The human sciences are sometimes conceived as aiming not only to explain human behaviour or action (from the outside) but also to understand it (from the inside). From this perspective, can the human sciences be said to have a

International Baccalaureate Theory of Knowledge

Cindy Tran Thai Bao Khanh

2) The human sciences are sometimes conceived as aiming not only to explain human behaviour or action (“from the outside”) but also to understand it (“from the inside”). From this perspective, can the human sciences be said to have a richness that the natural sciences lack, in terms of ways of knowing and access to different forms of justification?

The study of two sciences of nature and humanities is most influential to our modern life. A common factor between the two sciences is that they are both scientific knowledge based on logical and reasonable approaches to verify our observation upon sciences. We all know that natural science is the study of the nature and the universe, which include the explorations into the laws of the origins using scientific method. The knowledge that we gain is used to make precise predictions or explain nature. Human beings have been applying the same method into the study and interpretation of ones’ behaviours, experiences, and many other human factors. However, humans are unpredictable; the usage of scientific methods is not considered to give a full explanation why a human behaves consciously in any certain way. Hence, what do we do? The answer is to examine the motives, leading to the understanding of the action deeply in personal, contextual, historical, and spiritual terms.

When it comes to language, there are just so many factors to be considered, to me, the difference between the levels of language spoken by a person could also define the status and personality of him or her. Besides that culture also interacts with language in a way of judgement. Different cultures would have different perspectives on what to be said and how a sentence is said. For my own experience, Chinese men would have a positive impression with women who talk softly, while Americans tends to be more active in their body language and using different tones of voice when they speak.

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Furthermore, language, which is based upon personal experiences and thoughts, is showed by the transmission and communication of the concepts and ideas from one to another. Language, in my opinion, is such a powerful tool that can alter our thoughts and action. We made a connection with one another through the translation of languages. Its fluency on thought and behaviours plays an important part in human sciences. Personally, I think this way of knowing only plays as a translator in the nature sciences as it helped the exploration and development of scientific models to establish the knowledge of the nature following scientific methodologies. However, in human sciences, besides being a translator; it gives such a strong effect, feeling, or emotion. It can make you fall in love, it has the power drives you crazy, or it can create misunderstanding between people, leading to quarrels and stresses. Linking the information above to another way of knowing, emotion, is in a clearly interaction with language, as emotion also has the power to control the influence of thoughts and behaviours.

For my own experience, just yesterday, my best friend and I had such a terrible fight, we shouted at each other and for a moment, we even thought it was the end of our friendship, eventually, when we were calm enough to sit down and talk, we realized that there was misunderstanding due to the way that we spoke as the language that we used was insulting. If I applied the scientific methodology into my friend’s behaviour, I could explain that he was mad and angry due to the annoyance of my action, everyone is different, and people could not always agree with each other in every action, therefore, when I thought positively about my action, my best friend was mad. However, I could neither give any prediction nor hypothesis for the future if I did not understand him well, and I could never knew what was going to happen, since all of our reaction was unpredictable and based upon our own feelings and emotions. Moreover, we cannot apply one’s reaction to another to find out a solution to the problem if we did not understand each other so well.

In addition to the richness of human science, emotions play an important part in our judgement system. People can give out horrible judgement and have negative impression about someone just by looking at them, but we do understand that it was our emotion that sharpens the idea. For example, love is a powerful emotion of the human kind, when Miranda is in love with Patrick, she just gets mad all the times when any girls talk to him, she does not need to speak to those girls to find out how they are and what their purposes of attacking the guy she love are, she just feel the hates for the girls because of her love for Patrick. This emotion can drive her to do crazy things like fighting and arguing with her friends or being mean to people without the realization of her action. However, if the same situation is applied to another couple - Katherine and Travis who are more knowledgeable, Katherine would control her feeling and solve problems in a different way that leaves no conflicts or negative impression among the friends.

Emotion is an essential ingredient, which is used to verify the validation of scientific knowledge, especially humanities. The limitation of this way of knowing is that it is not quite useful for nature sciences due to its accuracy, there might be errors occurring during experiment testing.

"Human science should use those methods which provide the fullest answer possible to the questions asked about topics concerning the human realm and which produce knowledge claims whose defense before the community is convincing enough to bring about assent." (Polkinghorne, 259)

However, on the other hand, natural sciences have some of the richness that human sciences lack. Reason and logic cannot be used to identify the scientific methodology of humans’ behaviours in the way that they sometimes go against nature, as the genetics are different in every single human being. There are other arguments about the unique characteristics of Humanities like emotion and language, yet nothing else is identified. In contrast, for nature sciences, scientists can form and establish models from the knowledge that they study, and they can always base on the previous models that was discovered or invented. Besides that, they can make up hypothesis relied the scientific methodology, and subsequently carry out experiment testing to ensure their information and use it as a benefit, contributing to our life. The richness of nature sciences is the exploration of the nature physically, chemically and biologically. Do consider that beliefs and interests of human scientists might have impact and influence on their assumption and conclusion in certain fields like human sciences but not natural sciences as they are always clear on what is wrong and right.

In conclusion, from the way of classifying the two sciences, we can tell that there would probably be differences. We can argue that human sciences have the richness that the natural sciences lack, or vice versa, but to me, both are correct, just one is a little truer than the other. ‘Human sciences’ is an interesting subject to me. Even though it is a study of human behaviours and is studied and researched in university, I still believe we can learn it by ourselves through experiences; having someone to understand you is one of the most precious appreciations in life. Human beings are emotional, and a field for an everlasting-exploration, while natural sciences have their own richness as the invention and discovery of everything in the universals.

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