This article investigates two questions: have literary anthropologists offered telling critiques of science; and have they proposed another, more powerful, mode of knowing? It is suggested that neither literary anthropologists, hermeneutical philosophers, nor philosophers of science have constructed arguments that compel the rejection of science. ‘Thick description,’ offered as an alternative to science, is shown to exhibit properties of gossip. Thus the article responds to both questions in the negative and, in conclusion, proposes that the literary anthropological approach amounts to a doctrine of Panglossian nihilism.
