In today's episode Sophia and Rebecca suggest that you can distinguish students from different academic disciplines on the basis of their outfit. Clearly this is exaggerated, but differences exists between the various scientific disciplines, also cultural differences. Typically, we distinguish three different sciences, natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. In the UK and the US, the word science primarily refers to the natural sciences. But if we use the word science, we mean with it all sciences. The distinction between the three sciences is based on their object of study. The natural sciences study everything that would also be there if there were no humans, planets, rivers, light, carbon, animals, and plants, that kind of stuff. The social sciences, like sociology, economics, psychology, study humans themselves. And the humanities study products made by humans like literature, art, and languages. History is also considered humanities. Now this distinction is not perfect, but it works roughly. But these differences extend beyond what objects they study. Students in the natural sciences are often seen as nerds, loners, but the opposite is the case. In the natural sciences, they work in large teams of sometimes hundreds of researchers in a single project. In the social sciences, these teams tend to be smaller. And the scientists in the humanities often work on their own. The outcomes of their work are also different. Natural scientists write short articles of typically around ten pages. In the social sciences they also write articles but these tend to be somewhat longer. And in the humanities they write entire books, or rather, extensive articles. Scientists in humanities teach a lot and have little remaining time for research. While researchers in the natural sciences typically teach only several hours per week and have plenty of time for research. Natural scientists can do controlled experiments. They can manipulate, tweak, and even break their object of study as much as they want to ensure that these reveal their secrets. Psychologists, for example, cannot do this for obvious reasons. Also, and if you'd like economics, social sciences. It is difficult to run experiments in a lab, but more striking differences exist between the research methods used by the various scientific disciplines. I'm a philosopher, but although philosophy belongs to the humanities, I am more familiar with the natural sciences. In the humanities, they are used to so called schools of thought, a concept I was completely unfamiliar with. A school can be seen as a sort of glasses that you wear to study some phenomenon. We believe that language is a product of some mathematical machinery that resides in humans. And we study language from that perspective. This is peculiar for students in the natural sciences. They just study their objects of interest, and don't approach those from some chosen perspective. Not so long ago I had a dispute with a colleague from the social sciences. We were together supervising the same student. This student had some hypothesis that he wanted to test in an experiment with test persons. He designed a concise and small experiment to do just that. And I was fine with that. But the other supervisor was not. Why not design a larger experiment, was her comment, in which you collect more data. Then later you can look into the data and seek for new hypotheses that are supported by this data. I never thought of this. Looking for hypotheses after data collection. But in the social sciences this is not uncommon, and there's even a word for it, post hoc analysis. Now you might object to this procedure, but once you realize that it is time consuming and costly to find test persons, and to put them through some experiment, it makes sense that you want to reuse data for other purposes. Concluding, there are many differences between the three brands of science, natural science, social sciences, and humanities. It's all natural to think that your brand of science is the best or most real one, but that would be a mistake. It's all science.
