打印

[麦克萨尔]人文科学的非预期价值

本帖已经被作者加入个人空间

[麦克萨尔]人文科学的非预期价值

人文科学的非预期价值

斯蒂芬·麦克萨尔 著 吴万伟 译

刊发时间:2010-06-12 21:34:45 光明网-光明观察

  

  虽然表面上看"人文科学"和"人文主义"在词源学上的渊源关系相当明显,但不知什么原因,人文学者总喜欢对自己的晚辈下手。在市场条件恶化,难以招募年轻人时,学者们就兴冲冲地自相残杀了。

  就在一年前,著名学者斯坦利·费希(Stanley Fish)在他的《纽约时报》博客上谈到一个观点,即高等教育的一个突出特征就是缺席,其活动与"它对世界的可测量的影响"之间没有任何关系。最近他再次重复了这个观点。他单单把人文科学挑出来,指责它缺乏他所说的"应用价值"。他写到"人文科学的价值无法衡量,不过是一些学者的偏爱而已。"费希说,人文科学没有外在价值---工具性价值,不能提高生产力,也不能塑造智慧的公民、增强道德敏感性或减少偏见与歧视。

  并不令人奇怪的是,许多人上钩了。一个多月来,教授们就人文科学的用途争吵不休。这种争论正好发生在大众越来越多地怀疑人文教授及其研究的价值的背景下。人们似乎有一个没有明确说出来的(有时候大声说出来的)感觉,即文科教授似乎试图在逃避什么,我们该怎么说呢,他们试图在欺骗我们。这种心在去年《纽约时报》上的文章中达到了逻辑上的高潮,该文的题目是"在经济困难时期,文科必须证明自己的价值所在。"(考虑到这"困难时期"几乎完全是美国的商学院毕业生造成的,如果有人需要证明自身价值的话,应该是这些人才对。但或许只是我自己这样想。)

  所以当费希宣称人文科学研究的好处仅仅局限于研究者自己和课堂,因此公众不应该"资助我的美学鉴赏瞬间"。他实际上是很好地领会了共和党支持者的口号"钻探啊钻探啊,钱来了,钱来了"(讽刺联邦政府在海上石油钻探中的腐败-译注)中体现的当代思潮(zeitgeist)。

  正如费希承认的,真正的议题不是艺术、音乐、历史、文学是否具有工具价值,而是对这些学科的学术研究是否有价值。很少有人公然宣称艺术或文学没有内在价值或认为它们的用途可以测量出来。哈佛医学院的学生像美国各地医学院学生一样选修艺术课。研究者相信,艺术学习能够使得学生的观察力更强,思想更开放和灵活,简而言之,使他们成为更好的医生。

  1974年,国会成立了对国家生物医药和行为研究人体保护委员会。自那时以来生物伦理学家一直处于应用人文学科的前沿,尤其是在克林顿总统在1995年成立了国家生物伦理学顾问委员会后,生物伦理学家在医药、生物技术和法律等问题上的政策辩论中发挥了关键的作用。他们中至少相当一部分出身哲学系。

  虽然讲授毕加索或者康德可能需要学术上的思考, 但这些例子不能证明人文科学研究的用途,也不能证明这些学科的用途。医学院的艺术课不是有关画家莫奈(Monet)作品的学术研究,他们关心的是莫奈的实际画作。所以问题是:艺术、哲学、文学、历史的学术分析,也就是文科的学术研究是否有清晰可辨的用途?

  实际上,人文科学研究具有工具价值,但这种价值很少是直接的或者可以预测的。请看下面的例子:

  1970年代和1980年代,计算机科学家高德纳(Donald E. Knuth)突然意识到设计电脑软件实际上是类似于文学创作的美学行为。正如他在《文学化编程》(1992))中详细表达的,他的电脑语言工作受到人文科学的重大影响。高德纳写了两个电脑程序-WEB 和 CWEB-部分因为他找到了一种能够允许"一个人用意识流风格编程的"语言。

  "意识流"是1890年威廉·詹姆斯(William James)首次使用的术语,用来描述人类思想概念的流动。后来它被文学批评家梅·弗里德曼(Melvin J. Friedman)所采用,此人在1955年出版了一本书《意识流:一种文学方法研究》。他用这个术语解释1920年代现代派小说中常见的没有编辑的内心独白。但高德纳自己承认,他的革新主要受到比利时电脑科学家皮埃尔·阿诺德·玛尼夫(Pierre-Arnoul de Marneffe)的影响,而玛尼夫则是看了阿瑟·凯斯特勒(Arthur Koestler)1967年有关复杂器官结构的书《机器中的幽灵》受到启发的。《机器中的幽灵》的题目和思想则来自20世纪一项重要的人文科学研究吉尔伯特·莱尔(Gilbert Ryle)挑战笛卡尔二元论的《思想概念》(1949)。因此,我们看到一个看得见的价值传承,笛卡尔研究导致了电脑科学的重大革新。

  历史和文学研究也影响国家的情报界。当战略服务办公室(OSS,中央情报局的前身)在1942年创立时,办公室主任威廉·多诺万(William J. Donovan)吸收文科教授加盟。他招聘了50多位历史学家来研发战略服务办公室的分析方法。这些学者采用了文科研究的框架、脚注、尾注、参考书目、交叉索引、反向索引等指导下情报分析实践。这反过来使得战略服务办公室能够在一天时间内按重要性顺序编纂外国目标清单。

  后来成为中央情报局反情报主管的詹姆斯·安格勒顿(James J. Angleton)通过研究文学批评著作而养成的技能掌握了情报阐述技巧。理查兹(I.A. Richards)的《实用批评》(1929) 和燕卜荪(William Empson)《含混的七种类型》(1930) 等学术著作帮助创造了情报分析和信息管理的新方法。情报分析科学实际上就是在文科学者提出的研究方法上创造出来的。

  把这些故事联结起来的不是他们说明了文科研究具有工具价值,而是它们有非预期工具价值。这些学者没有打算也不可能预测自己研究的应用价值。但这不是说文科研究的应用性是研究价值所在。毕竟,学者研究莎士比亚的时候并不是用一只眼盯着中央情报局的创立。相反,文科研究就像所有学科研究一样重要,恰恰是因为我们从来不知道新知识会给我们带来什么结果。

  这个原则最近被洛斯阿拉莫斯国家实验室的科学家再次证实。科学家们画出了显示不同学科研究者展示复杂网络影响力的曲线图。他们跟踪阅读网上十万学术杂志的阅读模式,某个学术领域的研究者引用了另一个学科的文章时就记录一次,由此制成"科学点击流程图"。学科知识联系曲线图看起来就像车轮,其中的毂是人文社科杂志,位于边缘的主要是自然科学杂志,辐条则由新兴的跨学科杂志如新能源、人文地理、生物多样性等构成。该图显示人文科学充当了学科之间的桥梁,激发新观点和新研究领域。正如该研究的作者总结的,他们的发现纠正了"社会科学和人文科学"在科学研究成果上偏少的错误。所以,即使像斯坦利·费希的人文科学提供了"美学鉴赏瞬间"的愉悦是真实的,但那显然不是他们的全部工作。

  当然,有人可能会提出上面提到的所有例子都是20世纪早期和中期进行的文科研究。("新的研究成果在哪里?受福柯《性史》激发的酸奶冰淇淋技术在哪里?)但这是问题的一部分。现在只能辨别出20世纪人文研究的非预期价值,现在的人文研究的价值或许需要几十年后才能认识到。再过40年,人们回头看1980年代或者1990年代,说不定会认为这个时期是文科研究大丰收的黄金时代呢。我们不知道这种研究是否有应用价值。

  因此,用途和预期后果是棘手问题。费希宣称他讨论的只是文科研究与最终的工具性价值之间"直接的和预期的"关系,以此回避实质问题。但任何学科的任何研究项目在科研的程序特征和它可能具有的最终效果或非预期影响之间都不存在直接的和即刻的关系。如果有的话,研究者就不必研究了,直接做完全不同的事好了,如政策实施或者资产管理。所以,当有人说文科研究没有明显的直接的非学术用途时,我觉得这种说法从根本上说是大而无当,就像跨越牙签那样高的栅栏。预期结果和最终应用价值之间的巨大鸿沟是所有研究中常见的现象,无论在什么学科都是如此,这也是任何科研的特征。我们不知道不了解的东西,即使知道,我们也不清楚我们这些东西将来会有什么用途。

