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.

Do we and should we study human behavior objectively?

Over the years, there has been an anthropological debate on whether scientists should study human behavior objectively or subjectively. Traditional sciences attempted to collect anthropological information the way natural sciences do: with a clear method, isolation of variables, and, most importantly, an objective standpoint. However, modern sciences deal with "reality" as a relationship between the observer and the observed. It has become recognized that objectivity cannot be achieved, and is, in itself, a knowledge issue: how can someone determine what is purely objective or subjective? With this in mind, and as an economics student, as well as a physics one, I constantly have this debate of whether it is even possible to achieve such characteristics. Why are the "sciences" split into human and natural? Subjective and objective? As the scientific paradigms evolve over time, especially with groundbreaking discoveries such as quantum mechanics, it is seen more and more how one type is not as different from the other, how the human sciences may have a way of being objective, and the natural sciences (yes, physics and biology included), subjective.

Some sociologists have tried to adopt the methods of the natural sciences by using quantitative means and results instead of qualitative ones. In sociology, this is called "positivism," and it reflects a traditional approach to human sciences. Comte, a positivist, argued that sociologists should not be concerned with internal meanings, motives, feelings and emotions of individuals. According to him, these mental states only exist in an individual's consciousness, making measuring and other quantitative scientific methods hard to use. Instead, he argues that sociologists should look for correlations between different variables, just like in math or any natural sciences. Examples of this are the different studies of suicide rates, membership of different religions, among others. These are very useful when looking for culture studies as a whole. However, correlations are not always absolutely correct; for instance, there is a "correlation" between the lack of pirates and global warming over the years. Although there is a statistical correlation, it does not mean that the global temperatures are increasing because of the lack of pirates -- one does not affect the other. Sure, this may seem funny at first, but if we look at every so-called "correct" correlation this way, the quantitative evidence used goes to waste. This is a great example of how objectivity when studying human behavior should not always be used.

Many argue that it is crucial to accept that modern scientific research is relativistic and that objectivity is a "naive realism" of traditional sciences. Cultural relativists are some that agree with this belief. They argue that an individual human's beliefs and activities should be interpreted in terms of his or her own culture. They are also known for using cross-cultural methods essentially to develop any meaningful scientific comparative statements. However, if there is no structure for how the information can be collected, according to this group of scientists, how can one study compare to the other? In a sense, it is important to be able to repeat the same "experiment" twice and achieve similar results, as is seen in the natural sciences. With anthropologists, this cannot be achieved because so much of the investigation is in relation to the cultural environment of the scientist in charge. Without objectivity, cross-cultural comparisons are like comparing apples to oranges.

The recurring example of objectivity is the natural sciences. It has consistently been proven to be a methodologically successful area of knowledge and that it is the closest to objectivity that we have ever gotten. Even within this area, the most quintessential of all three sub-sections (Physics, Chemistry, and Biology) is the physical one, isn't it? Some laws and theories have withstood against time and are still taught until today, making this the most objective of studies, right? Wrong. Quantum mechanics is a great example of how century-old objectivity can be crumbled in a second. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle states that the better you know the position of a particle, the less you know its momentum, and vice versa. This goes against any "unbiased" collection of data belief in the realm of physics, and even natural sciences. And we're not talking about humans here -- we're talking about particles. Even the concept of relativity is questioned; the speed of a man walking inside a train in his perspective may be 1 meter per second. However, from the perspective of a person outside the train as it is moving, may be 45 meters per second. The difference is so big, and how can we be sure that one is "more correct" over the other?

Ultimately, we cannot classify one type of science as objective and the other subjective. Both human and natural sciences show examples of one or the other, and that shows how we should take both characteristics into consideration when studying humans, or even particles (as mind-blowing as that might seem).