‘Humanities, Sciences: Radically Different but Vital Enterprises’
The article by Dembart purports to delineate the difference between the sciences and the humanities. Among many other claims which Dembart makes is that the sciences progress but that the humanities do not, and further that the stuff of scientific inquiry is something that exists independently of our thinking about them but that humanist inquiry is entirely a product of our minds. He takes too narrow a view of both areas.
To begin with, Dembart lumps together under the heading of “the humanities” a number of disparate intellectual endeavors. His list includes art, music, literature, philosophy, law, sociology, “and so forth.” Art, music, and literature are part of the creative arts whose goal is to gain insight into the human condition. To be sure these are profoundly different from the sciences whose goal is to discover facts about nature and organize them into coherent systems. Law is a profession, neither science nor humanities.
The remaining two, philosophy and sociology, are indeed traditionally taught as humanities, but to say that they differ so radically from science is to show a lack of understanding of both science and humanist endeavor.
It is only in relatively modern times that science and philosophy have been separated into presumably mutually exclusive domains. Dembart says that philosophers continually go around in circles, always asking the same old questions about knowledge and truth, but never answering them. Does he mean to imply that scientists aren’t interested in knowledge and truth? Far from it. Modern science has stipulated its own definitions of knowledge and truth, and has in effect abandoned the question to philosophy, in order to get on with what it knows how to do. If a scientist performs an experiment, his findings are not accepted as true, nor are they considered knowledge, until they are replicated, preferably several times and by other investigators.
Dembart mentions sociology in his short list of the humanities. I assume this is his surrogate for what is usually termed the social sciences, psychology, linguistics, anthropology, economics, and government, to name a few more. These are disciplines whose subject of inquiry is human behavior. I am a linguist and cannot speak for the other disciplines, but linguists do consider themselves scientists and I expect the others do too. We use scientific methods. We observe behavior, form hypotheses inductively on our observations, make predictions deductively from the hypotheses, check these predictions empirically, and then confirm, refine, or reject our hypotheses accordingly.
What makes linguistics and the other social sciences different from physics and the other “hard” sciences is not its goal--understanding nature--or its method--empiricism--but its unique subject matter and available methodology. We study human behavior, a huge and enormously complex topic. We are not allowed to experiment, but are dependent on observation alone. A linguist studying child language acquisition cannot raise children in a variety of environments in order to discover the important parameters of this mysterious and wonderful process.
Finally, it is simply wrong to say that the stuff of the sciences exists independent of the human mind but that the disciplines of the humanities are merely the creation of the human mind. To be sure, the laws of physics would hold even if there were no scientists to discover them. But people also spoke languages and formed societies long before anyone decided to study these systems as scientific objects.
JOYCE P. McDOWELL
Pacific Palisades