  这是很正常的事。任何学科都有很多不清楚工具价值为何的研究的例子。不列颠哥伦比亚大学的科学家发现在一堵蓝色墙(不是红色)前面工作会促进创造性的思考。内布拉斯加大学和华盛本大学(Washburn University)的商学和社会学学者发现,打高尔夫球的女性在高尔夫课程上往往因为觉得自己掌握技术太慢的错误观念而感受到冷遇。加州大学戴维斯分校的土木工程师发现,人们买汽车时的选择部分受生活方式的影响。比如,他们了解到那些追求地位的人更愿意购买昂贵的汽车,而顾家的人更愿意购买小型面包车。表面上看,这种研究似乎稀松平常或没有什么工具性价值。但它的真正用途恰恰在于我们并不真正知道它的用途是什么。

  长期以来,美国人具有赞赏为学术而学术的美德的传统。1958年艾森豪威尔总统在鼓动创建美国宇航局时对国会发表的演讲中说,该新机构部分是出于国家安全的考虑,苏联已经在前一年发射了人造卫星,但它也有更抽象的理由。他指出,美国宇航局会刺激"人们探索未知领域的迫切渴望",提升"国家的地位",推动额外的"科学和探索",创造更加丰富的"科学观察和实验的机会,丰富我们的知识"等,因此会让我们受益无穷。

  就算我们假定艾森豪威尔故意对其军事用途轻描淡写是一种修辞手段的运用,令人印象深刻的是,他为美国宇航局的辩护是多么抽象,纯科学研究、模糊性和无知结果的愉悦是多么根深蒂固。它背后的基本逻辑至今依然存在。美国宇航局花费了大量金钱,但如果你问任何一个小学四年级的学生或成年人美国宇航局的目的及产品,得到的答案可能是诸如"地球引力对番茄种子的影响"或"卫星技术"或"Tang饮料美味可口"的争论(和大众普遍的观念相反,美国宇航局并没有实际开发常常被归功于它的有用发明如唐牌饮料(Tang)或耐高温涂料特富龙(Teflon)或连接辅料维克罗 (Velcro))在后冷战时代,美国宇航局的作用不是获得让人怀疑的番茄种子数据,而是为了学习新东西。我们进入太空是因为我们想了解新东西,而不是我们得到的什么。美国宇航局是纯粹科研的最伟大纪念碑,把它的重要性放在某个具体结果上来衡量是愚蠢的想法。

  我们预先并不知道科学研究的最终工具性价值如何,但我们还是要搞科研。公平地说,学习新东西当然好,不管它最终是否导致产生新技术或者其他用途。任何一个研究者,无论是美国宇航局工作人员还是诗歌学者都拥有一个基本特征,那就是不知道研究的最终结果如何。任何学科研究的共同点是结果未知。我们不知道将要发现什么,这恰恰是科学研究的价值所在。如果事先知道了科研项目的用途,那我们还研究它干嘛?

  译自:The Unintended Value of the Humanities By Stephen J. Mexal

  作者简介:斯蒂芬·麦克萨尔(Stephen J. Mexal)加州州立大学富尔顿(Fullerton)分校英语副教授。

  http://chronicle.com/article/The-Unintended-Value-of-the/65619/

 


The Unintended Value of
the Humanities

 
 

Christophe Vorlet for The Chronicle Review

Despite the ostensibly significant etymological link between "humanities" and "humane," humanities scholars, for some reason, love to eat their young. And in the event that market conditions make no young available, those scholars will, and happily, start to eat themselves.

Over the past year or so, Stanley Fish has occasionally devoted his New York Times blog to the notion that, as he put it recently, higher education is "distinguished by the absence" of a relationship between its activities and any "measurable effects in the world." He has singled out the humanities for lacking what he called "instrumental value," writing that "the value of the humanities cannot be validated by some measure external" to the peculiar obsessions of scholars. The humanities, Fish claimed, do not have an extrinsic utility—an instrumental value—and therefore cannot increase economic productivity, fashion an informed citizenry, sharpen moral perceptions, or reduce prejudice and discrimination.

Unsurprisingly, many rose to the bait, and for a month or so, the professing classes bickered about the usefulness of the humanities. This argument always reappears during the recurring, if increasingly frequent, periods of public suspicion of humanities professors and their research. There seems to be an unstated (or, on occasion, quite loudly stated) feeling that humanities professors are somehow ... what ... trying to get away with something; that they are ... how shall we say ... trying to put one over on us. This sentiment reached its logical apex last year in an article in The New York Times titled, "In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth."

(Given that these "tough times" were almost single-handedly caused by graduates of our nation's business colleges, it seems that they, if anyone, should have to "justify their worth." But maybe it's just me.)

