Differences Between Science, Social Science And Humanities

Science, Social science and humanities; it is a common way of organizing the different academic disciplines. The sciences encompassing all the subjects related to the laws of nature, the social sciences dealing with human nature and society and lastly the humanities covering the human experience. As might already become apparent by this description, the line dividing these three departments can sometimes be blurry and for some subjects it is difficult to put them in a category. An example of this is anthropology, which could be argued to be either a social science or a humanity. However, despite this occasional ambiguity, there are aspects in which these three departments differ from each other. In this essay I will focus on the differences …show more content…
Concepts such as epigenetics and gene expression were defined and the process of how DNA eventually becomes a protein was explained and illustrated with a metaphor. This explaining was not something that just happened at the beginning of the lecture, after which the lecturer could focus solely on his research. This explanation occurred throughout the whole of the lecture, with concepts such as sexual dimorphism being explained in the second half. Besides these concepts, several complicated graphs and pictures were used that required explaining. All of this shows that in order to understand specific research in the field of science, knowledge of specific jargon is needed along with an understanding of processes and research methods that a general educated public does not …show more content…
There is likely some diversity in how much information is collected from experiments and how much from literature between the different disciplines in the social sciences. However since the lecture was concerning psychology, this is the only subject I will be focusing on. The lecturer explained that during his research he had conducted more than one experiment, just like the scientist. The main difference between these experiments was that for the social sciences, people played a major role in these experiments. For example, the sense of agency people experienced when playing a game was measured. Instead of the outcome of this being objective and solely based on observation, like in the sciences, these people were asked how much they had felt in control. This raises the obvious question of how reliable this data is. The lecturer also mentioned how he has used literature in order to help him explain findings from the