Sometimes, we want to answer questions to accomplish practical outcomes. For example, we want to know whether a vaccine works so that we can decide whether to use it. Or we may seek basic insights about viruses so that we can develop vaccines in the first place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sometimes, we want to know things because we are simply curious. It is hard to justify a lot of astronomy (for example) on the basis of its practical implications. But we want to understand the universe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And sometimes, we want to understand people–and perhaps animals–because we are in relationships with them. When you ask friends how they’re doing, your motive may not be to solve a problem, nor mere curiosity, but care. You should give your friend your attention. The benefits are psychological, ethical, or spiritual–a change in one’s mind and in the relationship with the other person. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Friends may tell you things that you should believe for practical reasons or to satisfy pure curiosity. Someone might tell you that a vaccine works, so that you will take it, or that all the planets in our solar system could fit between the earth and the moon, because that’s kind of interesting to know. Paying attention means taking such claims seriously. But the main point of learning what other people think is not to find out what is objectively true; it is to know the other people. In fact, exploring the beliefs and values of a wide range of people can shake our confidence in beliefs, in general, and hence our feelings that we can and must get our own beliefs right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Attending to a text or an artifact from a distant time or place is a little different from an ordinary conversation. For one thing, you cannot directly benefit long-dead or faraway authors by giving them your attention. Although we have ethical obligations to the dead, the influence is basically one-way. However, reading, listening to music, and viewing art are similar to regular conversations in important ways. They too are practices that develop compassion and reduce our attachment to our own prejudices and concerns.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
While Michel de Montaigne\u2019s married friend Diane de Foix was expecting a child, he sent her advice about education. He recommended foreign travel and conversation with peers. A youth should listen and appreciate, he said, not try to form and share beliefs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And so should adults. Montaigne told de Foix, \u201cIn this school of human interaction, I have often observed this vice: instead of getting to know others, we only strive to give ourselves and are more concerned with using our own goods than with acquiring new ones. Silence and modesty are qualities very well suited to conversation.\u201d A passage in the same letter could stand as a justification of Montaigne\u2019s whole way of life:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nThis vast world, which some think is just one species in a larger genus, is the mirror in which we must look to truly know ourselves. In short, I want [our world] to be my student\u2019s book. The variety of moods, sects, judgments, opinions, laws, and customs teach us to judge our own people soundly and teach our judgment to recognize its imperfection and natural weakness: which is no small apprenticeship.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
If the purpose of the humanities–the disciplines that interpret texts and artifacts–is not to determine truth but to attend to other people, then we cannot outsource this thinking to machines or even to other human beings. The point is the experience, not the outcome.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Here is a complication: professional scholars in the humanities do pursue the answers to questions. At one extreme, they may seem much like scientists when they establish the date and provenance of a painting or correct a primary text. At the opposite extreme, they may offer highly creative or even counterintuitive interpretations, but usually they still claim to be telling us something valid about an object in the world. We can ask whether they are right or wrong, persuasive or unconvincing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I think scholarship is very valuable, but it ultimately contributes to the humanities as experience<\/em>. The point of watching or reading Shakespeare is to get out of one’s own head by attending to the author and his characters. The point of philological, historical, or interpretive scholarship about Shakespeare is to enrich performances and readings of the works. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Some of the scholarly labor can be assigned to machines. Because I cannot read Pali but I am interested in classical Indian philosophy, I have been very carefully using ClaudeAI to give me dictionary-type definitions of all the Pali words in select passages. This is an algorithmic task. Claude is probably using published Pali-English dictionaries, plus previous translations made by people who used the same dictionaries. A dictionary is also an algorithmic device, a kind of machine that generates a range of words in one language for each word in the other language. I believe that the first dual-language dictionary (Sumerian-Akkadian) was written more than 4,000 years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Thus there is nothing fundamentally new about creating devices that automatically assist readers, listeners, and viewers of human artifacts. In addition to lexicons and dictionaries, we might mention grammars, concordances, indices, card catalogues, provenance lists for artworks, search functions for digital texts, and many other scholarly resources. LLMs can often do these things better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The difference is that we were never tempted to view the tools as ends in themselves. They were meant to assist a reader in a practice that would enrich that person’s mind. Because the LLM’s speak in the first-person and purport to interpret and explain texts, it is tempting–and I feel this temptation–to imagine that they can do our reading for us.<\/em> To use a simile that is becoming a clich\u00e9, that would be like getting a machine to lift barbells to save us the effort. This would not count as exercise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nSource: Montaigne, vol. 1, essay :26 (\u201cOf the instruction of children\u201d). I follow Screech in interpreting \u201cque les uns multiplient encore comme especes soubs un genre\u201d to mean that our world is one species in a greater genre of worlds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
See also: the worlds we can lose when intelligence becomes artificial<\/a>; the difference between human and artificial intelligence: relationships<\/a>;\u00a0the design choice to make ChatGPT sound like a human<\/a>; against using the humanities instrumentally<\/a>; Bernard Williams on truth as a virtue of the humanities<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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