Is the Knowledge We Gain from the Natural Sciences More Reliable Than the Knowledge We Gain from the Human Sciences Essay

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Is the knowledge we gain from the NATURAL SCIENCES more reliable than the knowledge we gain from the HUMAN SCIENCES?

When I first pondered over the question in class confidently my thoughts were natural sciences, of course, but before long I was left bewildered. I realized I had taken the reliability of all sciences for granted, who’s to say any one is more reliable than the other? What even makes something reliable? I strongly believe the reliability of knowledge soundly depends on the variety of WOK’s backing it, the more ways something can be proved through language, perception, reason and emotion the more reliable it would be. Hold your thumb up in the air to cover a distant object(a tree, a car, anything) and close one eye, all …show more content…
However the fascinating counter claim to the above discussion is that with the facts, laws and rules of science constantly changing it could also be argued to create a sort of continuum of truth. Always bettering and updating itself.

The problems with the knowledge gained from the human sciences seem more difficult to overcome than that of the natural sciences. Human sciences aim to explain human behavior, formulate theories to predict it and then develop remedies for the problems identified by the predictions. Surveys are often used to collect data which is then graphed in a way that usually ‘looks pretty’ and statistics are then formulated, quite deductively so that the data fits the model. Geologists claim to know which countries are more developed than another’s by simply looking at a population structure graph and comparing it to the stages of the demographic transition model. Surveys provide the data for the population structure graph which are strongly influenced by language and the demographic transition model is no more than a theory based on an interpretation of demographic history developed in 1929. Yet this theory is still used to make grand assumptions about a country’s developmental status, many times certain ‘experts’ in the field present this data as if it were precisely
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