I think we must be operating with very different definitions of science. In so far as a humanities scholar employs scientific methods, I am happy to call him a

I think we must be operating with very different definitions of science. In so far as a humanities scholar employs scientific methods, I am happy to call him a scientist. > Here's a Greek manuscript. There's a lacuna in the text. What is the most likely correct emendation? If you use a statistical method to answer, explain how you compiled your corpus of comparisons. This lacuna is going to be filled using scientific thinking employed by the humanities scholar doing the. He is going to make comparisons to other documents and to other knowledge about the period, language, etc. That is to have some hypotheses about the lacuna, he is going to gather data, and then he is going to analyze that data in the context of the lacuna and propose solutions. As has been pointed out, there are existing computational systems that do this kind of work. There is a long history of work on this kind of problem from information theory and cryptography. > Oh my yes, just like football and gourmet cooking are worth doing. Besides which, your science labs are going to need industrial designers and lawyers, and at least a couple historians of science to warn you away from past methodological errors. Which means you also need at least a few scholars of rhetoric, fine arts, philology, general history and archaeology to train them. I did not make my point clearly. Let me make it again: if your methodology does not produce parsimonious models of the world that can be used to make accurate predictions, then what is the point of doing it? If you cannot produce testable claims of fact about the world, what is the point in doing it? I was suggesting to you, to take a jocular example, that if you know that astrology does not work, then it is not worth doing, even if it is your only method of making predictions. Your point about industrial designers and lawyers is a non sequitur in this context. I am talking about methods of discovery and methods of testing knowledge claims. As to psychoanalysis, the reason I brought it up is that it is still rampant in large parts the humanities: intellectual history, comparative literature, and English the chief problem fields.