Renaissance 2.0: Digitising the Pursuit of History

I’ve just been reading Timothy J Riess’s book Knowledge, Discovery and Imagination in Early Modern Europe: the Rise of Aesthetic Rationalism (CUP 1997) as I’m currently delving into a the murky world of whatever passed for aesthetic thinking prior to the eighteenth century. This is an interesting book, suggesting that one of the reasons for the big intellectual and social changes that took place in the Early Modern Period was due to a change in focus from the Bachelors’ studies of the liberal arts of the Trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric/dialectic) to those of the Masters’ studies of the Quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy). He notes that a new skill began to be applied out of these latter studies that would become central to them: mathematics. Riess focuses on the 1520s, claiming that a majority of university education before this point prioritised grammatica as the foundation of the others, placing language on a lofty pedestal from which the word was with everything and was everything.  The cosmos and the word (and so God) were one and the same. This obsession with the word played no small part in the rise of Humanism, fuelled as they were by a desire to find the perfect word, the most pure Latin, the closest translations, the oldest manuscripts and, soon after, the best use of vernaculars, in order to better read the books of God (bible and nature).

The problem began when language reached its limits. Language may be the way in which a culture understands its cosmos, but it also has constraints built into the language itself. Anything it cannot describe it, well, cannot describe. What was called res, a Latin word meaning ‘stuff’ or ‘things’ but also understood as ‘non-linguistic entities’ lay beyond the edges of grammatica. As a result, language became increasing complex and convoluted in its attempts to grapple with the big questions until, as Riess puts it “older theological and ontological knots combined with sociopolitical and epistemological ones to create an impasse” [Riess, p.2). This weighted down the pursuit of knowledge in the Trivium, while the introduction of new forms of mathematics into the Quadrivium enthused them and those practical arts, such as medicine and natural philosophy, which were studied after them. 

Initially, Petrus Ramus used method: a form of mathematics that he and the Ramist movement, so influential on later thinkers such as Descartes, deployed to restructure the pursuit of wisdom into organisational trees. Ramus’s contribution was one of methodological organisation rather than discovery. As natural philosophy became more prominent in the Quadrivium, and the grammatical bases ability to use natural language as a means of discovery fell away, mathematics became the new means of discovering knowledge. What is important is that this was not simply a rational or reasoned use of mathematics, but one that could explain music through theory, poetry through meter, and even understandings of related passions and actions (which is where I get more interested).

The idea that mathematics was the final cutting of the Gordian knot of discovery is one of a series of suggestion as to why the Aristotelian Organum had begun to be rejected in favour of new ideas. Some suggested a deep change in mentality from a world focused on hearing and understanding to one focused on sight and discovery. Others suggest that the shock of discovering both the New World and that your head didn’t explode from the heat if you kept going south, followed by the discoveries of  Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, began a process of questioning other assumed ideas; a realisation that quite often the ancients were wrong. All of these things, coupled with economics, environmental and population changes and the resultant geopolitics are, I suspect, part of it. Not only is it foolish to assume a single cause, in my opinion, but also we just don’t have the information. Yet.

But this is not what I am interested in. I am interested in the idea that natural language reached an impasse. That a time came when no more discoveries could be made by word alone and it turned out that the word was not God. Works became convoluted and over complicated, and the description of the cosmos as text was almost impossible. No matter how perfect the Latin, or vernacular, there remained the undiscovered raw signified.

I am getting a little ahead of myself.

One of the interesting things about history is that it is not a grand narrative, or a teleological series of causes and effects marching on in progression to now. There are continuities, sure, but why things might continue is as curious as why things discontinue, and both of these involve overlap, loss, discovery, rediscovery, and reconstruction. If history gives the illusion of teleology, it is because often comparisons between now and then, or between discontinuities and continuities, provide us with a tool to examine history in some detail. Then I wondered, what if something like a reconstruction or rediscovery is happening now. 

TEXTUAL HEALINGS

Without going too far into the tedious and complex (oh so tedious and oh so complex) details of poststructuralism, the very basic premise is this.

