Nick Glass
Genes and Behavior
Dr. Isabelle Cherney
9 April 2004
The Legitimate Role of Science in the Humanities
One of the goals of any discipline, including disciplines known as humanities, has to be
the promotion of true beliefs. Granted, promotion of true belief may not occupy the most central
or supreme position among the numerous goals espoused by the humanities. But there can be no
doubt that a discipline without any interest in promoting true belief on some level is not a real
discipline at all and so not worthy of being called one.
In addition, science has been reasonably and practically defined as “behavior by which
we improve prediction more than we can expect to improve it by chance” (Schrom, 2004). This
definition of science, if incomplete, is nonetheless indisputable in what it asserts. Any
methodology that is accepted as being scientific can be thought of as, in its ultimacy, an attempt
to increase the accuracy of predictions.
And since devotees of any discipline in the humanities, be it history, philosophy, or
theology, will at some point and to some extent have to make predictions, it follows that science,
in one form or other, would be of value to them. The post-Renaissance, pre-Industrial
investigators known as “natural philosophers” were, as indicated by their name, keenly aware
that naturalistic observation is extremely valuable to the cultivation of the wisdom so beloved by
philosophers. Likewise, historians and theologians are indebted to science for corroboration and
validation of some “discipline-specific” knowledge. For example, the practice of carbon dating
has provided invaluable insight regarding historical characters and events. Science has also
increased the appreciation people have for theological ideas such as miracles and other notions of
divine intervention.
So, properly understood, science does not threaten the humanities. And as long as
scientists are not so hubristic as to consider science the pursuit of “the truth, the whole truth, and
nothing but the truth” (p. 3), but rather just the pursuit of physically observable and measurable
truth, people in disciplines traditionally regarded as humanities will be more apt to acknowledge
the usefulness of science in their pursuit of different kinds of truth (Kitcher, 1993).
Moreover, people in the humanities and people in sciences should realize that their kinds
of truth are complementary. This relationship is important in that knowledge of one kind fosters
refinement to the approaches used in pursuing the other kinds. Thus, science should keep
philosophers, theologians, historians, etc., honest, rational, responsible, and aware in their
pursuits, while the humanities should keep scientists honest, rational, inspired, and curious in
theirs.
References
Kitcher, P. (1993). The advancement of science: Science without legend, objectivity without
illusions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Schrom, D. (2004). Can we use science to our own ends? Bioscience, 54, 284.