Science / Medicine : Humanities, Sciences: Radically Different but Vital Enterprises
The sciences are basically different from the humanities--not necessarily better or worse, but very different enterprises.
The difference is not simply a matter of the different temperaments that the sciences and the humanities attract, “The Two Cultures” that C. P. Snow correctly identified nearly 30 years ago. The differences are much more fundamental.
In the first place, there is the idea of progress, which characterizes the sciences, but not the humanities. The sciences are cumulative. They build on themselves and on each other. Sir Isaac Newton’s physics is an improvement on Aristotle’s, and Albert Einstein’s is an improvement on Newton’s.
By “improvement” I mean that there is a better correlation between the theory and experiment, that better scientific theories have greater predictive power than the ones they supersede and that better theories offer greater control over nature than weaker theories do.
The humanities, on the other hand, do not exhibit such progress. Humanists--and particularly philosophers--keep going around and around on the same questions and never seem to get anywhere. Not that their deliberations are uninteresting or unenlightening, but they never seem to answer the questions that they ask.
To put this idea another way, if Plato were to come back to Earth today, he would be at sea in the advanced technological world of electronics, airplanes, skyscrapers, genetic engineering, medicine and all of the other scientific marvels of our age. But if he got together with a group of philosophers, he would feel right at home with the questions they are asking: What is truth? What is knowledge? How do we know what we know? And so forth. Their questions are his questions.
By contrast with clear progress in the sciences, would anyone argue that 20th-Century music is an improvement over Bach and Mozart? Is modern art an improvement over Michelangelo or even over the Greeks? Contemporary music and contemporary art are different from their predecessors, to be sure, but it is not at all clear that they are better.
This inherent difference between the sciences and the humanities is related to another important difference between them. The sciences are about something out there in the world, something that exists independently of our thinking about them.
If life had never arisen on Earth, the laws of physics would still hold throughout the universe, and the planets of our solar system would still be going around the sun. This, of course, is a hard proposition to prove, but it seems intuitively obvious. The laws of physics exist even if we don’t think about them.
The humanities, however, can make no such claim. If life had never arisen, it would be meaningless to talk of art, music, literature, philosophy, law, sociology and so forth. These disciplines are creations of the mind, and they have no existence outside of human activity.
Once again, this is not to say that the humanities are inferior to the sciences or less important or less ennobling. But they are fundamentally and irrevocably different. They have no independent existence against which we can measure our theories. To be sure, how we investigate this correspondence between theory and reality in the sciences is a tricky question about which philosophers of science have spent much thought and spilled much ink, and there is still no consensus among them.
Working scientists tend to be impatient with such discussions. They say they understand what they’re doing even if the philosophers of science do not--another example of the two cultures in action.
The world needs both the sciences and the humanities, just as people need both reason and emotion, the brain and the heart. They represent two different but equally valid ways of knowing, each vital in its own sphere and useful in the other.
