Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 39, No. 172.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
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        Date: 2025-10-20 05:56:39+00:00
        From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
        Subject: experience & theory?

As is my habit, here is a statement of principle to be put to the test:
that for any activity for which use of a tool is essential, theorising
its use has value for others in proportion to the theoriser's experience 
with it--and even then requires exercise of both modesty and bravery.

My current example is not computing (though the principle, I think,
applies), rather photography. In the first of two of his wise books on the
subject, The Spoken Image (1999), Clive Scott cautions that, 
"Photography is such a fluid, mobile, unstable medium, so diverse in 
its applications, that any writer who takes it as a subject should avoid
being too categorical about any aspect of it." Having recently waded
through writings on the subject in which theorising triumphs over
experience, if indeed any experience lurks in the background at all, I
am inclined to ask if, for example, an anthropology of some distant
people whom one has never lived with, or a treatise on a manuscript one
has never had in hand (suitably gloved) would not be suspect?

Comments?

Yours,
WM
--
Willard McCarty,
Professor emeritus, King's College London;
Editor, Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts,
   Sciences and Humanities (Berghahn); Humanist
www.mccarty.org.uk


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