 If you take the names, the first names of the people on the next panel, you can make an anagram sentence, but just barely. So Amy, Miranda, Robert, Eve, Heiting, and Brian becomes I hit a bear, avenge my armbrit, or din. Please welcome Amy Davis-Rough, Miranda Celeste-Hale, Robert, Blazkowicz, Eve, Stebert, Heiting, Chin, and Brian Thompson. We got skepticism and the humanities. Hello everybody. We didn't assign seats beforehand and I was hoping there would be a fight, but apparently not. Hi, I'm Brian Thompson. I am the outreach coordinator for the James Randi Educational Foundation and this is a panel on skepticism and the humanities. And we're going to be talking about a lot of things, so we'll get started pretty quickly. Just so you know, I woke up this morning feeling completely upside down after the festivities of last night. So I'm wearing my Australian skeptics, Victoria skeptics t-shirt. And actually now I feel right side up. Do you, do you get it? This is the quality of jokes you're going to get this early in the morning. Thank you. I'm hearing mumbles of support from these people. So let's just go down the road. Everybody can introduce themselves. Let's start with Amy. Hey Davis-Rough, a lot of you know me as Surly Amy. I write for sceptchick.org. Thanks for the five supporters out there. I'm also the managing editor for madartlab.com, which is a blog about the intersection between art, science, skepticism, and geek culture. And I'm the creator of Surly Ramicks. Oh, of course, yes. Okay. I'm Miranda Celestel. I'm an English teacher. I teach primarily rhetoric and composition courses at the community college level. And I tend to focus on applying those skills to sceptical activism. And I guess that's the relevant part. Thank you. I'm Eve Siebert. I'm also an English teacher. I have a PhD in English literature, specifically Old English, Middle English, Old Norse, and Shakespeare, because something fun and modern. A high blog at scepticalhumanities.com. I'm interested in things like creationist interpretations of Beowulf, which you'll be surprised to learn aren't wrong. And I'm actually wearing... This is a Grendel's skull. Amy might not have realized this, but... Yeah, I have no idea what I do, you guys. That's true. Grendel was a dinosaur. Anyway. I'm Bob Blaskowitz. I'm a postdoc in the writing and communication program at Georgia Tech for about two more weeks. Then I'll be going to Wisconsin, where I'll take up a visiting assistant professorship. I'm also at scepticalhumanities. My PhD is in American literature and rhetoric and composition. My dissertation was on the World War II veterans' writings, both memoir and fiction. And I teach a number of classes that take as their subject extraordinary claims, giving students the opportunity to write about these topics and to research these topics on their own. Hi, Ting. I am an opera singer by trade. That song had lyrics by Sirly Amy. You can buy them on a... Not on a beer bottle, but on a necklace. I mean, I suppose if someone wants to buy this beer bottle. That's actually a good idea. We will donate the proceeds to the JRF. That music was written by my partner in crime, Matthew Shickley, who was out there somewhere last night at about 2 a.m. Right. I am Hai Ting Chin. I am an opera singer. Podcast with Matthew Shickley, the Scopes Monkey Choir, which is a podcast about... Scopes Monkey Choir, which is about... It is the podcast where music and sound meet science and skepticism. And I have an ongoing show that I'm calling Science Fair, which is science texts and writings by scientists set to music and staged with demonstrations. Excellent. And I was pretty embarrassing, too, because just before this panel, Hai Ting and I were talking about what she was going to do, and it turns out we were going to be singing the exact same song, so... It's awkward. I just decided instead I would sing Poisons Every Rose Has It Storn. Speaking of wonderful art, let's just get some definitions out of the way before we get started with the meat of the panel. I don't know if everybody here even knows exactly what we're talking about when we're talking about the humanities to paraphrase Raymond Carver. So, Bob, do you want to handle... Just explaining to us what exactly we are talking about here when we say humanities. Well, when I think of the humanities, the definition is a little fluid as these things often are, but it's a... a variety of disciplines that have to do with... you know, communication and meaning often, including, you know, literature and languages and linguistics, philology, cultural anthropology, depending on your definition of the social sciences, the fine arts, history, theology is a legitimate area of study. Apologetics? But, you know, theology is interdisciplinary. And then there are area studies that are also incorporated into the... under the umbrella name of the humanities, including things like gender studies, American studies, eco-criticism, communication studies, folklore, and classics. And some people go so far as to include things like law underneath the umbrella of the humanities. So, it's not just a bunch of people sitting around talking about just a bunch of nonsense. It's actually an academic field of study with expertise. Right. And that's one of the things that is... it can be kind of frustrating. I mean, there seems to be a sort of divide, and I know that Miranda will talk about this, but there seems to be a sort of divide between at least a mutual misunderstanding about what the sciences are doing and what the humanities are doing. We don't really communicate as much as we really ought to, because we share a lot of