleness. Generally speaking, the objects-with-meaning that the humanities study aren't signs in the sense that they aren't like the rising of the mercury column (that indicate warmer weather), nor like the speckles on one's skin (that indicate measles). But how exactly shall we make this distinction if we wish to avoid equivocation?

Here is my proposal. The kind of meaning that the objects of the humanities have is the (or a) meaning that derives from human conventions, from human intentions, and/or from human purposive behaviour. This phrase is sharp enough to exclude the meaning of the trail, the meaning of the height of the mercury column, and the meaning of the specks on one's skin, as none of these meanings is due to conventions, or human intentions; none of these things have intentions, nor does their meaning derive from human purposive behaviour. At the same time this phrase is broad enough to cover a plurality of things that can all be called ‘meanings’ which are the objects of the humanities. In order to make this point clear, I first have to deal with the notions of ‘intention’ and ‘purposive behaviour’ and next with the said plurality.

I claimed that the objects that are being studied in the humanities have a meaning that is, or is derived from, human conventions, intentions and/or purposive behaviour. People have intentions, and they act intentionally. Having intentions and acting intentionally are related, but nonetheless different things.Footnote ⁷ People have intentions, for example the intention to become a better piano player, or the intention to attend a particular meeting. But to have intentions is not the same as to act intentionally. People act intentionally, for example, when they buy a piano, and when they attend that particular meeting. These actions are intentional in the sense that people who do these things don't do them inadvertently, or by accident, or by mistake. They are, in one sense of the word, ‘meaningful’ actions. Now the intentions that people have, and the intentional actions they perform, are among the paradigmatic objects of humanistic study. For it is widely felt that to know what intentions people have, and which of their actions are intentional is very often quite important and valuable. (It isn't that engaging in humanistic study is the only way to come to know the intentions that people have, or the only way to come to know which of their actions are intentional. In many ordinary cases and quotidian contexts nothing that qualifies as ‘humanistic study’ is required for that. But sometimes it is.) And the point is that the natural sciences give us no handle on intentions, nor on intentional actions: they cannot help us to find out the intentions of people have, nor whether their actions are intentional.

As J.L. Austin has argued, acting intentionally is not the same as acting on purpose. What is done intentionally need not be done ‘on purpose’, i.e. not done for a purpose, but without a purpose. One of his examples is children that pull off the wings of a fly. There is no purpose to these actions, yet they are done intentionally. They are wanton acts. Austin suggested that what is done on purpose is always done intentionally. Purposeful action is always intentional action. Examples of actions done for a purpose are: standing up and walking to the book shelve in order to take out a particular volume; waving your hand so as to greet your neighbour; saying ‘I do’ in a very special setting with the aim of getting married. Actions done for a purpose are the objects of humanistic study, not of scientific inquiry. The natural sciences are blind to purposeful behaviours – they lack the categories to even articulate them.

Actions done for a purpose may lead to objects, states of affairs, or events that continue to exist long after the actions from which they resulted were completed. Purposive actions are themselves items with meaning. But many results or outcomes of purposive actions have meaning as well, for example uttered sentences, books, statues, paintings, buildings, legal regulations, wars, and many other things. The meaning that is the object of humanistic study, is meaning that is derived from human intentions and from human purposive behaviour.

A potential misunderstanding must be avoided. I have been talking about the ‘objects of the humanities’ and the ‘objects of the sciences’, and I claimed that these objects are different. This is potentially misleading in that the self-same thing X might be studied both scientifically and humanistically. Paintings and statues, for example, can be studied scientifically: it can be studied what sort of paint or material has been used, what its chemical and physical properties are, how sensitive to light the materials are, etc. At the same time they can be studied humanistically: it can be studied what they mean, what their makers intended with their production, what cultural relevance they have, etc. In such cases the humanities and the sciences study ‘the same thing’, viz. X. But this doesn't undermine my general claim that the humanities and the sciences study different objects, for they study different properties of things.

As I said earlier, the phrase ‘meaning that derives from human conventions, human intentions, and/or human purposive behaviour’, is broad enough to cover a plurality of things that can all be called ‘meanings’. To this plurality I now turn. I list seven different notions of ‘meaning’, each of which refers to a property in virtue of which their bearers are actual or potential objects of humanistic study.

[a] Sentence meaning. Sentences have meaning.Footnote ⁸ The English sentence ‘The earth revolves around its axis’ means something, it means the same as the Dutch sentence ‘De aarde draait om haar as’. Sometimes it is difficult to tell what the meaning of a sentence is, for instance when it concerns a topic you are not familiar with, or when you don't know some of the technical terminology that is used. If we want to understand such sentence, we try to find a sentence that expresses the same meaning, but, for us, clearer.

Sentence meaning is one kind of meaning falling under the umbrella ‘meaning that derives from human conventions, human intentions and/or from human purposive behaviour’, as the meaning of a sentence derives from human conventions about word meaning, grammar, and pragmatics.

It goes without saying that not each and every object with sentence meaning is an object of humanistic inquiry. Many sentences that are uttered and written down will never be the object of anything that merits the description ‘humanistic inquiry’. Still, sentences are among such objects. Sometimes they are such objects because they seem important while at the same time obscure, and hence in need of clarification. Such inquiry focuses on the meaning of the sentence and is exegetical in nature. Other times it is not the meaning of a sentence that is the object of humanistic study, but its structure; such inquiry is grammatical in nature.

The natural sciences don't and can't study these objects, as they are blind to sentence meaning. There is no natural science we can turn to when we want to know the meaning of a sentence.

[b] Word meaning. Words have meaning.Footnote ⁹ ‘To procrastinate’, for instance, means ‘to put things off’. When we don't know the meaning of a word, we look it up in a dictionary where we find more or less helpful synonyms for it.

Word meanings also fall under the broad umbrella of ‘meaning that derives from human conventions, human intentions and/or from human purposive behaviour’, as the meaning of a word derives from human conventions.

