CELC: Kramnick's Criticism and Truth and Cultural Evolution

This series of blog posts began as a set of observations about literary research on the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include evolutionary literary criticism. I have recently begun to work on incorporating cultural evolution (from Joseph Henrich, who follows the work of Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson). To read the blog post that began this inquiry, see my post from July of 2025 entitled Henrich's Secret of our Success, Cultural Evolution as a new foundation for evolutionary literary criticism.

In last month's blog entry, I discussed and criticized the arguments of Jonathan Kramnick in his book Criticism and Truth. I asked, do they hold up to scrutiny? My position is that the narrow claims do stand up, but the broader claims do not. Here, I want to examine that same book within the framework of cultural evolution as argued in Joseph Henrich's book The Secret of our Success.

Henrich argues that a community of humans possesses a collective knowledge that no one person within the community individually possesses, the community's collective brain. Each human community has multiple prestige hierarchies that preserve and maintain and expand different domains of the group's collective knowledge. This collective knowledge includes craft knowledge, such as how to fashion tools, but also beliefs and values. Those values include aesthetic values. The umbrella term to describe a community's collective pool of knowledge is to say that it is their culture.

One aspect of Henrich's theory of cultural evolution is that collective pools of knowledge grow, shrink, evolve, and come into and go out of existence all the time. Cultures change, hence the name cultural evolution. For example, he argues the bigger the human community, the larger its possible collective brain. He recounts the history of how some human groups, such as the indigenous people of Tasmania, have in the past been cut off from a larger network of human communities and then began to lose knowledge, such as how to fish.

In Criticism and Truth, Kramnick argues that knowing how to study literature using close reading is a craft knowledge. He bemoans the loss of faculty positions for literary criticism because fewer positions threaten the loss of that craft knowledge. As a faculty member, you need a safe place to conduct your own research and to mentor the up-and-coming new researchers who will carry on the tradition.

This loss of institutional knowledge due to a contraction in the size of the community is very much in keeping with Henrich's cultural evolution. If you wipe out literature departments, you lose both the collective knowledge of how to research literature and the prestige hierarchy that renews that knowledge.

Henrich further argues that different human communities will face intergroup competition from other groups. This competition can be violent in the case of war, but it doesn't have to be violent. If a second cultural group is more successful at, say, interacting with a harsh environment, the first cultural group might adopt the second's practices and in the process evolve its collective knowledge by abandoning some practices or beliefs and adopting others.

To give the example of the spread of agriculture, the evidence suggests that agriculture spread both by demographic shifts (farmers moving into a region) and by cultural adoption from one group to the next (neighboring cultures picking up the knowledge).

The loss of status for literary studies represents a broader trend within our overall culture. Political forces within the broader culture seem to have decided that the prestige hierarchy that is the English department at a university is not as worthy of institutional support as formerly. Some colleges are consolidating all of their humanities into one department. That department would have a much smaller program for practicing skills unique to the study of literature.

For an analogous situation, I think of the political transformation that occurred in the British government and society in the nineteenth century. At the beginning of the century, the Anglican Church was culturally and politically powerful. Getting a position as a curate was called "obtaining a living." To get that living, you had to support, at least nominally, the cultural belief system enshrined in the church doctrines.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the Anglican Church had lost power, and the tax dollars flowing to it to pay for clergy shrank dramatically. The government shifted funding toward scientific institutions, encouraged by advocates such as T. H. Huxley. I know vanishingly little about this history, but from what I understand, the cultural advocates for the study of science and technology had allies both among the capital investing class and among the working class. One prestige hierarchy was severely diminished as another was bolstered by the larger community.

It is useful here to compare Kramnick's favored approach to that approach that he claims is the position of Stanley Fish. (Because it is Fish as characterized by Kramnick, and I haven't read any Fish, I will refer to him as Kramnick's Fish. BTW, I checked Wikipedia on July 23, 2026, and at that time, it indicated that Stanley Fish is still alive, so I will refrain from the past tense.) Kramnick's Fish argues that an interpretation is right if it is accepted by the academic literary establishment. Period. Little or no connection is necessary between the interpretation and the literary text it interprets. If you can get your interpretation published in a peer-review journal and go on to get tenure, then the interpretation is valid.

Kramnick rejects this path (which might be a strawman for his thesis). For Kramnick, because the critic has to weave the original literary text into his own critical text skillfully, his interpretation cannot be divorced from the world outside the critic's mind and social group. Apt criticism makes a claim to truth about something in the world. Kramnick claims that skillful and apt prose makes a beautiful artifact, which is a fine claim. However, he then goes on to claim that this elegance, this beauty, is truth-bearing. The knowledge is a know-how as much as a know-that.

As I wrote in my earlier blog entry, the problem is that many different compelling interpretations can be woven from the original text. Kramnick claims that if your interpretation is not true, then your critical prose is not apt or elegant. Keeping in mind the Innocence Project, my response is: try telling that to all the former prisoners who were falsely convicted of rape based on compelling presentations before the jury who were then freed when the DNA evidence refuted those elegant arguments.

Still, the Fish-y argument of Kramnick's Fish relates to the concept of a prestige hierarchy. An interpretation is valid if the inner circle of experts agrees that it is. The college students in literature courses then follow the social rules about what constitutes a valid interpretation. Kramnick's point is that, at some point, the proposed interpretations of the inner circle of scholars have to provide effective ways to understand the canon of literary works. Their interpretations cannot become entirely unmoored from the texts they are discussing.

Elsewhere I have discussed my own framework of recognizing two competing types of truth, for which I have used the German words Treu and Wahr. The first kind, Treu, is a socially agreed upon truth, which is related to the concept of loyalty to a social group (be true to your school). The second kind, Wahr, which is related to the Latin word veritas, relates to factual accuracy and a correspondence with the observable world.

One can think of the two in relation to a criminal trial. The verdict of the judge or jury is Treu, the truth arrived at as a social decision. The evidence presented by the competing counsels is truth as Wahr, statements that are hopefully accurate to past occurrences in the observable world. One can strive toward making the two kinds of truth consistent, but the gap between the two is exemplified by controversies with jury selection and problems with witness intimidation and destruction of evidence. We love to hate lawyers because they can persuade juries that something that is not Wahr is Treu.

Kramnick argues that good criticism relates to both kinds of truth. Apt prose ties criticism to the observable literary text, but the academy judges the aptness of the criticism, which is a social evaluation of truth. The position of Kramnick's Fish is entirely within the domain of Treu with no Wahr necessary.

Within Kramnick's system, the observable world of his Wahr is not a reproducible world measured by scientific instruments; rather, it is the universe of written texts.

Kramnick argues, on the one hand, that the critic's text cannot be apt unless it skillfully weaves the original literary text with the critic's arguments, but on the other hand, that the judgment about what is apt is arrived at socially by a group of scholars. To circle back to the beginning and place Kramnick's academy within Henrich's theory of cultural evolution, the group of scholars that judge aptness is the inner circle at the top of a prestige hierarchy which maintains part of the community's collective knowledge. In this way, one can situate Kramnick's ideas within the theory of cultural evolution.

Bibliography

Henrich, Joseph. The Secret of our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, .... Princeton UP, 2015.

Kramnick, Jonathan B. Criticism and Truth: On Method in Literary Studies. U. of Chicago Press, 2023.

Pure Literary Theory: Kramnick's Criticism and Truth Criticized

This series of blog posts began as a set of observations about literary research on the novel A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include evolutionary literary criticism. This week, I am not focusing on evolutionary literary criticism but on pure literary theory itself.

At the end of 2023, Jonathan Kramnick published a slim volume entitled Criticism and Truth. The book's main argument: that literary criticism strives toward truth in a way that is unique and valuable and not reducible to the methods of the physical sciences. This thesis may relate to Kramnick's earlier critique of literary Darwinism, because proponents of that school argue that the humanities should be in consilience with (their version of) the sciences.

This slim volume is Jonathan Kramnick's apology for basic methods in literary scholarship. In the twenty-first century, literary criticism has come under institutional attack. In universities, budgets are drying up, and the number of graduates has dropped. Kramnick argues, first, that literary scholars have a unique and valuable method to their discipline which he and others call close reading, and, second, that the method of close reading produces knowledge or truth. Literature is therefore worthy of study in the university.

Key to Kramnick's argument is the idea that a critic, when writing about literary texts, weaves together the text of the literary work itself with his or her own critical text in a seamless whole. For Kramnick, writing criticism is a craft knowledge, like carving a sculpture or performing a dance (or even, if I may say, a physical scientist splitting a ray of sunlight into a spectrum of color). Kramnick rejects the imposition of the sorts of methods found in the physical sciences, where reproducibility and abstraction from the particular case are valued.

Kramnick discusses several techniques that critics use to weave texts together in their prose. He spends time on the technique of in-sentence quotation as well as the technique of interpretive narrative summary.

Kramnick doesn't just want to claim that the prose of the literary critic is the beautifully wrought product of a craftsman; he wants to claim that it is true. "I also want to underscore that skill has an epistemic function and is fundamental to method" (10). He echoes Keats by writing, "Elegance is aptness, and aptness elegance" (58). By saying that skillfully written criticism has an epistemic function, he seems to be arguing that beauty is truth.

