What kind of knowledge are the Humanities?

What kind of knowledge are the Humanities? It is hard to say that there are hypotheses, generalizations
and theories in the strict sense in which physics has them. In the face of such a challenge to the pursuit
of humanities, some humanists are tempted to argue the following: generalizations and theories are
not exactly of the same kind across physics and biology and chemistry. By the same token, it is
illegitimate to ask for similarities across physics and the humanities. What physicists say is a theory is
what theory is for physics and what humanists say is a theory is a theory for humanists. While this is a
clever argumentative move, it does not particularly help in understanding what is at stake in such a
question. At any rate, such extremely relativistic arguments should be shunned by decent people in all
walks of life. We should also avoid questions about the value of the humanities. We all know that the
humanities have some value and that is why we are even so much as bothering to have this debate.
Therefore it is churlish to rake up questions about the value of the humanities in a debate which is
actually about whence this value of the humanities.

Another breed of apologists for the humanities, who are at least cursorily acquainted with the sciences
and their very robust and powerful explanatory systems, would want to find physics-equivalent and
chemistry-equivalent explanatory systems in the humanities. They fail miserably. We could discuss why
they fail, but that is not at all illuminating. At any rate, if they had succeeded, we would have surely
heard about it, wouldnt we?

So, keep aside all that talk about the value and the scientific nature of the humanities. Here is a different
kind of a case. My case is not a meditation on the humanities. It attempts to lay down something like a
law. It makes a knock-down argument. Either it succeeds, or it fails. And, for once, there is nothing in
between, nothing of the shades of grey. I do not claim any originality for this argument. But I do claim
more, much more, than its original proponents claimed on behalf of this argument. There is more skin in
this game for us. Here we go. Caution: steep ascent ahead.

A proposition can be tested for its truth. Is it true that water contains two atoms of hydrogen and one
atom of oxygen? Is it true that E=mc2? And so on. A scientific theorys worth depends on truth condition
tests. Simply put, you make a hypothesis about a piece of the universe, and show how and why that is
true, and what the implications of that statement being true are. Others will fight you on this ground.
They will try to prove that what you are saying is not true, true but trivial, or true only for some things.
In extreme cases, they may say, it is impossible to understand what is it for such statements to be true.
Im sure you are reminded of certain debates in string theory and quantum mechanics. But then, as I
said, they are extreme cases. Workaday scientists mostly spar about truth. Now, a logical system of such
propositions is called a theory. Scientists build, test, improve or demolish theories. (You may feel the
need for some nicety here and therefore the following addendum: the truth of statements can be tested
only within a predefined domain (that is, a theory). Therefore the truth of propositions cannot be
understood independently of everything else happening within a given explanatory system.
Philosophers of science call this the theory laden-ness of facts. But, again, as I said, this is a nicety you
can safely ignore for the purposes of my argument.)

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Exactly like a statement can be tested for its truth, it can also be tested for its intelligibility. Examples will
now become counterfactual or extremely artificial. So please bear with them examples. There is a
reason why it has to be so. Imagine a statement like the following: in a game of chess, the knight moves
three staggered squares. This statement is not inviting you to test its truth. Instead it is asking you to
learn to play a game of chess using these parameters. It is not giving you information about a part of our
world, but instructions about how to identify and handle things. That is, it is giving you a small piece of
the grammar of chess. The test for this statement is whether you have interpreted it correctly or not. In
other words, the test is not about whether the statement is true or false. Nothing hangs on that. But
everything hangs on its intelligibility. Here too, others will fight you on this very ground. If you make a
wrong move, they will not try to prove to you that the statement the knight moves three staggered
squares is true. They will try to help you understand the statement better by teaching you how to do
things correctly. Suppose it is a toddler sitting in front them failing to understand this statement, they
will play along with the toddlers silly moves, knowing fully well that what they are playing now is not a
game of chess as they understand it. The toddler, in this instance, has confounded the intelligibility
conditions of the game of chess as they know it. (Again, for those seeking nicety, Wittgenstein called this
the language game that determines a form of life).

Now, to the humanities. The express purpose of the humanities is to deal with other experiences, other
people, other cultures, other epochs, other times, other forms of life, to render them intelligible. The
other may be right next to you or separated by eons and oceans. But the point is not to make
statements about them to subsequently test if such statements are true. The point is to understand the
categories and concepts that shape their actions in such a way that those actions are rendered
intelligible to us.