It goes without saying that not each and every object with word meaning is an object of humanistic inquiry. In the ordinary run of things we normally know what words mean. Still, words are among the objects of the humanities. Word meanings are studied by lexicologists. However, it is not only the meaning of words that is the object of humanistic study. Word forms are also studied; morphologists and historical grammarians do this.

The natural sciences, again, have no handle on word meaning and word form, and hence cannot contribute to their study.

[c] Speaker's meaning. Word meaning and sentence meaning must be distinguished from what Paul Grice has called speaker's meaning.Footnote ¹⁰ The difference between sentence meaning and speaker's meaning is the difference between what a speaker says (in the sense of the words he utters) and what he implicates (implies, suggested). Consider the sentence ‘It is cold in here’. This sentence has a meaning that everyone who reads these words understands. When John utters that sentence, however, he might mean to implicate that the window should be closed. It is one thing to know what a sentence means, it is another thing to know what the utterer of that sentence implicated, i.e. what he aimed to suggest by uttering it.

Speaker's meaning, as I will be using the term, encompasses more than Gricean ‘conversational implicatures’. It also encompasses illocutionary act intentions and perlocutionary act intentions. Here I am drawing on the theory of speech acts that was given its initial form by J.L. Austin.Footnote ¹¹ By way of explanation, when the prime minister said ‘Jack won't be released’, she said that, let us suppose, in order to calm down the opposition. She intended her words to have that calming effect. The intended effect of her words are her ‘perlocutionary intentions’. For understanding what someone said it is often quite relevant to know such intentions. Speakers also have ‘illocutionary intentions’. Suppose Agnes spoke the words ‘Alzheimer's disease is the next medical tsunami’, then how must her words be taken? Is she quoting someone, is she making an announcement, or is she making a prediction? She may have had any of these intentions. But to her hearers it will be quite important to know which of these ‘illocutionary intentions’ she in fact had. To understand what a speaker said, it will generally be quite important to know what the speaker's illocutionary intentions were.

Speaker's meaning can be attached to sentences, but also to larger linguistic wholes, such as speeches, articles, books.

In many cases, in many contexts, we don't need specialized scholarship in order to (get to) know a speaker's meaning. But sometimes we do. Such speaker's meanings are potential objects of the humanities.

Speaker's meaning also falls under the broad umbrella of ‘meaning that derives from human conventions, human intentions and/or from human purposive behaviour’. For speaker's meaning just is the intention a person has when he produces a sentence.

Speaker's meanings are not the object of the natural sciences. The sciences cannot address questions about conversational implicatures, perlocutionary intentions, and illocutionary intentions.

[d] Maker's meaning. Although linguistic objects form an important and expansive contingent of objects of the humanities, they by no means exhaust the field. Humans not only speak, they also make paintings, drawings, and statues, buildings, they make movies, and music, and they dance. Instances of these have analogues of speaker's meaning. They have what I shall call maker's meaning. The makers of these items have intentions in making these items, they realize intentions in making these artefacts. Paintings and drawings are made from a huge variety of intentions: to make a statement about war; to remind others of things that are important; to shed new light on a depicted event; they express anger or happiness; and many other things. Statues are made with the intention of enabling the commemoration of an important statesman, or to keep alive the memory of those who gave their lives for freedom's sake. Movies are made for an enormous varieties reasons: to accuse, to give hope, to commemorate, to edify, to warn, to amuse… Mutatis mutandis the same is true of music, dances and the dramatic performances: their makers had intentions (analogues of illocutionary and perlocutionary intentions) that they aimed to realize through these works. These intentions are the maker's meaning.

Maker's meaning, of which speaker's meaning is one variety, fits the broad umbrella of ‘meaning that derives from human conventions, human intentions and/or from human purposive behaviour’. For maker's meaning is the intention that the maker meant to realize through making the work; works of art, and artefacts in general, are the products of purposive human behaviour.

Many maker's meanings will never be the object of anything that qualifies as humanistic research. Still, if a thing has maker's meaning it is a potential object of such inquiry.

[e] Functional meaning. Humans make pottery, cutlery, ovens, tables, beds, clothes, and numerous other sorts of artefacts, such as laws and regulations, organizations and societal structures. These things are made with a purpose and made for a purpose. Pottery is made for the purpose of storing and cooking food in; cutlery is made for the purpose of civilized eating; laws and regulations are made for the purpose of structuring society, etc. These artefacts have meanings – the meanings being the functions they were intended to perform. I call this their functional meaning.

The functional meanings of human made artefacts fit under the umbrella of ‘meaning that derives from human conventions, human intentions and/or from human purposive behaviour’. This kind of meaning derives from human intentions and from human purposive behaviour; without these, these things wouldn't even exist.

Here too there are many things with functional meanings that never have been, or will become, the object of humanistic study. Still, such meanings are possible objects of such studies. Archaeological study of shards of pottery is an instance of such study – at least when the aim is to find out the functional meaning of the shards.

[f] Expressive/indicative meaning. Sometimes intentional human behaviours, or states of affairs resulting from those behaviours, express or indicate or reveal something that the agent who performs the behaviours, is or was unaware of. A possible example is what Freud has called ‘Fehlleistungen’, or what the English translators of his work render as ‘parapraxes’, i.e. mistakes that betray something of the deep attitude of the person in question, such as mis-hearing someone, mis-seeing something, slips of the tongue, and forgetting. Freud's example of the latter is the case of a young man who lost the expensive fountain pen that he got from his father; according to Freud the loss indicates that the young man has a troubled relationship with his father.Footnote ¹² If Freud's theory is right, parapraxes fit the broad umbrella of ‘meaning that derives from human conventions, human intentions and/or from human purposive behaviour’. For although persons are unaware of what their parapraxes express or indicate, their meaning does derive from their (unconscious) intentions and their (unconscious) purposes.