Still, he acknowledges that the skilled interweaving of texts is just the beginning. He writes, "Every one of my examples, in other words, grapples with the thisness of particular artifacts in order to derive from them some more capacious argument, set of concerns, or register of significance. ... Scaling up from the particular to the larger than one requires all kinds of skills that lie outside the scope of this book: skilled acts of research and abstraction, theory building, and historical-chronological argument" (47). The way I would say it is: skilled quotation is a beginning, but the final product is a significant and abstract argument.

On page four, Kramnick argues, "Academic work contributes to making the world intelligible and so transforming it for the better." I would disagree with the universality of his claim. What if I make the world intelligible by claiming something to be the case which is otherwise demonstrably false through methods of reproducible observations? Shouldn't the claims put forward in my beautiful prose also be true in the sense of veritas, in the sense of scientific reproducibility?

To give an example, what if I make the world intelligible by claiming that the recovered memory movement is valid, and that such memories are true? Reproducible psychological experiments can rigorously show that therapists can implant false recovered memories in the minds of their patients. Those implanted memories might ruin the lives of innocent people who have been falsely accused of heinous acts. That would be an instance where making the world intelligible does not transform it for the better.

In the physical sciences, one begins by positing an abstract theory to explain observable phenomena. Then one uses craft knowledge to create experiments which may confirm or reject the theory. Because of all the complex ways in which the physical world can present itself, falsifying a scientific theory is not straightforward, but the goal is to confirm the abstract theory or reject it.

When a scientist forms an abstract theory, the scientist might generalize from observations, such as Faraday's studies of electromagnetism. Or, the scientist might formulate the theory from philosophical principles, such as Einstein's belief that the universe is fundamentally simple. What makes the process scientific is that, at some point, someone uses observations, often observations derived from experiments built with craft techniques, to validate the theory.

The craft of the experimental method does have an epistemic function, but if there were no theory to test, the experiment would have no epistemic point and would be the equivalent of underwater basket weaving or interpretive dance. Kramnick cites Polanyi about skill in science, and he is not wrong to do so, but craft knowledge is only half of the scientific dynamic.

Kramnick wants to claim that the truth of the craft knowledge of writing good criticism is inseparable from the claims that criticism puts forward. "If, in the case of criticism, the truth or falsity of a given assertion is inseparable from how well the assertion is made, how well the assertion is made is inseparable from how well its objects are handled"(88). Kramnick's problem is that the 'if clause' of the above sentence is not true.

A literary critic needs to begin with a theory about the literary work under study. That theory might come from observations derived from the critic's experience with many literary texts, or it may come from a theory about what makes humans tick, say, from psychology or sociology. It could also come from religion or philosophy, such as, to pick a random example, a claim that a particular novel represents a dialectic between two competing versions of philosophical humanism.

A psychological theory used as the basis for a literary interpretation doesn't even need to be one that psychologists take seriously. For example, Freudian psychology is not considered a valid approach to scientifically-based psychology anymore, but it continues to be commonly used as way to interpret and understand literary works. Paradoxically, a Freudian interpretation of a literary work might be a valid way to interpret the literary work even if the theory upon which it is based on is not a valid way to describe how humans actually tick.

Once a thesis exists, the literary critic uses techniques such as in-sentence quotation to show the critic's readers how that already-formed theory can make this particular literary work intelligible. Quotation does have an epistemic function of demonstrating the application of that thesis to this particular literary text.

For example, one could use quotations and plot summary to investigate the question: can the Freudian theory of the Oedipal complex help us to see the actions of Shakepeare's character Hamlet in an intelligible way? (In this case, the answer is a resounding yes, in part because Freud first thought of the complex while reading Hamlet. He originally called it the Hamlet complex, but changed it to a character in an ancient Greek drama to avoid being seen as overly fond of British culture.)

A psychological theory which is not scientifically valid is especially appropriate for creating a valid interpretation of a work of literature if the author of the literary work subscribed to the now-rejected theory. For example, giving a Ross Macdonald novel a Freudian interpretation is especially effective in part because Macdonald was a follower of Freudian psychology. That type of argument, though, sends a would-be critic into a hockey brawl over the validity of hypothesizing the intentions of the author, the dreaded Intentional Fallacy.

What is the goal of literary criticism? If the critic's demonstration is effective, it strengthens the reader's conviction that the critic's claims about a particular literary work are worthy of respect. However, because it is difficult to prove some abstract assertion false about a literary text, it is difficult to invalidate a theory about literature. Often the best that a critic can do is show how a particular literary work can be seen through the lens of a set of aesthetic and cultural values. A reader of literary criticism regularly asks the question: does this assertion make the literary work more intelligible to me and more worthy of my attention? If the answer is yes, then the critic has succeeded.

Kramnick spends a good deal of time arguing that the methods of the scientific disciplines are fundamentally different from those of the literary critic. He goes on to argue that the methods of literary criticism are different from those of computational linguistics and gives an example from linguistics to show how they are fundamentally different (73). However, he does not compare literary criticism with a discipline that is adjacent to it, such as the craft of argument practiced by lawyers for and against the guilt of a defendant.

In the realm of jurisprudence, the elegance of the argument is also used to convince an audience (of jurors) about the truth of an individual claim. The legal argument might pull in evidence from a reproducible science, like DNA evidence, but it might not. It might convince the jurors to view the defendant as guilty even when the defendant is innocent (or vice versa), so the aptness and elegance of the craft of rhetoric might diverge from the truth of the theory about who committed the crime.

Kramnick complains that other literary theorists focus on the more abstract, or as he says capacious, arguments and sets of concerns and ignore the common practice among all literary critics: close reading. To me, it makes sense that critics would focus on the abstract arguments rather than the micro-process of close reading. The abstract arguments are where the cultural values are reaffirmed or rejected. If the academic establishment preserves, as Joseph Henrich would say, the collective brain of the community and its shared knowledge, then debating the overall significance of literary texts is where the action is.

On the one hand, I agree with Kramnick that techniques specific to the discipline, such as in-sentence quotation, do have epistemic qualities. However, it is the epistemic quality analogous to the craft knowledge of an experimental physicist or chemist. In the physical sciences, the truth-generating function of the experimentalist is used to confirm or reject a theory. In literature, the truth-generating function of the weaver of texts must be used in service of arguments for and against abstract theories of literary criticism and how they apply to a text. Both the scientist and the critic can conduct their craft work properly and arrive at a negative result.

In this book, Kramnick argues that you can begin with craft techniques such as in-sentence quotation and smoothly build up to the truth of abstract theories (56). But you can't. The theory is separate and antecedent, and the craft knowledge of the scholar tests the theory. In literature, you use the craft knowledge of weaving prose to make the case to the reader that the abstract theory about a particular literary work is valid and worthy of serious respect. The close reading methods should be true even if a paper's thesis which they test is not.

I have been studying what I call evolutionary literary criticism for some time, and I have recently begun moving the foundation of my approach to the theory of cultural evolution. Kramnick himself is one of the more prominent critics of what the practitioners themselves call literary Darwinism, arguing that the capacious arguments of the entire school should be rejected wholesale. I hope to take an in-depth look at his refutation of this school in the near future. However, I have begun here with an investigation of some of his broader claims to truth.

To repeat, I agree with Kramnick's immediate claim: that micro-processes such as in-sentence quotation and interpretive summary have epistemic functions. However, his broader, half-suggested claim that this craft knowledge can scale up smoothly to the inevitable truth of the abstract theories of various schools of criticism is not correct. Beauty is not truth, and the truth is not always beautiful.

Bibliography

Kramnick, Jonathan B. Criticism and Truth: On Method in Literary Studies. U. of Chicago Press, 2023.

CELC: Science and Cultural Evolution

This series of blog posts began as a set of observations about literary research on the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include evolutionary literary criticism. I have recently begun to work on incorporating cultural evolution (from Joseph Henrich, who follows the work of Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson). To read the blog post that began this inquiry, see my post from July of 2025 entitled Henrich's Secret of our Success, Cultural Evolution as a new foundation for evolutionary literary criticism.

I had been working on the blog entry that will appear next month. It is a review of the book Criticism and Truth by Jonathan Kramnick. That book makes claims about the "craft knowledge" of literary scholars. I began thinking about the craft knowledge that is involved in the physical sciences and how the scientific method relates to Henrich's version of cultural evolution. This month, I will discuss scientific methods, plural, and cultural evolution.

There is an old joke about a farmer who consults with a physicist. The farmer is worried about how few eggs his chickens are laying. The physicist studies the problem and comes up with a solution. But, she explains, the solution only works for spherical chickens in a vacuum.

In The Secret of our Success, Henrich discusses four essential features that distinguish human social life from that of other species (186-7). One: "We live in a world governed by social rules, even if not everyone knows the rules." Two: "Many of those rules are arbitrary, or seem arbitrary ..." Three: "Others care whether we follow these rules, and react negatively to violations;" and four: "We infer that others care about whether we follow these rules" (186).