Ancient Greece was a slaveholding society. They championed Democracy. Now, what is their concept of
democracy that seamlessly allowed for slavery? The question is to render the concept intelligible. There
is nothing true or false to be tested here. Akbar purportedly created a religion called din-i-llahi. Was this
a product of theological syncretism as we understand it today, or were there other concepts and other
motivations behind it? Indians have written aesthetic treatises for centuries now. How to understand
the absence of any debate about realism in this tradition, a debate which is so central to modern
western aesthetics? Was Luthers damnation of the Church a sound criticism going by the canons of
biblical hermeneutics, or was it an irredeemably literalist rant? Late in his life, Tolstoys Christianity was
approaching Chiliastic anarchism. What did Tolstoy understand his pursuit to be and what shaped his
worldview? To what extent would Catholic Christianity accommodate Tolstoys ideas?

Questions about the truth of particular propositions have little value in such a pursuit. That does not
mean you can fib your way through. It only means that the more important question is that of rendering
those choices, concepts, ideas and actions intelligible. How do people pick a quarrel in the humanities?
Someone may say, Greek notions of democracy and their support for slavery are a contradiction,
showing the deep seated hypocrisy of Greek thinkers. This is one way of rendering the idea intelligible.
Someone else may take issue with such characterization and say that driving a moral wedge into Greek
life will only make the case less intelligible rather than more. So, we need a better characterization than
this one. It is not my concern here to argue which one of the two is correct, but to show how fights are

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fought and resolved in the humanities. Demanding that truth conditions be fulfilled in a task which is
meant to fulfill intelligibility conditions is a category error of sorts.

The more persistent among you may still want to hold that the distinction between truth conditions and
intelligibility conditions is itself shaky. Isnt it necessary for something to be first intelligible to test if it is
true? And if you do not know what the appropriate test for the truth of a proposition is, does it also not
automatically mean that the proposition is not intelligible? Good question. But it is not a feature of the
world that some statements can be boxed into truth conditions and some into intelligibility conditions.
In other words, it is not an empirical distinction. It is a logical distinction. The same proposition can be
treated as fulfilling one condition or the other. The only rule is, these two treatments do not overlap,
but are mutually exclusive.

Truth condition tests are not essential characteristics of science. They are only paradigmatic to science.
Many more things happen inside science than merely truth condition testing. Similarly, many more
things happen inside humanities than merely intelligibility testing. It is just that this distinction shows
the two ways of handling things sharply enough for our purpose.

Now that I have riled the outsiders, let me rile the humanists too. When the humanities go beyond their
purpose of providing intelligibility conditions to providing causal and explanatory theories about the
world, they create mischief. It is not that some people are barred from searching for causes and
explanations. It is simply that your questions cannot be framed in the logic of intelligibility quests, and
your answers sought in the logic of truth quests. An example: why did the Founding Fathers choose to
keep an Electoral College system in the United States of America rather than a system of direct
representation? A good intelligibility account might look like this: They were trying to create a balance
between the white minorities of the slave-owning South and the white majorities of the free North. But
a truth condition and causation account would look like this: The Electoral College system proves that
the founding fathers were racists. Eureka! It is sad that a lot of taxpayers money is spent on
humanities professors who give such silly garden-variety causation accounts and theories at the cost of
doing their proper job. But then, shit happens.

Here you may want to be a contrarian and ask: arent there theoretical physicists doing exactly that with
high physics? Arent they asking questions about whether string theory is an intelligible account of the
universe or not? That may be true. But imagine a physicist getting tenured only by publishing
intelligibility-related papers without publishing anything with actual theoretical or experimental stuff,
the very stuff that truth condition tests are made of. Forget tenure, hell not even get invitations to his
colleagues parties. In contrast, Wittgenstein only did intelligibility-related stuff all through the latter
half of his career. His Philosophical Investigations is the epitome of such a pursuit. And he is arguably the
greatest philosopher produced by the twentieth century and Cambridge. (If you read the previous
sentence as a causal statement, then reread this entire article. You have missed something,
somewhere). Try reading Gibbons Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as a causal theoretical account
of the fall of the Roman Empire, and you will be forgiven for thinking Gibbon is daft; your history teacher
in school could do better. Read the same account as providing intelligibility conditions to understand the
political life-world of the Romans, and you may have been in the company of a master!