information and enthusiasm, really. But do you want to talk about that, Miranda? Sure. This is... Am I doing this right? Well, we've actually had this discussion during our preparation time about how it is interesting that the critical thinking skills are often taught in the humanities courses more than they are taught in science courses. So we can often take that as a valuable thing from humanities in the academic world at least, and as Bob said, humanities has a very broad definition, which can be both a good thing and a bad thing, because as you try to explain it, it is difficult to narrow it down. Yet it is nice to have this sort of big umbrella, because we can say these things are valuable too, these things are worth studying, and they provide us with skills that we can apply to skepticism in a way that science does too, so it's complementary, but different. I would say some parts of the humanities, some humanities courses are and subjects are a little more pragmatic than others, and I tend to prefer that, especially when we're talking about the context of skepticism, and how one can apply those skills, and that subject matter, to communicate effectively, to inform, and to allow us to persuade, it gets into the teaching how to think, not what to think, which is a cliche, but it's very important, I think, especially in the humanities perhaps, and so I suppose I'm also here getting into the justification of why, because Bob and I had previously talked about do we need to, it sounds weird, but defend, was that the word? Possibly defend the humanities. Defend the humanities, like their battle, but, yeah, it's a little bit of a justification, I suppose, for why these things are relevant to why we're here, and Are you going to call out Lawrence Krause? No, I'll let you do that, you're better than that. Okay, yeah. But I'm just saying, I appreciate that you brought up that, or you or you brought up that thing during the pre, you know, during our preparation, the critical thinking skills are often. How do you spell the substance of the mind? Sorry, I'm sorry. Got it. Critical thinking skills are often more prominent in humanities courses than in science courses, and that is, I suppose, ironic, but it isn't to denigrate the science courses by any means, I just believe they are complementary, and both can provide with similar. I think you've contributed to this, Turf War. Yeah, we're going to throw down. Yeah. We're going to lose so horribly, because they've got rockets and stuff. We have wars. And pictures and stuff. Yeah, we can paper cut you. I can make the ceramics for on the rockets, so we can work together, you guys, it's okay. Bridge building. Brian has rockets. Okay, fine. We'll work on that later. Look, a lot of people do think that there is this hard line divide between the right brain and the left brain, so I want to talk about how you apply these critical thinking skills to what you guys take. Did you just say critical drinking? I'm sure that you said critical drinking. How late were you out last night, Brian? We've all been drinking critically. Well, okay, well first I want to just sort of set the stage here, because we have two people here who are artists and creators, and we've got the rest of the panel is more on the academic side and the study side, and the two aren't mutually exclusive, but I do want to talk about how you approach things from both the practical creation side of art, and then how you approach critical thinking from the teaching and the study. So, Amy, Hi Ting, how do you apply critical thinking to what you both do? Well, this is a topic that comes up a lot, especially with the blog that I write for Mad Art Lab. Artists sort of have a reputation for being spacey, you know, hippie pot smoke and lazy people that aren't really interested in the rational side of things, but when you really break down the creative process, it's very similar to the scientific method. Artists will take materials that they have available to them, sort of like the available data that you would have if you were in a scientific setting. You then come up with a hypothesis as to what you could perhaps make with that data or those materials. Then you do your experiments in your lab, which is your art studio, and you come up with something, maybe it's something wonderful, maybe it's something ugly, you base it, you know, how does it compare to what I thought it was going to be, and then you release that out into the world and it's up for peer review. So the rest of you and other artists get to peer review our work. So I think that science and art are very, very similar in the process side of it. I like the word that you use, Lad. I want to add, however, the corollary to this lyric that you wrote, science, you don't have to believe in it for it to be true. I would say that the art version is art. It don't have to be true for you to believe in it. The part of the point of art is it's where we don't have to be rational and critical. In fact, it's great sometimes for us not to be, and even as skeptics we can let ourselves go in that arena. We don't have to worry about whether it is true. We can keep that part of our mind going if we want or not, but in the art world we can just feel, we can just experience, we can share with our friends. It doesn't, we're released from the obligation for it to approach truth. And if it happens to approach some kind of emotional truth, sorry. That's great for the artist and for the experiencer, but it's not necessary. And it's really also not necessary for art that the artist be critical or anything. It's not necessary. It's possible. Well, that's interesting because