I have long pleaded that humanities scholars should intensify and improve their efforts to try and find distinct answers to their research questions. They need to sincerely crave real results, that is to say, to advance knowledge. If they are successful in their endeavours, it means that they manage to learn something about the phenomenal world that they did not know in advance. I think that humanists should regard such new pieces of knowledge as findings, since this is just what they are. Well, discoveries would be just as appropriate. There is nothing dramatic in a claim like this. A scientific finding (or discovery) is simply something specific that has been found out about the world – be it inside or outside the living creatures inhabiting that world.

Once they gain real results, humanities scholars should also present them in terms of results (that is to say with claims to truth) and resist a certain fashionable temptation to degrade them into personal interpretations or biased perspectives that are dependent on their subjective vantage point or something similar that tends to belittle – although in their view ennoble – what they have accomplished.

Why do I emphasise the need for such a seemingly self-evident attitude to science and research in the humanities? Simply because it is not as self-evident among humanities scholars as one would wish. Far too many of them are unaccustomed to thinking, writing and talking about their achievements in terms of distinct scientific findings or results. When asked to mention important knowledge gains in their field of research, disappointingly many have nothing (or next to nothing) to offer. The interview quoted below is a typical example. It is a translated and slightly edited extract from a recent investigation into the condition of the humanities at a regional university in Sweden: