Chapter 2 - What Would the Community Think?

Summary

The natural sciences produce knowledge. Not necessarily because they do experiments, or because they use precise measurement devices, or because they investigate reality, but because they have developed highly conservative epistemic cultures whose members are overwhelmingly concerned with what the community thinks. My purpose in this chapter is to support this claim as one component of more general conception of disciplinary knowledge, a species of knowledge of which both the natural sciences and the humanities have historically been able stewards. If we use the natural sciences as a model for what real knowledge looks like, the question, “Do the humanities create knowledge?” turns not so much on the degree to which the humanities employ the Scientific Method, but on the degree to which they partake of the social processes by which disciplinary knowledge is achieved.