A Comparative Framework for Studying the Histories of the Humanities and Science

Author(s): Rens Bod

Source: Isis, Vol. 106, No. 2 (June 2015), pp. 367-377
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A Comparative Framework for Studying

the Histories of the Humanities and
Science
Rens Bod, University of Amsterdam

Abstract: While the humanities and the sciences have a closely connected history,
there are no general histories that bring the two fields together on an equal footing.
This paper argues that there is a level at which some humanistic and scientific
disciplines can be brought under a common denominator and compared. This is at
the level of underlying methods, especially at the level of formalisms and rule systems
used by different disciplines. The essay formally compares linguistics and computer
science by noting that the same grammar formalism was used in the 1950s for
describing both human and programming languages. Additionally, it examines the
influence of philology on molecular biology, and vice versa, by recognizing that the
tree-formalism and rule system used for text reconstruction was also employed in
DNA genetics. It also shows that rule systems for source criticism in history are used
in forensic science, evidence-based medicine, and jurisprudence. This paper thus
opens up a new comparative approach within which the histories of the humanities
and the sciences can be examined on a common level.

et me start this essay with a provocative question: Can we write a general history of science
without taking into account the history of the humanities? I shall argue that we had better
not.
But why should we be interested in a general history of science in the first place? General,
longue duree histories of science are as old as the field itself and continue to be written up to
the present day. While most current studies in the history of science focus on relatively
small-scale periods, general long-term histories try to lay bare patterns over longer periods. Yet
the two approaches heavily depend on one another; without specialized case studies, general
histories cannot be written, and without general histories, case studies miss the bigger picture
and fail to be the case of anything at all. Several of the foundational works in the history of
science are longue duree. William Whewells History of the Inductive Sciences (1837) covers
more than two thousand years. And one of the most influential works in the field, Alexandre
Koyres From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (1957), considers more than three
centuries. It has been noted that longue duree histories are in decline (except perhaps for the
genre of textbooks). But is this really true or is it simply a side effect of the increased difficulty

Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, University of Amsterdam, Science Park 107, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Isis, volume 106, number 2. 2015 by The History of Science Society.

All rights reserved. 0021-1753/2015/10602-0009$10.00

367

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Rens Bod

Focus: The Histories of the Humanities and Science

of writing longue duree histories now that we have become acutely aware of whig historiography? In any case, it is beyond doubt that for examining some of the most complex questions
in the field, such as how a scientific culture emerged and why the scientific revolution
occurred in the West, we need a long-term approach from a broad, comparative perspective.1
The seven-volume Cambridge History of Science (of which the last volume appeared in 2013)
is only one of the recent examples showing that historians cannot live with microstudies alone;
they want the bigger picture too.
The situation is not different in the much younger field of the history of humanities. While
for a long time there have been historical studies of linguistics, philology, art history,
musicology, and historiography, the general field and term history of humanities seems to
have been in vogue since 2008, when the first conference on the history of the humanities
(The Making of the Humanities: First International Conference on the History of the
Humanities) was organized. Since then the field has seen a consistent growth, including
follow-up conferences, a new journal (History of Humanities, published by the University of
Chicago Press), and also a number of edited books and monographssuch as the foundational work A New History of the Humanities (2013), which covers more than two and a half
thousand years.2 There is an increasing awareness that the humanities and the sciences have
a strongly connected history (see, e.g., Lorraine Daston and Glenn Most in this Focus
section), and yet the history of science and the history of humanities are still investigated
separately, with two different fields continuing to persist. This is the more surprising since the
study of nature and the study of culture have been interacting throughout history, both before
and after the distinction between these two fields was conceptualized and quickly institutionalized (see Jeroen Bouterse and Bart Karstens in this Focus section). Several insights and
methods from humanities disciplines were transferred to scientific disciplines and vice versa.
Moreover, many of these transfers took place over long periods. For instance, computer
scientists in the twentieth century appropriated insights from ancient Indian linguistics (e.g.,
the notion of formal grammar). And the transfer of methods from nineteenth-century philology (the use of family trees and stemmatic rules) to twentieth-century genetics took about a

