Humanists, scientists, and the cultural surplus

Assessing the limits of evolutionary and cognitive approaches to the study of culture goes to the heart of an issue that tends to divide humanists and scientists. The issue is how far, in dealing with complex cultural texts a nd the complex transactions we perform as readers, can we advance by scient ific reduction? The issue is vexed by the fact that at times the complexity and novelty of humanistic discourse is little more than obfuscation and st rained ingenuity. But such failings discredit neither the search for novelt y, nor the earned perception of irreducible complexity, nor the immense imp ortance of work that is necessarily, and terminally, speculative.