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Actual state of human sciences

  
 
ciarconn
22:11 / 27.01.03
Fist, I'd like to state a working definition: I'll be using Human sciences in a wide sense, including Anthropology, psychology, sociology, philosophy, communication sciences, history, economy, politics, etc.

So, What is the actual state of Human sciences?
Is there any investigation in these areas?
Are these sciences growing?
Are there any new currents of thought?
Is there any questioning on their status as sciences?
Is there any tendence to interdisciplinariety?
Is there any tendence to make purely "philosophical" questions (like "border" physics)?

Thank you in advance for your ideas and opinions
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
08:50 / 28.01.03
History a science?

Aha. Ahahaha. Ahahahaha...

OK, I've stopped. But I really don't regard history as a science, even though aspects or branches of it are based on quantitative analysis (or 'counting sheep in Norfolk'; this is what I am doing at the moment, only with Dutch people living in London, and it doesn't feel especially scientific - partly because the methodology is so strongly affected by the vagaries of the extant evidence). History doesn't, IMO, claim exactness because it knows it can't - funny old discipline, in which the object is to find out the truth about what happened but in which the practitioner is always aware of the subjective nature of the work. Or at least, they are if they're any good.

To answer your questions re: history:

Is there any investigation in these areas?

Yes, lots; though there is increasingly little scope for major work on new source material and people tend to work on smaller bodies of material at first, before they progress to major thematic or period-based works. But there is plenty of new research going on.

Are these sciences growing?

What do you mean by growing? I don't think the academic population is in decline (yet - though we'll have to see), and popular history is selling as well as if not better than it ever has; and the spurt in history television programmes is also encouraging (whatever one may think about the content of said programmes). I don't think much of history curricula in British schools, but that's not the teachers' fault.

Are there any new currents of thought?

Historians tend to react in generations - we're currently in the 'post-revisionist' period. I don't think it's the kind of discipline which attracts nwe currents of thought in the broad sense - most historians are now very wary of overly teleological work, as grand narratives and grand theories always leave things out and contain inaccuracies, and most historians confine themselves to a couple of centuries at most so... Having said that, see answer to next question but one...

Is there any questioning on their status as sciences?

I don't think anyone I know thinks of history as a science, though perhaps this just tells you that I don't associate much with ecenomic historians. I think of it as a humanity - yes, it's a catch-all term, but history is very much a catch-all subject, and I don't think the kind of intellectual stuff that a lot of my faculty indulge in is scientific in the slightest - nor is my stuff.

Is there any tendence to interdisciplinariety?

Yes, increasingly so, and very healthy it is too. Though the disciplines which are brought to bear on historical work are usually affected by the fact that it is a historian using them - i.e. I would be very surprised to find someone using Lacan or Saussure in their textual analysis of Robert Everard and the Presbyterian Poets of the Restoration. But yeah, there's loads - social anthropology, sociology, gender studies, art history, archaeology, english literature, economics, geography...

Is there any tendence to make purely "philosophical" questions (like "border" physics)?

The closest I can think of are 'what are the uses of history' and other historiographical questions about methodology, purpose etc - though few people in the academy ask this sort of thing nowadays, probably because they're all up to their ears trying to teach and fulfil their research requirements. Also there's counterfactual history, which I think is a bit of an intellectual game for show-offs like Niall Ferguson and Simon Schama...

Hope that answers your questions - do bear in mind though that I'm talking about British academic history, so YMMV...
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
15:28 / 28.01.03
Bit rushed but just want to say i'm really interested by your idea of a 'human sciences' as I ve been thinking of something similar for a while. Although I would probably not classify some of the above as sciences either, but I think there's definitely room for disciplines such as the above (and I'd bung psychiatry, counselling, 'alternative' therapies, cultural studies in there as well) to learn from each other , as they're all concerned with the study of people/humanity, but from very different angles/approaches.

< stuck in HP mode >
Something like Muggle studies, perhaps

< /stuck in HP mode >

Think there could be something very fruitful, for example, in terms of academic work, for having closer links between these areas, and the work being done in them.

To take an eg from my own experience, there's a lot of work been done in the past few years in cult.studs on trauma as a societal experience, and the political possibilities for using this (eg Judith Butler's done work on 9/11 from this angle) which is very interesting and searching, but coming from a counselling/pyschotherapeutic angle, is old news...

