knowledge cannot control the natural processes but
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The human sciences contain a multitude of disciplines that do not self-evidently offer a common denominator. Research in social work focuses on the interaction between individual and public authorities, often using qualitative research methods. They may want to find out how different outreach programmes should be organised to achieve the best effect, e.g. in reducing anti-social behaviour. Economy studies economical systems, often using mathematical models. The goal might be to find out how 1% price increase in raw cotton from India could affect British households. Archaeology studies the past with the guidance of artefacts found in the ground, sometimes using carbon dating. Literature studies various aspects of the meaning mediated through literature and how it affects us, usually using some form of linguistic or narrative analysis. One might want to find out about the impact of 1984 on contemporary ideas about government control. Philosophy studies, for instance, what cannot be studied empirically but which the empirical sciences take for granted, e.g. objectivity, rationality, and meaning. There is no tracking device for the reliable identification of rationality or ways to chemically analyse it. Conceptual analysis is the appropriate method, simply because rationality is not a chemical compound. As everyone knows, the validity of methods is relative to the subject matter. Given this short but extremely varied list of disciplines one might wonder what on Earth could unite the human sciences and set them apart from the natural sciences. They deploy a range of methodsinterviews, mathematical modelling, carbon dating, questionnaires, narrative analysis, and conceptual analysissome of which require/allow statistical analysis of the data.
The subject matter of different disciplines within the human sciences seems equally disparate: social interactions, exchanges of goods/money, the past, texts, and concepts/ideas. My suggestion is despite the disparate character of the objects being studied, the human sciences actually study a particular type of entities that are decisively different from the type of entities studied by the natural sciences. While natural science studies inanimate matters of all kinds, the human sciences study what I call 'meaningful phenomena' (see section 4 below). To my mind, the methodological difference we observe is a consequence of differences in the nature of the entities being studied. Science, in the most general sense, designs and uses methods in accordance to what suits the study of the objects they are interested in. This is the rational thing to do.
The natural sciences
Natural science, I suggest, is the study of what I will call the merely physical; unconscious physical matter in all its forms. Of course, some scientific disciplines traditionally classified as natural sciences, e.g. medicine and biology, do study conscious beings, like humans. But, ex hypothesi, in so far as this study is correctly labelled 'natural science' it only studies the physiology of humans. It is possible to study most of the functions of the body quite independently of what goes on in the consciousness of the person inhabiting that body. However, when medicine diverts its attention to the investigation of a patient's wishes, wants and preferences (e.g. psychosomatic disorders)things that we are at present unable to understand in physical termsit is no longer involved in pure natural science. And, typically, the study of psychosomatic disorders suffers from the same criticism as the human sciences; lack of decisive evidence and strict laws that can give accurate predictions and/or treatments. It is important to discern here between approaches that assume that fixing the mind is to fix the body, e.g. with the use of chemicals, which is a natural science approach, and those who assume that to fix the mind might at least require a combination of chemicals and some form of cognitive approach. This apparently interdisciplinary approach, it seems to me, consists in the simultaneous application of two distinct types of treatment that we hope will interact in ways we do not yet fully understand. Who knows what the future will reveal about the connection.
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