On the possible decline of longue duree histories see Frederick Holmes, The Longue Duree in the History of Science,
History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, 2003, 25(4):463 470. See also the Focus section The Generalist Vision in the
History of Science, Isis, 2005, 96(2):224 251; in particular Paula Findlen, The Two Cultures of Scholarship? pp. 230 237.
For a discussion of the longue duree in past and current historiography see David Armitage and Jo Guldi, A History Manifesto
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2014). Armitage and Guldi also mention other possible causes of the decline of the longue
duree, including the dedication of historians to test and debunk larger theories about the nature of time and agency and the
inward turn of academics toward an ever greater specialization of knowledge. For the question of how a scientific culture
emerged see Stephen Gaukroger, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1210 1685
(Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2006). For the question of why the scientific revolution occurred in the West see H. Floris Cohen,
How Modern Science Came into the World: Four Civilizations, One Seventeenth-Century Breakthrough (Amsterdam: Amsterdam Univ. Press, 2010).
2 The Making of the Humanities Conference was organized as a biennial conference since 2008 but becomes annual from
2016 onward. Future conferences are planned in Baltimore (2016), Oxford (2017), and Beijing (2018). Long-term histories of
the humanities include Rens Bod, A New History of the Humanities: The Search for Principles and Patterns from Antiquity to
the Present (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2013); and James Turner, Philology: The Hidden Origins of the Modern Humanities
(Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2014). See also the three edited volumes on the comparative history of the humanities: Rens
Bod, Jaap Maat, and Thijs Weststeijn, eds., The Making of the Humanities, 3 vols. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam Univ. Press,
2010 2014); the volumes are subtitled Vol. 1: Early Modern Europe (2010); Vol. 2: From Early Modern to Modern Disciplines
(2012); and Vol. 3: The Modern Humanities (2014). Also, in the history of the social sciences we find long-term histories, such
as Scott Gordon, The History and Philosophy of Social Science: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1993); and Roger Smith,
The Norton History of the Human Sciences (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997).

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369

century and a half. If we want to write the history of these transfers between the humanities
and science, we need a comparative framework within which their histories can be examined
over longer periods.
This immediately raises a conceptual problem: How and at what level can the humanities
and the sciences be compared? The contexts of these two areas of study, as well as their
concepts, can differ substantially. In this essay I will focus on the interactions between the
humanities and science at the level of the transfer of methods, in particular of the underlying
formalisms and/or rule systems used by these methods.3 As I have extensively argued in my
book A New History of the Humanities (2013), we find formalisms and rules not only where
we would expect themin the (nomothetic) sciences but also where we would perhaps not
expect them: namely, in the (presumed idiographic) humanistic disciplines. Humanities
scholars in all periods and regions have examined their humanistic materialfrom languages,
texts, art, music, to historical sources by means of formal representations and sets of rules.
Examples are not limited to the aforementioned grammars in linguistics and family trees in
philology but also include formalisms for describing style periods in art (e.g., H. Wlfflin);
formalisms for finding narrative patterns in folktales (e.g., V. Propp) and oral literature (A.
Lord); and rule systems for investigating musical harmony (see Julia Kursell in this Focus
section). These formalisms and rule systems are sometimes literally mentioned in the works
produced by humanities scholars, while at other times (especially in works written before
1800) they remain implicit and should be extracted from the texts.
My main argument in this essay is that there is a level of abstraction at which different
disciplines can be formally compared. This is at the methodological level and, more particularly, at the level of the underlying formalisms and rule systems used. At that level, certain
parts of linguistics are not just analogous but equivalent (or isomorphic) to parts of computer
science, and parts of philology are equivalent to genetics, and so forth. We will see that at this
level, humanists and scientists alike have abstracted and decontextualized formalisms from
the concrete problems for which they were constructed and recontextualized them within
an entirely new field. (And although I will focus on a comparison between the humanities and
science in this essay, it goes without saying that a comparison at the level of formalisms and
rule systems can also be used to compare any other sets of disciplines.)
In the following I will therefore often abstract from the context of the various disciplines
not only for lack of space but also because I want to discern the underlying formalisms and
rules across different knowledge-making disciplines. My way of working differs from that of
many other historians who usually do not introduce additional categories or concepts (such
as formalism or rule system) in their comparisons.4 However, if we do not make use of
additional concepts, we will only find differences and no commonalities in our crossdisciplinary comparison. On the other hand, we should make sure that even our most general
concepts remain historically meaningful.
As already explained in the introduction of this Focus section, the disciplines that we today
call the humanitiesthat is, the study of language, literature, music, art, and the pastall
existed before the term humanities was coined. These disciplines were not only existent in

The term formalism has usually meant the symbolic manner in which the material under investigation is represented. See,
for example, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/facts/formal-theories.html. I am grateful to Julia Kursell for pointing out that what
I was actually doing in an earlier version of this paper was the comparison of formalisms.
4 For other comparisons between disciplines see, for example, Geoffrey Lloyd and Nathan Sivin, The Way and the Word:
Science and Medicine in Early China and Greece (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 2003); and Geoffrey Lloyd, Disciplines
in the Making (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2009).