One might imagine that the scientific method transcends these essential features of human social life. If we form a hypothesis about a socially accepted understanding that is used to justify a rule about behavior, we might hope that experimental evidence might be used to change the rule without waiting for the slower process of cultural evolution. But what is the relationship between cultural evolution and scientific knowledge?

Let's use as an example a study that was published in the journal Lancet in its July 16, 2005, issue. The CDC of the United States in conjunction with Procter and Gamble and agencies from the nation of Pakistan conducted a thorough and comprehensive experiment to see if the practice of children regularly washing their hands would reduce the rate of infectious disease in a relatively poor population (see citation below). They compared washing with regular soap and anti-bacterial soap. The surprise result was that diligent washing with regular soap was just as effective as washing with anti-bacterial soap, and washing with either soap was very effective at reducing infections among children.

Now, observers have noted since the mid-nineteenth century that handwashing reduces the spread of disease (just ask Ignaz Semmelweis). This 2005 study, however, raised to the level of fact this claim: that diligent handwashing with regular soap in particular reduces the spread of infectious diseases among children as effectively as regular handwashing with anti-bacterial soap.

Numerous studies for over a century have allowed us to say that it is objectively true that you should wash your hands. You should adopt that as a cultural practice not because some other person high in the prestige hierarchy within your community said that you should wash your hands (what I sometimes call the treu aspect of truth); rather, you should do it because it reduces the chance you will get sick (what I sometimes call the wahr, or veritas, aspect of truth).

The nickel tour of some thoughts on the scientific method:

One could break the scientific method into three stages. 1) The first is one where someone forms an abstract idea about how the world works. That idea could come from systematic observations (think, Michael Faraday's studies of electromagnetic fields). Or that idea could come from a belief about the world (think, Einstein's faith that the laws of nature should be the same in all reference frames).

2) The abstract idea is then refined, perhaps by using mathematics or simplifying models (such as assuming that chickens are spherical and move in a vacuum), to produce specific predictions that might be tested by observation. For example, using the patterns in his periodic law, Dmitri Mendeleev predicted the properties of three hitherto unknown chemical elements. This prediction followed logically from his abstract theory. (His abstract theory, though, had been built in part through the patterns of observations of other, known elements.)

3) The predictions of the abstract idea are then tested by observation. If the idea is tested by physical experiments, craft knowledge is used to fashion those experiments to test the claims that follow logically from the abstract idea about how the world works. Experimental scientists have to be sharp-eyed, skilled with their hands, clever about putting equipment together, etc. The craft knowledge of the experimenter has epistemic value. If the experiment is poorly crafted, it will fail to test the truth-value of the abstract idea. Experimental results can be misleading, which is why it is important to replicate experiments.

One can wax euphoric about the epistemic value of experiments; however, one must keep in mind that what is being tested by the experiment is the theory about the nature of the observable world. Admittedly, there is a complex back-and-forth between a) the theory, b) the theory's predications, and c) the observations, and that complexity makes this brief model simplistic. A different mathematical technique might lead to different predictions. An unexpected observation may cause a change in the theory, etc.

The question is: how does the practice of science compare to the theory of cultural evolution as articulated by Henrich? Henrich posits that, in general, humans are smarter than other animals in only one primary way: we are better at cultural learning. Most of the time most humans do not set up double-blind experiments and then apply statistics to the data sets to learn things. Instead, they look to individuals in their community who are considered to be knowledgeable, or just cool, and they learn from them.

This "looking to others" then forms a prestige hierarchy, in which lower-status individuals imitate and learn from higher-status individuals. In some instances, it can lead to the spread of scientific methods, as was the case in eighteenth-century Europe when philosophes followed the example of Newton's Opticks. In other instances, it can lead to families refusing to vaccinate their children because an influencer told them not to. All manner of social trends follow from our desire to imitate and learn culturally.

Cultural institutions can be established to help channel that desire to imitate toward individuals who are worthy of imitation, perhaps because they are skilled at adding to scientific knowledge. Universities are prestige hierarchies that foster the creation and preservation of knowledge. The Nobel prize and other such honors signal who in the social order is imitation-worthy.

One benefit to examining science through the perspective of cultural evolution is that cultural evolution brings in the social and political aspects of the process. Discovering deep structures in how the universe works is a cultural value in and of itself, but it also brings practical advantages for the human community that holds it, and it does not occur in a vacuum (with spherical chickens).

Expanding the collective brain has social and economic implications. Prestige hierarchies of knowledge, scientific or otherwise, have to work with dominance hierarchies of political and military power. The financial resources which are used to support the scientific enterprise come from economic systems that depend on the social behavior of the entire community. Cultural evolution puts this dynamic between scientific knowledge and cultural jockeying into a broader context of cultural learning and prestige hierarchies.

As for our example with handwashing and disease, I haven't seen any reports that anyone at Procter and Gamble ever publically regretted their involvement in the study, but I can imagine that they had been hoping that their patented anti-bacterial soap would have been more effective than regular soap for controlling infections. There is an economic aspect to human cultural communities. P. and G. had a financial stake in the outcome.

The Theory of Cultural Evolution itself makes truth claims. It comes from a tradition that, if not scientific itself, is certainly a philosophical viewpoint that is science-adjacent. Accepting that humans evolved through an interplay of cultural and genetic factors implies accepting the values of the disciplines from which the theory arose.

Bibliography

Luby, S. P., Agboatwalla, M., Feikin, D. R., Painter, J., Billhimer, W., Altaf, A., & Hoekstra, R. M. (2005). Effect of handwashing on child health: a randomised controlled trial. The Lancet, 366(9481), 225-233.

James Poskett and Peter Dear, Book Reviews. Collected Reviews Off-line

This series of blog posts began as a set of observations about literary research on the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include other topics. This entry discusses the history of science. But first, a note about my collection of book reviews.

Back around 2010, the nonprofit library corporation OCLC had as a feature of their WorldCat service the ability to attach a book review to the record of a book in their combined catalog WorldCat. At the time, I liked to write Amazon reviews, but I didn't like giving Jeff Bezos my intellectual property, and there are many books, such as Ph. D. dissertations, which are not in Amazon. Goodreads is also owned by Amazon, and, like Amazon, Goodreads does not contain the entire universe of books.

Over the next ten years, I posted about 250 book reviews on WorldCat. Some of them were brief, but some were as complex as a scholarly review. They centered on my own personal interests: writings about John Kennedy Toole, books on the history and philosophy of science, especially evolution, and other topics. I even started writing reviews of novels from the perspective of evolutionary literary criticism.

All that came crashing down when OCLC eliminated the book review function in 2022. Fortunately, I had saved the reviews, so they were not lost. I created a webpage in HTML and posted it on a personal web space that was provided to me by my university. By the summer of 2025, I had posted 172 book reviews on the page. I also placed a counter on the page run by the company Statcounter.com. One thing I discovered from a couple years worth of data was that very few people were reading my book reviews ( ... and I mean, very few).

The publication of the reviews again came crashing down when my university eliminated personal websites for faculty at the end of 2025. Because no one was viewing them anyway, I do not feel a great rush to repost them. I do eventually want to have them on the web, but eventually.

Since I was a child, I have had an interest in the nature and history of science. I am especially drawn toward its philosophical roots. In my college years in the 1980s, I was drawn to issues surrounding biological evolution. The philosopical details of evolution keep one's attention in part because a large fraction of the American public rejects that science for religious reasons. In this sense, the disagreements over the philosophical foundations of biological evolution have high stakes.

With my lost review collection in mind, I offer below a double book review. I review Horizons by James Poskett and The World As We Know It by Peter Dear. Both were published within the last five years, and they are a study in contrasts.

Horizons: A Global History of Science

Poskett's book Horizons gives the reader a quick tour of the history of science, emphasizing the contributions made by persons who were not from the sphere of European culture. Considering that many accounts of the history of science focus almost exclusively on European culture, Poskett's efforts have the salutary effect of widening the frame.

The book begins after the European discovery of the western Hemisphere. Poskett argues that the discovery of the New World showed Europeans that the Greeks and Romans of the ancient world were not all-knowing. Poskett explains that the Aztecs had a sophisticated culture which featured a thorough study of the animal and plant species of Mexico. When the Spaniards wrote back home about the natural history of Mexico, they consulted both native texts and native scholars.

The second chapter discusses astronomy. Poskett shows that Islamic scientists educated the European thinkers in this subject during the medieval era. He devotes sections to astronomical activities in China, India, and Africa. This history is important, because it is certainly the case that the knowledge collected by researchers in many parts of the world, not just members of European cultures, was important in supplying evidence and ideas to help guide the theories that have shaped our current understanding of the laws governing observable phenomena in our world, including our understanding of our planet and the cosmos. (Notice how carefully I have worded that long sentence.)

Poskett is committed to saying positive things about many different cultures. For some cultures, the task is easy. The Arabs gave western culture al-Gebra and al-Chemie (to say nothing of distilled al-Cohol). The Chinese gave western culture, among many other things, technologies such as paper and the printing press (to say nothing of gunpowder). For other cultures, though, Poskett seems to strain to identify things that could be construed as contributing to the scientific enterprise. Not every non-European culture contributed equally to what we now consider to be scientific knowledge, and some cultures that did contribute are unknown because of the inadequacies of the historical record.

