Humanism, Social science and Natural Science

I like studying Humanism, but I have a deep respect and fascination for the sciences. I'm a big fan of anything involving maths.

The two are conflated in the Scandinavian languages, the thread starter being Norwegian and the OP demonstrating that quite well.

Better late than never...

The division between natural sciences, the social sciences and the humanities (or "the spiritual sciences" as they were originally called) goes back to the late 19th century which as an era represented the triumph of mathematically/logically based natural science, engineering, etc. At the very least that was the spirit of the age, and led to the attempted assimilation of the rest of academic activity under the methodology of natural science with the Positivism of Auguste Comte as a prominent example.

Thing is, as Wilhelm Dilthey counter-argued the spiritual sciences' and the natural ones' fields of interest are radically different hence requiring different methodology: The former studies the internal experiences and thoughts of humans as expressed in language (defined rather loosely here), the latter studies the external world as can be measured and weighed mathematically. There are way more subjective factors at play and to much more important degrees in the humanities, and to study them from a completely naturalistic point of view would be to miss the forest for the trees.

I guess that the social sciences would be where the humanities and natural science overlap because of mathematics and statistics' importance, but the exact hows and whys are rather complicated. Within the field of economics for instance, there are several radically different models to explain and predict economic activity that nonetheless all have come under fire for (no matter which set of premises lie behind) assuming humans to act in their rational self-interest all the time. Another example would be Tom Wolfe's quite hilarious essay Sorry But Your Soul Just Died about the sociobiology fad of the late 1990s.

aginor wrote: I am very disappointed in the way the university where i study at, use so much of its resources on the petroleum, i think its wrong politics to give one section of students more then other students,  i find education in reading of texts as important as what you say above, in the global world to be able to understand the world through text and literature, makes the world a better place to live, because, then news and texts wont be seen as dangerous or politicians cant use their powers without, being criticized, so i would investigate money also on analytic science, humanism and social science, along with natural science.

What do they fight over exactly? The vast majority of Biology bears not even a remote relation to Sociology. 

Edited by Equality 7-2521 - January 02 2014 at 16:23

Dean wrote: Simply put: no petrochemical technology = no vinyl, no acetate = no Prog.

aginor wrote: natural science is about science, of looking forward and to come up with something which in the future is beneficial to me petroleum technology is not that and (specially in Norway) its a short-lived science and it will come out of date when there is no oil or gas left on the planet, and when the environment is all wahooo , basically waste of time, and money, tech has to be beneficial to us, like cell-phone technology, nano-technology, energy-technology, petroleum is not that, when if it can be converted to other fields that will cost more money then to have begun on other fields (> this is more of a complain against Norway, who solely is fixed on petroleum, like a mania and fails to see other ways of technological progress, and development) but i believe petroleum to not be true science but faux science with no scientific beneficial value, ,

Edited by Dean - January 02 2014 at 18:52

The differentiation between the humanities and natural sciences is actually newer than people think, I think it begun in the early 19th century and didn't really set until Wilhelm Dilthey who based most of his career on establishing a separate set of premises and methodological principles for the "spiritual sciences" as he called them.

Does not help that most of the humanities and social sciences (except to some extent economics) didn't pass Karl Popper's falsifiability criterium for "real science", who completed the job from the other side of the fence.