KNOWLEDGE

Is The Knowledge Created By The Natural Sciences More Accurate Than The Knowledge Created By The Social Sciences?

Is The Knowledge Created By The Natural Sciences More Accurate Than The Knowledge Created By The Social Sciences?

Introduction

Accuracy of knowledge cannot be compared depending upon whether it is created by natural sciences or social science. Knowledge defines a human being as a symbolic construct humans' knowledge symbolically. Humans are the only species that organizes its environment in a symbolic way. The great theme of the species is organizing their environment trying to understand the underlying issues that environment, i.e., what is below that surrounds human, as it has been noted by Aristotle. However, this essay focuses on the comparison between the accuracy of knowledge and identifying whether it is more accurate if it is created by the natural sciences or it is more accurate if it is created by social sciences.

Discussion

Comparison between Natural Sciences and Social Science

Along with the industrial revolution that crystallizes a sharp division between the natural sciences and the social sciences, this division had its foundation that the natural sciences had achieved great development paradigm using deterministic or causal, with technological advances that have impacted the daily lives of people, which made a lot of social and intellectual prestige (Berger & Luckman, 1971, pp. 13-15). Thus, the natural sciences were linked with the idea of infinite progress of humanity at that time. By contrast, the social sciences, with little speculative imminently explanatory and predictive power, had become almost useless in esoteric study in the eyes of society. In this context, during the first half of the twentieth century, social scientists tried to take the deterministic paradigm for their own development, obtaining few relevant results.

The mid-twentieth century is a paradoxical development in the social sciences and natural sciences. While social scientists tried to approach the deterministic paradigm of natural science, trying to explain social phenomena in terms of cause and effect (an obvious example is the economic theories, for me a social science), in natural science theories emerged strongly deterministic, as was the forerunner "uncertainty relation" of Heisenberg, the "chaos theory" and "theory of complex systems." All these developments challenged the entire physical world that could be explained deterministically (Gordon, 1995, pp.634-640). All these theories coming from the natural sciences (physics, biology, chemistry, systems theory) found fertile ground in the social sciences (psychology, sociology, history) and came across a field and interdisciplinary collaboration in which these theories have been applied to different fields in all sciences. It can be said that this development was genuinely epistemological without tributes prevailing powers and ideologies. In short, it can be said that deterministic explanations of physical and social phenomena were only a good approximation in ideal conditions, but it was much larger universe of nondeterministic phenomena were better explained by the theories of chaos and complex systems. These theories became a real silver bridge between two previously separate scientific aspects (Henslin & Possamai, 2011, ...