From its inception, social science--which includes economics, sociology, anthropology, political science and social psychology—has struggled for respect.

General ideas about functions of socialstructure are central but are not mathematized as in economics (e.g.,economists might focus on allocative efficiency defined mathemat-ically while sociologists might focus on social reproduction of elitesuccess measured statistically or qualitatively)

each socialscience discipline has a different endowment (i.e., ahistorical mastery of tools and accumulated knowl-edge) and comparative advantage.

active collaboration among scientistswith different training—meaning a diversity of perspec-tives is influencing the research—as opposed to oneresearcher passively borrowing ideas from other fields.

Incest avoidance, the focus of so many cultural conventions, also springs from ahereditary epigenetic rule.

Color vision, one of the important sensory determinants of culture, has been relativelywell tracked all the way from genes to neurons.

Phobias are aversions powerful enough to engage the autonomic nervous system. Theycan evoke panic, cold sweat, and nausea; are easily acquired, often from a singlefrightening experience;

The smile, which appears in infants from the ages of two to four months, invariablyevokes affection from adults and reinforces bonding between caregiver and infant. Inall cultures and throughout life, smiling is used to signal friendliness, approval, and asense of pleasure.

onsider the matter of vision. What we intuitively believe to be the "real world" is what wesee.

Emotion, as now understood, is not something separate and distinct from thinking, as theRomantics fancied.

Confidence in the unity of knowledge-universal consilience-rests ultimately on the hypothesisthat all mental activity is material in nature and occurs in a manner consistent with the causalexplanations of the natural sciences.

They are separated, conventional wisdom has it, by anepistemological discontinuity, in particular by possession of different categories of truth,autonomous ways of knowing, and languages largely untranslatable into those of the naturalsciences.

physics, chemistry, and biology have been connected by a web ofcausal explanation organized by inductionbased theories that telescope into one another.

This helps us to see how ontological duality characterizesobjects such as historical “events,” objects that exist only as inferences fromsurviving documents. All of the historian’s objects are monuments in spiteof the ephemerality of events,

We scholars canno longer affect the arrogance of a Benjamin Jowett, but perhaps it wouldbe strategic for us at the present moment to stop apologizing and beginexplaining what it is that we study.

Whatever else we may want to assert about the methods or aimsof the humanities, surely the most important fact for us to acknowledge isthat by the humanities, we mean the study of a particular kind of object.This object calls to us across the long time of human existence, exceedingby far the duration of any one human life

Monuments, on the other hand, give the illusion of immediate acces-sibility; many people are able to give the basic definition of Kant’s “cat-egorical imperative” or the plot of Moby Dick without having read Kant’sMetaphysic of Morals or Melville’s novel. The more familiar the monument,the greater the space it occupies in the cosmos of culture, amounting fi-nally to a specious familiarity.

Documents, by contrast, find their metaphoric association in substancessuch as parchment or paper, at once fragile and yet surprisingly enduring.Documents also have the purpose of recalling to mind, but they do notnecessarily make any demands.

We can easily see that by monument Panof-sky does not mean only a certain kind of metal or stone structure, a memo-rialization of a great event. Conversely, Panofsky does not mean by docu-ment a piece of paper only, or even writing. For a religious historian, thealtarpiece itself may be a document, a means of inquiring into some otherobject of study, for example, devotional practices. For that scholar, suchpractices possess monumentality, and the altarpiece documentality. Thereversible nature of the “records left by man” is a condition of possibilityfor their study, whatever name we choose to give to this study.

Let usconsider the possibility, with Panofsky’s help, that the humanities mightpossess a coherence that can be described more richly than an aggregationof nonscientific disciplines.

The problem that troubles the rhetoric of defense is even more evidentin the second major line of defense, the argument that the humanities dealuniquely with human things, or the human world.

The first is that the humanities are uniquelyvaluable for their use in making better persons, or more specifically, bet-ter citizens.

defenses of the humanities arises above all from their failure to describethe objects of study in humanities disciplines, to make the demand of theseobjects upon our attention vivid and undeniable. Humanities scholars havedevoted too much effort to declaring the purpose or value of humanitiesstudy—the why—and too little to giving an account of what they study. It ismy contention that a better description of what we study will yield a betterunderstanding in the public sphere of why we study these objects.

In recent decades, a meme emerged in public discourse, assert-ing that English and other humanities majors fail to get jobs and that stu-dents would be wiser to major in STEM fields and other practical subjectssuch as business or communications. Several governors even proposed tu-ition penalties for students in their state universities who major in humani-ties.