Defining 'the humanities'

The division of knowledge into 'science,' 'social science,' and 'the humanities' is deeply entrenched in ways of thinking prevailing in the English-speaking world and is reflected in many institutional structures. The English word science, which excludes not only 'the humanities' but also logic and mathematics, does not have exact equivalents in other European languages. It is a conceptual artefact of modern English and is saturated, so to speak, with British empiricism. There is a pressure on speakers of English to regard 'natural sciences' as a paradigm of all knowledge, or at least all knowledge that modern societies should value and pursue. The semantic changes that the English word science has undergone in the last two centuries or so make empirically-based knowledge of the external world seem central to all human knowledge. This paper shows why 'the humanities' constitute a field of inquiry that is fundamentally different from 'science' (and from 'social sciences' modelled on 'science') and yet essential to human knowledge and 'human understanding.' In doing so, the paper draws on the thought of the 18th-century Italian philosopher Giambatista Vico and on the methodology of linguistic semantics, and in particular on the 'NSM' theory of language and thought.