In Literature, there's very little that lets you check what you're saying, and in some circles not even asking the author what they meant counts. So there's confusion to dissolve, but it doesn't seem to be common practice.
Study of literature, especially older literature, is in my opinion indispensable for what is perhaps the most difficult act of overcoming bias, namely realization that there can exist people with views and values radically different from one's own who are not delusional, stupid, or malicious.
Do you mean actually reading older literature, or academic analysis of older literature? If the latter, a quick look at the Wikipedia entry for literary theory seems to show that the field is full of confusion:
...many contemporary theorists and literary scholars believe either that "literature" cannot be defined...
and many of the schools of thought listed there seem to be about writing a bottom line, and then making whatever work of literature (whatever that is) is being examined fit.
A Wall Street Journal article by Harvard professor of government Harvey Mansfield claims that the social sciences and humanities are inferior to the sciences. The article implicitly urges undergraduates to major in science. From the article:
Do you agree with this? As a game theorist I probably have a rather biased view of the situation. It's certainly true that the ideal of the scientific method is vastly better than the practice of economists, but I think that majoring in economics provides better training for a rationalist than majoring in any of the sciences does.
Economics explicitly considers what it means to be rational. Although it infrequently considers ways in which humans are irrational, I'm under the impression that the hard sciences never do this. Furthermore, because economists can almost never perform replicable experiments we have to rely on what everyone in the profession recognizes as messy data; therefore we’re far more equipped than hard scientists to understand the limits of using statistical inference to draw conclusions from real world situations. Although I have seen no data on this, I bet that a claim by nutritionists that they have found a strong causal link between some X and heart disease would be treated with far more skepticism by the average economist than the average hard scientist.