Part two of the book covers the period of the ascendance of European science. Poskett emphasizes the connection between Enlightenment thinking and the vast financial profits that were derived from the building of European empires. The first chapter of this section is entitled "Newton's Slaves." (Isaac Newton didn't personally own slaves, but he did have some of his money invested in a British corporation that did profit from the slave trade, so he did participate directly in the overall economics of empire.) Poskett does not let the reader forget the human cost of the ascendancy of European science.

My problem is that, while Poskett is focused on the colonial economy that helped finance European science, he doesn't delve into what it was about the theories or methods of modern science made them so revolutionary. There have been many empires throughout human history that have oppressed and exploited conquered populations but which failed to produce advances in our scientific understanding of the universe. (The Spanish Empire that was contemporary to the British and French Empires of the modern era comes immediately to mind.)

What made the European Enlightenment different? We know that Newton made some money in ways that are today considered unethical, but we don't learn from Poskett why so many eighteenth century philosophes were desperate to imitate his intellectual accomplishments.

The World As We Know It

Peter Dear's book is focused on how the European intellectual discipline of natural philosophy was transformed into modern science. He digs into exactly what it was about Newton's approach that was revolutionary and caused would-be scientists across Europe for the next hundred and fifty years to follow his example. Lavoisier wanted to be the Newton of chemistry. Buffon saw himself as Newtonian. Cuvier wanted to be the Newton of anatomy.

With regard to Newton, Dear points out that there are two major parts of his legacy. First, the Philosophae Naturalis Principia Mathematica was an enormous achievement, building a branch of mathematics and using it to explain universal gravitation and the movement of both the planets and terrestrial objects. It showed how a handful of mathematical laws could accurately explain a wide range of phenomena, everything from the path of a comet to the plop of a turd in the toilet.

For this system of mechanics and gravitation, Newton did not begin with experimental methods; instead, he began with a first principle, that God had created universal laws of motion and gravity that were obeyed by all objects equally. He used observational data from Kepler (who got it from Brahe) as well as from sources outside the sphere of European culture (as Poskett explains). But the overall framework is a theoretical principle—that all objects with mass attract each other with gravitational force.

However, in Newton's own day, his second legacy was just as important as his laws of motion and gravity. His book Opticks showed how to conduct effective empirical experiments. It ended with a series of speculations about other areas of potential investigation, such as chemistry. His many followers in the eighteenth century were inspired as much by the experimental model and speculations from his second book as by the universal laws of motion from his first book.

To jump to the end of Dear's book, Dear shows the parallels in the thinking of Newton and Einstein with regard to gravity. Einstein did not take the steps of the traditional scientific method: first looking at experimental data, then forming a hypothesis, and finally testing it. He began with a strong conviction in a philosophical principle, that there is an ultimate simplicity to the universe. His theories were not driven by evidence; instead, they came from first principles and the thought experiments that followed from those principles.

Just as Newton believed that God had established laws for motion and gravity that are universal, Einstein believed that the laws of physics had to be invariant. When it was confirmed that light would bend in a gravitational field—a prediction of general relativity—someone asked Einstein what he would have thought if the observations had not confirmed the prediction. Einstein said that, if that had happened, he would have felt sorry for God, because the universe would have been less beautiful. As Dear writes, "the elegance, simplicity, and economy of the foundations of a theory acted for Einstein as the hallmarks of its truth."

To Poskett's credit, it is certainly true that knowledge gathered for all parts of the world informed the scientific revolution of the seventeenth through twentieth centuries. And the military and economic hegemony of European culture helped maintain support for that culture's privileging of scientific investigation. Dear's book, by focusing on the fine-grained philosophical debates, passes over that economic foundation.

Poskett's book, however, seems to overlook the critical role of the new theoretical and philosophical approaches that led to profound breakthroughs in many areas of knowledge nearly all at once. That new theoretical approach took place almost exclusively in the sphere of European culture.

These two books view science from very different angles. Both books are valuable in their own right, and each supplies an important part of the story missing from the other. Together they add to a more complete picture of the history of science.

Bibliography

Dear, Peter. The World as We Know It: From Natural Philosophy to Modern Science. Princeton UP, 2025.

Poskett, James. Horizons: A Global History of Science. Viking/Mariner Books, 2022.

CELC: Theory of Humor #30: Cultural Evolution and Humor

This series of blog posts began as a set of observations about literary research on the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include evolutionary literary criticism. I have recently begun to work on incorporating cultural evolution (from Joseph Henrich, who follows the work of Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson). To read the blog post that began this inquiry, see my post from July of 2025 entitled Henrich's Secret of our Success, Cultural Evolution as a new foundation for evolutionary literary criticism.

For years in this blog, I have explored the nature and origins of mirthful humor (especially from 2017 to 2020). In February of 2018, I articulated what I consider to be my own theory of humor as I merged two of the major schools within this discipline. (Note: I may call this my own theory of humor, but it is very similar to many other theories of humor. I haven't created something new so much as put my own spin on ideas that have been around for centuries, if not millennia. For a discussion of how similar many of those theories are, read this blog entry from October of 2018.)

In April of 2020, I showed how this theory could fit into a branch of evolutionary psychology. (Others may challenge my claim that I am using evolutionary psychology, as I use ideas that fall outside the strict definition of evolutionary psychology originating with Tooby and Cosmides.)

Since the summer of 2025, I have been trying to migrate the foundation of my approach to literary criticism to cultural evolution as articulated by Joseph Henrich. This effort raises the question: how does a foundation of cultural evolution change my theory of humor? Toward the end of this blog post, I will give an example.

At the beginning of my inquiry into humor, in a blog entry from July of 2015, I discussed the personality traits of the hero of a physical comedy. I had taken that list of traits from a documentary starring Rowan Atkinson. (Unfortunately, that video has been taken down from YouTube, probably because it has many clips of classic physical comedy from film.) In July of 2016, I issued a bit of a correction. Not all physical comedy conforms to the list of traits from that documentary, though Atkinson's list is still quite good in many instances. For the example I give below, I will review that Atkinson list of personality traits and discuss how they might fit into a theory of cultural evolution.

My Definition of Humor: Mirthful humor has two components: first, an incongruity that is triggered when two scripts or "mental spaces" in the brain clash with one another, and second, a social / emotional component. The social component often features disparagement or a lowering of social status, and the emotions are often inconguous emotions. Those two components usually occur within a playful context. Some humor focuses on the first component—incongruity—while other humor focuses on the second component—social adjustment.

I have adapted this theory of humor to be compatible with evolutionary psychology, but a version of evolutionary psychology that includes David Sloan Wilson's multilevel selection theory. I argue that humor often functions to adjust social status within a group of people, an adjustment which can be either gentle or aggressive. Non-violently adjusting social status helps a social group function smoothly. Having a well-functioning social group is important for group selection within multilevel selection theory. Within the framework of evolutionary literary criticism, humor can reinforce pro-group behavior and discourage anti-group behavior.

Cultural Evolution: How does this theory change under Henrich's cultural evolution? In The Secret of our Success, Henrich discusses four essential features that distinguish human social life from that of other species (186-7). One: "We live in a world governed by social rules, even if not everyone knows the rules." Two: "Many of those rules are arbitrary, or seem arbitrary ..." Three: "Others care whether we follow these rules, and react negatively to violations;" and four: "We infer that others care about whether we follow these rules" (186).

As Henrich continues, "From the gene's-eye view, survival and reproduction would have increasingly depended on the abilities of one's bearer (the individual) to acquire and navigate a social landscape governed by culturally transmitted local rules ..." (186).

How do social groups police violations of those norms according to Henrich? Typically in small-scale societies, "the sanctioning of norm violators begins with gossip and public criticism, often through joking ... and then intensifies to damage marital prospects and reduce access to trading ..." (188). As I have argued, when humor is used to sanction someone, it is typically a non-violent mechanism. What happens if the norm-violator does not get back into line? "If violators are still not brought into line, matters may escalate to ostracism or physical violence ... and occasionally ... group executions" (188). The background for this theory is found in the works of Boyd, Richerson, Bowles, and Boehm. Please consult Henrich's Secret for references.

The Example: Atkinson's theory of the slapstick protagonist

Below are the elements of Atkinson's theory of the personality traits of the hero in a physical comedy. I list the element and then explain how it fits into the framework of cultural evolutionary literary criticism (CELC).