art is subjective to a certain extent. But when you talk about bad art there's an example that I think everybody probably here can relate to hotel room paintings. We all have the same ones here. Probably, it's just a bunch of horses. But see how that's community building. We're all having similar experiences with that art. So even though it's bad art all of us can take something out of that. It might be humor. It might be the fact that we all have that art. True. I think it still has meaning. I want to get your feedback on this because I'm probably wrong. But I think that maybe one of the primary criteria for bad art is a certain sense of untruth or dishonesty about it. So for example with hotel room art you look at it and it's just kind of it's competent. It gets the job done although I don't know why my painting in my hotel room has a horse that appears to be lying down dead except he has one head up. Yeah, it's very strange. But on the other hand it seems to be done with sort of the cynical bare minimum that this was done not necessarily because of any sort of passion to relay any kind of truth that the artist was really feeling it was done because these were the colors that were asked for in the hotel room. So do you think that there is anything to that that the sort of critical thinking the science minded people are in search of truth and art maybe is also in search of truth at least the best kinds of art? Tell me I'm wrong. You're wrong. Art, listen art cannot show you art cannot teach you truth. I have a a director friend of mine who's fond of saying if you want to send a message go to western union. If you already know what the message is you can find it in the art and it can be reinforced by the art. If you are curious about some message that you don't understand you also might be sort of tweaked into thinking about it by the art. But the point of art is not to instruct on facts or to search for deeper truth that science is about trying to figure out how our human senses are fooling us and what is beyond what our human senses can perceive and how they are fooled. Art is about reveling in our human senses and the way they fool us and the beauty that comes out of the fooling us. The stories that our brains tell us some of which are ridiculous and not true but are really fun to think about. That's the domain of art. And again I just want to reinforce there's sort of this idea that the artist is dead. Once I create a piece of art or anyone else creates a piece of art or whoever the person is that created the ugly horse art that is in the hotel rooms that their intention was and it could have been for that to be the most beautiful reference to their pony named sugar that they loved so much. Whatever their intention is is sort of irrelevant once the art is placed in front of you. So it's up to you to decide what that meaning is. So Bob and even Randa how do you apply critical thinking to the study of the humanities but even more than that how does critical thinking make you a better scholar in humanities? Well I think critical thinking is necessary to any academic form because well you just have Bibl otherwise. So we look for evidence we come to conclusions based on evidence and we make an argument based on and then present the evidence to support our arguments. In English literature or literature generally the text to a large extent is the primary source of evidence but also historical contextual evidence and textual evidence which I think is ridiculous because manuscripts and stuff and in the humanities there isn't like a one answer that's sort of correct necessarily so you can have two different quite opposing points of view about say Hamlet because there are at least two different as I understand points of view about Hamlet but it's still valid as long as you are presenting evidence that's valid I remember the first time I taught a literature class I told my students papers they don't really like writing them it turns out no way and I said there's no right answer and then I started writing papers and then I revised that to there are wrong answers there is no single right answer but there can definitely be wrong answers if you're saying something that's directly contradicted by the evidence then that's probably not so much correct or if you're just apparently have made up your own story because I've had that students go well maybe Rip Van Winkler's Wife well maybe but that's just a different story and it's great and go ahead and write that story but not for this paper that's an analysis of the story you know there's another thing that I realized early on in teaching writing classes I had a student this was like my first day as a graduate student teaching a college level class and I was all wearing a suit and everything all respectable I ditched the backpack for the computer bag long pants and everything and propeller beanie and I showed up in full academic regalia and it was the damnedest thing but I had a student who after I read the syllabus clutching it really tight and trying to power through it and at the end of that he said I thought this was going to be a creative writing class where it's a research class and I stopped for a second but all writing is creative you know that there isn't the analytical side and the creative side are joined perfectly in these writing classes so yeah well I had a friend who at some point got frustrated with her dissertation and had decided she was going to write a dissertation haiku I believe the committee didn't really go for that though that makes me sad but how long would a haiku have to be to be a dissertation Hamlet was mad hashtag the dissertation