Can't help but think if departments/subjects weren't so walled off from each other, there would be alot more work being done that moved our understanding onwards
 
 
ciarconn
14:42 / 29.01.03
Well, a bit off topic, but that´s how we are organized at the school I work at. Teachers are organized in Academies: Math, Natural sciences, Spanish and linguistics, and Human sicences. It´s more of a practical organization than an epistemological one (Piling up all the courses related to the human being). As it is, we are closely helping ourselves when there is any need, and we´ve come up with some interesting activities for the students.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
12:16 / 30.01.03
It's an interesting one, and BiP's interdisciplinary idea is eeeenteresting.

F'r example, I studied Classics at college. To be exact, I studied litterae humaniores - the more human letters. That strikes me as quite an interesting model; Lit.Hum. includes studies of literature, philosophy, and history, and branches out into all sorts of other area, most obviously philology, linguistics, archeology...theoretically the unifying factor is the classical period, whatever that may be, but thanks to postmodernism Classics extends pretty well everywhen now. Yay hegemonic thought structures.

Soooo.....is there a case to be made for some sort of interweaving field of studies in which elements of all of these disciplines reinforce each other? Would the loss of specificity and depth be made up for by the breadth and interconnection of the information? And, that old saw, what would it be *for*?
 
 
Lurid Archive
13:54 / 30.01.03
Not sure how relevant this is, but it isn't clear to me that collaboration and close links between different disciplines is always a good thing. You run the risk of losing, not only depth, but also diversity.

At one uni I worked at, there was a big drive to get all departments to collaborate with industry and business. That was clearly a crude unifying principle designed to increase income but perhaps trying too hard to get people to work together tends to impose dominant philosophies?
 
 
Linus Dunce
18:55 / 30.01.03
Soooo.....is there a case to be made for some sort of interweaving field of studies in which elements of all of these disciplines reinforce each other?

Comme Les Philosophes? I reckon it would either be spread a bit thin or a complete bastard to revise.

I agree there's a fair bit of cross-pollenation already, in some of the new subjects, in less-new things like area studies and older stuff like Haus', PPE, etc. It's a good thing, IMO, and ...

[head parapet="80%"]Maybe, just maybe, yer PM critical models could be said to be a little isolationist? Can one be a feminist/queer theorist and a marxist at the same time?[/head]
 
 
No star here laces
09:06 / 31.01.03
Um to return to actual bona fide sciences (and isn't Lit. Hum. all literature? Unless there is a great canon of plant-based writing that I am unaware of...)

Neuroscience is humming at the moment. Advances in MRI technology, computer modelling and anatomical studies mean that physical investigation of the brain's structure is advancing at a staggering place. The intersection between Neuroscience and AI is particularly fascinating. A bloke I knew at University called Jake Chandler is, I believe, doing some truly mentalist stuff in this area. At least I reckon he will be, as he was staggeringly bright.

Again, I'm too out of touch - Ganesh might know, but I think that a lot of recent work has been done on the neuroanatomy of the amygdala which casts a lot of light on the mechanics of emotions and their linkage to other areas of the brain.

Psychology is quite faddish in that every decade seems to have it's own favourite approach. The cognitive approach appears to be on the wane (although, again, I'm sure someone will correct me) in favour of the neuroscientific one.
 
 
grant
14:09 / 31.01.03
I can tell you that only within the last two years or so has Social Work, as an academic/scientific discipline, discovered postmodernism.

So much for "latest developments," eh?
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
15:01 / 31.01.03
On byron's point: know naff all about it but know a few people doing this kind of work at Sussex Uni. Their COGS (cognitive and computing sciences) department combines comp.sci, pyschology, philosophy and various other disciplines to research artifical evolutionary and adaptive systems...

From the above site:

Since the mid-1980's, there has been rapidly growing interest in research studying the behavioural and evolutionary foundations of cognition and intelligence.

Studies of computation as an emergent phenomena, cognition as adaptive behaviour, coordinated perception and action, and evolutionary learning techniques (such as genetic algorithms) can all be broadly classified as work in Artificial Life. The study of systems which exhibit adaptive behaviour has received growing attention from workers in fields as diverse as ethology, robotics, neuroscience, cognitive science, economics and linguistics
 
 
Linus Dunce
00:33 / 01.02.03
Um to return to actual bona fide sciences (and isn't Lit. Hum. all literature? Unless there is a great canon of plant-based writing that I am unaware of...)

Oh yes, that's right -- unless there's a machine that goes "ping," it's not science.

:-)
 
  
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