1. Atkinson: The slapstick hero is alienated from his society. CELC: He finds himself in a low position on the social status hierarchy or outside it and has already been, to a degree, ostracized.
2. Atkinson: He is childish. (Childish here means that he is naively selfish.) CELC: This indicates that he refuses to adopt social norms which might include cooperative behavior toward others or is incapable of understanding them. One could say that he takes actions that might, if allowed, advance individual reproductive advantage, even when the social norms forbid those actions.
3. Atkinson: He has to fight with ordinary objects. CELC: He has not adopted the cultural practices that allow him to participate in the group's collective knowledge about their local environment, such as using tools properly.
4. Atkinson: His body can be humorous itself. CELC: His physical body may prevent him from conforming to social expectations. This relates to a form of prestige that is based on appearance or physical ability. He cannot achieve high-status within the dominance and prestige hierarchies of the group because of his diverging appearance or abilities.
5. Atkinson: He is uncivilized and cannot or will not conform to social rules. CELC: This point directly addresses his inability or unwillingness to embrace cultural learning. This point arguably includes several of the other traits, such as childishness.
6. Atkinson: He is a threat to respectable people. CELC: Respectability relates to conforming to social norms and staying within a prestige hierarchy. Again, because he refuses to conform to social norms, the slapstick hero is a threat to those for whom social norms are the basis for the group's status hierarchy.
7. Atkinson: He mocks authority and politeness. CELC: This is a sub-point of being a threat to respectable people and not conforming to social rules, but here his refusal to conform is intentional and active. He may already feel ostracized from the status hierarchy and actively reject it because he has himself been rejected.
8. Atkinson: He spreads confusion. CELC: Violating social norms causes the social order based on prestige and cultural learning to be thrown into disarray.
9. Atkinson: The final trait. He always survives his travails. CELC: Many violators of social norms who violate those norms to gain dominance or for genetic advantage threaten the basis for the social order. Those violators can be killed in retaliation. However, the slapstick hero is often like a child who is too immature to understand why social norms should be followed. He is not a fundamental threat to the social order, but the social order may have to restrain him. He might be expelled as a scapegoat, but he does not need to be killed to punish his refusal to follow social norms.

CELC: Role of Language in Human Nature

This series of blog posts began as a set of observations about literary research on the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include evolutionary literary criticism. I have recently begun to work on incorporating cultural evolution (from Joseph Henrich, who follows the work of Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson). To read the blog post that began this inquiry, see my post from July of 2025 entitled Henrich's Secret of our Success, Cultural Evolution as a new foundation for evolutionary literary criticism.

A variety of thinkers have held that human language is the medium of all thought within the human brain and is an essential precondition to us becoming reasoning beings. For example, this claim can be found in Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. In a very different school of thought, the literary theorist Kenneth Burke also held that we think in language.

In the present day, some contemporary branches of Critical Theory hold that language is the crucial trait that allows humans to escape from biology and construct their world socially. One formulation of this idea is, "The world must be made to mean." For example, the book Ten Lessons in Theory is an introductory textbook to Critical Theory. In that book's introduction, Calvin Thomas writes, "The phrase 'textual anthropogenesis,' then, involves what's called linguistic determinism, or what I'll call semiotic materialism, the argument, also to my mind permanently revolutionary, that any human reality, and any individual or collective 'subject' thereof, any and all persons, must be made out of language as a specifically 'anti-natural'--unreal or 'anti-real'--form of productive labor." (xxiv).

Steven Pinker, as a neuroscientist and advocate for evolutionary psychology, holds that language is not the stuff of thought. Pinker argues that the mind thinks in its own internal thought-language called mentalese. Pinker started out in the field of neurolinguistics, so he is in an excellent position to make that case. To him, verbal language is a mechanism by which we can package information, originally formulated in mentalese, and share it with other individuals within our language community. It is a communications protocol, not the machine language of the brain's central processor. (To give my own example of non-linguistic thinking, a good chess player can sit down to a game and think hard for hours without using any language at all. A sculptor can do the same while wielding the chisel.)

The cultural evolution of Boyd, Richerson, and Henrich says that cultural learning is the essential precondition for what makes us human, not language per se. Language evolved in a cultural context in which we were already learning from one another.

Henrich argues that the skill for crafting physical tools may have come before verbal language. Sophisticated tool-making requires recursive mental procedures which parallel the recursive mental procedures of language. Therefore, tool-making could have been the cognitive path evolution took to build the genetically programmed neural structures that became the preadaptation for human language (Secret, pp. 250-255).

Language presents a tricky problem for evolution. If a single individual in a proto-human species were to begin to develop language, with whom could she speak? What selective advantage would accrue to this lone proto-speaker? It is difficult to see how language as a stand-alone instinct with specialized brain wetware can evolve. It would be like the sound of one hand clapping.

On the contrary, a social group that has a gifted tool-maker can benefit even if that individual's mental abilities are unique. Everyone else can still use those superior tools, even if they don't have the brains to make them. Brain structures that facilitate a complex Chomskyan grammar might have evolved because of the selective advantage that was conferred on early human communities with singular individuals who could produce superior tools. Only then did the selective advantage for cultural learning take those brain structures and adapt them to create this powerful communication system we call verbal language. Language, once evolved, then turbo-charged cultural learning.

For those theorists who have argued that language is a necessary precondition for humans evolving the capacity to cooperate with one another, Henrich argues that it is the other way around. "For complex communicative repertoires to evolve in the first place, this cooperative dilemma has to have already been at least partially solved. Therefore, language can't be the big solution to human cooperation" (257).

Whether the theory of language-through-toolmaking is confirmed by later research, this scenario at least offers at path by which it could have occurred. In Chomsky's original formulation of his universal grammar, the language instinct popped into existence as a fully formed spandrel, like Athena from the head of Zeus. Pinker's neurolinguistic work shows that the Chomskyan grammar which is universal among humans has some of the "Panda's thumb" imperfections that indicate that it has evolved, but Pinker did not explain how the human brain was able to boot-strap our sophisticated language-related traits from brains that lacked human language. Tool-making-first theories solve the paradox.

Post-script: As for recent research into the evolution of language-enabling structures in the brain and throat, scientists have compared the DNA of Homo sapiens (us) with the DNA of Neanderthals and Denisovans. They have found that the most rapid evolution within the human genome since the split with those other species has targeted the vocal tract and other language-related structures (as well as genes that have flattened the face and eliminated the chimp-like muzzle). See for example: Gokhman, David, et al. "Differential DNA methylation of vocal and facial anatomy genes in modern humans." Nature Communications 11.1 (2020): 1189.

Bibliography

Henrich, Joseph. The Secret of our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, .... Princeton UP, 2015.

Pinker, Steven. The Language Instinct. William Morrow, 1994.

Thomas, Calvin. Ten Lessons in Theory: A New Introduction to Theoretical Writing. 2nd Edition. Bloomsbury Academic, 2023.

CELC: Cultural Evolution and Biological Evolution

This series of blog posts began as a set of observations about literary research on the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include evolutionary literary criticism. I have recently begun to work on incorporating cultural evolution (from Joseph Henrich, who follows the work of Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson). To read the blog post that began this inquiry, see my post from July of 2025 entitled Henrich's Secret of our Success, Cultural Evolution as a new foundation for evolutionary literary criticism.

One might reasonably ask: how does this theory of cultural evolution differ from the sorts of culture-first theories of human nature that might be found in the philosophical tradition of Critical Theory? It turns out that there is a big difference.

Using as a guide to critical theory the book Ten Lessons in Theory by Calvin Thomas (2/e), one can see that a foundation of that school is that humans are fundamentally different than other animals.¹ We humans have achieved a plane of existence in which we can define ourselves. Thomas uses the term antiphysis to signal this discontinuity. Language has allowed humans to cease to be bound by biology.

Thomas's version of Critical Theory--or just "Theory" as he calls it--seems to have some relationship to Henrich's cultural evolution. After all, Thomas calls the human condition, in contrast to mere animal nature, a "'sociogenic' and/or 'biocultural' existence" (22-23 of the preface). Thomas sees his antiphysis arising from Marx's historical materialism, and Marx was a reader of Darwin.

Nevertheless, antiphysis is a stance that culture is nearly completely divorced from biology. Thomas looks to Lacan as an authority, for example. Thomas's Freudian theory of child development is a century out of date. He argues that our use of language means that we have the ability to define ourselves ("the world must be made to mean") in a way that escapes scientific attempts to describe us. For Critical Theory, the philosophical "reification" which is a necessary precondition for describing the world in a scientific way is itself an evil to be exorcised. In particular, for Critical Theory, we have transcended the influence of natural selection.

By contrast, Henrich argues in Secret of our Success that cultural evolution has taken over from genetic evolution among humans, but that biological evolution still operates. In particular, he writes, "Cultural evolution is a type of biological evolution; it's just not a type of genetic evolution" (263). Again, "cultural differences are biological differences but not genetic differences" (263). He makes these statements after explaining that the skill of reading and comprehending a written language "actually rewires our brains to create a cognitive specialization" (262). Finally, culture may have taken over from genetics, but natural selection is still shaping the process.

A more hard-line, genes-only evolutionary psychology diminishes the role of culture in building the human being. However, Henrich's cultural evolution does not abandon completely the behavioral constraints that flow from the genes. "We evolved genetically to have (somewhat) programmable preferences, and modifying our preferences via cultural learning is part of how we adapt to different environments" (266). The word "somewhat" indicates that genes do still have an influence on preferences.

Footnote 1: It is my sincere hope that Thomas' Ten Lessons in Theory is fairly representative of Critical Theory in general, because I have studied it (the second edition), and I don't want to have to slog through another book about Critical Theory related to literary criticism.