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the West but also in other regions and civilizations, from China to Africa and from India to
the Arab world. I will therefore freely use the term humanities across periods and regions (a
similar way of reasoning could also be held for the term science), while keeping in mind
that any conceptual distinction between humanities and science appeared in the modern era
only (see Bouterse and Karstens in this Focus section).
Finally, I would like to emphasize that the level of formalisms and rule systems is not the
only level at which different disciplines across the humanities and sciences can be compared.
We can also compare disciplines at the level of practices, virtues, institutions, and so forth. Yet
the level of formalisms and rule systems is perhaps the only level where we can find
equivalence instead of mere similarity.
GRAMMAR FORMALISMS IN
LINGUISTICS AND COMPUTER SCIENCE

One of the most salient technological developments during the last century has been
the emergence of information technology. While this development is usually seen as a
product of computer science rather than of the humanities, it was a humanistic disciplinethe study of languagethat provided the underlying formalism for developing
programming languages. A fundamental insight in linguistics is that human language can
be described by a system of rules, known as a grammar. The first extant grammar is found
in the work Ashtadhyayi (Eight Books) by the Indian grammarian Panini who lived around
500 B.C. The Ashtadhyayi contains one of the most complete grammars in existence.5 Panini
developed a set of 3,959 rules that cover all possible sentences of Sanskrit. That is, Paninis
grammar can determine whether a given sequence of sounds is a correctly formed sentence
in Sanskrit.
Panini was not just a descriptive linguist, however; the underlying formalism he developed
is just as interesting. To write down his 3,959 rules, he used a grammatical system of rules that
indicate how a certain part of a sentence (a phrase) can be built up (rewritten) out of
other, smaller phrases and words, provided they appear in a certain combination. In fact not
every combination of words or phrases leads to a grammatical sentence. Paninis approach in
the Ashtadhyayi was to make his grammar system explicit and comprehensive. He devised a
set of rules that, using a combination of a finite number of lexical units, could cover all correct
Sanskrit utterances. Paninis rules are optional, which means there is always more than one
possible choice (otherwise it would only be possible to cover one linguistic utterance).6 But
for every grammatical sentence there must be at least one choice of rules such that it produces
the particular sentence.
One of the other influential ideas in Paninis system of rules is that a grammar rule can
invoke itself; a given construction can contain another example of that construction. This is
known as recursion, which in Sanskrit is known as Nya ya. Recursion occurs, for example, in

The transcription from Sanskrit by Indologists is usually Pa n ini, where the accent is on the first syllable (Pa ). For this paper
I will use the more common transcription Panini. See Paul Kiparsky, Paninian Linguistics, in The Encyclopedia of Language
and Linguistics (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1993). For an accessible translation of the Ashtadhyayi, with examples and commentaries, see Panini, The Ashtadhyayi: Translated into English by Srisa Chandra Vasu (1923; rpt., Charleston, S.C.: Nabu Press,
2011).
6 On Paninis sentence construction method see Frits Staal, Universals: Studies in Indian Logic and Linguistics (Chicago: Univ.
Chicago Press, 1988), p. 3. On Paninis set of rules see Vidyaniwas Misra, The Descriptive Technique of Panini: An Introduction
(The Hague: Mouton, 1966), pp. 43 ff. On the rules being optional see Paninis rule 2.1.11 (vibhasa) in the Ashtadhyayi (cit.
n. 5).
5

