Hamlet and scholarly paradigm conditioning

Insights from scientists who study paradigm shifts and scientific revolutions that might shed light on confirmation bias [1] in Shakespeare scholarship:

In his famous 1963 book on scientific revolutions, Thomas Kuhn tells of an experiment where subjects were asked to view playing cards for brief, controlled amounts of time, and identify them. Many were normal; a few were “made anomalous, e.g., a red six of spades and a black four of hearts.”

Some had trouble with the anomalies, but as the time to view each card increased, subjects were more able to correctly notice and identify even the anomalies.

“Further increase of exposure resulted in still more hesitation and confusion until finally, and sometimes quite suddenly, most subjects would produce the correct identification without hesitation. Moreover, after doing this with two or three of the anomalous cards, they would have little further difficulty with the others.”

[Most, but not all?]

“A few subjects, however, were never able to make the requisite adjustment of their categories. Even at forty times the average exposure required to recognize normal cards for what they were, more than 10 per cent of the anomalous cards were not correctly identified. And the subjects who then failed often experienced acute personal distress. One of them exclaimed: “I can’t make the suit out, whatever it is. It didn’t even look like a card that time. I don’t know what color it is now or whether it’s a spade or a heart….” (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, third edition, 62-63.)

How does this relate to Shakespeare scholarship?
See Richard Strier: “I want to argue for the desirability of approaching individual texts with as few presuppositions—theoretical and historical—as possible. The more that the critic knows in advance what a text must or cannot do, the less reading, in the strong sense, will occur.”

“Differing interpretations of a text generally share a large number of particular agreements before they part company. And when they part company, they are still responsible to the features—I would call them facts—that they share. Interpretive conclusions, even widely held ones, do not become facts. That Hamlet delays in killing Claudius is a fact. That Hamlet is neurotic (or whatever) in doing so is not.” [2]

In Shakespeare scholarship, many readers and playgoers have been conditioned to think Hamlet has an Oedipal complex, Ophelia commits suicide, and Gertrude is probably damned. They pay more attention to those assumptions, the “conceptual categories” they are conditioned to believe, and no longer pay close attention to anomalies in the text that might not fit those categories.

https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2023/01/hamlet-and-scholarly-paradigm.html


NOTES:
[1] Confirmation bias is when we pay more attention to things that confirm our existing assumptions, and less to those that challenge them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

[2] From the book, Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts, by Richard Strier, Number 34 in the series, The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics, Stephen Greenblatt, General Editor. (Berkeley, California: Univ. of Calif. Press, 1995), pp. 2-3.

IMAGES:
The images of the black four of hearts and the red six of spades are from a wonderful little essay by Bobby Matherne regarding his first encounter with Kuhn's book, about which he writes,
"It took me about 15 years to locate this book and about 15 minutes to realize how important it was to me as a scientist. Kuhn explained to me things that had puzzled me from the time that I outgrew my textbooks in physics and the other sciences. How was it that the major innovators in the sciences, men like Galileo, Newton, Dalton, and Einstein, were able to create their new ideas about the physical world? The textbooks made their discoveries sound so simple and logical that their discoveries seemed to be easily deducible from the state of science as they found it in their time. And yet their discoveries were amazing. How does one reconcile these two contradictory ideas? Kuhn laid it out for me like a "patient etherized on a table" [*] readily available for inspection."
http://www.doyletics.com/art/tsosrart.shtml

[*] “patient etherized on a table” is a quote from T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”


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Disclaimer: If and when I quote or paraphrase bible passages or mention religion in many of my blog posts, I do not intend to promote any religion over another, nor am I attempting to promote religious belief in general; only to explore how the Bible and religion influenced Shakespeare, his plays, and his age.
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Thanks for reading!
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My current project is a book tentatively titled Hamlet’s Bible, about biblical allusions and plot echoes in Hamlet.

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https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2019/12/top-20-hamlet-bible-posts.html

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