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hayley reed's picture

ambiguity of science

I have had some trouble posting recently and I am not sure if my first post went through. But, in case it didn't here it is again.... 

I completely agree with a lot of what you said Shannon! One of the things that really stuck out in your post is that there is less room for ambiguity in science. It does seem when you are in a math class, you either know the answer or you don’t. But, in an english class there is much more room to come up with answers. There is no one right answer. In this sense, I feel the humanities are much more lenient. I think one of the reasons I don’t accept ambiguity in science is because if I get “the wrong answer”, my answer may have a direct impact on someone’s life. This is kind of a confusing claim but, I will do my best to explain it. When it comes down to it, I connect science with medicine & health. In these fields there is no room for error. If a doctor makes the “wrong decision” they can have a direct impact on someone’s life. When my dad was diagnosed with cancer this past year I wanted to make sure that his doctors knew exactly what they were doing when they went into surgery. I didn’t want anything to be ambiguous! I wanted to have 100% confidence in what they were doing. I needed to know that there was one answer and one solution. Having gone to a humanities high school I can say that I think in the field of humanities this threat to human life is not present. When scholars, teachers, writers, and students in the humanities explore questions they don’t have this same pressure.

Moving past my problems with ambiguity in science I realize that this puts way too much pressure on the sciences to always be right. No one can be right all the way. And as much as it hurts me to realize it, there really is no right answer to anything. Going back to the doctor example…certain treatments work better for different people and a doctor can never know or say with 100% certainty that he is the right answer or the right treatment for a solution. Patients respond differently to treatments and what worked for my dad may not work for all people who had the same kind of cancer as he did. I guess what I am trying to say is that I am beginning to accept ambiguity in sciences more. But, I should qualify this statement by saying that I am definitely a work in progress!

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