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the English sentence, He was harassed by the individual who was caught by the policeman
who was spotted by the photographer. We can make this sentence longer, indeed as long as
we want, by recursively applying the grammatical rule for subordinate clauses in English (and
by choosing different words from the lexicon). The use of recursion allowed Panini to describe
the unlimited number of Sanskrit sentences with a finite number of rules.
Toward the end of the eighteenth century Paninis grammar was discovered by European
scholars, and it took another century and a half before it was relatively well understood. In the
1950s, the renowned linguist Noam Chomsky based his work on Paninis ideas and called him
his spiritual father. Yet it is still an open question whether a finite system of rules can represent
a complete grammar of a living language; only for a dead language like Sanskrit does this seem
to be beyond doubt. For living languages there is an increasing awareness that only a statistical
approach that continuously updates the grammar with new utterances can deal with the
fine-grained syntactic and semantic differences expressed by humans.7
Nevertheless, the notion of grammar appeared to be exceptionally well suited for describing
and creatinga rather different kind of language: high-level programming languages for
computers. In contrast with low-level programming languages, high-level programming languages do not use zeroes, ones, or other machine-like codes for programming. Instead, they
use statements very similar to sentences and phrases in human languages (and these statements are translated into the underlying machine language only in a second stage and finally
into zeroes and ones by a separate algorithm).
The development of such high-level programming languages did not fall from a clear blue
sky. In the 1950s, the concept of language became one of the central metaphors around
which the discipline of computer science was built. This language metaphor was part of a
more general discourse that introduced linguistic concepts to biology, computer science,
mathematics, and the social sciences. The linguistic conception of programming was put
forward by such prominent researchers in computer science and artificial intelligence as John
Backus, Peter Naur, Edsger Dijkstra, and John McCarthy.8 During the second half of the
1950s, the language metaphor acquired a more abstract meaning, which was closely related
to the formal grammars of linguistics. It was believed that computers, human brains, and
natural and formal languages were all systems defined by their common abstract structures.9
The anthropomorphic metaphors of grammar and syntax started to represent more than just
convenient analogies between linguistics and computer science. In fact, the formalism for
describing programming languages (the notion of grammar) was equivalent to the formalism
used by linguists for describing human languages. This is not to say that the rules themselves

7 For a discussion of the relation between Panini and Chomsky see Bod, New History of the Humanities (cit. n. 2), pp. 290 295.
On whether a finite set of rules can describe a living language see Rens Bod, Beyond Grammar: An Experience-Based Theory
of Language (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1998). On a statistical approach to living languages see, for example, Christopher
Manning and Heinrich Schutze, Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999);
Bod, Remko Scha, and Khalil Simaan, Data-Oriented Parsing (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2003); and Bod, Jen Hay, and
Stefanie Jannedy, eds., Probabilistic Linguistics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003).
8 On language as a central metaphor in computer science see David Nofre, Mark Priestley, and Gerard Alberts, When
Technology Became Language: The Origins of the Linguistic Conception of Computer Programming, 1950 1960, Technology and Culture, 2014, 55(1):40 75. On linguistic concepts in additional fields see, for example, Matthias Drries,
Language as a Tool in the Sciences, in Experimenting with Tongues: Studies in Science and Language, ed. Drries (Redwood
City, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 2002), pp. 120. The computer scientist John Backus is not to be confused with the
acoustician and physicist John Backus.
9 Nofre, Priestley, and Alberts, Technology Became Language (cit. n. 8).

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were equivalent, but the underlying formalism in which these rules were expressed (the form
of the rules together with the notion of recursion) were equivalent.
It was John Backus who first picked up this Paninian-Chomskian notion of formal
grammar and applied it to design the full syntax of the most successful high-level programming language, ALGOL60.10 Virtually all current high-level programming languages are
written in this or a very similar formalism that incorporates the linguistic notion of a grammar
with recursion.11 Such a grammar can determine whether a given sequence of statements
forms a correct expression in a particular programming language or not. If the statements
follow the rules of the grammar, they are syntactically correct, which means that they can be
processed by the underlying machine language and interpreted by the computer. If the
statements do not follow the rules of the grammar, they are incorrect, and cannot be processed
and interpreted.
Thus the linguistic formalism of grammar was used by computer scientists, giving the fields
of computer science and information technology an unprecedented impulse. This led to the
development of programming languages that were machine independent. This was possible
owing to the insight that the abstract notion of grammar could be decontextualized from the
concrete grammars constructed by linguists and recontextualized within the field of computer
science to create grammars for programming languages. At the level of grammar formalism,
linguistics and computer science share a deep commonality.
HISTORY TREES AND
STEMMATIC RULES IN PHILOLOGY AND BIOLOGY