The rubric of expressive/indicative meaning should be understood so as to also encompass the quite elusive phenomenon that texts may express thoughts and ideas that go beyond what the author may explicitly have wanted to express. In such cases it wasn't the author's explicit illocutionary intention to convey those particular thoughts and ideas. The author may even be unaware of the very thoughts and ideas themselves – and this not because of some false consciousness in the author. This sets the sort of cases I have in mind apart from the Freudian cases mentioned in the previous paragraph, as in those cases there is some sort of false consciousness. To substantiate the suggestion that there is this sort of expressive/indicative meaning, think of, for example, King Lear. Certain thoughts and ideas in that drama may only become evident as the play is performed, thought about, criticized, etc. These thoughts and ideas may be latent in Shakespeare's text and they may never have been explicitly contemplated by Shakespeare himself. Still, the drama, or the performances thereof, may be said to ‘express’ those thoughts and ideas. René Girard was a literary scholar who was rather keen on this kind of expressive/indicative meaning. He argued that a number of novelists expressed important thoughts and ideas about desires and desiring that they in all likelihood had never explicitly contemplated.Footnote ¹³ The thought their works expresses, he argued, is that desires and desiring have a mimetic structure, by which he means that when person X desires something Z, X desires Z not because of Z's own qualities, but because some other person Y desires Z, and X, unbeknownst to Xself, mimics or imitates Y. Whether or not Girard was right is up for debate. But his approach of novels fits a general pattern, viz. that texts may express thoughts and ideas that their authors were unaware of (and aren't due to false consciousness).

We here approach one way in which Wilhelm Dilthey sought to delineate the objects of the humanities.Footnote ¹⁴ Human beings, he said, experience things. Moreover, they express their experiences in poems, in books, in gestures, in works of art, etc. These expressions are ‘objectifications’ of private experiences, they take on an objective existence in the world of culture, and thus become in principle accessible to others. The objects of the humanities are objectified expressions of human experiences. The objects of the sciences lack this character. Neither the rising of a mercury column, nor the speckles on a person's skin express experiences.

Objectifications of human experiences have expressive/indicative meaning too – they are indications and expressions of experiences. These meanings too fit the broad umbrella of ‘meaning that derives from human conventions, human intentions and/or from human purposive behaviour’, as the objectifications are the products of human intentions and of purposive behaviour.

Of course, not all objectifications will need humanistic scholarly treatment in order for their meaning to be captured. And not all will have this kind of meaning. Still, objects with such meaning exist, and they are the potential objects of a humanistic scholarly approach.

Expressive/indicative meaning hence covers both unconscious (Freudian-type cases) and conscious (Diltheyan-type cases) expressions and indications.

[g] Value meaning. Many things have value properties. Things mean something to us, because they have value properties. Certain poems mean much to us, because they are beautiful; they have aesthetic properties. Some acts mean much to us because they are acts of kindness, others because they are courageous. Some actions, moreover, are morally permitted, other morally required, yet others morally forbidden. So acts, as well the products thereof, have value properties, namely moral properties.

Aesthetic and moral properties, along with other value properties, too fit the broad umbrella of ‘meaning that derives from human conventions, human intentions and/or from human purposive behaviour.’ They do so, first, because objects with value such as beautiful works of art, have that value due to human intentions and human purposive behaviour. Second, actions have value properties because human intentions and purposive behaviours are almost invariably driven by values, or rather the recognition thereof. Humans aim to realize values by making works of art, as well as other artefacts, and also by acting in particular ways.

Many things with value meaning will never be the object of humanistic investigation. Often the value meaning of things will be obvious to us. But not of all, perhaps not even of many. In such cases they may become the object of humanistic inquiry. Values and value properties of things and actions are among the objects of the humanities.

The sciences don't and even can't study the value properties of things.Footnote ¹⁵ However, in the technical sciences physical properties of materials are studied in the interest of deciding whether or not they can be used to build fire-resistant doors, or to make air-allowing water-proof overcoats from. Since fire-resistance and air-allowing water-proof ness incorporate values for humans, it could be thought that the study of values is not the prerogative of the humanities. However! The science-part of the technological disciplines has no handle on the fact that fire-resistance and air-allowing water-proof ness incorporate values for humans – viz. the values of safety and comfort. In order for people working on these projects to be able to grasp these values, something other than science must be reverted to, as values are among the objects that the sciences have no handle on. Values are among the objects of the humanities. Similar things can be said about pharmaceutic research.

What I have been arguing, then, is that the objects of the humanities are items that have a special sort of meaning – viz. ‘meaning that derives from human conventions, human intentions and/or from human purposive behaviour’. It is not unimportant to add to this that I am not at all suggesting that we have a crystal clear and uncontroversial grasp on the metaphysical nature of intentions, or purposive behaviour, or values. Much ink has been spilled over whether intentions, purposes and values can be reduced to other things or whether they have an independent ontological status, and on the question whether or not they fit in a scientific view of the world.Footnote ¹⁶ I don't aim to address these very large and complex issues here. What I have said must be understood as follows: the objects of the humanities are items that have a ‘meaning that derives from human conventions, human intentions and/or from human purposive behaviour’, whatever we may philosophically think about the metaphysical nature of intentions, human purposive behaviour, and values. In order to work in the humanities one needn't have a worked-out philosophical account of intentions and purposes – nor of meaning for that matter! Just as a medical researcher can professionally and effectively conduct his research on patients, even if he has no worked-out metaphysical view as to what persons are.

3. The Aims of the Humanities

So far I have indicated in broad strokes what the objects of the humanities are and suggested that the natural sciences are unable to study them. The basic idea is that the objects of humanistic study are characterized by the fact that they have meaning, are woven into the fabric of intentions, and embody values. I should now like to move on and indicate what the aims of the humanities are, i.e. what they try to accomplish, and again contrast these with the aims of the sciences. Of course, strictly speaking neither the humanities nor the sciences are the sort of things that can have aims. It is only human beings that can have aims. In a non-strict way, however, we can say that the humanities and the sciences do have aims. We can do that when we think of engagement in the sciences and humanities as a social practice, that, following Alasdair MacIntyre, may be thought of as a coherent but complex form of socially established human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve standards of excellence that are appropriate to and partly definitive of that form of activity.Footnote ¹⁷ ‘Goods internal to’ a practice, are the ‘aims’ of that practice. The goods internal to the humanities, as I will argue in this section, are different from the goods internal of the sciences.

