Human Sciences

How do we decide whether a particular discipline should be regarded as a human science?

Do the human sciences and literature provide different types of knowledge about human existence and behaviour?

Are predictions in the human sciences inevitably unreliable?

What are the main difficulties that human scientists encounter when trying to provide explanations of human behaviour?

Is human behaviour too unpredictable to study scientifically?

Do the boundaries between different disciplines and different areas of knowledge help or hinder understanding?

Is it possible to discover laws of human behaviour in the same way that the natural sciences discover laws of nature?

To what extent is it legitimate for a researcher to draw on their own experiences as evidence in their investigations in the human sciences?

Is it possible to eliminate the effect of the observer in the pursuit of knowledge in the human sciences?

How might the beliefs and interests of human scientists influence their conclusions?

How can we know when we have made progress in the search for knowledge in the human sciences?

If two competing paradigms give different explanations of a phenomenon, how can we decide which explanation to accept?

What forms of protection against research error and bias are available to human scientists?

What role do models play in the acquisition of knowledge in the human sciences?

Are observation and experimentation the only two ways in which human scientists produce knowledge?

What assumptions underlie the methods used in the human sciences?

To what extent are the methods used to gain knowledge in the human sciences “scientific”?

How does the use of numbers, statistics, graphs and other quantitative instruments affect the way knowledge in the human sciences is valued?

To what extent can the human sciences use mathematical techniques to make accurate predictions?

• To what extent are the methods used in the human sciences limited by the ethical considerations involved in studying human beings?

• Do researchers have different ethical responsibilities when they are working with human subjects compared to when they are working with animals?

• What are the moral implications of possessing knowledge about human behaviour?

• Should key events in the historical development of the human sciences always be judged by the standards of their time?

• What values determine what counts as legitimate inquiry in the human sciences?

• Can knowledge be divorced from the values embedded in the process of creating it?

• Is the role of the human scientist only to describe what the case is or also to make judgements about what should be the case?