Science Vs Science

Human Sciences vs Natural Sciences

P.S. I'm all for Natural

Zara, Camilla, Jeremy

The scientific approach to human behavior

April 11 2017

What did i learn today?

Basically the quiz was really good. At first, I was a bit scared about the quiz because I forgot to revise for it. Basically, I read for it over the weekend and I did not look over it yesterday. This made me scared that i wasn’t going to do well. contrary to my belief, I actually excelled at the quiz that we took today in class. I got every single answer correct. Next in class we read the elective readings. I chose to read about the taco trucks and the soul of america. This article literally talked about how more immigrants are coming into america. It joked about how the mexicans will begin to make take trucks at every street corner as a way of living. The article also talked about the issues of diversity in europe verses america. It showed that european countries did not like diversity and wanted they country to remain the way it is while america welcomed immigrants and believed that they made the country better. Zara read an article about the Sat and camilla read an article about ignorance in science

Zara read about the SAT as a standardized test. The SAT is used a means to rank students in high school. The article showed that the SAT is quite useless in the fact that it does not really affect the grades of the students in University. The article showed that the student who had good grades in school ended up having good grades in University. Their SAT score did not really have an impact on their grades

After class entry

My group decided to use camilla's reading as the base of our paragraphs. Her reading was from an excerpt a book by Fierstein Stuart. He spoke about how ignorance drove science. We as a group thought that it was very interesting and it went with the question: Must science change over time? Why?

Essential Terms

Verstehen position: the belief that the main aim of the human sciences is to understand the meaning of various social practices as they are understood by the agents themselves

holism: the belief that the best way to understand somethings is by looking at them as a whole

reductionism: the belief that some subjects can be explained in terms of other more fundamental ones

law of large numbers: a statistical principle which says that random variations tend to cancel out when a population is large enough

nature-nature: the debate about whether we are influenced more by our biological nature or our cultural nurture

Behaviorism: a school of though which says that the subject-matter of psychology should be overt behavior rather that hidden thoughts and feelings.

Reactance: the tendency of people to react against advice, rules and regulations perceived as a threat to their freedom

Observer effect: the tendency of people to behave differently when they are being observed

Knowledge Questions

Can we study human beings in the same way that we study other natural phenomena

To what extent can we measure human phenomena

What is it about theories in the human sciences and natural sciences that makes them convincing?

To what extent does human sciences give us a sense of who we really are

Do we learn more about human nature from psychology or from literature

The final essay

Must science change over time? Why?

Science must change over time because there are many things that we are ignorant about and need to discover. It is this search to discover new things that changes science over time. Firestein Stuart wrote a book about ignorance and how it drives science. He stated to his students that the part of science that has not yet been discovered is what drives us all to be in the lab day and night. He later states that it is the absence of facts and understanding and not simple stupidity that is the definition of ignorance. His college course encouraged his students to find some things that they were ignorant about and pursue answers. It is the ignorance about subjects that allow us discover new things about areas of knowledge such as the Human Sciences. It was the ignorance of many scientist that allowed them to discover new things which has changed the course of science over time. It was the ignorance that Stuart faced that made him teach his students the importance of ignorance and how it drives science.

Extension Proposal

I think that this should be added to the reflective reading because it expands on the essay that I wrote. He talked about many of the question that we are still ignorant about and how we could solve and get answers to the questions. The video explains what techniques we could use to find answers to these questions that we are still ignorant about. He talked mentioned the big questions like How did the universe begin? How did life begin? Are we alone? -- and discusses how we might go about answering them.