Post-Script

In looking back over my history with evolutionary literary criticism and Henrich's cultural evolution, I see that the transition has been more gradual than I realized. I had listened to an audiobook of Secret of our Success in the summer of 2023. I have found evidence that it influenced my thinking about ELC before January 1, 2025. That might help explain why I subsequently declared that a transition from ELC to CELC was not that dramatic of a shift. What happened in the meantime was that I actually studied Henrich in detail and realized that I had to rewrite my entire theory.

Bibliography

Henrich, Joseph. The Secret of our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, .... Princeton UP, 2015.

Leighton, H. Vernon. "Henrich's Secret of our Success, Cultural Evolution as a new foundation for evolutionary literary criticism." John Kennedy Toole Research. Posted July 1, 2025. URL: https://leighton-toole-research.blogspot.com/2025/07/

Thomas, Calvin. Ten Lessons in Theory: A New Introduction to Theoretical Writing. 2nd Edition. Bloomsbury Academic, 2023.

Ignatius as Romantic Aesthete, Idea #33, and More Toole Resources Moving to OpenRiver

On December 31, 2025, (yesterday) the university where I work, Winona State University, shut down the server that I have been using to publish many of my John Kennedy Toole resources and other resources. I will be exploring means to migrate my content to other servers.

Therefore, I have converted the rest of my JKT resources to PDF documents and am making all of them available in one of two places. The first place is OpenRiver, the institutional repository for Winona State University. A list of my resources on OpenRiver can be found at: https://openriver.winona.edu/do/search/?q=author%3A%22H.%20Vernon%20Leighton%22. The second place is my ResearchGate account, located at: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Vernon-Leighton or click here: Vernon Leighton, ResearchGate.

My university has allowed me to create some webpages on a WordPress site, so my directory for various John Kennedy Toole resources is now at: John Kennedy Toole Research at educate dot winona dot edu. It has links to: 1) a PDF version of my Ideas for Papers or Term Papers on John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, the Occasional Series; 2) a PDF version of my Critical Annotated Bibliography of Obscure Scholarship on John Kennedy Toole and A Confederacy of Dunces; 3) a PDF version of my lecture, The Dialectic of American Humanism: the Lecture Script; and 4) a PDF version of my John Kennedy Toole's Papers: A cautionary tale of scholarly research, lecture script. I have decided that I will no longer be adding entries to either "Ideas for Papers" or the "Obscure Scholarship," so they will be fixed PDFs.

Versions of Evidence of Influences and ResearchGate

My "Evidence of Influences" paper was my first big study of Toole's novel. I had had several versions of that study. The version which I produced to accompany my big peer-review article, "Dialectic of American Humanism" (2012) was version 2.0. I did produce three years later a version 2.1, but no one has cited it, and I have not updated it since. I will let 2.1 vanish (unless you can find it on a way-back machine). Version 2.0 is the canonical text, and it was already on ResearchGate. A "Green" open access version of the peer-review article "Dialectic of American Humanism" is also already available on ResearchGate. You can find links to those resources on my John Kennedy Toole Research page on educate.winona.edu

As a perk to you for going to the OpenRiver site, I am adding one new entry to the "Ideas for Papers," which I have also included as part of this blog entry.

Idea for Paper about JKT and Confederacy, #33: Ignatius as Romantic Aesthete

Most of my ideas for papers on John Kennedy Toole, such as comparing Ignatius to Kosmo Kramer, are rather modest. This is not one of those modest ideas. This is a Big Idea. I had been saving it for myself. I believe that it genuinely warrants a peer-reviewed paper. Were I to devote further effort to writing one more scholarly paper on Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, this would probably be it.

Within the Toole Papers at Tulane, one will find that Ken Toole studied the 19th century English Romantics extensively. For example, in the Fall of 1956, Toole's Tulane transcript indicates that he took "English 651: English Romantic Poets, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats."

When Kenneth McIntyre wrote a book chapter for Theology and Geometry (2020), edited by Leslie Marsh, about the possible influence on Toole of the Kierkegaardian concept of the aesthete, I wrote to him. I let him know that there was no mention of Kierkegaard in Toole's surviving papers, but his studies of Romanticism are extensive, especially Keats. If Toole was thinking about an aesthete, it was probably not a Kierkegaardian aesthete but an aesthete in the mold of Keats or one from the Walter Pater school. Such an aesthete might be related to the sensitive types in Proust and Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, discussed in Idea #14 above.

This theory that Ignatius is a Romantic aesthete meshes nicely with theme of Neoplatonism. The Romantics were big on Platonism and Neoplatonism. I would recommend to a scholar starting on this topic the book The Platonism of Shelley by Notopoulos (1952), which was contemporary to Toole's intellectual education. This Neoplatonism also nicely connects to Evelyn Waugh.

This theory also fits well with Ignatius's self-image as a genius. The Cult of the Genius was strong among the Romantics. Because Ignatius is a parody of a genius, A Confederacy of Dunces may be seen as mocking the pretensions of the Romantic aesthete.

Thesis: Explore the parallel themes within the tradition of English Romanticism and within A Confederacy of Dunces. Discuss aestheticism, Neoplatonism, and the role of the Genius.

Artificial Intelligence: What is Truth, What is Education?

This series of blog posts began as a set of observations about literary research on the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include topics such as AI. This entry discusses a facet of that discipline.

First, I would like to acknowledge that a number of people offered advice on this topic, and they generally know more than I do about philosophy and education. I would name them, but then I would want to have their approval, and I take ultimate responsibility for this text.

On October 22, 2025, I was a co-presenter of a talk at Winona State University to the informal AI Discussion Group along with Professor Malgarzata Plecka. I billed the talk as "The Reverse Turing Test." The basic thesis of the talk was not groundbreaking in the least: if you are trying to discern whether an academic text was generated by AI rather than written by a person, then one strategy is to check the footnotes and references. AI systems will sometimes fabricate references to articles that don't really exist. If a submitted paper has fabricated references, a reviewer can reject it not because it was generated by AI, but because it is a flawed paper. It was probably generated by AI, but that is almost beside the point.

As part of that talk, I digressed onto the philosophical issues pertaining to the situation. Namely, I touched on philosophical theories of Truth. In last month's entry for this blog, I compared "truth as factual accuracy" with "truth as loyalty." A friend of mine who is more familiar with these issues pointed me toward a philosophical position called "The Correspondence Theory of Truth." Does a given statement correspond to a state of affairs in the world?

I sent this paragraph to a philosophy professor:

Some schools of thought deprecate the belief that there is an external, objective, observable world at all, much less one that can be measured. I am reminded of the joke about the drunk at the bar during the philosophy conference who said, "Solipsism works for me, but that’s just one man’s opinion."

That professor pointed out that there are a variety of philosophical schools that don't fall into this dichotomy of "correspondence theory of truth" or solipsism. There are deflationist theories and pragmatist theories which still believe in the external world. Further, one can deny the existence of the external world without being a solipsist, such as in Bishop Berkeley's philosophy of idealism.

Circling back to factual accuracy, though, even if you don't buy a theory similar to the correspondence theory in general, it is neverthesless the case that a research library is part of a scholarly correspondence theory of truth. Even for scholars who cast a jaundiced eye toward the value of telling the truth, they do largely adhere to a different commitment to factual accuracy: within their own scholarly texts, they try to accurately quote and reference other writings.

For example, I have read a book by Melvin Pollner called Mundane Reason. Pollner develops a theory of ethnomethodology, which he then uses to question the existence of the objective, determinate world. Truth is socially constructed, and a community will develop a unitary world of social truth.

Even if I am a scholar who is a follower of Pollner or Bishop Berkeley, I will still adhere to a correspondence theory of truth in my production of my own scholarly texts. If I claim a quotation from one of their texts or a text that discusses them, I will make a citation that will correspond to the location of that statement in the objective, observable universe of texts managed by libraries.

These musings are relevant to a discussion of AI LLMs, because LLMs generally string statements together without worrying whether they are factually accurate statements about the universe of scholarly texts. ChatGPT will often just make crap up. Some commentators politely refer to made up quotes and references as hallucinations. Others rely on Harry Frankfurt’s definition and refer to the act of making up stuff, including references, as bullshitting. Some library researchers have created a metric for testing LLM systems called the Reference Hallucination Score. See citations below.

The scenario that we presented on October 22nd was this: a researcher has claimed to have authored a paper that was submitted to an academic journal. The editors of the journal have a policy of not allowing texts that are generated by AI. The basic justification for detecting AI-generated texts is that they should be identified and rejected. Why should they be rejected, though?

Obviously, if a student is assigned to write a paper without the assistance of AI, and the professor can show that the paper was generated by AI, that is a violation of the assignment. But if the paper is a genuinely brilliant and well-executed paper, perhaps an academic journal should consider publishing it, even if it is generated by an AI LLM. Of course, if the references in the paper are fabricated, then the paper is by definition flawed, regardless of who or what generated it.