Before doing that, however, I note that practice-internal aims must be distinguished from whatever it is that motivates people to engage in the practice in the first place. People can be motivated towards engaging in the humanities or in the sciences by intellectual curiosity, or by the wish to show to others that they can take on an intellectual challenge, or by the wish to do something respectable, or by the wish to boost their ego, or by the wish to be part of a social group, or by the wish to make money. None of these or other motivations have (or perhaps I should say: should have) a bearing on the practice-internal aims of the humanities or the sciences.

What, then, are the aims internal to the humanities? As will become immediately clear, a truly bewildering array of aims can be distinguished. As will also become clear, sometimes those aims can be attained inside and other times outside of a scholarly context. In some cases these aims are attained routinely, in other cases their attainment requires protracted scholarly effort. It is mostly only when the aims are attained within a scholarly context that we speak of the humanities. Something similar is true of the aims of the sciences: sometimes these aims can be attained outside of academic and laboratory contexts, but other times they can't. In some cases the aims of the natural sciences can be attained routinely, in other cases their attainment requires extensive research and hi-tech laboratories. It is mostly only when the aims are attained within an academic setting that we speak of science. Susan Haack once said that science is ‘the long arm of common sense’;Footnote ¹⁸ I say that the humanities are another long arm of common sense. Many of the ordinary quotidian aims we have, and many of the ways of finding things out, are continued and sharpened in both the humanities and the sciences.

Orienting myself to the various kinds of objects that were delineated in the previous section, I will now list a number of the aims of, the internal goods of, the humanities. Since the humanities are a huge and living thing that is moreover in constant flux of development, the list cannot possibly lay claim to completeness.

With respect to [a], sentence meaning, the aims include: (i) understanding the meaning of sentences in a language, especially sentences that seem puzzling or even obscure to us; (ii) explicating the syntactic rules that underlie well-formed meaningful sentences in a language; (iii) tracing syntactic changes and developments over time; (iv) explaining how syntaxis is learned by children and second-language users.

Concerning [b], word meaning, the aims include: (i) explicating the meanings of words in a language; (ii) tracing shifts in word meaning in a language over time; (iii) explaining why certain words became popular, while others receded into obscurity.

As to [c], speaker's meaning, some aims are: (i) understanding or reconstructing what it was that a speaker or an author intended to convey through her words (=understanding the illocutionary intentions of a speaker or author); (ii) explicating what a speaker or an author aimed to bring about through his words, what effects he tried to secure through them (=explication the speaker's or author's perlocutionary intentions); (iii) understanding what it was that motivated the speaker to say what he wanted to say, what it was that motivated the author to say what she wanted to say.

Aims concerning [d], maker's meaning, mimic the aims concerning speaker's meaning: (i) understanding or reconstructing what, if anything, it is that the maker of a particular non-linguistic artefact such as a painting, a statue, a musical composition, etc. intends to convey through her work; (ii) explicating what, if anything, the maker of a non-linguistic artefact aimed to bring about through her work, the effects he tried to secure through it; (iii) to understand what motivated the maker to make what she made; (iv) to explain why an audience responded to the maker's work in the way it did.

Regarding [e], functional meaning, the aims include: (i) understanding the actual or intended function of a particular object or man-made institution; (ii) explaining which properties of a particular object or institution are responsible for its ability to perform its actual and/or intended function; (iii) gaining historical insight into how certain things and institutions, rules and laws have come to be; (iv) understanding the emergence of things and states of affairs that are unintentional side-effects of intentional actions.

A propos [f], expressive/indicative meaning, some aims are: (i) to explicate what is, perhaps unintentionally, expressed by a speaker's speech, or a maker's work in terms of a particular theory such as Marxism, Psychoanalysis, Mimesis theory, etc.; (ii) to articulate the respects in which a speaker or maker is a child of his times; (iii) ‘getting into the mind’ of someone who expressed himself in particular ways – trying to see what someone else saw, feel what someone else felt, etc., i.e. getting a sense of what-it-is-like to have an experience one hasn't had for oneself.

Finally, concerning [g], value meaning, we may say that one of the aims of the humanities is to value things (i.e. to evaluate things) – more specifically, to value them properly. One values a thing properly when one endorses its value when it has value, or denies it has value when it has no value. Poems and novels can be valued – and what the humanities strive for is to value them properly, i.e. to endorse their, say, aesthetic and artistic value when they have such value, or to deny them value when they don't have value. Actions such as slapping someone in the face, helping one's grandmother in need, and having an abortion – these actions have moral properties. To value these actions adequately is to see them as morally required or permitted when they are morally required or permitted, and to see them as morally wrong when they are morally wrong. Analogous things could be said about other values. In a way that needs qualification it can be said that the aim of the natural sciences is not to gauge the values that things may have. The natural sciences don't value the aesthetic properties of poems, or whether or not a certain action is morally permitted. The aims of the humanities hence include: (i) gauging the literary, aesthetic, moral and others values of speeches, poems, novels and other books, and of works of art, and of states of affairs and events; (ii) understanding in virtue of what certain objects, or states of affairs are good or bad; (iii) finding out what we ought to do, and ought not to do; they also include (iv) handing over insights into what is valuable and honourable to new generations.

I take it that we can see that these aims cannot be attained by doing physics, or chemistry, or biology, or astrophysics, or brain science. Why that is? The answer has to do with the practice-internal aims of the sciences. These are varied (but perhaps not as varied as the aims of the humanities): (i) finding out the regularities and correlations that hold in the natural world; (ii) explaining phenomena by figuring out their natural causes (Virgil's adage Felix, qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas has resounded throughout the ages); (iii) predicting future events; (v) providing knowledge that might satisfy technological and practical interests, i.e. enable humans to produce artefacts that they think are useful.

