Human Science 1

Introduction

Let's try to answer three questions:

1. A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? 
................. cents

2. If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?
 ................. minutes

3. In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch  doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake?
................. days

These three very short questions have sent smoke reeling through the ears of many people, as if mental gears were colliding, and in fact mental gears are colliding.  This test, along with other experiments, have persuaded many psychologists that human beings have two systems of thinking.  The first is quick, intuitive, emotional, and given to generalizing.  The second is slow, deliberate, logical, and given to making distinctions.

Many stumble on the three questions because System 1 leads them quickly and directly to the obvious and incorrect answer.  Those few who get them correct have resolved the problems with System 2.  These two systems of thinking have recently been explained in an engaging book entitled Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 (I suggest reading his short autobiography at the Nobel site!).

Have you learned something about human beings? 

Welcome to the world of Human Science!

What are the human sciences?

The area of human sciences encompasses a large number of disciplines that includes  anthropology, archaeology, economics, education, game theory, law, linguistics, political science, sociology, and psychology.  These disciplines seek to apply the scientific method to understand how and why human beings think and feel, behave and interact, as they do.

But unfortunately the scientific method, which already gives rise to issues when applied to natural phenomena, has even more issues when applied to the study of human beings.  The Austrian philosopher Karl Popper argued very well that a scientific theory should be falsifiable and if it were not, then that theory was pseudoscience.  Therefore, psychoanlysis was pseudoscience:  Dr. Freud was always right and could not be proven wrong.  Would this be true for many human sciences?  Are theories in the human sciences like theories in the natural sciences?  And while one can speak of natural laws, such as the four Laws of Thermodynamics (elegantly explained in a brief book by Peter Atkins), are there any laws of human nature? 

Early pioneers of the human sciences, such as Auguste Comte and Emile Durkheim, believed the scientific method could be applied to the study of the behavior of human beings.  But when we begin to think about it, every step of the scientific method will have issues in this new application.     

The human sciences present much food for thought in a TOK class.

What methods can be used?

In the Natural Sciences the scientific method (Observation, Hypothesis, Experimentation) can lead to results and insights that can be explained with a scientific theory.  One proceeds inductively from observations to generalizations.  Unvarying regularities in nature are known as physical laws.  A scientific theory (i.e., a scientific explanation) is based on evidence and a chain of reasoning, it is falsifiable and has predictive powers.  As Galileo first discovered in his study of mechanics, mathematics is a very helpful tool for precise measurement and analysis of data.  Theories that fail to explain adequately natural phenomena are discarded and one can witness a complete paradigm shift.  Any currently accepted theory is tentatively accepted as the best explanation at this moment.

Methods in the human sciences, on the other hand, can be divided into two categories:  quantitative methods and qualitative methods.

• Quantitative Methods
• These include experiments, surveys, questionnaires, and tests that provide numerical data that can be analyzed for frequencies and trends.  Mathematics is used as a tool of analysis, but statistics that are produced need interpretation. 
• Qualitative Methods
• These include interviews and case studies.  These studies can provide more textured and nuanced data, but it is not precisely measured. 

Experts will often use both quantitative and qualitative methods.  In the next classes we will explore these methods more closely to understand their purposes and their issues.  Already one can see that linguistic interpretation is integral.