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Humanities aren't a science and shouldn't be treated like one (2012)

blogs.scientificamerican.com

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Re: Humanities aren't a science and shouldn't be treated like one (2012)

#21

Post by AnimalMuppet »

maweki wrote: post #6

Provocative title. The author argues - more or less - that quantitative and mathematical approaches do not lend themselves to questions of the humanities or social sciences. As an example they take a network analysis that was done on social relations of characters of fictional works. While the author finds this use dubious, I think it's the contrary. While the researchers might not fully understand the methods, they…

If you reduce the humanities to what is quantifiable, you kill them. (You also kill humanity.)

[Edit: After re-reading, I'm not sure the parent thinks that numbers should take over the humanities, so my comment may be misdirected. I'm leaving it anyway, because I think the point is valid, even if it doesn't address the parent's point.]

Re: Humanities aren't a science and shouldn't be treated like one (2012)

#23

Post by naushniki »

earthboundkid wrote: post #19
Gimpei wrote: post #8

This conflates social science with the humanities. I agree with respect to the humanities. Less so with respect to social science. People in large groups do in general follow certain trends and we do have decent ways of establishing causation. Now there is a lot of stuff that people do that we can't analyze quantitatively due to lack of data or other blockers. For these qualitative methods will have to do. Fine, but…

When you describe continental drift, it doesn’t make the plates go faster. When you do economics, it changes the economy. Social sciences have a worse reflexivity problem than the arts, because with art, nothing turns on whether it’s right or wrong. With social sciences, if your hypothesis is wrong but widely believed, you can still kick off seventy years of communism.

By this logic quantum physics is also not scientific.

Re: Humanities aren't a science and shouldn't be treated like one (2012)

#24

Post by beambot »

earthboundkid wrote: post #19
Gimpei wrote: post #8

This conflates social science with the humanities. I agree with respect to the humanities. Less so with respect to social science. People in large groups do in general follow certain trends and we do have decent ways of establishing causation. Now there is a lot of stuff that people do that we can't analyze quantitatively due to lack of data or other blockers. For these qualitative methods will have to do. Fine, but…

When you describe continental drift, it doesn’t make the plates go faster. When you do economics, it changes the economy. Social sciences have a worse reflexivity problem than the arts, because with art, nothing turns on whether it’s right or wrong. With social sciences, if your hypothesis is wrong but widely believed, you can still kick off seventy years of communism.

When you hypothesize the existence of new particles, people spend large sums of money building accelerators like the Large Hadron.

Fwiw, if you're going to call out communism, then you also have to include representative democracies.

Re: Humanities aren't a science and shouldn't be treated like one (2012)

#25

Post by stanfordkid »

naushniki wrote: post #23
earthboundkid wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you describe continental drift, it doesn’t make the plates go faster. When you do economics, it changes the economy. Social sciences have a worse reflexivity problem than the arts, because with art, nothing turns on whether it’s right or wrong. With social sciences, if your hypothesis is wrong but widely believed, you can still kick off seventy years of communism.

By this logic quantum physics is also not scientific.

Not really. The equations of quantum physics don't change by virtue of you observing them.

Re: Humanities aren't a science and shouldn't be treated like one (2012)

#26

Post by inerte »

earthboundkid wrote: post #19
Gimpei wrote: post #8

This conflates social science with the humanities. I agree with respect to the humanities. Less so with respect to social science. People in large groups do in general follow certain trends and we do have decent ways of establishing causation. Now there is a lot of stuff that people do that we can't analyze quantitatively due to lack of data or other blockers. For these qualitative methods will have to do. Fine, but…

When you describe continental drift, it doesn’t make the plates go faster. When you do economics, it changes the economy. Social sciences have a worse reflexivity problem than the arts, because with art, nothing turns on whether it’s right or wrong. With social sciences, if your hypothesis is wrong but widely believed, you can still kick off seventy years of communism.

We also got eugenics based on “science”

Re: Humanities aren't a science and shouldn't be treated like one (2012)

#27

Post by swimfar »

Gimpei wrote: post #8

This conflates social science with the humanities. I agree with respect to the humanities. Less so with respect to social science. People in large groups do in general follow certain trends and we do have decent ways of establishing causation. Now there is a lot of stuff that people do that we can't analyze quantitatively due to lack of data or other blockers. For these qualitative methods will have to do. Fine, but…

We can't predict how one person will react to a situation. But sometimes we can estimate, on average, how a large group of people will react.

Even a lot of engineering deals with similar types of uncertainty. We build huge structures out of metal, concrete, and wood on top of soils and other geological materials, often with the assumption they they are all homogeneous with constant material properties through the structure (they aren't). However, we can do this because the variations in properties tend to average out as the material sample gets larger. If we try to make the same assumption on very small scales, we find that there is a lot more uncertainty and our predictions aren't going to be as accurate. We see this in physics and many other scientific fields as well.

Re: Humanities aren't a science and shouldn't be treated like one (2012)

#28

Post by AnimalMuppet »

tengbretson wrote: post #11
ed25519FUUU wrote: post #5

This reminds me a little bit of the push to add “art” to STEM schools.

I've noticed this too! I've seen schools describing their curriculum as STEAM, and all I could think was "Isn't that just normal school, but without history?"

If you're drunk, you can get history, too. Because then you slur your words, and it comes out SHTEAM.

Re: Humanities aren't a science and shouldn't be treated like one (2012)

#29

Post by ThomPete »

Gimpei wrote: post #8

This conflates social science with the humanities. I agree with respect to the humanities. Less so with respect to social science. People in large groups do in general follow certain trends and we do have decent ways of establishing causation. Now there is a lot of stuff that people do that we can't analyze quantitatively due to lack of data or other blockers. For these qualitative methods will have to do. Fine, but…

social science is interpretation of data and much closer to history than science. The data will often change over time and thus the interpretation. Its very problematic that we treat it as science because it can be politized. To the extent its science its very very imprecise and is on the other end of the spectrum than something like physics which makes very very careful conclusions about very specific things and even they are to a certain extent also just interpretations. It should be called interpretational disciplines not science.

Re: Humanities aren't a science and shouldn't be treated like one (2012)

#30

Post by guerrilla »

"Psychology is not a natural science." I used to think this and to a certain extent I still do but the fact is that the feild has changed and become much more reproducible as time passes and it matures.

More importantly though this article conflates humanities with social sciences pretty badly. This is quite insulting to sociology and even more so to economics and anthropology. Physical antrho is pretty serious science.

There are limitations to social sciences but those are not the same limitations of literary criticism.

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