It seems that I just can’t get enough of Interdisciplinary Skills courses these days! Tomorrow I begin attending the weekly ‘Exploring Disciplines‘ frolic as part of the KCL researcher development programme (part of what someone somewhere thought it would be a good idea to call ‘SkillsForge’). And today I’ve been doing the reading. Here’s a paragraph from I. A. Richards’s 1955 Speculative Instruments which I’m pretty sure former Hawarden residents will find stimulating. That’s right, 1955! Someone was writing a treatise for interdisciplinary studies four years before the two cultures! Here’s what he said:
If the possibilities to be realized are such and such, then a certain phrasing will be best. But note well the if here. Linguistic science can and will help us to see which phrasings will do what, but it cannot, as science, settle which possibilities are to be realized. As students of the humanities, we know this to be a deeper matter than any science, as yet, has explored; a matter of what man is and should be, of what his world is and should be, of what the God he should worship and obey is and should be. All this, the Scientist – linguistic or other – will admit to be beyond his purview as a Scientist. What is done and what can be done he can inquire into, but what should be done is not within his province. [all emphases original]
I pass on without any comment at all except to say that the last sentence of this same chapter is “[b]ut there is already in these Notes more than Literary Criticism itself may be expected to agree upon, let alone other Studies”. Oh, it’s endless.
Will Tattersdill