was only three lines long but there was a 500 page bibliography footnotes mostly favorites can I do a little bit on this question I like that we discussed the pedagogical aspects of how critical thinking affects the humanities and has a relationship to it I think that those pedagogical skills teaching skills are completely transferable outside of the classroom too and that's what makes it relevant to what we're talking about here because we get to get out of the academic world which can be very boring on occasion and in and we get to take it out and use those skills that we have in perhaps a more practical manner where we're not just assigning papers and about Hamlet or haiku and instead we are using the skills that we teach about how to find sources evaluate their quality use them to support your arguments that's often a thing with students to support their arguments with evidence they just want to say I believe it therefore it is true and that isn't how it works and so that can be a very hard thing to overcome so once we can sort of help students in the classroom to learn that they do need to support their actual assertions with good quality evidence I think that's very relevant to skepticism they don't like that part either what do you mean by good though you know it's like well here's my opinion and look the Google agrees with me or Wikipedia which I love but I always have to explain it isn't necessarily the most trustworthy source but anyway I just mean that we can transfer those skills to skepticism in the sense that we can communicate how important it is to support our assertions with evidence outside of just writing papers but whoever our audience is and whatever our goal and objectives are communication is one of the primary goals of anybody who's a good skeptic what it means to be a skeptic at least in the way that we are here we've come to a gathering of fellow skeptics we're not just sitting at home just thinking to ourselves you know what I think evolution is true we are interested in communicating that idea being active helping people who are being harmed by false beliefs and that's the one thing that every you know even though we have practicing artists and their severest critics together on the same panel but the one thing that Bob don't start a war I don't know I heard him saying that song sucked I'm not trying to cause any trouble or anything there's gonna be a war today she's the only one with a glass bottle it didn't suck it blue I wouldn't mess with her Bob that's the one thing that we all have in common is that we're all communicators and that's one of the fundamental principles behind the humanities is that we are trying to put our understand one another better understand like the cultural products and artifacts that people have produced we put ourselves inside someone else's head when we're reading a novel we try to understand what was daily life like during the renaissance it kind of to go back to what Michael Sherman was saying on the first day these are ways of practicing expanding our sympathy for our fellow humans and to celebrate what we're capable of doing and that's very important and I want to bring it home this message of what visual art what performance art what the humanities in general how we as this community use it just a few examples that come to my head Phil Plate we're all pretty much familiar with him I don't know if you follow him on Facebook or Twitter or Google Plus but he is absolutely amazing at what I think is an accident that he does gorgeous photos of the cosmos and it draws you into his conversation suddenly you can understand what he's talking about when he's discussing black holes or other phenomenon Scott Sigler you may be familiar with him he's a bestselling horror author but what he does with his characters is he has skeptical characters that use real science in his books that helps to communicate that Tim Minchin hello what about his beat poem that probably taught more people about the problems with alternative medicine than any argument that I've heard our beloved George Robb knows he knows how well he can get a jingle to stick in your head so you'll remember a bit of science I think that there's a lot of ways that we can practically apply the sort of wishy-washy ideas of performance and visual art to express what we're trying to tell a larger audience about critical things we were talking earlier about the idea that art is often a way of recognizing your tribe that you hear the music you sing it together you see the jewelry or the clothes you make a reference to a movie and in our modern world we're choosing our tribes we have many but it's a way of bringing ourselves together recognizing each other a short hand for all kinds of things that we know we have in common and a way of reinforcing that and making us feel a certain kind of common humanity and I I think it's really important that people when you recognize some art or artists that you like that you support that person not just with enjoying their art but financially because a lot of you buy the CD go to the show a lot of art has been commissioned and paid for by people that we do not agree with over the millennia the church for instance I'm singing for the Episcopal church because they have an institution they have a repertoire they have money to pay me I talked to a really nice visual artist last night who makes inspirational Christian art because people buy it so if you want art that supports your worldview go out and support it the way you to show that you want that worldview represented I am the pony guy that made the paintings in the hotel room and the pony guy he really loves sugar or has had a good life I think he sold enough paintings he was probably supported by this hotel just like a crowbar eyeglasses screwdriver Brian did you make those paintings I did I just want to say really quickly that the scientific and skeptical artists are rather rare but I know for a fact that there's at least 5 people out in this audience right now that are skeptical minded artists I would raise that too I'm hoping there's more there's 6 now there's a gentleman in the front he's great we need to show that we appreciate this art and that we're trying to build a community even the artists that haven't made anything yet and tell them to put their stuff out there because we need you guys especially in this era of the internet where it's so easy to spread the word about something a lot of people I think mistake spreading the word for support and it's great when you can like a facebook page or tweet about you should go check this thing out but you're actually contributing hit a donate button buy a CD ask if you can buy a painting or a sketch this sounds so mercenary but when I think about all the money that's being given to artists to make art to support a world view to reinforce to legitimize world views that they don't believe in it makes me mad because somehow I'll leave this to the experts for some reason art is powerful and we would love to use it to move us in the right direction to move humanity in the right direction instead of some of the ones that it has moved in for the last well do you think that do you think that there is a quality trap though and what I mean by that is I was raised Southern Baptist and when you go to church a lot you see a lot of movies made by the church you see a lot of puppet shows for some reason were really big Southern Baptist circuit you see all these things and everybody watches them and everybody says that they like them but if you judge them based on sort of the prevailing standards of that form of art you know if you're an academic then you understand that there are certain objective criteria you can judge a subjective thing like art buy so for example I don't know if anybody else has seen the Kirk Cameron film Fireproof which is about how a guy uses Jesus to help him not be a jerk to his wife what? I don't want to get into it the point is that it's just not only is it not a good movie in its messaging it's poorly made from objective standards like the lighting is bad the editing is bad but people the people who that movie is made for love it do you think that there is a risk in the critical thinking in the science community of us falling into that same trap where we will spread something because we agree with the message but it's not necessarily something that's of the quality to appeal to outsiders listen there's a lot of bad art in the world there is inevitably a lot of bad art about all kinds of things and about nothing at all but the more art there's so much bad say there's so much bad music that was written during Bach's time but what do we remember? we only got Bach because there were a thousand and one horrible composers writing for the Lutheran church and what I'm saying is support everything if you like it especially consume it support it spread it around pay for it if you don't like it it's there and it's part of the morass there are 7 billion people on the planet there's people like all kinds of art some people like those horse paintings on the wall there's art for everybody the more art there is about something the more chance we have that there will be good art about it I was on a panel last week at Convergence at Skepticon or Skepticon and one of the panelists named Ryan brought up a really good point when he first started making art he made really ugly art and he just started putting it out there and he found other people that made really ugly art and they got together and they became friends and they encouraged each other and then as time went on they made beautiful art so I still think that it's important that we encourage people especially in such a small community that we have we need to be supportive of the arts and we need to encourage people you know what make ugly art write a bad song go out there do it keep doing it same with podcasts it's like anything you're going to come out with they might not be fantastic but if you have good intentions and a good message that you're trying to share you should keep at it but this is also why I say if you like it support it because that's you know putting your support behind hopefully raising up the better stuff you don't have to buy the ugly art but just say good job keep at that you know keep it up a really good effort yeah I don't know sometimes I mean I like what you said about there being lots of wrong answers you can say sometimes you're allowed to say that's horrible I don't like it that has nothing to do with science there should be a Facebook button that's just like condescending compliment maybe condescending compliment you really made something there one of my students asked me what B.A.R.F. meant in the margin of their paper and I threw up a little when I read this do you actually write that in your papers? Barf? Yeah I have Awesome I actually barf on just occasionally well no matter what we do whether you're an artist or a scientist or a construction worker if you're here you're interested in getting to the bottom of reality promoting a reality based viewpoint of the world and learning as much as we can about what's really going on in the natural world let's just start with Miranda but anybody can jump in later what do the humanities teach us about reality