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The Discovery of Rule Systems in the Humanities

The Discovery of Rule Systems in the Humanities. Rens Bod University of Amsterdam ILLC / Huizinga Institute. Humanities vs Social Sciences (1). What are the humanities? Wilhelm Dilthey (1883):

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The Discovery of Rule Systems in the Humanities

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  1. The Discovery of Rule Systems in the Humanities Rens Bod University of Amsterdam ILLC / Huizinga Institute

  2. Humanities vs Social Sciences (1) • What are the humanities? Wilhelm Dilthey (1883): • Humanities (Geisteswissenschaften) are the disciplines that study the products of the human mind e.g. musicology, philology, linguistics, art history, theatre studies, rhetoric, etc • The term ‘humanities’ appears in English only in the 20th century

  3. Humanities and Social Sciences (2) • Humanities are sometimes grouped under the general umbrella of “social sciences” • Especially history, linguistics, sometimes musicology • Yet, art history, literary theory, theater studies, rhetoric, philology are usually not seen as ‘social sciences’ • The conjunction ‘social sciences and humanities’ is sometimes referred to as ‘human sciences’ • Cf. Forum for History of Human Science

  4. Historiography of the humanities • Compared to the social sciences, the comparative history of humanities seems to be neglected • General historical overviews do exist in the social sciences: e.g. Gordon 1993; Smith 1997; Porter & Ross 2003… • Only very recently, a first comparative history of the humanities was written (Bod 2010) • Covers history of the study of language, text, music, art, history, theatre, literature and oratory

  5. A guiding question for a history of the humanities • How did humanities researchers investigate their material -- texts, music, language, art, theatre -- and what did they find? • The humanities as we know them today have been proposed as a coherent set of disciplines only since the 19th century • But the study of texts, language, music, art etc. goes back to antiquity. Thus a history of the Humanities can be written from Antiquity onwards

  6. Quest for patterns in the humanities: search for underlying rule systems • There seems to be unbroken tradition in the quest for rules and rule systems underlying languages, texts, music, art, literature, theater • Next to this quest there are also approaches that reject patterns, rules and regularities • from ‘Anomalists’ in Pergamon in 3rd c. BCE to current postmodernists

  7. A dominant vision in the philosophy of the humanities • W. Dilthey 1883/1908: • Sciences (Naturwissenschaften): erklären • Humanities (Geisteswissenschaften): verstehen • W. Windelband 1904: • Sciences: nomothetic (explore the law-like) • Humanities: idiografic (explore the unique) • These distinctions were introduced to emancipate the humanities from the sciences, but are rarely evaluated with respect to humanistic practice • See also Cassirer, Rickert, Heidegger, Gadamer

  8. The nomothetic/idiographic distinction • Opposition between exploring the law-like vs the unique does not distinguish sciences from humanities • Humanities have always had (also) a nomothetic component, e.g. in modern era: • Linguistics: Grimm, Bopp, Schleicher, Saussure, Chomsky • Philology: Lachmann, Maas, Greg • Literary theory: Propp, Jakobson, Todorov, Bal • Art history: Wolfflin, Riegl, Panofsky • History: Berr, Bloch, Braudel, Weber • Musicology: Adler, Schenker, Plomp, Levelt • In the following we’ll give a bird’s eye view of the humanities in Antiquity

  9. Rule systems in Ancient Humanities • What humanities activities do we find? • Linguistics: China, India, Greece, Rome • Philology: Greece (Hellenistic world), Rome, China • Musicology: everywhere • Art theory: everywhere • Logic: everywhere • Rhetoric: everywhere • Poetics: everywhere • History writing: Egypt, Greece, China, Rome, Ethiopia • there is more, but will not be covered in this talk

  10. Study of Language (Linguistics) • Panini: first attempt to describe a language as a whole (India, c. 500 BCE) • grammar of Sanskrit of 3959 syntactic, morphological and phonological rules, all of the form A  B / C -- D • Dionysius Thrax: mostly morphological rules (word forms) -- for Greek • Similar for Varro, Donatus en Priscianus -- for Latin • Linguistics: rule-based system that produces all (infinitely many) correct forms of a language with finite means

  11. Recursion in Language • One of the greatest inventions by Panini is recursion: • +voc  +len /- +voc +savarNa • rAma-s- + ShaShTha  rAma-Sh-ShaShTha • ya-t- + nAsti  ya-n-nAsti • recursion: infinite productivity by finite means, • e.g. in I saw the man who called the boy who kissed his sister who hit the child… • Linguistic grammars: procedural rule systems, based on a finite procedure of steps to decide whether a sequence of words is ‘grammatical’

  12. Philology • How can an archetype (original source) be reconstructed from extant copies? • Systematic philology: foundation of Library of Alexandria (300 BC): an empirical world of over 700,000 manuscripts • Often hundreds of manuscripts of the ‘same source’ but many inconsistencies.

