GRE essay sample: The university community consists of three different worlds...

[Prathibhaalam]

"The university community consists of three different worlds—the sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences. Because each world operates on its own assumptions and has its own special habits of thinking, rarely is there meaningful interaction among the sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences."

Topic - The Sciences, the humanities and the social sciences
Scope - Meaningful interaction among the three
Assumptions - they are 3 different fields.
Each world operates on its own assumptions and has its own special habits of thinking
Rarely is there meaningful interaction among the sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences

Conclusion – All the sciences should interact meaningfully to develop a meaningful world to live

GRE Essay:

The issue statement assumes and asserts that the difference between the sciences, the humanities and the social sciences are so manifest that people consider them totally unrelated fields. Even though each of the sciences, the humanities and the social sciences operate on its own assumptions, I strongly believe that there is a meaningful interaction between the three and together they develop a meaningful world to thrive.

Science, in the broadest sense, refers to any system of objective knowledge. In a more restricted sense, science refers to a system of acquiring knowledge based on the scientific method, as well as to the organized body of knowledge gained through such research.

Fields of science are commonly classified along two major lines:

1. Natural sciences - Is the rational study of the universe via rules or laws of natural order. The term natural science is also used to distinguish those fields that use the scientific method to study nature from the social sciences, which use the scientific method to study human behavior

2. Social sciences - Is any discipline or branch of science that deals with the sociocultural aspects of human behavior. The social sciences generally include anthropology (is the holistic discipline that deals with the integration of different aspects of the Social Sciences and Humanities), economics, political science, sociology, criminology, and social psychology.

Social sciences diverge from the arts and humanities in that the social sciences tend to emphasize the use of the scientific method in the study of humanity, including quantitative and qualitative methods.

These fields (natural sciences and social sciences) are empirical sciences, which mean the knowledge must be based on observable phenomena and capable of being tested for its validity by other researchers working under the same conditions.

The humanities are those academic disciplines which study the human condition using methods that are largely analytic, critical, or speculative, as distinguished from the mainly empirical approaches of the natural and social sciences. Conventionally the humanities include the classics, languages, literature, music, philosophy, history, religion, and the visual and performing arts. Additional subjects sometimes included in the humanities are anthropology, area studies, communications and cultural studies, although these are often regarded as social sciences.

Many American colleges and universities believe in the notion of a broad "liberal arts education", which places an emphasis on all college students studying the humanities in addition to their specific area of study. Prominent proponents of liberal arts in the United States have included Mortimer J. Adler[3] and E.D. Hirsch.
The 1980 United States Rockefeller Commission on the Humanities described the humanities in its report, The Humanities in American Life:
Through the humanities we reflect on the fundamental question: What does it mean to be human? The humanities offer clues but never a complete answer. They reveal how people have tried to make moral, spiritual, and intellectual sense of a world in which irrationality; despair, loneliness, and death are as conspicuous as birth, friendship, hope, and reason.

The social sciences, in studying subjective, structural aspects of society, were traditionally referred to as soft sciences. This is in contrast to hard sciences, such as the natural and physical sciences, which focus exclusively on objective aspects of nature. Nowadays, however, the distinction between the soft and hard sciences is blurred. Some social science subfields have become very quantitative in methodology or behavioral in approach. Conversely, the interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary nature of scientific inquiry into human behavior and social and environmental factors affecting it have made many of the so-called hard sciences dependent on social science methodology. Examples of this boundary blurring include emerging disciplines like social studies of medicine, neurophysiology, bio economics and the history and sociology of science. Increasingly, quantitative and qualitative methods are being integrated in the study of human action and its implications and consequences.

The social sciences are sometimes criticized as being less scientific than the natural sciences, in that they are seen as being less rigorous or empirical in their methods. This claim is most commonly made when comparing social sciences to fields such as physics, chemistry or biology in which direct experimentation and falsification of results is generally carried out in a more direct fashion. Social scientists however, argue against such claims by pointing to the use of a rich variety of scientific processes, mathematical proofs, and other methods in their professional literature. Others, however argue that the social world is much too complex to be studied as one would study static molecules. The actions or reactions of a molecule or chemical substance are always the same when placed in certain situations. Humans, on the other hand, are much too complex for these traditional scientific methodologies. Humans and society do not have certain rules that always have the same outcome and they cannot guarantee to react the same way to certain situations.
A third criticism is that social sciences tend to be compromised more frequently by politics, since results from social science may threaten certain centers of power in a society, particularly ones which fund the research institutions. Further, complexity exacerbates the problems, since observed social data may be the result of factors which are hard to evaluate in isolation.
The very concept of the ‘humanities’ as a class or kind, distinct from the ’sciences’, has come under repeated attack in the twentieth century. T.S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions[5] argued that the forces driving scientific progress often have less to do with objective inference from unbiased observation than with much more value-laden sociological and cultural factors. More recently, Richard Rorty, an US philosopher, has argued that the distinction between the sciences and the humanities is harmful to both pursuits, placing the former on an undeserved pedestal and condemning the latter to irrationality. Rorty’s position requires a wholesale rejection of such traditional philosophical distinctions as those between appearance and reality, subjective and objective, replacing them with what he endorses as a new ‘fuzziness’. This leads to a kind of pragmatism where the oppositions between the humanities, the arts, and the sciences, might gradually fade away...

In sum, all the three sciences, though each world operates on its own assumptions and has its own special habits of thinking, are interdependent and grow together intertwined. None of them are useful and developed in isolation. All of them are developed by applying the approaches in one field to the other. Absence of any one of them is detrimental to the others. Interdependence and a meaningful interaction among these sciences facilitates in making this world a beautiful place to live.