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

Páginas: 7 (1621 palabras) Publicado: 22 de marzo de 2011
What is it about theories in the human sciences and natural sciences that makes them convincing?
Word count: 1599
The natural are considered as the dominant cognitive paradigm or model of knowledge, because it gives certain and scientifically answers that let us have a deepest knowledge of what we are trying to know. The deepest you analyze the topic, their properties and characteristics, makeit easier to found an answer for it. If you apply science on your answer, then it is consider reliable. If you cannot prove something in a scientific way, then you don’t really know it at all. You can apply physics, chemistry or any other are of knowledge to make your answer convincing, but all of these areas of knowledge try to explain a shift on nature, or any phenomena. In the other hand, thereare areas of knowledge like psychology, economics, social anthropology that tries to discover human mysteries. “The human sciences are an attempt to reduce the mystery by studying human behavior in a systematic way” is what the book Theory of Knowledge by Richard van de Lagemaat tried to explain us. All of these areas of knowledge try to give us a reliable answer of what is going on with thehuman behavior. They are all based on observation and seek to discover law and theories about human nature, and as natural sciences, it give to us a certain and reasonable answer.
The natural sciences might have a support to make it reliable and the uses of accurate tools, to understand the phenomena and how to explain it. One way of supporting your topic and expecting scientifically answers is theuse of the scientific method (which is known as inductivism). Begin with the observation and classification of the relevant data. After this, you may look for the patterns on the data and formulate a hypothesis; finally you make a prediction, which you test by an experiment. The experiment has to be controllable, measurable and repeatable. If the experiment results confirm the hypothesis that youformulated before, then you may have discovered a scientific law, or just confirm the answer of a data already discovered. This is the way of confirming your answers and to have data on a scientifically way; through this method any knowledge would be accepted, because was proved with science, using mathematical arguments, physics formulas or any other science bases. Nevertheless, this method hassome problems that the scientific may pass through like the problems with observation, testing the hypothesis, and the problems of induction.
In the problems with observation, you might know about the relevance, the expectations, the expert seeing and the observer effect, just if you know how to observe. Because if your observation is poor, it may have problems with any of this features. Therelevance could affect your observation if you don’t know really how to observe, for example you are in a biology laboratory and making a practice about the photosynthesis; you need to count the bubbles that a plant produce inside a measuring glass with water and you didn’t look at the air conditioner was on, that mistake, would affect the condition of the plant on the water, because the temperaturewas increasing, so the plant was producing less bubbles (the photosynthesis), altering the final results. The minimum error on the observation can affect your analysis. Another problem with observation is that our expectations can influence what we see, in other words the topic’s analysis. For example, you are trying to have the control of the level of homicides and the level of criminal acts onthe city, but in the newspaper there was the new that said that the guns were cheaper, so you conclude that decreasing the price on guns would affect the crime and the level of homicides would increase. That affects your results, because your expectations were exaggerated. When you use scientific support, you may use more than one scientific opinion, because you can have problems of expert seeing....
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