Human Sciences Tug-of-War: Is It More Like Natural Sciences or History?

Renata Sayão

Block 5 TOK

Ms. Hunt

Aug. 23, 2013

Are the human sciences more like the natural sciences or more like history?

            Although in technical terms, the human sciences do not encompass history, to a large extent the validation of a most human science knowledge claim relies on historical evidence and reference. After hours of thinking and researching and sorting data into categories, I’ve come to this simple conclusion: the human sciences try to follow the paradigm that is applied in the natural sciences but nonetheless are still more like history because their subjects are conscientious animals.

            Let’s take the TED Talk by William Ury on “the walk from ‘no’ to ‘yes’” to begin. Ury is a writer and mediator who works to resolve and study conflicts throughout the world. He’s an unofficial sociologist and anthropologist. He begins by explaining, in a very scientific term, that humans are reaction-machines, and that they cannot get an outside view of the conflict they are facing because they have already reacted. This is a knowledge claim based significantly on psychology and the study of human behavior, and can be tested using the methods and established rules that the natural sciences laid out. A little later, however, he begins to talk about conflicts in the Middle East, and references Abraham, the first man to walk across this territory. He discusses how Abraham is a symbolic “third side” that reminds us [humankind and Middle-Eastern tribes] that we’re part of an extended family. In addition, he discusses that when angry or lost in the world, walking is the key to getting back in focus for humans. These proposals are heavily based on historical analysis, following the “make a justified claim that is testable” of the natural sciences but having at their cores historical evidence and reference because that is how they get their data samples and examples. Since it is very difficult to “remind humans that we’re part of an extended family” in a scientific and methodic way, it is only through history that it is justifiable.

            In addition, an article published in 2008 in the freakonomics website on the “Economics of Happiness” is, as the title clearly depicted, an economic report. Journalist and economist Justin Wolfers noted the trend in graphs comparing GDP and overall wellbeing in a spam of 60 years, from 1950 to 2010. He concluded that the income-well-being relationship “has appeared just about as strongly in surveys probing happiness as in surveys asking about life satisfaction”. The relationship between income and happiness is about as strong today as it was in the very first surveys, which were taken sixty years ago, hence concluding his point that there is and has always been a direct correlation between income and well-being in humans. Now… how did he come to that conclusion so fast? He used historical data and analyzed, with the paradigm of a scientist (looking for patterns and trends), that there was a correlation between the two sets of surveys. There is no natural-sciences-method that could prove this correlation to be true in a laboratory or through an experiment. It is with data originating from history that one is able to prove his or her point. Had anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists not observed from history general trends and behaviors, they would not be able to ever come to a “justified true belief” through a scientific lenses and would not be able to call themselves social scientists.

            One last example that clearly distinguishes human sciences as an area of study more like history is Brené Brown’s TED Talk on “the power of vulnerability”. She says in the beginning of the talk that she likes to put human chaos into boxes, to observe patterns, observe if her observations are correct, and sort human society into organized information matrices. This is, to an enormous extent, a natural sciences paradigm, because again these scientists are trying to find patterns and behaviors that can be tested by other scholars and proven correct. However, she claims that when she gathered interviews and her qualitative data (which is very obviously a historical approach to society), she noticed that some aspects of human behavior can only be proven by interacting with people not by testing them or changing their environment or building experiments to prove the point. Similarly, historians take different perspectives on one event or situation and must build their arguments and explain their logic with these perspectives. Both areas of knowledge work strongly with qualitative data and put pieces of human society and behavior together with such scattered mediums of data. Meanwhile, in the natural sciences knowledge claims can only be justified if it can be observed and tested with the same results, and does not include qualitative data or different sorts of data.

            All in all, after going through some of the studies published by human scientists, I have come to the conclusion that the area of study is very closely connected to history. Again, the studies appeal to the patterns and testable information that is encouraged by the natural scientist community, however they almost always go back for data in historical evidence and records. Some observations are made through peering into history, looking at the evolution of our species and our civilizations, and such data could not be considered 100% valid and testable and acceptable in a natural sciences community.