So when Fish claimed that the benefits of humanities research were limited to the researcher or the classroom, and that the public should therefore not have to "subsidize my moments of aesthetic wonderment," he was drill-baby-drilling into the zeitgeist quite nicely.

The real issue, as Fish concedes, is not whether art, music, history, or literature has instrumental value, but whether academic research into those subjects has such value. Few would claim that art and literature have no intrinsic worth, and very few would claim that they possess no measurable utility. Students at Harvard Medical School, for instance, like students at a growing number of medical schools across the country, now take art courses. Studying works of art, researchers believe, makes students more observant, more open to complexity, and more-flexible thinkers—in short, better doctors.

And bioethicists, working at least in part out of the discipline of philosophy, have been at the forefront of applied humanities since 1974, when Congress created the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research. Since then, and especially after President Clinton established the National Bioethics Advisory Commission, in 1995, bioethicists have played a crucial role in policy debates arising in medicine, biotechnology, and the law.

While teaching Picasso or applying Kant probably involves some scholarly mediation, those examples do not prove the usefulness of humanities research so much as they prove the usefulness of the subjects of that research. Medical-school art classes aren't concerned with scholarship on Monet's paintings, they are concerned with Monet's actual paintings. So the question is this: Can academic analyses of art, philosophy, literature, or history—that is, academic research in the humanities—have recognizable utility?

In fact, humanities research already has instrumental value. That value, however, is rarely immediate or predictable. Consider the following examples:

In the 1970s and 1980s, the computer scientist Donald E. Knuth was struck by how designing computer software was essentially an aesthetic act, analogous to writing literature. As detailed in his book Literate Programming (1992), his work on computer languages was shaped by his engagement with the humanities. Knuth wrote two computer programming systems—WEB and CWEB—in part because he sought a language that would allow "a person to express programs in a 'stream of consciousness'" style.

"Stream of consciousness" was a phrase first used by William James, in 1890, to describe the flow of perception in the human mind. It was later adopted by literary critics like Melvin J. Friedman, author of the 1955 book Stream of Consciousness: A Study in Literary Method, who used the term to explain the unedited forms of interior monologue common in modernist novels of the 1920s. However, by his own acknowledgment, Knuth's innovations were most clearly influenced by the work of the Belgian computer scientist Pierre-Arnoul de Marneffe, who was in turn inspired by Arthur Koestler's 1967 book, The Ghost in the Machine, on the structure of complex organisms. And that book took its title and its point of departure from a key piece of 20th-century humanities research, Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind (1949), which challenged Cartesian dualism.

There is, then, a visible legacy of utility that begins with research into Descartes and leads to important innovations in computer science.

Research in history and literary studies has also shaped the world of national intelligence. When the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, predecessor of the CIA) was established, in 1942, the director, William J. Donovan staffed his agency with humanities professors. More than 50 historians alone were hired to develop the OSS's analytical methods. These scholars adopted the framework of humanities research—the footnote, the endnote, the bibliography, cross- and counter-indexing—to give order and form. to the practice of intelligence analysis. That, in turn, enabled the OSS to do things like compile a list of foreign targets in order of importance on less than a day's notice.

James J. Angleton, who became chief of counterintelligence for the CIA, understood that the interpretive skills he had cultivated by studying works of literary scholarship like I.A. Richards's Practical Criticism (1929) and William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) could help create new methods of intelligence synthesis and information management. Research methods developed by humanities scholars, in sum, essentially invented the science of intelligence analysis.

What unites those stories is not that they exemplify times when humanities research has had instrumental value, but rather times when it has had unintended instrumental value. Those scholars did not intend, nor could they have anticipated, the applied value of their work. Yet that's not to say the application of their work was the point of their work. After all, scholars weren't studying Shakespeare with an eye toward establishing the CIA. Instead, research in the humanities, like research in all disciplines, is valuable precisely because we never know where new knowledge will lead us.

This principle was demonstrated recently by scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory, who put together a graph demonstrating the complex web of influences among researchers in different disciplines. They tracked the reading patterns of nearly 100,000 online scholarly journals, charting when a researcher in one academic field cited an article in another academic field. The resulting graph—a "clickstream map of science"—looks like a wheel in which the hub is composed of humanities and social-science journals, and the rim is made up mostly of natural-science publications. The spokes are formed by journals from emerging interdisciplinary fields like alternative energy, human geography, and biodiversity. The graph suggests that the humanities act as a bridge among disciplines, sparking new ideas and areas of research. As the study's authors conclude, their findings correct the "underrepresentation of the social sciences and humanities" in outcomes of scientific research. So even if, as Stanley Fish argues, the humanities provide pleasures of "aesthetic wonderment," that's obviously not all they do.