Everything we describe we do so has a referent (the ‘thing’), a signifier (the label or word used to describe the ‘thing’), and a signified (the concept we attach to the thing). Take a door. That wooden thing behind me (referent) is called a "door" (signifier) and is conceptually something that I use to get in and out of my room (signified). The signifier and signified come together to form a ‘sign’, because without both, you just have an extra-linguistic referent that cannot be understood. A word without a concept or meaning is just noise, a concept without a signifier is something unknown. 

Signifiers need not be words. Road signs are a classic example of a signifier that is not a word. It is still communicating something, but not through a natural language. Mathematics could also be included as signs. Indeed, maths is the harshest type. An incorrect equation is almost by definition a signifier without a signified.

Here is the problem identified by poststructuralists, as simply as I can put it. In order to describe the signified – in the case of the door that is ‘something that I use to get in and out of my room’ – you need another set of signifiers. ‘Something' can be signified as ‘an object’, ‘I use’ as ‘an action by the self for practical purposes’, ‘out’ as ‘not from within’, and so on. This forms another set of signs, all of which have their own signifiers and signifieds and on it goes. It ultimately all becomes text; how else do you describe the signified of a road sign? 

According to Derrida, you can take these layers of signifiers, deconstruct them, and then reconstruct a different but just as valid sign. So the signified of a door could be reconstructed as  ‘an action utilized by the self that is not from within an object’, altering the overall sign. This is a very, and I mean very, simple example of reconstruction (but at least you can see where the indecipherable language of poststructuralists comes from!).

One of the most pressing problems with poststructuralism is that they really should not write anything at all, because if there is no ultimate signified, there is no foundation to any sort of knowledge. Epistemology is just shifting sands on which nothing is real, and everything is subjective, as with postmodernism. Oddly, this postmodernism and poststructuralism that has buried deep into the skull of social science and the humanities seems to have bypassed physical science. This may be because the physical sciences have already faced this crisis way back in the 16^th and 17^th Centuries, when natural philosophy realized the shortcomings of natural languages for many of the same reasons. It may also be because poststructuralism’s problems do not apply in the same way to mathematics, because you can unpack equations into their foundational elements. This can even be done if the mathematical signifiers lack a signified.

The problem is not that everything is text, but that some things are not. Extreme postmodernism may be right: it seems that you cannot discover real things about the complexities of human social and cultural interaction, in the past or the present, using natural language alone.  There will be an impasse where many of the ontological, epistemological, and sociocultural and political – not to mention psychological, ecological, and economic  - knots of human behaviour become wrapped up in a language of non-discovery.

RENAISSANCE 2.0

The social sciences and humanities need a Renaissance. Mathematics has, thus far, not been all that fruitful to the pursuit of history. Richard Carrier has attempted to use Bayes Theorem in order to study history, but his laudable ambition falls short when you realise that the figures to be plugged into his calculations are little more than educated guess work, prone as that is to subjective influences. However, there is a new tool at the disposal of humanities and social sciences that might bring hope: computers.

From a slideshow on the Digital Humanities
available by clicking here.

The Digital Humanities (and Social Sciences) open up opportunities to examine patterns free from the constraints of natural languages. It allows huge amounts of texts and other data to be collated, dissected and compared. It allows for the possibility of context free patterns to be merged within a series of contexts such as that of the work, the author, their background, the readership, and the person to whom the work is responding. It allows us to move past the unending raft of social theories that seem no better to me than the often discounted observations of early modern philosophers, and to examine the data inductively for hypothesis forming patterns, and then test that hypothesis, possibly through Bayes Theorem and/or by making a prediction about future data.

Now, I know this will freak out a lot of social sciences and humanities people out, but it need not. I think that the tools now at our disposal take us past the examination of at most a few hundreds of sources and potentially into the examination of millions. Combined with the very best of current methodology, including a close look at what we find out to be the more representative, and least representative, texts, this can only be a good thing. It means we have to be ready to adapt. It means we have to ask questions and not assume answers, and it means, in the case of history, that those answers are more likely to come from the past, than the present.

I actually think it is not only good, but also very probably the future.