Park Science Building

English House

Two angles of vision, as seen from the Bryn Mawr College campus--
(we might begin by reading these pictures!)

• a college comp teacher: Science deals with the physical body of the world; Humanities deals with the soul.

• a physicist: the distinction I see that is very much in play is that the subject matter of sceince is external to us, however that of the humanities is internal to us--created by us and located in between our ears in a fundamental sense. Science, although shaped by our human lenses, takes as it objects of inquiry an external world.

• a lawyer (my husband): Science knows that there is a world outside the self. Humanities is still debating this.

• an electrical engineer (my father): Science is based on fact and has a very narrow window for answers. Humanities is like art which has larger degree or area for the answer.

• my cousin: Sciences - How / Humananities - What
  (I had this question on a test in high school and I got it right then!)

• a computer programmer: The difference is: 1) the object of study. 2) the humanities scholar has a wider meta analysis of the data, while the sciences have a wider peer-to-peer analysis of the data. 3) the money they make.

• a theater director: about fifty thousand dollars a year.

• a minister: Let me know how your scientist colleagues define "science" .... anything studied within the scope of this definition...is science and all else studied in a disciplined academic manner (and this, too, needs a definition) is humanities.

• the minister's addendum: I enjoyed the variety of definitions from your Brown Bag group and others....I like the following quote which is tangentially relevant to science/humanities discussion. "It quite saddens me to think that when I cross the Styx, I may find myself among so many professional biologist, condemned to keep trying to solve problems, and that Pluto, or whoever is in charge down there now, may condemn me to sit forever trying to identify specimens from my own specific and generic diagnoses, while the amateur entomologists, who have not been damned professors, are permitted to roam at will among the fragrant asphodels, of the Elysian meadows, netting gorgeous ghostly butterflies until the end of time." William Morton Wheeler (1865-1937), from an oft quoted lecture, "On the Dry Rot of Academic Biology". He was an entomologist noted widely for his groundbreaking study of the social behavior of ants. Also the following from the same lecture.
  
  ...written by the naturalist William Morton Wheeler in 1922. The legendary ant expert took college professors to task for spreading the "dry rot of Academic Biology," and held them responsible for destroying the exuberance of their young charges through "narrow-minded specialization" and "senile abstraction." Wheeler suggested one solution was to "at least ask every professor to change their mental underwear" before entering the undergraduate classroom.
  
  Worthy of study/discussion: Do humanists change their underwear more frequently than scientists? Physically and mentally?

• a biologist: science's sphere of interest is more encompassing...more stuff we're interested in. but, more complicated than that due to several factors: the precepts of materialism, and cause and effect; science is more or less stuck in a rut (due to above); and most "hard" scientists are anti-social or worse, thus try to avoid humans. the difference between science and the humanities may have something to do with "who" is doing each.

• a clinical social worker: I believe science likes to tell stories it thinks it can "prove" are true (even if the scientists deny this and say they only try to falsify hypotheses) while the humanities tell a variety of stories- with no assertions of truth usually (the current flap about what constitutes "memoirs" not withstanding).

• a chemist: really needs a long, leisurely discussion. first i thought: focuses on physical world vs on human behavior (i'm thinking physical sciences only). then i thought: searches for the best consistent story vs searches for an endless number of stories

• a biologist: The form of the evidence being gathered and analyzed. In the humanities the evidence consists primarily of words or symbols and language. Scientists ...manipulate and analyze physical materials and then have to find language to report their findings or ideas...it's not always a clear-cut distinction.

• a psychologist: to me it has to do with methods and what counts as evidence....sometimes the level of explanation (micro vs. macro) is different too, but the more I hear, the humanities can be pretty micro too.

• a poet-teacher: Oomph...didn't one scientist...plaintively say that science is what you can measure quantitatively, rationally, empirically? ....In "Tradition and the Individual Talent," T.S. Eliot is trying to turn the poet into a kind of "scientist." But the poet is not a scientist-- except, perhaps, in his commitment to the truth (different kind of truth) and his dependence upon close observation of the material world.

• a biologist: I would LOVE to talk more about this, especially in light of the last discussion in a faculty seminar... which I found unsatisfying and am still trying to discern the why's and wherefore's.

• a literary critic: I think perhaps the differences between science and humanities are already inside both of them, each resisting the other (the sciences rejecting poetic style; the humanities rejecting numbers and proof) and each claiming to speak for the other (e.g., the humanities provide the art of rhetoric for scientists to use to write grant proposals; the sciences provide a treasure trove of new metaphors for humanists to use to create new aesthetic works or new aesthetic theories). If each is its own difference from itself, then what?

• an educator: i don't know. is this for a survey? i'm more confused about this now than would've been awhile ago. would rather be part of a conversation about it than write it here.

• a social scientist: maybe when the humanities aren't trying to imitate science i like to think that they are more humble about certainty; revel in difference and uncertainty and find it a source of stimulation and interest...although then i...wonder if "true" scientists whether they are "science" or "humanities" folks are just really curious (nosy?) folks that are excited about new ideas and connections.

• an art history/creative writing major: in a revised approach to the sciences one could consider not difference but intersection...and have the broadest intersection be, in fact... your notion of love...as something changable and changing, that looks to fulfill not the creater of love and not the object of love but the love itself. i think that the bridge between a science and humanities approach is neither disinterestedness or the self but the location of an energy that moves through people and creates change in thought and in practice. I would also say that scientific discoveries are best created with the same type of emotional energy that is created when reading a novel or writing or...

• my mother: this question will take more study.

• a social activist (my Sarah-Lawrence educated daughter):
  none. none at all.

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