The Humanities are About "Inwardness"

It is the irreducible reality of inwardness, and its autonomy as a category of understanding, over which Pinker, in his delirium of empirical research, rides roughshod. The humanities are the study of the many expressions of that inwardness. Pinker’s condescension to the humanities is endless. He proposes for the humanities “a consilience with science,” but the only apparent beneficiary of such an arrangement would be the humanities, since they have nothing much to offer the sciences, which obviously occupy a higher place in the hierarchy of knowledge. Or more precisely, “the humanities would enjoy more of the explanatory depth of the sciences ... [and] the sciences could challenge their theories with the natural experiments and ecologically valid phenomena that have been so richly characterized by humanists.” I am not sure I understand the latter compliment. He seems to be saying that scientists think well and humanists write well. “Consilience” is a word that should get humanists’ backs up: the convergence of which it dreams is not so much a convergence of the sciences with the humanities as a convergence of the sciences upon the humanities. Pinker’s program puts me in mind of the definition of scientism that a British philosopher offered years ago: “the belief that science, especially natural science, is much the most valuable part of human learning” and “the view that it is always good for subjects that do not belong to science to be placed on a scientific footing.” It is a more candid and more accurate definition than Pinker’s casuistry about intelligibility and difficulty. Pinker impugns humanists for inventing a straw man called scientism, and then he goes and covers himself in straw.

Argument for why they cannot be reconciled with science.