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What are the Human Sciences? Free
The human sciences are a diverse set of disciplines, including Economics, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Sociology, and Psychology. What they have in common is that they study human beings in their...
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Ethics in the Natural Sciences
Arguably all knowers are responsible for aspects of the knowledge they produce. If the Natural Sciences are held up as being the primary producers of knowledge then they are also the primary bearers of...
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Perspectives
Science attempts to explain the world around us and many scientists may claim that it reveals what is really there in an objective manner independent of human beings. However, it is not hard to see that...
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Challenges faced by the Natural Sciences
Despite their reputation for smooth and robust knowledge-making, things sometime do not go so smoothly within the Natural Sciences. Scientists face extraordinary challenges both in carrying out experiments,...
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Perspectives in the Natural Sciences
f We have seen that disciplines within the Natural Sciences already offer different perspectives on certain phenomena. However, different perspectives may also exist within a single discipline. Although...
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Methods and Tools
It is tempting to think that all the disciplines of the natural sciences use roughly speaking the same kinds of methods, but the ToK student may be surprised by the variety of approaches that are used....
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Theories, laws, models, and assumptions
Theories are general bodies of knowledge that explain many phenomena. Often they involve natural laws, models, and are typically based on assumptions about how to understand the phenomena they explain....
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Experiment and observation
Science is often said to be special because it employs a unique method, the so-called 'scientific method'. But is there a single scientific method and does it justify regarding scientific knowledge as...
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Explanation in the Natural Sciences
Perhaps the main job of scientific knowledge is to explain natural phenomena. But what counts as an explanation in the Natural Sciences? Are there different kinds of explanation? Do explanations need...
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Science, non-science, and nonsense
A typical mistake in a pub quiz is to confuse astronomy with astrology. Astronomy is a science, a branch of physics, while astrology is a so-called pseudoscience, something that looks like science on...