The Words of Knowledge

Science is at one and the same time the most important and the most controversial word of our age. The Germans partly avoid the controversies that have roiled academia in the English-speaking world by using the word wissenschaft. A wissenschaft is any ordered field of knowledge, whereas in academic English "science" is distinguished sharply by some from the humanities. The study of ancient Greece would not be called a "science" in normal English parlance, while it would be called a "wissenschaft" in German. By science, then, English speakers generally mean the "natural sciences" and mathematics. This stance is confused by the fact that "scientific methods" are often used in the humanities today, such as in a statistical study of Shakespeare.

The humanities are often seen as polar opposites to the sciences, especially the natural sciences. They are regarded thus for two reasons. First, they are by nature "fuzzier". The basic tools of the natural sciences, mathematics and controlled experiment, are surely not central to the humanities. The humanities are also concerned primarily with the nonreproducible, while science is concerned with the reproducible. The humanities are concerned with the particular, the sciences with the general. The history of Russia, for example, is not the history of any place else; while analogies may be drawn, it cannot be expected to be understood by studying the history of any other country. The humanities are also primarily concerned with what goes on inside the human mind, and so far science has not gotten very far in understanding this level of complexity. But perhaps the most important claim for the distinctiveness of the humanities is that they are valuing enterprises. They are interested in comparing, contrasting, and evaluating the works of Mozart and Beethoven in terms far different from a study of the acoustic dynamics involved in the performances of their works.

Unfortunately, academics do not fit snugly into such boxes. Some are interested in generalizing from many cases. Historians often employ a variety of science-seeming methods in their work. And scientists may become in some of their endeavors historians of another sort. The stories of evolution are histories using methods not necessarily at variance with those of human history. Geologists have traditionally also been interested in developing histories of the earth that go far back beyond that of sentient beings.

The social sciences were originally based on attempts to apply the methods of science to the study of human beings. The problem has been that with the possible exception of economics (in those areas in which it relies of mathematics) the social sciences have not lived up their early promise. If the proof of a field of knowledge is its ability to provide a more reliable basis for applied actions than were available formerly, then the natural sciences have succeeded remarkably. They have put a man on the moon. The social sciences have not succeeded to anything like this extent. For example, society has found it cannot reliably use their results to devise better prison or educational systems. The enthusiastically received "breakthroughs" in this area of one generation become the discarded experiments of the next.

Aside from economics, the three best known social sciences are anthropology, psychology, and sociology. They have all been plagued with cycles of theoretical creativity and theoretical destruction. While the works of Galen and Newton have laid the basis for a great and proliferating growth in the natural sciences, heroes of the social sciences such as Comte, Spencer, Freud, and Marx have had their efforts savaged by their successors, so that one gets the feeling that each generation of social scientists needs to start over from ground zero. At the edges of all three, however, natural science aspects have developed. For example, in psychology, acoustic laboratories have advanced understanding of human hearing. In anthropology, physical anthropologists have been able to contribute to the understanding of humanity using such tools as studies of the presence or absence of certain factors in blood samples in broad populations, or in forensic anthropology. In sociology, social survey techniques have developed to where consistent and useful results have been attained