I'm officially a PhD student working on a thesis on Tolkien!

[Ephtariat]

I'm officially a PhD student working on a thesis on Tolkien!

I will be working under the supervision of Professor Thomas Honegger at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena.

My proposed thesis is titled "Giant’s Daughter, Fairy Mistress, Reverse Orpheus: Folktale Types and Motifs in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Tale of Beren and Lúthien".

It's so great that I can announce this result of years of research and I am glad I can share the news with you!

[Aikári Salmarinian]

Eph: I see, thank you for posting the differences and congrats still. I am moving over my questions to this thread as it is more appropriate place. Do you have a research plan in plan how to prove that the tale of Beowulf is a merger between these two genres? And how the unknown poet did it? Do you feel you are able to figure it out, there are not many resources of so long ago?

[Ephtariat]

Aiks: As you can guess from the title, my thesis is rather on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, that was stated by scholars long ago to be a merger between a Giant's Daughter type and a Fairy Mistress type. My thesis is that Tolkien read the scholars arguing this (as we know from his writing) and was inspired to merge the Giant's Daughter and the Fairy Mistress in his own way in the tale of Beren and Luthien. I will cite that Beowulf also merges two types of tales just as a comparison.

[Arnyn]

That is actually really cool! I'd be interested in reading that!

[Ephtariat]

Thanks, @Arnyn!

[Romeran]

Congrats! And enjoy your time in the program. My PhD is in a totally different field but it’s definitely an experience that you’ll never have again. How far along are you? I assume since you have a thesis title that you’re no longer taking any course work.

[Ephtariat]

@Romeran Thanks! I just started it but you have to decide the general plan for your thesis and propose a title beforehand. It's a cumulative PhD that's based on the obbligation to publish a few chapters of the thesis as peer-review articles, but it has no course work nor teaching assignments.

[Romeran]

Gotcha. Are you studying in Europe? I think PhD programs in the US are quite different, my program was in the US. Ultimately my thesis was like a few relatively related published papers that were stapled together and called a thesis lol. Part of me wishes I had been able to do something more wholistic, but that’s rarely how it works in my field. I was also expected to teach and or do other paid research to. Well congrats regardless and I’m sure it’ll be an excellent experience!! Would you like to stay in academia when you’re done? Like as a professor or researcher? I abandoned academia immediately

[Ephtariat]

I'm studying in Germany, at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena. I believe I am a researcher by nature, I think I would do research in my sleep if I couldn't in my waking life!

[Aikári Salmarinian]

Eph: I see, cool! Is it a good university?

[Ephtariat]

Aiks: It is an historical university, the homeland of German Romanticism. That's why it is dedicated to Friedrich Schiller, and it is also the place where Hegel wrote his Phenomenology of the Spirit.

[Romeran]

Sounds like it's a great program for you then. When you submit some of the chapters for publication it would be great to post them here! I'm sure many of us would enjoy reading them, myself included.

I enjoy research, I still do research at my job, I just didn't like academia, at least in my field. Publish or perish is a real thing here and it's particularly challenging to get a tenure track job and often requires 2-3 postdocs which is just glorified grad school again

[Ephtariat]

@Romeran of course, it will be my pleasure.

What's your field?

[Romeran]

@Ephtariat my PhD is in statistics, almost as far away from Tolkien as you can feasibly get. At first in college I was convinced I was going to study english and linguistics and try to be a philologist, but I really hated a lot of it and, after a rather circuitous path, ended up in statistics which I'm glad for. But I'm definitely not one of those "would conduct research in my sleep" types. I enjoy my job (mostly), I like research and I wouldn't pick a different field, but I also really enjoy my hobbies. That being said, even when I inevitably retire I expect I'll still be reading and learning either in this field or something tangential (like math or physics), I definitely love learning (and teaching -- it's the main thing I miss about academia, although I do still get to teach a lot at my job it's just not quite the same).

[Ephtariat]

@Romeran I briefly studied Math before turning to humanities, but statistics was the main reason why I changed field. Not that I was bad at it, it's just that I have epistemological problems with it.

[Romeran]

@Ephtariat you can't tell me you have epistemological problems with statistics and not elaborate on what you mean. After all much of statistics is essentially a sub-field of mathematics where almost all of the results can be proved in similar manner (e.g. the central limit theorem, law of large numbers etc.), or at least demonstrated to be highly effective (e.g. much of the field of machine-learning which is largely where my PhD work was although nowadays I do more standard statistics albeit at a very large scale).

[Ephtariat]

It's a theoretical problem, that is largely irrelevant in practice. It is the difference between what we actually know as a fact and what is inferred from the average result of an experiment. This gap cannot be filled by any progress in statistical science and it motivated my loss of faith in the scientificity of natural sciences.

[Romeran]

I'd be curious to hear more about what you mean here. Obviously in an experiment (even a randomized one) you can usually never truly observe what you're trying to estimate -- that's the point. But you can still say a lot about it, even if you can't say everything with complete certainty, but I'd argue that so rarely is it the case that we can say much with complete certainty anyway. But perhaps that's part of your problem with it also I imagine this getting rather off-topic.

[Ephtariat]

What I mean is that I wonder whether our "knowledge" of the physical world can be wholly trusted, regardless of what works and what not. I mean, in order for it to be hard science you would have to exclude that everything working is actually due to imponderable causes, and you simply can't do that. For example, I did experiments measuring radioactivity in samples, and the measurements that were off scale were automatically discarded just because they didn't fit in the presumed picture. I wonder whether we can afford to be so confident, speaking in absolute terms.

