Area of knowledge - The human sciences
Area of knowledge - The human sciences
The human sciences include a diverse range of disciplines, such as psychology, social and cultural anthropology, economics, political science, and geography. These disciplines share a common focus on the study of human existence and behaviour.
The diversity of the disciplines included within the human sciences can itself be a stimulus for interesting TOK discussions, as can the coexistence of different approaches within a single discipline (for example psychodynamic versus behaviourist versus humanistic approaches in psychology).
One interesting focus for discussion could be, for example, whether there are fundamental differences between the human sciences and the natural sciences in terms of how they interpret the word “science”, the methods they use for collecting data, or how they test the validity and reliability of hypotheses.
Another interesting focus for discussion could be the use of questionnaires and polls in the human sciences. This could include whether the results of questionnaires can be reliable given the challenges around neutral language, leading questions, or sampling and selection effect. It could also include discussion of issues relating to respondents not being truthful or deliberately giving misleading responses.
Students could also be encouraged to consider the ways in which social, political, cultural or financial factors may affect the types of research that are supported and financed in the human sciences. For example, market research is often undertaken as a way for companies to increase their profits, and social science research sometimes seeks to influence public policy. This can raise interesting questions about the purpose and context within which knowledge is pursued in the human sciences.
Examples of knowledge questions arising from this area of knowledge are suggested below.
Examples of knowledge questions
Scope
How do we decide whether a particular discipline should be regarded as a human science?
Do the human sciences and literature provide different types of knowledge about human existence and behaviour?
Are predictions in the human sciences inevitably unreliable?
What are the main difficulties that human scientists encounter when trying to provide explanations of human behaviour?
Is human behaviour too unpredictable to study scientifically?
Do the boundaries between different disciplines and different areas of knowledge help or hinder understanding?
Is it possible to discover laws of human behaviour in the same way that the natural sciences discover laws of nature?
Perspectives
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?
How might the beliefs and interests of human scientists influence their conclusions? How can we know when we have made progress in the search for knowledge in the human sciences?
If two competing paradigms give different explanations of a phenomenon, how can we decide which explanation to accept?
What forms of protection against research error and bias are available to human scientists?
Methods and tools
What role do models play in the acquisition of knowledge in the human sciences?
Are observation and experimentation the only two ways in which human scientists produce knowledge?
What assumptions underlie the methods used in the human sciences?
To what extent are the methods used to gain knowledge in the human sciences “scientific”?
How does the use of numbers, statistics, graphs and other quantitative instruments affect the way knowledge in the human sciences is valued?
To what extent can the human sciences use mathematical techniques to make accurate predictions?
Ethics
To what extent are the methods used in the human sciences limited by the ethical considerations involved in studying human beings?
Do researchers have different ethical responsibilities when they are working with human subjects compared to when they are working with animals?
What are the moral implications of possessing knowledge about human behaviour?
Should key events in the historical development of the human sciences always be judged by the standards of their time?
What values determine what counts as legitimate inquiry in the human sciences? Can knowledge be divorced from the values embedded in the process of creating it?
Is the role of the human scientist only to describe what the case is or also to make judgements about what should be the case?
Making connections to the core theme
How does advertising utilize knowledge of human psychology to influence and persuade us? (scope)
What is it about a theory that gives it the power to destabilize our view of ourselves and of the world? (perspectives)
How might the language used in polls and questionnaires influence the conclusions that are reached? (methods and tools)
What moral obligations to act or not act do we have if our knowledge is tentative, incomplete or uncertain (ethics)
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