Please enable JavaScript.
Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.
KQs for The human sciences, Making connections to the core theme, Human…
KQs for The human sciences
Scope
• Do the human sciences and literature provide different types of knowledge about human existence and behavior?
• Are predictions in the human sciences inevitably unreliable?
• What are the main difficulties that human scientists encounter when trying to provide explanations of human behavior?
• Is human behavior 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 behavior in the same way that the natural sciences discover laws of nature?
• How do we decide whether a particular discipline should be regarded as a human science?
Methods and tools
• 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?
Ethics
• 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?
• Areas of knowledge 30 Theory of knowledge guideAreas of knowledge Examples of knowledge questions
• What are the moral implications of possessing knowledge about human behavior?
• 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?
Perspective
• 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?
Making connections to the core theme
• How does advertising utilize knowledge of human psychology to influence and persuade us? (scope)
• What is it about a theory that gives it the power to destabilize our view of ourselves and of the world? (perspectives)
• How might the language used in polls and questionnaires influence the conclusions that are reached? (methods and tools)
• What moral obligations to act or not act do we have if our knowledge is tentative, incomplete or uncertain (ethics)
Human Sciences