Week 16: Human Sciences

1. AIO: “Nature vs. Nurture”

2. Philosopher Portrait: Emile Durkheim, BF Skinner, Max Weber

3. Special Audio Notes:

4. NPR Debate on Epigenetics and Behavior

• Readings:

1. 190-197

2. 198-204

3. 205-210

• Problem of Knowledge:

Are we mere rational beings?

A man drinks a glass of wine:

A deer drinks from a river…

Three Ideas for the Week

1. The “Human Sciences” is a framework of

knowing, categorizing, and analyzing human

behavior towards prediction and possible

prevention/correction

2. The “Human Sciences” is a collection of

loosely related branches of evolving thought

throughout history. Today, the paradigms

correspond to Behaviorialism vs. Gestalt,

Naturalism vs Interpretivism. And Qualitative

vs. quantative research.

3. The “Human Sciences” have several AoK

crossovers, including ethics, nature vs.

nurture, and the ongoing pursuit of “truth”

and/or “fact”.

Branches of Human Science1. Anthropology

2. Human biology

3. Business studies

4. Communication studies

5. Criminology

6. Demography

7. Development studies

8. Economics

9. Education

10. Human geography

11. Industrial relations

12. Law

13. Media studies

14. Medicine

15. Methodology

16. Philosophy

17. Political science

18. Political theory

19. Psychiatry

20. Psychology

21. Public administration

22. Social policy

23. Sociology

1. Which of these are

more “science” and

which are less

“science”?

2. What are some of the

obstacles and pitfalls

with calling this AoK

“Human Sciences”?

3. Read your handout

scenario. What is the

language describing?

What elements of the

language are missing?

Activity: Deal or No Deal

http://www.xpmath.com/forums/arcade.php?do=play&gameid=70#.UZCTr7Xvt8E

Analyze the Scene: What TOK Issues are Operating?

Competing Definitions

• What might be the most optimistic definition?

• The most cynical definition?

• What are some basic problems of knowledge involved with studying human behavior? (word map for 2 minutes) Nothing made me happen. I happened

I expect most psychiatrists have a patient or two they'd like to refer to me.

Perception and Analytics

Test

Look closely and Answer the

question correctly

Analyze the following:

1. Myopia is correlated to those

who have slept with the light on

as children

2. The amount of ice cream

consumed is correlated to the

number of shark attacks

3. Cigarette smoking amongst

young people correlates to poor

grades at school

4. Sleeping with your shoes on

correlates to suffering from

headaches in the morning

5. The decline in pirate numbers

correlates to the increase in

global warming

Causation or Correlation?

• How do we discern between factors that are caused, vs. simply a coincidental correlation?– Remember your fallacies

(post hoc)

• Extra difficulties may arise in our discovery of why things happen when the cause and the effect is hard to distinguish from one another.

McGurk Effect

• Get in teams of 3

• One begins mouthing a “buh” sound

• Another begins speaking the sound “buh” with the last member “perceiving”

• After 5 lip syncs, change the sound to “vuh”

• What happens?

McGurk Effect Study

Formal Critique of Language and

Persuasion

Quantitative or Qualitative?

• Quantitative data is

gathered by such activities

as surveys, questionnaires,

statistics, etc.– Strength: provides ‘hard’ knowledge

about a thing

• Qualitative data seeks to

gather more personal

information– Strength: often descriptive rather

than numerically-based and

instantly measurable

Naturalism vs. Interpretivism

• Question: Should studying humans develop “objective” results?

• Naturalist: yes, one must observe humans as any other animal or object.

• Interpretivist: No, one must understand the complexity of personality, belief, and feeling.

Pavlov’s Experiment

"In any animal, regardless of its prior

history, painful stimulation of the foot

causes the leg to be withdrawn by bending

at all its joints. This flexor reflex is an

example of an unconditioned reflex, an

innate response based on fixed

connections in the chain of neurons from

the receptor (sensor) to the effector. Of still

more interest in everyday life are

the acquired or conditioned reflexes, in

which the functional connections between

the excited sensors and the patterns of

activity in effector organs become

established by learning process”Schmidt, R. F. (1989). "Behavior Memory (Learning by Conditioning)".