that traditional science education does not? I don't know if we're necessarily all on the same page about this but probably pretty similar I don't honestly think that the humanities do teach just anything that science doesn't but it gives us the skills that can help us to think about things that have been discovered empirically and rationally and with evidence and have gone through testing and we can say something like peer review and Amy has used that very broadly which is good we can peer review anything basically it goes back to the two cultures by C.P. Snow from the late fifties which probably just stirred up more controversy than anything else with the division of humanities and science but honestly I don't think that science or the humanities can necessarily teach us anything that doesn't already out there but we can use our tools to help people to discuss it and to spread the messages not just science messages but whatever it is that is already but I'm using a very broad definition of science here too obviously I don't know what would the word be for what I'm talking about I guess empiricism perhaps one of the things that humanities can teach us about reality that science can't would be how to parse up this particular question that you know there seems to be an assumption behind the question that the highest achievement that man can reach is to somehow grasp reality and that's not exactly what the humanities are about they're about maybe representing reality although I do think that there are things like Amy pointed out that science and art and humanities do share I think we have pretty much the same delight when we go into an archive and we find a document that totally changes our view of something it's rare but it happens and we like scientists we like to peek around the corner a little bit we like to speculate and then go out and see if we can find something that confirms it or challenges those speculations I think that there's a lot of commonality there you're going through a similar process that scientists do when it's done well yeah and Amy talked about that too making art is you're going through that similar sort of process that scientists do I'm going to jump in and say that I'm a little confused by the question can the humanities teach us something that science cannot well I wish I had a neuroscientist up here because I'm sure that there's research that's been done in terms of emotions and how it affects the brain so I would think that there would be science and how humans react when they see things I also think that there's a lot to be said for communication using art and that a lot of us who are lay people myself included that don't really understand the hard science and might be scared away from the specific studies and the arguments that are very high brow I think that art can allow the rest of us to engage in the scientific discussion so perhaps I think of it more as a tool than as something that's specifically separate I think that's a good I think as far as you know physical reality well you know studying that we're going to let you do that no one is ever writing a poem and then accidentally oh look I'm splitting at him isn't that cool I don't know if Bob had been playing the bongos when he figured out some physics I'm not sure if that's entirely true causation or correlation not causation so we so it would have to be reality in a sort of broader terms and the experience of reality as people have been experiencing reality for years I think more than 10 now people are experiencing reality I'm not sure for at least 6,000 are you a really younger creationist like you're a 10 year creationist I don't want to go make any really bold plans and so obviously history it looks into things like that and arts the way it's been expressed the way people have experienced reality what they thought was important they thought was interesting and so I that's a valid way of I think looking at the world too in fact Amy you're saying that you wanted a neuroscientist up here I just like them do we have any neuroscientists possibly with some fun equipment but the sciences do seem to be influencing what can be done in the humanities there's an entire field of study known as neurophilosophy now that we have a better understanding of mirror neurons you know what does that have to say about human creativity what does that have to say about the old Greek principle of mymesis of imitation I mean that it changes things and if you're doing something I mean I'm not sure that good working humanities will ever overturn science but then again I don't think it's trying to there are some people who did try to do that the French you know the postmodernist or like a radical feminist view of science as a raping nature when we talk about postmodernism in general I mean we don't have to but just how that can can we just put neuro in front of it neuro postmodernism when we talk about the soquel affair and how easy it is for frequently postmodernist and it's still around unfortunately it never seems to go away they will adopt the terminology of science without knowing or they probably know what it means but in order to further their argument even though it's pure nonsense there's a lot of posturing and postmodernism and and yeah they appropriate science words in order to assume the authority of science I mean it's a rhetorical move but when pressed they can't explain what they're talking about and I I find that very frustrating I think that part of the bad rep that the humanities have gotten in science circles has to do with the fact that there is this small number of fringe cultural theorists who are willing