The differences in aim between the humanities and the sciences are stark. The natural sciences don't tell us about and don't study meanings, intentions, or values. Of course, natural scientists inevitably will have ideas about what is meaningful (for instance about what is meaningful to investigate, or about the meaning of certain experiments, and also, surely, about what words and sentences mean), they surely have intentions (for instance the intention to conduct rigid experiments on super conduction), and they no doubt have ideas about values (even if only so-called ‘theoretical values’, i.e. values that should be heeded if an inquiry is to yield valid results). But meaning, intention, and value are not among the objects that they study.

The differences are stark, even when both the sciences and the humanities sometimes seek to ‘explain’ things. However, ‘explanation’ is a bit of a weasel word, and we cannot suppose that in the context of the humanities the word refers to the same things as it does in the context of the sciences. According to one important theory of scientific explanation, Hempel and Oppenheim's account of deductive-nomological explanation, phenomenon X is explained provided X can be deduced from the laws of nature and the local initial conditions.Footnote ¹⁹ Although this theory has its problemsFootnote ²⁰ , it is widely agreed that a wide and important class of explanations in the sciences do involve essential reference to physical laws, i.e. laws that describe relations of nomic necessitation.Footnote ²¹ Explanations in the humanities, however, don't refer to laws of necessitation. As Rens Bod has forcefully argued, the humanities do embody a search for principles and patterns, such as grammatical patterns, phonetic principles, etc.Footnote ²² But such principles and patterns are not physical laws of necessitation. Moreover, these principles and patterns are mostly not presented as explanations but rather as organizers of otherwise seemingly jumbles of facts. The principles and patterns make the facts intelligible. This is not to deny that in the humanities explanations are offered. But such explanations as are given don't refer to laws that necessitate. Rather, such explanations refer to the intentions of actors, to the reasons they had for acting as they did, as, for example, when an explanation is offered why Churchill bombed part of the French fleet in 1940 (known as the Battle of Mers-el-Kebir), or an explanation of why Hendrik IV (1056–1106) went to Canossa, or an explanation why my neighbour sold his house. My point, then, is that even if both the sciences and the humanities aim to ‘explain’ things, the nature of the explanations offered is very different.

The aims of the humanities, then, have to do with understanding and explaining meanings, intentions, and values, whereas the aims of sciences don't. This may give rise to the question whether there is a fundamental difference in aim underlying all other differences in aim? Karl-Otto Apel's interesting proposal is that the humanities and the sciences embody different so-called ‘cognitive interests’.Footnote ²³ Whereas the aims of the natural sciences are impregnated by the interest to explain natural phenomena, the aims of the humanities, by contrast, are impregnated by the interest of communicative understanding.Footnote ²⁴ This proposal accords to some extent with what I have been arguing in this section. However, it doesn't explicitly refer to the value-oriented aims of the humanities, nor to the humanities’ focus on intentions, intentional actions, and the products thereof. For this reason I prefer my own suggestions about the peculiar objects of the humanities, as well as about the specific aims of the humanities, since they make these references explicitly, and thus give a richer picture.

So far I have highlighted differences. However, there is one communality of aim between the sciences and the humanities that is of staggering importance. They both serve the two prime epistemic goals, which have been described by William James as follows: ‘We must know the truth; and we must avoid error, – these are our first and great commandments as would-be knowers; but they are not two ways of stating an identical commandment, they are two separable laws.’Footnote ²⁵ Seeking truth and avoiding error are the two lode stars of both the humanities and the sciencesFootnote ²⁶ . Both seek knowledge and aim to undermine what is only presumed knowledge. They seek knowledge of different objects, as I have been at pains to show – but knowledge nonetheless. And to seek to know, is to seek the truth, and to avoid falshood. For knowledge entails truth, and false knowledge is impossible. What I say is that both the sciences and the humanities have as (part of) their practice-internal aim epistemic aims, i.e. the aims of seeking truth and avoiding falsehood. This means that both aim at propositional knowledge.

Saying that the humanities aim at propositional truthFootnote ²⁷ is a claim of some moment, as many working in the humanities eschew talk of truth and put a lot of emphasis on ‘subjectivity’, ‘situatedness’, and ‘relativity’.Footnote ²⁸ However, in actual practice truth-relevant considerations do play an important role in the humanities. This is the way it should be. For the humanities must be veritistic, if they are to be at all.

4. The Methods of the Humanities

In what ways do the humanities aim to attain their aims? What do scholars in the humanities do in order to attain those aims? What are their methods? Do they have any methods at all? Well, what is a method? Before taking on these questions, I quote a very sensible remark of John Stuart Mill about methods and theories about methods:

The last sentence bears rephrasing: we should never have known by what methods truth is to be ascertained if we had not ascertained many truths independently of any explicitly formulated scientific (or, I add, humanistic) method.

Very generally speaking, a method is a set of rules that must be systematically applied in the interest of securing a certain result. The results aimed at can be broadly practical: one set of rules may be applied so as to build a house, another so as to fight a nasty germ, yet another so as to select the best candidate. The results aimed at can also be broadly theoretical: one set of rules may be applied so as to find out the height of a mountain, another set so as to establish the probability that some event will take place, yet another set so as to find out what it was that an author wanted to say by means of his text, still another set so as to detect the value of something, etc.