Metaphors from the language sciences also found their way in the life sciences. In the course
of the 1950s, biologists came to represent organisms and molecules as information systems by
using linguistic tropes and textual analogies. The human genome was viewed as a textual
information system; the way DNA sequences could be replicated, mutated, and contaminated
were phrased in terms of philological and computational concepts. These representations of
heredity did not arise from the inner logic of DNA genetics. Instead, they had been transported into molecular biology from cybernetics, information theory, and computer science.
And these latter disciplines had already imported these metaphors from the language sciences,
as discussed above.12 But while computer scientists had looked mainly at linguistics, molec-

10

How John Backus took up the notion of formal grammar is unknown. In any case, he does not seem to have absorbed it
directly from Chomsky, let alone from Panini. In an interview published in 1998, Backus said the following: Theres a strange
confusion here. I swore that the idea for studying syntax came from Emil Post because I had taken a course with Martin Davis
at the Lamb Estate. So I thought if you want to describe something, just do what Post did. Martin Davis tells me he did not
teach the course until long afterward [1960 1961 according to Daviss records]. So I dont know how to account for it. I didnt
know anything about Chomsky. I was a very ignorant person. Quoted in John Backus, A Restless Inventor, in Out of Their
Minds: The Lives and Discoveries of Fifteen Great Computer Scientists, ed. Dennis Shasha and Cathy Lazere (New York:
Copernicus, 1998), pp. 520. Although Backus thus seemed to know about Chomskys work only through Post, and probably
knew nothing about Chomskys reading of Panini, the line from Panini via Chomsky and Post to Backus has been spelled out
at various places; see also P. Z. Ingerman, Panini-Backus Form Suggested, Communications of the ACM, 1967, 10(3):137.
11 See Erol Gelenbe and Jean-Pierre Kahane, eds., Fundamental Concepts in Computer Science (London: Imperial College
Press, 2009), p. 99.
12 On 1950s biologists representing organisms and molecules as information systems see Henry Hoenigswald and Linda Wiener,
Biological Metaphor and Cladistic Classification: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (Philadelphia: Univ. Pennsylvania Press,
1987). See also Lily Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life? A History of the Genetic Code (Redwood City, Calif.: Stanford Univ.
Press, 2000), pp. 23. On the import of philological and computational concepts into molecular biology see Steve J. Heims,
The Cybernetics Group (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991); and Lily Kay, Cybernetics, Information, Life: The Emergence

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ular biologists (also) looked at stemmatic philologythe theory of text reconstruction that
creates a tree of variants (a stemma) of the transmission of a text so as to deduce its presumed
archetype.
The way biologists made use of textual concepts in DNA genetics was not just a matter of
metaphor or analogy. If we look at the deeper level of formalisms used in philology and DNA
genetics, we can discern an equivalence between nineteenth-century stemmatic philology and
twentieth-century molecular biology. This equivalence went even further than the one
discussed between linguistics and computer science; not only was the formalism of a philological tree of texts (or stemma) taken over by biologists, but several of the rules or operations
that philologists had developed to operate on a stemma were adopted as well.
The history of the notion of stemma has been investigated at various places. Robert OHara
draws attention to the presence of trees of history glossed as branching diagrams of
genealogical descent and change in a large variety of disciplines: textual criticism, evolutionary biology, historical linguistics, and information science. The first ever stemma seems to
have been produced for Swedish legal manuscripts by Carl Johan Schlyter in 1827.13 It
predates the use of the first genealogical trees in linguistics by August Schleicher in 1850 and
Charles Darwins descent with modification in 1859. It was the philologist Karl Lachmann
(17931851) who in 1850 spelled out the rules that applied to a philological stemma of texts
and how they could be used in reconstructing the original text from hereditary copies in the
family tree. The origins of this technique of text reconstruction are much older; many of its
facets can be traced back to the early humanists, in particular to Angelo Poliziano. However,
in the nineteenth century this humanistic practice was turned into a more or less orderly set
of rules. These rules were further refined and mathematically formalized in the early
twentieth century, which resulted in several formal rules or operations for describing the
errors in variants due to copying mistakes, such as rules for substitution, deletion, and
insertion of elements.14
These operations of substitution, insertion, and deletion turned out to be applicable both
to sequences of lexical elements and to sequences of DNA elements and thus were independent of whether these elements were due to scribal alterations arising over successive generations of recopied manuscripts or due to genetic mutations in DNA molecules occurring
through successive generations.15 At the level of the formalism used and (several of the)