to appropriate the language of science and just expound mindlessly on it aren't they dead now though are they all dead? no I mean it still gets taught like zombie are they like derrida zombies? they come out and they want your brains but in a really irritating way and it really in a neuro pretentious way and then you just want to take it out yourself and just throw it at them I'm trying to stop this war can I deflect us from postmodernism for a second and say I think a lot of the humanities and the arts are about sort of holding up a mirror to ourselves and drawing our attention is holding up a mirror to us as a sort of collective and drawing our attention to something in the way and by doing that they I don't know where I'm going with this I mean we know that we can only pay attention as human beings we can only pay attention to so much at once and I think there's a collective way of doing this too that humanities can draw our attention to a certain thing that we might find is important for some reason it can show it can suggest a question that science might ask and I think that also there's some literature nerds in the audience I think would understand this but I think I can explain it in a way that it's pretty easy to understand there's a difference between the cultural philosophy kind of postmodernism and the literary kind of postmodernism and in literary or postmodernism it is I think it speaks to what you're saying it's kind of a scientific process so for example in oh you want to that's the problem postmodernism is defined as that which cannot be defined there you go blame Brian for continuing this discussion please I want to talk about postmodernism well it's also kind of the anti-modernism knocking down the idea that there is progression towards something greater in cultural theory there's this idea that the meaning of a word or some type of cultural symbol is not really contained within it but it is defined by a series of negations and therefore you can make I know all meaning is extrinsic the intrinsic meaning is extrinsic what does that even mean and ultimately all language deconstructs into meaninglessness as I believe we've proven here today that makes me want to be an artist but you can pull back from that and talk about context like general semantics which is the idea that it's a mistake in communication to assume that the map equals the territory in other words a map is not the land that it represents it's a representation of that land a word is not the idea it represents it's a symbol for that idea and this is very important I think for anybody who's interested in communication to not assume that everybody has the same ideas attached to the same symbols that relates to art very well and that's sort of what I was trying to get at when I said that art cannot tell you truth if you have if you believe if you think that you know a certain truth you're going to see that in the art so and the art cannot directly instruct you about a different truth that might suggest to you some other and that sort of comes back to the idea of art being a sort of mirror to draw your attention in one direction or another and then science can study in that direction to search out whether we're right about it but it's not art is not there to show you the truth or tell you do you think that will inspire you to think confirmation bias in art sometimes oh definitely definitely not I mean do you think it's always a good thing or always bad things or a good tribal issue too which can be a good community building thing one of the problems that at least in my graduate training was that we didn't draw attention to the fact that there was something called confirmation bias in fact in all of the one of the things even I are working on is a writing textbook I look through the modern language association database for the phrase confirmation bias and it appeared once in the entire database it's just not on the radar and one of the you know when we're training someone to do an interpretation of the novel often you're finding someone just picking out out of Moby Dick five or six passages and saying this is my case and you need to that's discarding a lot of data right that can be valid if you're not and therefore the whole novel means this but I mean you can pick out a small part of conclusion and discuss that part of base cherry picking well we can all continue this discussion outside and we're out of time we did not come to physical violence which is good if anybody is interested though I guess maybe like downstairs outside the conference area please if you're going to come to blows yes one thing in closing I just want to encourage anyone out there in the audience that has a skill that they can lend to the fight skepticism to get out there and do it if skepticism is really going to be a valuable tool that will encourage the progress of humankind then this community is going to have to find ways to speak to our emotions as well as our intellects to be active no matter how do stuff and I would like if somebody here is an educator who is using extraordinary topics in their classes in the sciences or in the arts I'm currently working on the SWIFT blog to assemble work that you're doing in blog format so if you could kind of find me or look up my email or look at my website or whatever yeah we're looking for that for randy.org so if Bob will be outside having a fight after this just find him I think we will sell this bottle and it's a company there's no beer left in this bottle at Amy's table and we'll donate the money to the JRAP so if you're interested thanks to Amy, Heikting, Miranda, Eve and Bob thank you everybody