During the discussion after the presentation, a professor argued that he uses AI LLMs so extensively that a text under his name is almost always a fusion of his own words and those of the AI LLM, and that he himself might not know which of the two crafted any one passage. The basic motive for detecting AI-generated texts is that human-generated texts are preferred. The basic point of the other professor's claim of blending is that the AI-generated text is superior to the human-generated text and should be utilized. Those two positions are not necessarily opposed to one another.

The core of the problem is whether the human claiming authorship is actually the author of the work. Here I offer a modified definition of author, namely: the human is the author if that human is an authority on the content in the work, and the human takes responsibility for what it says. An AI LLM might have assisted with the wording, or even some of the ideas, but the human should have both a command of the content and editorial control of the final text. After all, human ghost writers have been around for millennia; this is not a new concept.

If a paper has fabricated references, then it is likely that the purported human author left the generation of the text entirely up to the AI system. The human might not understand what the paper says or what it contains. For a paper that is entirely composed by an AI system, the human is not the author of the paper under this definition.

If, on the other hand, the human is fully in control of the subject matter and is using the AI system as a tool to improve the final product, then that case probably falls on the acceptable end of the spectrum. That assertion of authorship, though, would involve actual work by the human.

For instance, if the AI system offers up references, the human would be responsible for actually tracking down those texts (and in the process verifying their existence), reading them, and establishing that they are relevant to the argument. This problem of AI-fabricated references is related to the long-standing problem that arises when human authors borrow citations from earlier human-written texts without verifying them. If the earlier paper has a mistake in the reference, that mistake will be perpetuated by later authors who fail to verify the reference and read the cited work.

You can even couch this discussion within a larger context of education: To me, the point of the university is 1) to educate students, 2) to expand the realm of knowledge through research and scholarship and creative works, and 3) to preserve that realm of knowledge and share it with the broader community.

Educating students can be thought of as the process of building neural networks. However, they are the biological networks made of actual neurons and located between the ears of the students, not neural networks located in massive data centers (which in the industry are sometimes called "multi-layer perceptrons"). If the students (or faculty members) rely solely on an artificial neural network, they are often not building the biologically-based neural network in their own brains, and we are failing to educate them.

A complicating aspect of today’s world is that AI is ubiquitous. One of the things our students—and our faculty—will have to learn is how to delve into AI systems to leverage their own knowledge while still retaining intellectual control and responsibility. ( "Delve" and "leverage" are two words commonly used by AI LLMs when writing prose—as are m-dashes.) That authorship requires work, and AI systems make it easy to skip the work and masquerade as the author. Worse, employers may require workers to give up their authorship to increase productivity (that is, increase the quantity of product, not its quality).

NOTE: None of the above text was generated by an AI LLM. It is all the product of the wetware inside my skull, plus the broader collective knowledge held by the community of people with whom I consulted and written texts which are part of my culture (and the product of cultural evolution).

Afterword, December 12, 2025

I shared the above blog entry with my friend Will Dowling, who is retired now from, first, teaching computer science, and then, working in the computer industry. He now teaches an occasional AI course as an adjunct at Temple University. He was the person who suggested that I look into the correspondence theory of truth.

One question he asked when he read my phrase "fabricated references" was: "how would you know whether incorrect references are fabricated, or due to innocent error?" My answer: "You cannot know for certain that a citation was fabricated, but there is a difference between a typo and a citation where none of the details relate to an actual citation. In the paper that Professor Plecka brought to me and my colleagues, NONE of the citations existed in the observable universe of scholarly texts. One citation had for its title a phrase from a quote that the supposed author had made in another, existing article. The AI system probably found that quote and used it when cobbling together its references. Humans can fabricate references, too, but it would be time consuming to do so, and it would be faster to go into a library database and download a number of real citations on the relevant topic."

To my claim that "if there are fabricated references, then the supposed author probably left the writing of the paper entirely to an AI system," Will writes: "I don't buy this. Say I write an article, by myself, no help from AI. It has 10 cited references. I need to fluff up the references section before submission. I go to Claude, and now I have 40 references." My response: Good point.

Will also took issue with my statement: "The basic motive for detecting AI-generated texts is that human-generated texts are preferred." He noted that studies have shown that the average person prefers a text written by an LLM to a text written by a human. That may be true--he cited an article that really exists to back up the point (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.13939v3)--but what I meant was that editors of journals and readers who want to learn from other humans might prefer a text that was generated by a human.

Will took issue with my "jaundiced eye" statement. Just because someone does not subscribe to the correspondence theory of truth does not mean that the person does not value telling the truth. My reply: Fair enough. Melvin Pollner might not dislike truth-telling, he just defines truth in a particular way that includes "the politics of experience."

Will didn't agree with my definition of an author. He writes, "Who gets to judge whether you are an authority of the content in the work? This moves what should be unambiguous, author or not?, to the realm of judgment call. I prefer the common (JAMA; The Lancet; Nature; PLOS ONE; etc.) requirement that contributing co-authors must enumerate their contributions including categories such as conceptualization, writing (original draft) and writing (review and editing)."

My response: I agree with Will's basic point. But in libraries, there are instances where a corporation is an author, such as a congressional committee being the author of the text of a hearing. My definition would allow one to argue that an editor at a publishing house is equally the author of a book that the house edited. But in literary studies, there are already debates about the degree to which authorship is shared among a group of people in the text production process, so this is not a new problem. I guess I would retreat back to the point that the author is the entity which takes full responsibility for the text. Whether that person or legal entity knows what is in the text or is an authority on the content, that is a judgment call.

Thanks Will. Your critique is very much welcome and has helped me improve my thinking on this topic.

Bibliography

Aljamaan, Fadi, et al. (2024). "Reference Hallucination Score for Medical Artificial Intelligence Chatbots: Development and Usability Study." JMIR Medical Informatics 12 (1): e54345. doi: 10.2196/54345

Hicks, Michael Townsen, James Humphries, and Joe Slater. (2024). "ChatGPT is Bullshit." Ethics and Information Technology 26: 30. doi: 10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5

Pollner, Melvin. (1987). Mundane Reason. Cambridge UP.

CELC: Cultural Evolution and Stephen Jay Gould

This series of blog posts began as a set of observations about literary research on the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include evolutionary literary criticism. I have recently begun to work on incorporating cultural evolution (from Joseph Henrich, who follows the work of Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson). This entry discusses that discipline.

When I was in college in the 1980s, I enjoyed the essay collections of the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould. In the Summer of 2025, I was reediting my old book reviews that had originally been posted on WorldCat. I discovered that Gould's collections of essays are available as audiobooks on the platform Hoopla, a platform to which my public library subscribes.

I began listening again to the first collection of essays, Ever Since Darwin. Lo and Behold! Gould was arguing in favor of the concept of cultural evolution back in the 1970s, before even Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman published their seminal book Cultural Transmission and Evolution, which was published in 1981. At that time, Gould was arguing against the position of the school of Sociobiology. Its champion was E. O. Wilson, who published an influential book of that title.

For example, in Ever Since Darwin, Gould describes a scenario where grandparents in the Arctic will sometimes sacrifice themselves to help the young survive. In the sociobiology literature, it was hypothesized that there was a gene or combination of genes which were responsible for that behavior. Gould offers an alternative to the genetic theory for elder sacrifice: "The sacrifice of grandparents is an adaptive, but nongenetic, cultural trait" (256).

"Thus, my criticism of Wilson does not invoke a nonbiological 'environmentalism;' it merely pits the concept of biological potentiality—a / brain capable of the full range of human behaviors and rigidly predisposed toward none—against the idea of biological determinism—specific genes for specific behavioral traits." (256-257)

Where I think Gould differs from proponents of evolutionary psychology is in the phrase "predisposed toward none." I believe that an evolutionary psychologist would say that we are predisposed toward some, though that predisposition might be overruled by cultural norms.

The question remains, how does Gould's vision of cultural evolution differ, if at all, from the vision Boyd and Richerson developed in the 1980s? In The Panda's Thumb, Gould's second collection of essays, he offers the theory that cultural evolution uses Lamarckian inheritance instead of just natural selection to transmit heritable traits. I am not sure that that idea has aged well, but I have to think about it more.

Philosophical Digression

Extremes of genetic determinism tend to be on the right side of the political/social spectrum (for example, Nazi theories of racial purity), and extremes of Lamarckian evolution tend to be on the left side of the spectrum (for example, Lysenko's purging of genetic research under Stalin). Gould's passionate rejection of genetic determinism and his suggestions of Lamarckian cultural evolution indicate, if any indication was needed, that he leans toward the left side of that one-dimensional political spectrum.

The word truth has many definitions. In my own musings on the nature of truth, I often think about two of those definitions. One of them focuses on factual accuracy. There is a whole school of philosophy that ponders how a statement about the world corresponds to a state of affairs in the world. That definition is related to the German word wahr or the related Latin word veritas.

With the rise of natural philosophy and the physical sciences in the 1600s, observation—as opposed to, say, contemplation—was given a privileged place in the discovery of knowledge. One could write whole libraries about philosophers such as Plato, St. Augustine, Hume, Kant, etc. and their relationship to factual accuracy and the existence of an observable world.