of Scriptural Representations of Heredity, Configurations, 1997, 5(1):2391. On language as the prime example in information
theory see Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Champaign: Univ. Illinois
Press, 1949).
13 Robert OHara and Peter Robinson, Computer-Assisted Methods of Stemmatic Analysis, Occasional Papers of the
Canterbury Tales Project, 1993, pp. 5374. Schlyters stemma was added to the appendix (ill. 2) of Carl Johan Schlyter and Hans
Samuel Collin, eds., Westgta-lagen, Vol. 1 (Hggstrm, 1827). See also Britta Olrik Frederiksen, Stemmaet fra 1827 over
VstgtalagenEn videnskabshistorisk bedrift og dens mulig forudstninger, Arkiv fr Nordisk Filologi, 2009, 124:129 150.
14 Sebastiano Timpanaro, La genesi del metodo del Lachmann (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1963), pp. 513; translation by Most, The
Genesis of Lachmanns Method (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2005). Angelo Poliziano, Miscellanea (1489). For the origins
of formal text reconstruction see Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Text (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1991), pp.
56 ff. See also Most, Quellenforschung, in Bod, Maat, and Weststeijn, eds., The Making of the Humanities, Vol. 3: The Modern
Humanities (cit. n. 2), pp. 207218. On early twentieth-century refinement of the rules see Walter Greg, The Calculus of
Variants: An Essay on Textual Criticism (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1927). For an overview see Vinton Dearing, Principles
and Practice of Textual Analysis (Oakland: Univ. California Press, 1974). For a history of the copying rules in stemmatic philology
see Kari Kraus, Conjectural Criticism: Computing Past and Future Texts, Digital Humanities Quarterly, 2009, 3(4), http://
digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/3/4/000069/000069.html.
15 See Willi Hennig, Phylogenetic Systematics (Champaign: Univ. Illinois Press, 1966).

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operations applied, there is not just analogy but equivalence between philology and genetics!16
That is, both in philology and in genetics a sequence (whether words in the case of a
manuscript, or nucleotides in the case of DNA) is copied on the basis of the same operations.
When changes occur, textual changes and DNA mutations are described by the same system
of rules or operations. For example, the operation of substitution of one word for another (in
text copying) is equal to the substitution of a nucleotide for another (in DNA copying). The
elements differ, but the abstract rule or operation is the same. And the operation of insertion
or deletion of words is formally equal to the rule of insertion and deletion of nucleotides. Even
philological contamination, whereby pieces from several manuscripts are combined, follows
the same formal rule in DNA genetics, known as genetic recombination.17
Thus the formalism and rule system from the discipline of textual philology were decontextualized and then recontextualized in the new field of genetics. We cannot really grasp the
history of science, in this case twentieth-century genetics, if we neglect the long-term history
of its methods, some of which originate in the humanities; in this case the methods originated
in nineteenth-century stemmatic philology. But the opposite also holds. In fact, the story does
not finish here. Over the last few decades, stemmatics in biology has led to the new field of
cladistics, which has turned into a highly sophisticated computer-assisted methodology for
creating the equivalent of history trees in biology. Although originating in philology, cladistics
has now influenced philology and historical linguistics again, not only technically but also
conceptually. Cladistics software is currently applied to stemmatic philology to derive highly
sophisticated trees of texts that lead to new questions in philology.18 Thus, the interaction
between humanistic and scientific disciplines is a highly dynamic one; it is rarely a one-way
transfer. Formalisms and rule systems from philology first entered biology and next came back
to philology in computational form. The same happened with linguistics and computer
science: the linguistic notion of grammar was first transferred to computer science, from
which the notion of computational grammar came back to linguistics, thereby leading to the
field of computational linguistics.
OTHER SHARED FORMALISMS AND RULE
SYSTEMS ACROSS THE HUMANITIES AND THE SCIENCES

Linguistics and stemmatic philology, with their formalized methods, are sometimes viewed as
belonging to the realm of the sciences rather than to the humanities; it is actually the more
hermeneutic and interpretative disciplines that are the real backbone of humanistic research,
as it is sometimes claimed. Historiography, as the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey put
it, is not concerned with explaining events but with understanding them, as illustrated by the
German word verstehen. In the view of the neo-Kantians, rather than aiming at finding rules

