There are two cultures, one is of the deep...

A significant difference between study in the humanities and that in the sciences is that logic, Popperian logic say, has never seemed of much importance in or to the arts. Doubtless there are many reasons for this, but perhaps the greatest is this: that in the arts we have no hypotheses, because, indeed, we have no problems. By this, I mean that there is no great interest in forming a technology of the arts, that there is nothing to be won there. Yet, a great part of literary critical theory, certainly in the 1990s when I last paid attention, appears dedicated to the mastery of all territory. Why is it that literary theorists did not turn to the obviously successful scientific method? Because, shrewdly, the scholars of literature knew that this modified empiricism would rapidly take the field out of their hands, and criticism would be succeeded by naturalism. This would have been personally and institutionally inconvenient.