Another, very different definition of the word truth relates to group loyalty. Am I true to a cause, to my school, to my nation, etc.? This definition relates to the German word treu. In a social group, when a bully wants to assert dominance over others in the group, the bully might insist that the social truth is directly and obviously opposite to factual accuracy, such as when, in Shakespeare's "Taming of the Shrew", Petruchio insists that Katherina call the sun the moon.

To me, part of the point of some philosophical skepticism of the physical sciences boils down to an argument that scientific claims belong to the treu aspect of truth rather than the veritas aspect of truth. An extreme version of the philosophy that references Thomas Kuhn's Structures of Scientific Revolutions says that major scientific theories are like clothes fashions; they come and go, and one paradigm is incommensurate with its successor. The extreme version refuses to admit that scientific claims can be falsified.

I reject that argument in its pure form, but I hold to a slightly different claim that all statements purporting to be true have at least a little bit of treu. You cannot escape it. The best you can do is minimize it and guard against letting it dominate like a bully. Even in a situation where there is a clearly defined question about the world and a straightforward, accurate observation of the world that answers that question, even just deciding which question to ask adds an element of treu to the situation. For example, asking whether some of the change in the climate is caused by human activity has political implications, and studying the question might be taboo within some social groups.

The challenge to students of cultural evolution—where the stakes for treu are quite high—is to do careful and accurate work to find the veritas about how cultural evolution works. It is further complicated, because different theories of cultural evolution might predispose adherents to different philosophies of the nature of truth.

I like Gould's work in part because, though he is partisan in his promotion of his theory and its social implications, he spends most of his time reasoning over the evidence or pointing out the lack of it. He does not insist that we call the sun the moon, though he might be stubborn in his belief that genes cannot predispose human behavior.

Bibliography

Gould, Stephen Jay. Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History. Norton, 1977.

Gould, Stephen Jay. The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History. Norton, 1980.

Henrich, Joseph. The Secret of our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, .... Princeton UP, 2015.

Post-Script

No part of this text was generated by an AI LLM, despite the frequent use of the m-dash.

CELC: Is Memetics Still Dead? Yes, Margaret, it's still dead.

This series of blog posts began as a set of observations about literary research on the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include evolutionary literary criticism. I have recently begun to work on incorporating cultural evolution (from Joseph Henrich, who follows the work of Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson) into my critical framework. This entry discusses that discipline.

Back in 2012, I wrote a review of the Susan Blackmore book The Meme Machine, which I entitled: "Memetics as a science is still dead." I adopted in that review the arguments made by Steven Pinker in his book, How the Mind Works. Pinker argued that the brain thinks thoughts like the stomach processes food: it is a machine that does things. The theory of memetics supposes that the brain is just fertile top soil in which memes can grow and replicate and compete against each other and undergo natural selection. (Granted, I am simplifying here for the purposes of ridicule.)

The theory of cultural evolution argues that recent human evolution has been strongly driven by a gene-culture coevolution. That raises the question: is cultural evolution simply memetics by another name?

The answer is no, they are not the same. And, to repeat myself, memetics as a science is still dead. Henrich, Boyd, and Richerson even wrote an article skillfully rebutting the idea that they were the same. They argue that proponents of memetics labor under five major misunderstandings about cultural evolution.

One major difference between the theory of cultural evolution and the theory of memetics is that cultural evolution posits that individuals actively want to learn and adopt cultural knowledge. It's not that our brains are fertile top soil for the meme that can out-compete other memes. We seek out and imitate prestigious other members of our community, and we adopt the cultural traits of those we esteem.

Years ago, I enjoyed reading essays by Stephen Jay Gould where he criticized religiously-based creationism. What I noticed was that he would use the frontal attack on creationism, an easy target, to make a back-handed attack on sociobiology at the same time. He would criticize creationism, but he would then end with something along the lines of, "and sociobiology is just as bad, but going the other way."

It turns out that the article cited below has a similar double attack. The authors criticize memetics, which is an easy target, but then they criticize some critics of memetics as having a bad model of cultural evolution going the other way. They then try to articulate a superior model for cultural evolution between the two misguided extremes. In this way, the article is quite entertaining and informative. They even score debating points against Steven Pinker, whose criticism of memetics so inspired me decades ago.

In their conclusion, they argue that the misunderstandings of the memetics debate all stem from "a tendency to think categorically rather than quantitatively" (133-134). We like to place things in simple categories, and the process of cultural evolution is much more complex than can be characterized by a simple category.

Henrich, J., R. Boyd, and P. J. Richerson. (2008). "Five misunderstandings about cultural evolution." Human Nature, 19(2), 119-137. doi:10.1007/s12110-008-9037-1 For a copy at Harvard, Click Here.

CELC: Adding Cultural Evolution to ELC: How does my earlier theory of ELC1, ELC2, and ELC3 hold up?

This series of blog posts began as a set of observations about literary research on the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include evolutionary literary criticism (ELC). When I began my work on ELC, the foundation of my approach was the theory of biological, genetic evolution through natural selection. I have recently begun to subscribe to the theory of cultural evolution and gene-culture coevolution (from Joseph Henrich, who follows the work of Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson). Metaphorically, I have dug a new theoretical basement, and I want to shift my ELC edifice from the old foundation to the new one. Will it fall over? Will it have to be rebuilt?

In my blog entry of July of 2025, I announced that I had begun shifting my thinking away from traditional evolutionary psychology and more toward the school of gene-culture coevolution. One question that arises is: Does this new focus alter my previous theory of evolutionary literary criticism? The short answer is: Not much.

I have in the past argued that there are three different versions of evolutionary literary criticism (ELC) (for example, in my blog entry of January of 2025). In short, the second and third types of ELC are already fairly compatible with this new framework of cultural evolution, and the first can be adjusted.

ELC1: To quote my January, 2025, blog entry, the first version of evolutionary literary criticism (ELC1), examines "elements of a literary work that relate directly to the reproductive fitness of the characters. That can relate to both their individual fitness (don't get eaten by the alligator) and group fitness (fight bravely in battle so that your group prevails over its opponents)."

The first half of ELC1 specifically deals with non-socially-constructed forms of biological fitness, like having children. Henrich's cultural evolution theory argues that the strongest force on genetic evolution of modern humans has been cultural evolution. Still, one cannot completely dismiss biological reproductive fitness in one's analysis of genetic evolution, so that aspect of behavior should not be completely eliminated from ELC1. This half of ELC1 can remain with some adjustments.

The second half of ELC1 deals with group fitness. I was using the multilevel selection theory of David Sloan Wilson to frame my understanding of group selection (Sober and Wilson, 1998). Henrich would argue that much of what drives group selection is not genetic evolution but cultural evolution. Still, Henrich's theory continues to focus on group mechanisms such as the role of altruistic punishers to enforce behavior by others in the group. What is different is that the behavior which is enforced does not need to be directly specified by genetics. It is controlled by cultural learning. It can be any set of social norms, rather than just prosocial, group-enhancing behavior. Different sets of cultural practices do come into competition with one another, but the intergroup competition is not solely driven by violent conflicts, such as warfare. See chapter ten of Henrich's book The Secret of our Success (citation below), for a discussion of the forms that intergroup competition can take.

ELC2: Again, to quote my January, 2025, blog entry, the second version of evolutionary literary criticism (ELC2), examines "the ways in which the literary work shows that storytelling itself is an adaptive behavior. This 'storytelling as adaptive' perspective relates to the philosophical framework of viewing the world as a social construct." This version of evolutionary literary criticism is already compatible with the theory of cultural evolution. Henrich might say that the behavior among humans which is ultimately adaptive is cultural learning. Storytelling is just a proximate mechanism for some forms of cultural learning.

ELC3: Finally, the third version of evolutionary literary criticism (ELC3), examines "ways in which valuing a storytelling tradition can signal membership in a social group, which benefits the reader's group identity. This version of evolutionary literary criticism sees the story as an object within an adaptive context." This version again is compatible with the theory of cultural evolution. The literary text is a vessel holding some of the collective knowledge of the social group. We treasure literature because humans have evolved to want to learn and preserve cultural information, even if that information does not seem to have a rational function or immediate purpose.

Ironically, the theory of cultural evolution from Boyd, Richerson, and Henrich is more compatible with my three versions of evolutionary literary criticism than the more traditional theories of evolutionary psychology. My theory is morphing into Cultural Evolutionary Literary Criticism. Goodbye ELC, hello CELC.

Bibliography

Henrich, Joseph. The Secret of our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, .... Princeton UP, 2015.

Leighton, H. Vernon. "Confederacy of Dunces and Evolutionary Literary Criticism." John Kennedy Toole Research. Posted January 1, 2025. URL: https://leighton-toole-research.blogspot.com/2025/01/

Leighton, H. Vernon. "Henrich's Secret of our Success, Cultural Evolution as a new foundation for evolutionary literary criticism." John Kennedy Toole Research. Posted July 1, 2025. URL: https://leighton-toole-research.blogspot.com/2025/07/

Sober, Elliott and David Sloan Wilson. Unto Others: the Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior. Harvard UP, 1998.