16

See Don Cameron, Problems in Manuscript Affiliation, in Biological Metaphor and Cladistic Classification: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, ed. Henry Hoenigswald and Linda F. Wiener (Philadelphia: Univ. Pennsylvania Press, 1987), p. 302.
17 See Kraus, Conjectural Criticism (cit. n. 14). See also Caroline Mace
, Philippe Baret, Andrea Bozzi, and Laura Cignoni,
eds., The Evolution of Texts: Confronting Stemmatological and Genetical Methods, Proceedings of the International
Workshop Held in Louvain-la-Neuve on September 12, 2004 (Rome: Istituti Editoriali e Poligrafici Internazionali, 2006).
18 See N. Platnick and H. Cameron, Cladistic Methods in Textual, Linguistic, and Phylogenetic Analysis, Systematic Zoology,
1977, 26:380 385. For an overview of cladistics and other methods in philology see Mace et al., eds., Evolution of Texts (cit.
n. 17). On new questions in philology resulting from the use of cladistics software see, for example, N. Cartlidge, The
Canterbury Tales and Cladistics, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 2001, 102:135150; and Heather Windram, Prue Shaw,
Peter Robinson, and Christopher Howe, Dantes Monarchia as a Test Case for the Use of Phylogenetic Methods in Stemmatic
Analysis, Literary and Linguistic Computing, 2008, 23:443 463.

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or regularities (with a nomothetic aim), historiography focuses on the specific (the idiographic).19
Yet it is also the discipline of historiography that developed the general and widely
applicable method of source criticism. The nineteenth-century historian Leopold von Ranke
(17951886) is usually credited with the first precise description of the rules of source
criticism that aimed to determine whether a document is genuine. Both the content of the
source and its external facets, such as the form and the carrier, had to be subjected to a
number of critical questions. Rankes system is not a formalism, like an abstract grammar or
a tree, but instead a rule system for critically evaluating sources. While Rankes ideal to
reconstruct historical reality (wie es eigentlich gewesen) is today seen as unrealistic, the
source-critical method has been adopted by all disciplines (scientific and humanistic) that
need to evaluate sources critically, such as evidence-based medicine, forensic science, and
jurisprudence.20 Students in medicine learn how to read medical evidence, students in
forensic science need to figure out the trustworthiness of a source, and students in law often
need to unmask fake sources.
There are many other shared formalisms and rule systems across the humanities and
science disciplines. A particularly early one was Leon Battista Albertis first formalized
description of linear perspective. Alberti uncovered the rule system underlying the illusionistic
reproduction of three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional surface as carried out by early
Renaissance painters like Masaccio. This rule system not only led to a revolution in European
painting and art theory but also to the mathematical study of perspective, which started out
with the same formalism and rules of linear perspective created by Alberti.21
Shared formalisms are also abundant between the study of music and certain sciences; the
formalism of musical harmony in terms of simple integer fractions was taken as the model of
the universe, not only in Europe, but also in China. For a long time this kind of musical
formalism and rule system was so dominant that all cosmological models were based on it. It
took until the late seventeenth century before it was possible to destroy this cosmological
harmony.22 (See also the contribution by Kursell, in this Focus section, for the nineteenthcentury transfer between acoustic and historical study of music.)
An overview of the history of shared formalisms also should not overlook the impact of

19

Wilhelm Dilthey, Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften: Versuch einer Grundlegung fur das Studium der Gesellschaft und
der Geschichte (1883), pp. 29 ff. For an English translation see Wilhelm Dilthey, Selected Works, Vol. 1, trans. and ed. Rudolf
Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1991). On the neo-Kantian view see Wilhelm Windelband,
Geschichte und Naturwissenschaft, 3rd ed. (Straburg: Heitz, 1904). The discussions by Dilthey and Windelband are more
subtle than summarized here. See Bouterse and Karstens in this Focus section for more details.
20 See Lorraine Daston, Objectivity and Impartiality: Epistemic Virtues in the Humanities, in Bod, Maat, and Weststeijn,
eds., The Making of the Humanities, Vol. 3: The Modern Humanities (cit. n. 2), pp. 27 42. See also Kasper Eskildsen, Leopold
Rankes Archival Turn: Location and Evidence in Modern Historiography, Modern Intellectual History, 2008, 5:425 453. The
necessary critical questions are still being taught and used; see, for example, the brochure, Evaluating Information: A Basic
Checklist (Chicago: American Library Association, 1994). On use of the source-critical method in other disciplines see Richard
Riegelman, Studying a Study and Testing a Test: How to Read the Medical Evidence (Baltimore: Lippincott, Williams &
Wilkins, 2004); Charles Bazerman, The Informed Writer: Using Sources in the Disciplines (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995);
and Lawrence McCrank, Historical Information Science: An Emerging Unidiscipline (Medford, N.J., Information Today, 2002).
21 Leon Battista Alberti, De pictura (1435). See Bod, New History of the Humanities (cit. n. 2), pp. 211216.
22 See H. Floris Cohen, Quantifying Music: The Science of Music at the First Stage of the Scientific Revolution, 1580 1650
(Dordrecht: Reidel, 1984). For a recent overview on shared methods between music and science see Peter Pesic, Music and
the Making of Modern Science (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2014). On destruction of the harmony see Cohen, Music as
Science and as Art: The Sixteenth/Seventeenth-Century Destruction of Cosmic Harmony, in Bod, Maat, and Weststeijn, eds.,
The Making of the Humanities, Vol. 1: Early Modern Europe (cit. n. 2), pp. 59 71.