In Schmidt, Robert F.; Thews, Gerhard.Human Physiology. Translated

by Marguerite A. Biederman-Thorson (Second, completely revised

ed.). Berlin etc.: Springer-Verlag. ISBN 3-540-19432-0.

Analysis: Approach to Murder

• How would a

naturalist study

murder?

• How would an

interpretivist?

• What areas of

Knowing interact with

such a topic?

Article Analysis: Raising a

“Genderless” child?

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/relationships/news-and-views/judith-timson/the-genderless-baby-well-intentioned-but-

wrong/article2036155/

What gives a child its sense of self?

According to Ken Zucker, psychologist-in-

chief at the Centre for Addiction and Mental

Health and a world expert in childhood

gender identity issues, the story here may

not be about gender or sex or stereotypes at

all: "It is way more than that. It is about

identity, the development of the self. ... To

really grasp the core, one has to go below

the surface. How is the self constituted?

How do parents transmit, via thousands of

micro-interactions in day-to-day life to their

children, who they are? How attuned are

children to these thousands of micro-

interactions? I think that this is at the heat of

this intense discourse."

Reading Discussion 5/21/15

1.Apply this PoK to

your reading:

1. What biases exist in the

peoples, concepts, or

presentation of the concepts

within the novel?

1. 190-197

2. 198-204

3. 205-210

• Philosopher Portrait

• Debate: Nature or

Nurture?

Determinism at Work?

Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select - doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations and the race of his ancestors”. (Watson, 1924, p. 104)

What ethical issues are at work?Milgrim Experiment

Ordinary people, simply doing their

jobs, and without any particular

hostility on their part, can become

agents in a terrible destructive

process. Moreover, even when the

destructive effects of their work

become patently clear, and they are

asked to carry out actions

incompatible with fundamental

standards of morality, relatively few

people have the resources needed

to resist authority.

Famous Experiment Prezi Review

1. Research a controversial experiment from tiny.cc/tcpsych

2. Prezi web review summarizing the experiment

3. Choose two AoK’s where the Human Science Experiment overlaps with others

4. Create a PoK, attempt to answer it in a paragraph (point, counterpoint).

Due: 5/29

Nurture? LRA and Ethical Issues

• What societal factors exist in the development and perseverance of child armies?

• Are the techniques of control, as well as the teachings of violence, compatible with the human sciences? – How is this similar/different

than the natural sciences?

• Using the lens of human sciences, develop another PoK question regarding this topic.

Conduct your own research!

• Find a video, article, pop-culture reference describing a social experiment.

• Try and replicate the experiment (or the idea/part of the experiment)

• Decide on what type of research method you will use.

• Decide on what school of thought you will use to define your conclusions.

June 4th, 2014

MESH Post 7: Multicultural Psychology

Read “Shakespeare in the

bush”:1. Summarize in 2 sentences the

greatest divergence between

Shakespeare and the African

tribal understanding.

2. Summarize in 2 sentences the

greatest divergence between

Shakespeare and modern

culture.

3. Summarize in 2 sentences

another class this year and how

another culture might not

understand the concept (and

why).

Due 6/1

3 rows of 4

1. 4 flavors your partner will love the most. Put them in order of preference.

2. Choose a number of jelly beans to deicievewith a different color.

3. Have the student guess without any labels.

Activity: Taste identification

• How is our taste related to our environment, those around us, and our other senses?

• How is our taste related to language, engineered flavors, and prior experience?

• How might this test have significance in understand the Human Sciences?

Know thyself—and then thou wilt

despise thyselfTiny.cc/johariwindow

Philosophyexperiments.com

1. How well do you know yourself?

2. Do others know you better than you know yourself?

3. Are we intentionally blind to our own person in order to function?

4. Are you, when observing yourself, in a special category of observer?

Change Blindness

• In the same way as the Taste Test, how might we be “blind” to certain changes around us? Why might this lack of observation be useful? How might it be a disadvantage?

• What is the crossover with the Human Sciences?

Gestalt Theory vs. Behavioralism