First, whether we're talking about mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology or psychology, literature, linguistics, philosophy, history, and classics, knowledge in each discipline advances along a continuum between the hypothetical and the tested and confirmed. The humanities are part and parcel of the knowledge the human species has acquired about itself over the centuries, together with the social sciences and the natural sciences.
Second, knowledge is acquired in many ways and may exhibit many degrees of generality, certitude, and power to predict the future. It can be the product of direct observation and a small number of general assumptions, or the result of a very elaborate and long chain of hypotheses and deductions. It can posses a rich factual content or be almost devoid of it, but it must always lead back to factual observations. Indeed, it is the development of knowledge in the humanities that has allowed many fields to become real scientific disciplines and to become separate scientific endeavors, distinct from the humanities as still embryonic forms of future disciplines. By the end of the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance many fields studied by Aristotle became independent sciences (particularly in the 18th and 19th century). The same thing happened with the domains included in the humanities. The number and the nature (contents) of those domains changed over the centuries and gave birth to new fields of humanities and to the so-called social sciences, along with a certain number of natural sciences.
Third, in our many activities we shape the world that exists independent of our creating; in turn, this transformed world shapes us and our subsequent activities. This takes place in a “one world”--a supersystem composed of interconnected systems of various kinds (physical, cultural, social, biological, and so on) that possess their own peculiar properties and laws. Given that this world is one, as the different tributaries of knowledge gain force and depth, they necessarily move with increasing momentum toward one main stream.
In the work of Aristotle, Marx, Einstein, and Chomsky, we see this disciplinary convergence at play. Think of all the fields studied by Aristotle (including the knowledge he himself developed) to understand his one world more completely: from biology (zoology and botany) to medicine and the constitutions of the nation-states in Greece, to law and physics, and, of course, to logic. Chomsky's early and radically innovative formulation of a universal grammar is also a case in point. His research program threw new and important light not only on linguistics, but also on biology (the modularity of the brain), psychology (the mind not as qualia independent of the brain, but as a mind/brain composite), and mathematics (recursive function theory). Today, we see modern linguistics in convergence with other research programs such as those advanced in neuro- and evolutionary biology as well as zoology (animal communication systems). (See Chomsky et al, "The Faculty of Language: What is it, Who has It, and How did it Evolve" in Science, vol. 298, 2002.) Today, the human genome mapping not only gives us a much sharper understanding of biology (genetics), but proves instrumental in advancing knowledge in geography, archeology, anthropology, and linguistics, among other areas of inquiry.
We see many scholars embodying this impulse toward unification at the Ohio State University. To cite only the most obvious examples, David Huron turns to cognitive science and neurobiology to explore how music stimulates the imagination, triggers our appraisal faculty, and moves us emotionally (Sweet Anticipation); Timothy Schroeder in philosophy turns to neuroscience to shed light on what motivates us to act, to feel pleasure and displeasure--to desire and imagine (Three Faces of Desire). In the department of Spanish and Portuguese, Javier Gutierrez-Rexach employs modern linguistics and the cognitive science to analyze films. In the English department, David Herman uses cognitive science to explore how structures of narrative work in fiction--and many of our everyday activities (Story Logic), Jim Phelan turns to the field of ethics in his study of how short stories and novels move us to feel and act (Experiencing Fiction), and Brian McHale turns to aesthetic philosophy to take the pulse of contemporary fiction and prose poetry (Postmodernist Fiction).