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Rens Bod

Focus: The Histories of the Humanities and Science

linguistic family trees on scientific racism. The nineteenth-century idea of the IndoEuropean language family defined our view of the relationships between peoples, for the
better and the worse. Among other things, it gave a boost to the hypothesis of the existence of
a pure Aryan language and race, a theory that would be taken over much later by the
National Socialists. This shows that the impact of formalisms from the humanities is not
necessarily positive. The claim that the humanities are crucial for developing a critical
mentality and for democracy (as Martha Nussbaum contends) may thus deserve further
discussion.23
We can also add some examples of formalisms and rule systems used in more recently
established humanistic disciplines, such as film studies and television studies. Insights from
these disciplines include a formal analysis of the medium of television and indicate that
viewers are captured through what has been called flowsthat is, nonstop streams of
information, advertising, entertainment, and trailerswhose purpose is to keep the viewer
tuned to a particular channel. And what to think about the discovery that the television series
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, which has dragged on for years, can be described by a rule
system that consists of only eight narrative building blocks that are endlessly reshuffled?24
Time will tell whether these formalisms and rule systems will be used in other disciplines, but
they are in any event intriguing.
CONCLUSION

This paper has opened up a new area of historical study: the history of shared formalisms and
rule systems across the humanities and the sciences. I have argued that the notion of
formalism provides a level of abstraction at which very different disciplines can be compared.
The transfer of formalisms from one discipline to another (across the humanities and the
sciences) had hardly been examined before. I have shown that these transfers are never
one-way eventsthere is a continuous and long-term interaction between disciplines at the
levels of methods, formalisms, and rules. While disciplines can also be compared at other
levels (e.g., in terms of practices, values, virtues, and institutions), I have argued that
the level of formalisms and rules may be the only level where I find equivalence rather
than just similarity.
My short overview also has made clear that methods, formalisms, and rules from the
humanities have had a much larger impact on science and society than often thought. The
humanities provided grammar formalisms (linguistics) that were used in the development of
high-level programming languages. The humanities also provided stemmas and rules for text
reconstruction (philology) that were applied to DNA analysis. In addition, they developed
widely applicable source-critical methods (historiography) that are used in a variety of fields,
from forensics to medicine. And there is more, including the first art-historical description of
linear perspective and the formalism for historical-linguistic underpinning of scientific racism
(historical linguistics). There is no reason whatsoever to suppose that these examples are

23

Stefan Arvidsson, Aryan Idols: Indo-European Mythology as Ideology and Science (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2006), pp.
241 ff; and Martha Nussbaum, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press,
2010).
24 Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (London: Collins, 1974); and Benedikt Lwe, Eric Pacuit, and
Sanchit Saraf, Identifying the Structure of a Narrative via an Agent-Based Logic of Preferences and Beliefs: Formalizations of
Episodes from CSI: Crime Scene InvestigationTM, in MOCA 09: Fifth International Workshop on Modelling of Objects,
Components, and Agents, ed. Michael Duvigneau and Daniel Moldt (Hamburg: Univ. Hamburg Department of Informatics,
2009).

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exhaustive in any way. To the contrary, a systematic exploration is likely to yield many more
such cases of interactions and transfers between the humanities and science.
In any case, it has become clear that an overview of the history of science will have to take
into account the history of the humanities; otherwise we neglect the methods and formalisms
that have their own history. If we want to understand the long-term history of science there is
no other option than to integrate it with the history of the humanities. To do this without
falling back to whig history will perhaps be the biggest challenge for the future.

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