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As someone who has majored in English, I strongly disagree. You don’t need to understand the subject matter to make rudimentary assessments of validity. People

As someone who has majored in English, I strongly disagree. You don’t need to understand the subject matter to make rudimentary assessments of validity. People who study the humanities learn to ask questions like, does the author seem to have a bias? Are some obvious questions not being raised by the text? Does the author contradict themselves? You might not be able to definitively state that the author is being disingenuous, or is a shill, but you can learn to explicitly state where certain narratives are weakly supported. Most people can’t do this. They tend to accept all texts as authoritative.

threwere434234f 7y ago
As someone who has read a fair bit of "critical"ly read texts - I strongly disagree. English majors often don't understand enough to even be able to pick out contradictions properly, and all they end up doing is (quite ironically) act as spin doctors spinning webs for the ideological sugar daddies.
thundergolfer 7y ago
> You don’t need to understand the subject matter to make rudimentary assessments of validity. Possibly for really rudimentary assessments, but do you have any evidence for this? The book source in my original comment is package with peer-reviewed research on this. One study in the book is about college-educated participants that aren't baseball fans scoring worse on a reading comprehension test than non-college educated labourers who were baseball fans when the subject matter is baseball. Really, each of the questions you list all require knowledge to answer. The latter you could say just requires literacy but that is knowledge it's not some skill you can divorce from domain-specific concepts. > Are some obvious questions not being raised by the text? How could doing this be some generalisable ability divorced from knowledge about the content of the text and the domain(s) of concern in the text? Without even looking at the scientific research it seems pretty implausible that you could train a human being to pick out "obvious questions" of import to some text about the 2nd World War if you ensured to keep them ignorant of knowledge about France, Nazi Germany, Nationalism, War, etc. etc.

threwere434234f 7y ago

As someone who has read a fair bit of "critical"ly read texts - I strongly disagree. English majors often don't understand enough to even be able to pick out contradictions properly, and all they end up doing is (quite ironically) act as spin doctors spinning webs for the ideological sugar daddies.

thundergolfer 7y ago

> You don’t need to understand the subject matter to make rudimentary assessments of validity. Possibly for really rudimentary assessments, but do you have any evidence for this? The book source in my original comment is package with peer-reviewed research on this. One study in the book is about college-educated participants that aren't baseball fans scoring worse on a reading comprehension test than non-college educated labourers who were baseball fans when the subject matter is baseball. Really, each of the questions you list all require knowledge to answer. The latter you could say just requires literacy but that is knowledge it's not some skill you can divorce from domain-specific concepts. > Are some obvious questions not being raised by the text? How could doing this be some generalisable ability divorced from knowledge about the content of the text and the domain(s) of concern in the text? Without even looking at the scientific research it seems pretty implausible that you could train a human being to pick out "obvious questions" of import to some text about the 2nd World War if you ensured to keep them ignorant of knowledge about France, Nazi Germany, Nationalism, War, etc. etc.