  13. Philology (2) • Aristophanes of Byzantium (257-180 BC): • Formal rules of Analogy • If an unknown ‘item’ is inflected in the same way as a known word, then the item is a word, otherwise it’s a typo or corruption • Rules on the basis of: (1) gender, (2) case, (3) suffix, (4) nr syllables and (5) accent • Procedural rule system

  14. Study of music • Oldest law is a musical law (Pythagoras) • Law of Consonant intervals • Consonant intervals are concords where the separate tones fuse, become ‘one’ tone • Consonant intervals correspond to simple ratio’s (with respect to the lengths of strings), e.g. 1/1, 1/2, 2/3, 3/4 • Cosmological significance • Already in antiquity controversy on this issue: a ‘third’ corresponds to 64/81 but sounds much more consonant than the ‘second’, which is 8/9 • Pythagoras against Aristoxenus

  15. Study of music (2) • Aristoxenus (3rd cent. BCE) • Focuses on melodic laws underlying Greek music • Similar to language: Aristoxenus gives 25 grammatical restrictions for Greek melodies, e.g.: • No pyknon (i.e. 2 dieses) is adjacent to another pyknon • From a tone there are two possible progressions: a third downwards or a pyknon upwards • Aristoxenus’ rules only give the restrictions, not a procedure for generating all ‘good’ melodies: • Declarative rule system • Cf. declarative vs. procedural programming languages

  16. Art Theory • Pliny (1st cent. CE): first extant art history and search for rules underlying art. • (1) increase in Illusionism from 500 BCE onwards • (2) artistic genius cannot be formalized • (3) but there are underlying proportions in art, e.g. all sculpture from 500-300 BCE follows the Canon as ‘formalized’ by Polykleitos’ Doryphoros • Also in architecture, Vitrivius discovers/describes proportions of doric, ionic and corinthian orders

  17. Polykleitos’ Doryphoros: Functioned as Canon Proportions in Ionic order

  18. Art Theory (2) • India and China: also fixed proportions have been ‘discovered’ in both painting and sculpture: • Buddhist art: Vatsyayana (300 CE): describes Sadanga proportions • China: Xie He (500 CE) give six principles for ‘good’ painting • Proportions only define the boundaries or restrictions of possible art pieces, no procedure: • Declarative rule system

  19. Logic and Rhetoric • Logic and Rhetoric are strongly interconnected in antiquity • Logic: is there a system of rules underlying human reasoning? • Rhetoric: is there is system of rules underlying human persuasion? • Aristotle gives first attempt of rule-system for both logic (syllogisms) and rhetoric (enthymemes) • Stoic logicians give a formalized propositional logic

  20. Logic and Rhetoric (2) • While Aristotelian logic is deductive it does not provide a procedure for applying his logic to concrete situations in rhetoric • There is a set of heuristic rules that can help the rhetorician to create a convincing argumentation: • Heuristic rule system: no guarantee of success

  21. Poetics • Aristotle gives in his Poetica an explicit set of principles (restrictive rules) that counts for a good piece of theater and narrative • Aristotle’s rules are generalizations of observations of existing Greek tragedies • However, Horace prescribes Aristotle’s rules in a normative way: “I will tell the poet his duties … what he should and should not do…” • Process from Description to Prescription

  22. Poetics (2) • Dionysius of Halicarnassus (1st c. BCE) • Empirical Poetics: Dionysius tests the rules given by the Stoics for “poetic” language • E.g. nouns must precede verbs, verbs precede adverbs, etc. • Dionysius finds that the Stoic laws of poetic language are not followed by Homer (whose reputation was uncontroversial). He therefore rejects the stoic poetic theory. • Declarative rule system

  23. Ancient Humanities in Retrospective • Empirical tradition in the study of texts, language, music, art, literature, argumentation: • Quest for underlying rule systems • Procedural rule system • Declarative rule system • Heuristic rule system • These systems can be falsified • We find both a search for rules and for exceptions • Analogists of Alexandria vs the Anomalists of Pergamon (cf. nomothetic vs idiographic)

  24. Similar kind of rule systems also in modern humanities • E.g. situation around 1900-1950: • art history: stylistic analyses and iconological interpretations by declarative rule system (Wölfflin, Panofsky and others). • literary theory: rule-based structural analysis of literature by a procedural rule system (Propp, Todorov) • linguistics: grammatical analysis by a a procedural rule system (Jacobson, Chomsky, Joshi and others) • Historiography: rules for source criticism by Berr, Bloch and others, looks like heuristic rule system • music analysis: rules for harmonic, melodic and rhythmic analysis by e.g. Schenker, Lerdahl and Jackendoff, procedural / declarative • theatre analysis: searching for underlying rules of acting by Eugenio Barba, declarative rule system • Etcetra

  25. Conclusions • Study of humanistic practice is fundamental for understanding discoveries in the humanities: • Procedural rule system • Declarative rule system • Heuristic rule system • While rules and regularities were attacked by Dilthey, Windelband and later postmodernists, they continue to be part of humanistic practice.

  26. For more info:(English version appears in fall 2011)

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