One might reasonably point out that all of the historical examples above are from humanities research performed in the early to middle part of the 20th century. ("Where's the new stuff? Where's the frozen-yogurt technology inspired by Foucault's The History of Sexuality?") But that's part of the point. It takes decades to make sense of the present, and it is only now that the unintended contributions of 20th-century humanities research can be discerned. Forty years from now, people might look back on the 1980s and 1990s as a golden age of inadvertently useful humanities research. We simply don't know how or if such research might yet acquire use value.

Consequently the issue of utility and intended outcomes is a thorny one. Fish hedges by claiming that he's talking about only a "direct and designed" relationship between humanities research and any ultimate instrumental value. But no research project, in any discipline, has a direct and immediate relationship between the academic procedures characterizing it as research and any eventual, extracurricular effects it might have. If it did, the researcher wouldn't be doing research, but rather something else entirely, like policy implementation or asset management. So if one wants to claim that humanities research has no immediately obvious nonacademic utility, I suppose that claim is basically correct. But making that argument is like hurdling a toothpick. The yawning gap between intended outcomes and eventual use value is one common to all research, regardless of discipline. That's what makes it research. We don't know what we don't know, and we also don't know how—if at all—what we learn might be used in the future.

This is nothing new. Examples of research with unclear instrumental value abound, in all disciplines. Scientists at the University of British Columbia have found that working in front of a blue wall (and not a red one) improves creative thinking. Scholars of business and sociology at the University of Nebraska and at Washburn University have discovered that female golfers often feel unwelcome on golf courses, in part because of the misperception that they are slow players. And civil engineers at the University of California at Davis have found that the kind of vehicle one purchases is determined partly by lifestyle. considerations—status seekers, they learned, are more likely to buy expensive cars, while family-oriented people are more likely to buy minivans. Viewed superficially, that sort of research may seem obvious, or at least devoid of instrumental value. But its real usefulness is, paradoxically, that we don't yet fully know how it will be useful.

Americans have long appreciated the virtues of pure research. In an address to Congress advocating the establishment of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, in 1958, President Eisenhower said the new agency would be necessary in part for national security—the Soviet Union had launched Sputnik the year before—but also for more-abstract reasons. He indicated that NASA would be a boon because of the "compelling urge of man to explore the unknown"; because it would increase "national prestige," which would then lead to additional "science and exploration"; and because it would create further "opportunities for scientific observation and experimentation which will add to our knowledge."

Even if you assume that Eisenhower's downplaying the military potential was a rhetorical ploy, it is striking how abstract his justification for NASA was—how rooted in pure research, ambiguity, and the pleasures of unknown outcomes—and how much that basic logic has persisted to this day. NASA costs a tremendous amount of money. But ask any fourth grader, or any adult, for that matter, about the purpose of NASA, about what it has produced, and you will very likely get some mumblings about "the effect of gravity on tomato seeds," or something about "satellite technology," or maybe just that "Tang is delicious." (Contrary to popular myth, NASA didn't actually develop Tang, Teflon, or Velcro, three useful inventions for which it is commonly credited.) But in the post-cold-war era, the point of NASA is not to acquire some questionable data about floating tomato seeds; the point of NASA is to learn new things. We go into space because we learn stuff, not because we get stuff. NASA is our greatest monument to pure research, and it is foolish to suggest that its importance can be determined on the basis of particular utilitarian outcomes.

We can't know the ultimate instrumental value of research in advance. But we perform. that research anyway, because we have decided that, on balance, it is good to learn new things, whether or not they eventually lead to new technologies or other useful things. All researchers, NASA scientists and poetry scholars alike, possess an essential cluelessness about the ultimate outcomes of their work. Common to the act of research across all disciplines is the core principle of the unknown outcome: We don't know exactly what we're going to find out—and that is precisely the point. After all, if we knew in advance precisely how a research project would be useful, why would we need to do it at all?

Stephen J. Mexal is an assistant professor of English at California State University at Fullerton.


 

附件:

TOP