Philosophy of science text books usually discuss deductivism, inductivism and falsificationism as scientific methods.Footnote ³⁰ Deductive methods include such rules as: ‘formulate axioms or first principles of a certain field of study and make sure these axioms are perfectly evident (and a proposition is evident when only a little attention is needed to recognize it is true); next, prove propositions that are even slightly obscure, by deducing them from the axioms and propositions that have already been proved; third, treat things as much as possible in their natural order, beginning with the most simple and most general, and explain everything belonging to the nature of the genus before proceeding to particular species.’Footnote ³¹ Deductivism has worked fine for mathematics, but as a method for doing empirical research it was seriously flawed. Inductivist methods, by contrast, don't include rules having to do with stating axioms, or first principles. Rather, they include such rules as: ‘first, collect data in an unprejudiced way; next, organize the data in a perspicuous way, free from presuppositions and constraints; then, through induction, derive correct generalizations and explanatory principles from the organized data.’Footnote ³² Inductivism doesn't work well for the empirical sciences: we need selection principles for finding data (as not all data are relevant for the purposes at hand); moreover, we need principles to organize the data (data don't organize themselves); and most of all: there is no logical procedure to get from the organized data to the generalizations and explanatory principles – we need imagination, as theories are underdetermined by the data. Falsificationist methods include such rules as ‘first, get clear about the empirical consequences of the theory you entertain; if you can't derive empirical predictions from it, then recast the theory in a way that will enable you derive predictions from it; if you can't recast the theory, then discard it; next, check whether the predicted consequences do obtain, if they don't, then reject or adjust the theory, but if they do, then stay on the outlook for falsifications.’ Falsificationism worked well in some respects, but not in others. It worked well, insofar as it urged scientists to formulate theories that could in principle be refuted by counter examples and counter evidence. But it didn't work, insofar as it offers no rules for what to do in order to confirm a theory.

Although discussions about these methods are interesting in their own right, they are also rather abstract and at quite some remove from actual scientific and humanistic practices. In order to discuss the notion of method in a way that connects more nearly with actual practices, we need further distinctions. First, as already hinted at, methods are geared towards specific aims. The method of applying a thermometer aims at finding out temperatures, it doesn't aim at finding out velocities. The method of applying penicillin aims at fighting bacterial infections, it doesn't aim at fighting mental depressions. Second, methods specify rules that must be applied if the aim is to be attained. The method of applying a thermometer specifies how the thermometer is to be applied. For instance, if it is a thermometer for gauging out door temperatures, the thermometer should be in contact with the out door air; but if it is a thermometer for gauging temperatures of human bodies, it should be in contact with certain bodily parts, and not with others. The method of applying penicillin specifies how, when and where the drug is to be administered. Third, methods can be differentially successful in attaining their aims – if two methods are geared towards the same aim, the one may be more reliable than the other. One type of thermometer may be more reliable than another; one kind of penicillin more effective than an other.

It should be noted that a method may but need not consist of a great number of rules, may but need not involve rules that are very difficult to apply, may but need not involve rules that must be mastered through some training schema. The method for measuring the speed of light consists of many rules, many of which will be difficult to follow, and many of which will have to be mastered through some training schema. The method for figuring out whether one stone is bigger than another may, by contrast, consist of one simple rule: looking. This rule isn't hard to follow, and it requires no specialized training. Of course, if two stones are differently shaped and of roughly equal size, this method won't secure a result. In that case another method should be applied, for example the respective immersion of the stones in a fixed volume of water in a container; the stone that raises the water level most, is the bigger of the two. (One may worry that looking is not a ‘method’. However, on my definition, it is a method. For it is geared towards an aim, viz. figuring out the shapes and colours and positions of middle-sized objects. It consists of rules, such as: having one's eyes opened, and looking in the direction of the object or objects.)

What are the methods of the humanities? Given the multiplicity of aims mentioned in the previous section, we must expect a multiplicity of methods. Which is exactly what we find. It will be impossible to describe, for each of the aims that are connected with the objects of the humanities, which methods are used. I therefore restrict myself for each of the objects to one or two methods geared toward one or two aims. Before turning to this, I need to touch a general matter that is of great importance to all of the methods that are wielded in the humanities. What is so reassuring about science is that its methods can repeatedly be employed by different persons, at different times and at different places. Because of this, the outcomes of the employment of a method transcend the level of personal divination or subjective feeling, as the outcomes can be tested, or verified, or corroborated by other persons using the same method. Do the methods applied in the humanities have this reassuring quality? This is a very big question that I cannot possibly deal with here. What I can say, and what I think must be said, is that insofar as the humanities apply rules, and since it belongs to the nature of rules that they can be re-applied (by different persons, at different times, to both the same and other materials), this invites us to make a presumption in favour of the methods used in the humanities. Whether these methods are all equally reliable, and whether they are as reliable as the methods of the natural sciences, is a very large matter that I won't go into. My present point is only that the methods of the humanities must initially be presumed to be reliable – the onus of proof is on the person who claims the methods to be unreliable.

I now turn to a number of methods, of which I can only provide the barest of sketches.

[a] Sentence meaning. Suppose we hit upon a sentence whose meaning escapes us. What can we do to find its meaning? Is there a method, a set of rules, that we can apply to secure this aim? There are numerous rules we can and do apply, even if many of them have never been explicitly formulated in the (imaginary) Handbook for Finding out Sentence Meaning. Such as: ask the speaker; if the speaker is unavailable, ask others who you think are competent users of the language what they make of the sentence; in case you can't or won't do that, and the meaning escapes you because of an unfamiliar word, then consult a dictionary; if the meaning escapes you but not because of unfamiliar words, then consult a grammar book of that language; if the construction of the sentence cannot be found in the grammar book, then try to see whether the construction mimics constructions that can be found in other languages; if it does, you may have a clue, but if not, and if you cannot think of any other rules you can apply, you may provisionally conclude that the speaker produced a faulty sentence, that she made a mistake and that her sentence has no meaning (and a sentence can have no meaning, even if all the words it contains have meaning, as in ‘Apples great as blue can hope umbrageous’.) Of course, these rules require that a number of non-trivial resources are available: dictionaries and grammar books. These resources themselves are the products of inquiry – products that have been methodically secured. The methods for finding and describing the grammar of a language have been developed en refined over time,Footnote ³³ and have been described in great detail by professional linguists.Footnote ³⁴ They include: finding out what the smallest meaningful units of a language are – and there are methods for doing this, ‘methods of isolation’ as they may be called. Also: finding out which grammatical roles which words can have in a language: which words can and which can't play the subject-role, which can and which can't play the predicate role, which words are substantives, which are adjectives and adverbs, which are count words, etc. There are myriad rules to follow if one wants to find out a language's grammar.

