AREAS OF KNOWLEDGE:
THE HUMAN SCIENCES
Employees showered with confetti at the close of trading for the year in front of a screen showing the Korea Composite Stock Price Index (KOSPI) at the Korea Exchange (KRX) in Seoul.
Photo: SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg (2013)
“How did Homo sapiens manage to cross this critical threshold, eventually founding cities comprising tens of thousands of inhabitants and empires ruling hundreds of millions? The secret was probably the appearance of fiction. Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths. Any large-scale human cooperation – whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe – is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination. Churches are rooted in common religious myths. Two Catholics who have never met can nevertheless go together on crusade or pool funds to build a hospital because they both believe that God was incarnated in human flesh and allowed Himself to be crucified to redeem our sins. States are rooted in common national myths. Two Serbs who have never met might risk their lives to save one another because both believe in the existence of the Serbian nation, the Serbian homeland and the Serbian flag. Judicial systems are rooted in common legal myths. Two lawyers who have never met can nevertheless combine efforts to defend a complete stranger because they both believe in the existence of laws, justice, human rights – and the money paid out in fees.”
Class Activities
What could be more complex and daunting than our attempts to study human existence and behavior? The human sciences include: psychology, social and cultural anthropology, economics, global politics, and geography.
Here are some class activities that will enable students to explore the scope of the human sciences. Students will reflect on their own relationship to several of the disciplines, and gain insights into the extent that researchers in each field are legitimately able to bring their own perspectives to their work. Students will encounter the distinct methods and tools of the various disciplines, as well as some of the ethical conundrums confronted by them as they strive to analyze, interpret, and understand human endeavor and its consequences.
Consilience of Knowledge
A hierarchy of knowledge?
Remembrance of things past
Proust’s Madeleine cake
Memento (2001)
Time machine in the brain
Consequences of total recall
Imagining and remembering
Physics envy
Five Knowledge Questions in rotation
Written assignment
“Alas, the human race is not a single, rational entity. It is composed of nasty, envy-driven, irrational, inconsistent, unstable, computationally limited, complex, evolving, heterogeneous entities. Loads and loads of them. These issues are the staple diet—perhaps even raisons d’être—of the social sciences.”
KNOWLEDGE QUESTIONS
The new Theory of Knowledge Guide (2020) provides no less than 385 Knowledge Questions for student exploration. Here are my personal favorites from the human sciences section.
SCOPE
Is human behavior too unpredictable to study scientifically?
Do the human sciences and literature provide different types of knowledge about human existence and behavior?
PERSPECTIVE
To what extent is it legitimate for a researcher to draw on their own experiences as evidence in their investigations in the human sciences?
Is it possible to eliminate the effect of the observer in the pursuit of knowledge in the human sciences?
METHODS AND TOOLS
What assumptions underlie the methods used in the human sciences?
How does the use of numbers, statistics, graphs and other quantitative instruments affect the way knowledge in the human sciences is valued?
ETHICS
To what extent are the methods used in the human sciences limited by the ethical considerations involved in studying human beings?
Can knowledge be divorced from the values embedded in the process of creating it?
CONNECTING TO THE CORE THEME
How does advertising utilize knowledge of human psychology to influence and persuade us?
How might the language used in polls and questionnaires influence the conclusions that are reached?
What moral obligations to act or not act do we have if our knowledge is tentative, incomplete or uncertain?
Stanley Milgram with the fake “shock box” used in his 1960s obedience to authority experiments at the Yale department of psychology.
Photo credit: Alexandra Milgram