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The natural sciences often offer themselves as a model to other disciplines. But this time science might look for help to the humanities, and to literary criticism in particular.A major root of the crisis is selective use of data. Scientists, eager to make striking new claims, focus only on evidence that supports their preconceptions

Despite the popular belief that anything goes in literary criticism, the field has real standards of scholarly validity.

In his 1960 book “Truth and Method,” the influential German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer argues that an interpreter of a text must first question “the validity — of the fore-meanings dwelling within him.” However, “this kind of sensitivity involves neither ‘neutrality’ with respect to content nor the extinction of one’s self.” Rather, “the important thing is to be aware of one’s own bias.” To deal with the problem of selective use of data, the scientific community must become self-aware and realize that it has a problem. In literary criticism, the question of how one’s arguments are influenced by one’s prejudgments has been a central methodological issue for decades.

‘‘Homophobia’’ was a hit. Weinberg had intuited that culture wars are waged not just in hearts and minds, but also in conversation.