There appears to be no sharp borderline between the each and every day ways of finding out sentence meanings, and the sophisticated proceedings of professional linguists. Linguists wield the long arm of common sense procedures for figuring out sentence meaning, and they refine them with great skill and sensitivity in response to linguistic material at hand, and given the aims pursued. It should be clear that these methods are very different from the methods used in the sciences, such as the C-14 method for estimating the age of an object, or methods used for sequencing DNA, etc..

[b] Word meaning. Suppose we hit upon a word that we don't know – even though we are familiar with the language to which we presume the word belongs. Can we apply a method, rules we can apply, to find out the meaning of that word? Of course. We can ask others, we can consult a dictionary. If that doesn't help we can collect sentences in which the same word is used, and so get a sense of the context in which the word is used (the context of ship building, or computer programming, or abstract metaphysics, or cricket). Something like that is what lexicologists do when they make a dictionary for foreign and so far undescribed languages. In order to figure out the meaning of an unknown word in the absence of a dictionary, it is also relevant to find out to what the speaker commits himself when he uses that word in a variety of sentences in that language. Again these methods are very different from methods used in the natural sciences.

[c] Speaker's meaning. Looking about for methods that enable us to find out speaker's meaning lead us away from the methods that average language users, grammarians, lexicologists and other linguists enable them to find out about sentence and word meaning. In the preponderance of cases knowing the meaning of a sentence will be a necessary but insufficient requirement for knowing the speaker's meaning. So the first thing to do, if one wants to know a speaker's meaning, is to get to know the meaning of the sentence(s) that he uses. It is telling that Grice, who brought so much intelligence to the topic of speaker's meaning, never indicated how to go on from there – he never specified a method for doing that. He assumed that we more or less know how to do that, even if we cannot explicate the rules we follow. But here, as before, in most ordinary life contexts we do know the speaker's meaning, i.e. we know what he implicated, we grasp his illocutionary intentions, and often we also have a decent sense of his perlocutionary intentions.

Often we are confident about these things because we know the speaker or author, and know about his ways with words (is he a straight talker, or is he prone to making implicit suggestions, etc.); and perhaps we know something about his general outlook on things so that we can be somewhat confident about his intentions; or because we heard the entire speech, or read the whole book, or perhaps even more than that; or because of specific contextual clues we are aware of (we know who the audience was, and the occasion on which the speech was given; or the circumstances under which the text was written, etc.); as well as the culturally dependent modes of expression that we know of.

If we are not confident, we can ask the speaker or the author what he implicated, or what his intentions were. If they are unavailable, we will have to go by the clues that I mentioned in the previous paragraph, as well as by many others. Highly relevant among the clues is the genre to which the text from which the sentences are taken, belongs, or must be presumed to belong: is it a historical report, a literary essay, a novel, a poem, a propagandistic text, or yet something else? Every genre requires it own approach and its own rules of exegesis. It is the traditional task of hermeneutics to formulate those rules.Footnote ³⁵ Often ego-documents of authors will provide clues as well. So there is a welter of things to attend to if one aims to grasp the speaker's meaning. Again, these ways of going about are very different from the ways of going about in the sciences.

We should not suppose that even if insistent scholarly attention is given to the clues mentioned above, and to the hermeneutical rules that have been proposed, we will have full certainty of the speaker's meaning. Pronouncements about speaker's intentions are fallible. Here as in the natural sciences, we will mostly have to be satisfied with probabilities – probabilities that often can not be given a precise numerical value. There are two main reasons for the lack of full certainty: (a) clues that once existed, may have gone missing; (b) speakers and authors may themselves not have very clear speaker's meanings, they may even have conflicting speaker's meanings.

[d] Maker's meaning. Finding out the maker's meaning of an artefact such as a painting, or a law, or a practical tool, is in many respects analogous to finding out speaker's meaning. Maker's meaning, recall, is what the maker aimed at by means of the work, what effects he may have hoped to realize through it.

Of relevance here are such things as: knowledge about the maker, what her station in life is, her general outlook on life; other things she made; what she said or wrote about what she made; what sorts of things her contemporaries working in the same area made; what her social and cultural environment was; what cultural conventions were in place; etc. All of these, and many more, might be or contain clues as to the maker's meaning. Examples of statements of speaker's meaning are: ‘she intended that this law should improve the entrepreneurial interaction with the Russians’, ‘she intended to show that post-Raphael painting was dead’, ‘she aimed to stir up the public against the government's colonial politics’.

Finding out maker's meaning may very often not be a work of great travail. In many ordinary and run of the mill situations, we more or less unreflectively get a decent sense of maker's meaning. Not all situations are ordinary, however, and often we are clueless about the maker's meaning. In such situations, we may self-consciously pay explicit attention to the clues mentioned, and study them in an in-depth way, i.e. engage in humanistic scholarship.

Again we must not suppose that we will always reach a clear resolution about maker's meaning. Vital clues may get lost. Makers may have not one, but multiple meanings, and these might be in conflict with each other. Or they may explicitly say that they ‘mean nothing at all’. Still, as a rule we may suppose that there is maker's meaning; there is no apriori reason for thinking things are otherwise. Also, we must deem ourselves able to capture maker's meaning; there is no apriori reason either for thinking we never can. In fact, there are strong reasons for thinking both that maker's meanings exist, and that we often are able to capture it. For example, we know from our own case that often when we make things, such as email messages, shopping lists, philosophical papers, poems, songs, paintings, laws, we have specific intentions in making these things (we affirm or deny something; we accuse or condone; we demonstrate something or cast it into doubt, etc.) and we aim to secure certain effects (we want certain things to be taken note of; certain things to be changed; certain seeds to be sowed, etc.); also: we often know the meanings of other makers (we know, we think, what Rembrandt wanted to say by means of The Nightwatch; we know what Rietveld intended when he made his famous chair.)

There are, then, multiple clues for finding out maker's meaning, multiple methods, i.e. multiple rules, to apply. Art historians, cultural scientists, historians may not have their methods cut out as clearly as linguists. But they surely have their methods – there is in fact intense discussions about them.Footnote ³⁶ And the point to see is that these methods for finding out maker's meaning are very different from the methods used in the natural sciences. And that is only natural, given the diversity of aims.

With respect to [e] functional meaning, we should note that, as Heidegger rightly remarked, in ordinary contexts the functional meaning of many objects is unreflectively understood: we know the function of cups and cutlery, books and newspapers, cars and bikes, shoes and clothing, axes and rakes. We know what they are for. But there will always be objects whose functional meaning escapes us, in which case some bit of inquiry will be required – humanistic inquiry. The functional meaning of many states of affairs (for instance the state of affairs consisting in the borders between countries) and regulations (such as EU regulations for procurement) will often be less clear. In such cases we will have to do much more in-depth investigation, often of a historical nature. For a description of the prehistory of the opaque states of affairs and seemingly strange regulations may make them intelligible. Historical inquiry can shed light on the factors and motivations of key players that are responsible for the emergence of the states of affairs and regulations. Historians have many methods at their command to do this.

Historical accounts of functional meaning may sometimes have the effect that now that we see the history behind the objects, states of affairs and regulations, we become convinced that they are out-dated, or wrong-headed, or unjust. At this junction the humanities may take on the further task of what has been called ‘ideology critique’, the task of passing critical normative judgments on what has emerged. However, on the basis of historical accounts of the functional meaning of objects, states of affairs and regulations, we can also become convinced that they are still important, still valuable, or even in need of further development. These too are important tasks of the humanities, and below, when discussing value meaning, I will return to it.

The obvious point this leads up to, of course, is that these methods are very different from the methods of the natural sciences, that are impotent when it comes to understanding the functional meaning of human-made artefacts.

Let us now turn to [f] expressive/indicative meaning. What humans do and what they make, is often the expression of something – something they might be unaware of. At least, that is what Marx and Freud, and the entire Christian tradition have maintained. Certain states of affairs, such as land ownership, Marx claimed, are expressions of capitalism. Certain cases of forgetting, Freud claimed, are expressions of certain unconscious attitudes. Certain attitudes, such as pride and greed, Christianity has said, are expressions of not being properly attuned to God. Whether these claims are true or false, depends on whether Marx’ theory of capitalism is correct, on whether Freud's psychoanalytic theory is true, and on whether what Christianity says about sin, is true.

There are ways of critically testing such claims, and these ways are not the ways of natural scientific inquiry.

Finally we turn to [g] value meaning. We must endorse that a thing has value only when it in fact has value, and deny that a thing has value only when it lacks value. It is an unwanted, an unjust, and an unholy state of affairs when what is worthless gets high acclaim, and when what has great value, is declared worthless. Valuing, or evaluating, is something we do virtually all the time, in virtually all contexts, and often implicitly. We value, evaluate, meals by how they taste. We evaluate clothes by how they look on us, by how expensive they are, and by the likelihood that they bear slavery footprints. We evaluate speeches by how effective they are, by how well they are composed, by how authentic they seem. We evaluate actions from historical figures by the soundness of their aims, by the moral virtues those actions display, and by the good or bad effects that they sorted.

Evaluating is ubiquitous and mostly goes entirely spontaneous. However, sometimes we are puzzled, and don't know how to evaluate some deed, some object, some state of affairs. In such cases we must explicitly reflect on what to think, some form of study, investigation or scholarship is called for. In some of these the humanities have a task to perform. For as I said in the previous section, one task of the humanities is to value things. It should be clear that many things are not the object of humanistic evaluation. For instance, that your meal today was cooked well, is an evaluation, but not a humanistic evaluation. That the boss's farewell speech was a tad over the top is an evaluation, but not a humanistic one. However, some evaluations can be a task of the humanities. I mention four kinds of evaluation: logical, philosophical, aesthetic and moral.

We evaluate both deductive and inductive arguments in terms of soundness, validity, etc. To say of an inductive argument that it is incorrect is to pass a logically evaluative verdict on it. We evaluate works of art, among other things, in term of beauty and thus pass aesthetical verdicts on them. We evaluate persons, actions, and the products their actions in terms of being virtuous, being right and being just and thus pass moral verdicts on them.

Is there a method that is applied when the humanities pass such evaluative verdicts? They are certainly not chance verdicts, that might as well have taken an entirely different content. There is a method in it. First, all the relevant non moral facts must be ascertained, so: the physical qualities and properties of the painting or the statue, the compositional properties of the music, the circumstances of the action, etc. Sometimes non-humanistic modes of learning will have to be used to get things straight here. Next the relevant normative standards will have to be applied. How do we know about these standards? Is there a further method by which we can secure them? Many philosophers have held that there are ‘first principles’ that can be intuitively known by well-formed and well-educated persons that are free from prejudice. Aesthetics, logic and ethics all have been claimed to have their own first principles that supposedly can be known immediately, i.e. independent of argument or ratiocination.Footnote ³⁷ What may be required, though, is reflection, but reflection is not argumentation.Footnote ³⁸ Others have proposed methods for argumentatively deriving moral truths from a single principle – as did Henry Sidgwick in his voluminous The Methods of Ethics. Footnote ³⁹

There is no space to go into this in any detail. Fortunately, there is no need either, as the main point is, again, that passing evaluative verdicts on matters aesthetical, logical and moral, cannot possibly be the business of the natural sciences. If scholarly attention needs to be given to such verdicts, then the humanities are in charge.

All of what I have said about method is still of a high level of abstraction and generality, even if it goes some bit further than the statements of Deductivism and Inductivism. But it is, I aver, or rather hope, of the right level to make the argument that the methods of the humanities are very different from those of the natural sciences at least plausible.