Beyond OSU, we have scholars such as: Patrick Colm Hogan who turns to advances made in the cognitive and neurosciences to identify prototype emotions that generate cross-cultural fictional prototypes; scholars such as Lalita Pandit, Robert Storey, Joseph Carroll, Jonathan Gottschall, and Nancy Easterlin, among many others, who have turned to advances in evolutionary biology to explore the repetition and rupture of human behavior; some like Porter Abbott who have used evolutionary biology as a foundation to clarify the differences between our evolved capacity for fact-making (history) and fiction-making (literature). Lisa Zunshine focuses on our theory-of-mind capacity to explore levels of pleasure and frustration in our fiction consumption; others have used new technologies such as fMRI, EEG imaging, and PET scans to compare networks of neural response in fiction and non-fiction activities (see Paul Mathews and Jeffrey McQuain's The Bard on the Brain). John G. Nichols (From Neuron to Brain) and Joseph LeDoux (The Emotional Brain) investigate how the biochemical and biophysical transmission of nerve signals creates in humans a higher-minded self that has evolved the capacity for meta-representation--a key ingredient in our evolved faculty for communication, including the visual, plastic, and written arts. And V.S. Ramachandran's neuroscientific research on perception and the senses generally aims to throw light on aesthetics (A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness); Antonio Damasio's neurobiological studies extend our knowledge concerning the functioning and role of emotions; Marc D. Hauser (Moral Minds) and Jorge Moll and his research team explore the neurological basis for ethical behavior and attitudes.
In my own work, I seek to have a firmer grasp on how novels, films, comic books, and the like, tick. In our one world, we all tell stories based on actual events or made up. Our narrative making and engaging capacity is universal. And, while biology constrains what we can do with oral narrative fiction (the limits of our memory, for instance) we have developed ways to throw off such restraints in a variety of metarepresentational media, including the form of written narrative fiction. In short stories and novels, for instance, there can be deep temporal layers as well as subtle forms of filtering a story through the perspective of a character such as the use of free indirect discourse and psychonarratology. I find the work done in narratology useful as it allows me to identify the overused techniques used in written (and other) narrative fiction. And, narratology coupled with research developed in the cognitive sciences and neurobiology can deepen further the use of specific narrative techniques as well as shed light more generally on the processes involved in our making and consuming of narrative fictional works. The rather recent discovery of the mirror neuron system--a set of neurons that become active in the brain's superior temporal sulcus and the Broca region (or language center) when we perform and observe an action--reveals more precisely how we produce language, feel empathy, interpret and understand other people's emotional states, and know the difference between fact and fiction.
The humanities are an integral part of the knowledge the human species has acquired about itself over the centuries, together with the social sciences and the natural sciences. And it is important for us to cherish the knowledge we have acquired and to continue developing it, because the practical and theoretical human activity called knowing (learning, experimenting, verifying, and teaching), together with the theoretical and practical human activity called technology and technological invention are the specifically human activities that allowed us to survive and to radiate across the planet. Knowledge is quite literally essential for our survival. In whatever shape you want to slice global reality (social, natural, and so on) and to whatever degree of certainty that we may possess knowledge at any given moment, such knowledge (however limited and provisional) is a necessary stepping stone for the ulterior acquisition of more precise knowledge.
Certainly, I fret over my students pulled toward the flatus voci of poststructuralism and other dead-end, idealist and spiritualist paths. I'm distraught because we live in a world governed by a socioeconomic system that mutilates our cognitive potential and dwarfs our human capabilities. This said, as long as there are people and a world to inhabit, there will be those like my students (and many others) genuinely interested in acquiring, deepening, and sharpening the contents of knowledge in order to generate new and solid research programs.
I am not worried about the future of the humanities, because, to the extent that their contents become more and more precise knowledge, they will give birth (or transform themselves) to new scientific fields, new sciences, new scientific research programs. Imagine what a science of written narrative fiction will be when we study more deeply phenomena such as free indirect discourse with the help of developmental psychology, neurobiology, and linguistics. The more we learn about certain subjects and problems (techniques such as free indirect discourse, for instance), the more this work will become a solidly established discipline with its own set of problems studied, understood, and subsumed under a series of scientific research programs, approaches, and methods.
Rather than bemoan our own obsolescence, perhaps we should focus our energies in developing concepts as tools sufficiently clear with sufficiently precise boundaries for us to dig for answers to our different sets of questions and problems. Perhaps we should consider the ways in which our work in the humanities to know our world better converges with the research programs in the neurosciences, ethics, biology, geography, history, psychology, philosophy, mathematics, among many others.
The real, deep reason the humanities matter today, yesterday, and tomorrow: they are knowledge.