MeghanIsMe

Random thoughts that a Calvin and Hobbes comic on Facebook (the one here inspired today:

The more I've thought about this kind of joke in the context of my own experiences with academia, the more I've wanted to analyze why this is funny despite its apparent trivialization of areas of the humanities that are important to me.

Academic journals are intended to be a conversation between specialists about complicated topics with arrays of nuance that require the construction of terms and phrases to refer to them. Those concepts do not exist in common understanding outside the field, so to discuss them readily, people familiar with them have to create their own 'code' if you will, to refer to them.

This is true in any specialized discipline. If I look at high-level physics, for instance, I have far less of a clue what is being expressed than I do in something like the title of Calvin's paper there. Just like published articles in humanities journals, hard-science journals are not written for a lay audience; they are written for other experts. Being understandable to the public is not a significant concern. (That is, indeed, a problem in itself, and science needs to be more accessible in many ways to many more people. But that's its own topic.)

So I have to wonder why incomprehensible humanities jargon gets made fun of so much more often than incomprehensible hard science jargon. Maybe it's because people have a sense that they already know about the topics being investigated by the humanities researchers? That these things are simple enough that people who are making them so hard to understand must be either engaging in intentional elitist posturing, or are disconnected from the underlying, far more simple, reality?

It's a strange double-standard. Hard-science research gains credence when it's so complex as to be incomprehensible to the layperson. Humanities research *loses* credence when it's so complex as to be incomprehensible to the layperson.