[Ephtariat]

And yes, this is rather getting off topic, but I didn't want your question be left unanswered.

[Romeran]

Yeah I mean as a statistician I don't believe we live in a world of "facts" and instead in a world of evidence and probability. Form my perspective having a reasonable (but not complete) level of confidence, or being able to reasonably falsify something (within a respectable margin of error) certainly constitutes as knowledge even if it's not fact. I don't think of the physical sciences (often which are founded on experimental science) as a "repository of facts" but rather as a working model of the world, which has high predictive accuracy. It's like that saying from George E.P. Box "All models are wrong, some models are useful." Even the models for motion break down when you either go very large (motion of galaxies) or very small (motion of atoms) -- one of the bigger open problems in physics is unification of these models.

But even math itself is not perfect and is really only a language which is convenient for describing observed phenomena. I'm not sure if you're familiar but for example Godel's Incompleteness Theorems, which fundamentally rocked foundations of mathematics at the time, which shows that any axiomatic formal system can be either complete (in the sense that anything that is true in the system can be proved within the system) or consistent (in the sense that you cannot derive contradictions using the system) but never both.

"First Incompleteness Theorem: Any consistent formal system F within which a certain amount of elementary arithmetic can be carried out is incomplete; i.e., there are statements of the language of F which can neither be proved nor disproved in F."

So even something which seems so dogmatically "factual" as pure mathematics is itself incomplete -- we know that our standard set of axioms are consistent but consequently not complete but even worse there's no better system that doesn't also suffer from this problem!

So I tend more to the perspective that physical science, and indeed mathematics (and consequently statistics), is not fundamentally a "collection of facts" (nor is knowledge, imo, limited to being a collection of facts) but rather they express a working understanding (in forms of systems, models, and results) which have either yet failed to be falsified (e.g. gravity) or which are particularly effective at predicting observed phenomena (e.g. models for motion) or occasionally both.

[Ephtariat]

Yes, I am aware of Godel's theorems, but I don't believe in Popper's account of falsifiability. As an epistemologist I rather follow Feyerabend's "Against Method", where he showed how the presuppositions of natural science are simply those that are founded in the scientist's preconceptions and/or those that are supported by the funding institutions. I recommend you to read him if you haven't. Perhaps you won't agree with him, but at least he will give you the full reason why I don't believe in the natural sciences anymore and have not been closely following their advancements anymore nor looking into them as much as I used to. My turning away from full engagement with them dates to so many years ago that I'm sure I cannot convince you about it because it is something I have been taking for granted for two decades almost and cannot anymore argue for it as the (aspirant) expert in the field that I once was since I turned away from it long ago.

[Romeran]

I'm familiar with the concepts although I have not read the book. But this strikes me very much as "throwing the baby out with the bathwater", so to speak. Do we abandon mathematics because of Godel's Incompleteness theorems? Notably these are provably true in contrast to Feyerabend's critcisms but nevertheless show that a system which prior to this (notably e.g. Bertrand Russell) which was taken to be completely consistent and complete was not in fact as stated. But clearly mathematics and physical sciences are highly effective, we wouldn't be discussing this over the internet on a digital device if that were not the case!

But I think the crux of the matter it sounds like you are an epistemologist and I am a pragmatist. Nevertheless, it's been an enlightening discussion and I wish you all the best with your PhD work! I hope it keeps you happy and interested.

[Ephtariat]

Yes, indeed I warned you that what I was going to say was highly theoretical. But the very drive that once brought me to pursue Math was theoretical, so a serious compromisement in the theory meant for me that I could not fully trust our knowledge of why or how it works, though of course it does work according to our models in a large part enough to be practically irrelevant. But we really are in a situation where we cannot tell whether the light turns on because we push the button or we push the button because the light turns on, or even there is some external third factor associating light and button. I took a paradoxical example because it has to do with our involvement in the process of making science: there is no objective impersonality of the scientist, I don't believe in that either. I would rather say that the presumed impersonality of the scientist is what constitutes their bias, both because human activities cannot be impersonal, and because, if they were, that would be part of their pursuer's personality.

I wish you all the best as well with your work, and I'm sorry if I'm not more supportive, but my lack of faith in the discipline forbids me. It was nice exchanging ideas.

[Romeran]

the very drive that once brought me to pursue Math was theoretical, so a serious compromisement in the theory meant for me that I could not fully trust our knowledge of why or how it works

I can certainly understand if that was a primary driver for interest in math that it can be rather existential when encountering some of these results. I don't expect you are the first nor the last to fall into this.

I wish you all the best as well with your work, and I'm sorry if I'm not more supportive, but my lack of faith in the discipline forbids me. It was nice exchanging ideas.

Likewise! I have no problem with people not caring for my particular field of study, in fact I find a lot of people are like "yuck statistics" for a variety of different reasons, but that doesn't bother me.

[Ephtariat]

@Romeran As much as there are some scientists who say "oh the humanities, how dare they call them sciences?" but I find it funny because I deem the creations of the human being to be the only things of which we have actual knowledge from the inside, that means first hand experience of a people or even the entire race that is comparable to self-knowledge in an individual. "Know thyself" was the Delphic motto, and I stick to that. Also Socrates's "I know only one thing: that I know nothing" I read as meaning the only knowledge is self-knowledge.

[Romeran]

@Ephtariat that makes complete sense to me, to be honest and I would have a hard time actually disagreeing. I still like statistics though

[Ephtariat]

@Romeran

[Aikári Salmarinian]

Eph: Thanks! Good luck with writing your thesis.

[Ephtariat]

Aiks: Thank you very much!