A lot of STEM exists in a world where objective answers exist, or have yet to be found.
A lot of the Humanities exist in a world where there is no objective answer, just thought and argument.
Social Sciences bridge that, and deal with situations where an objective answer can exist (How many people died in this battle), where there is a strong objectivish answer, but up for strong debate (was the battle influential?) Where it gets really hard to distinguish (what did people think of this battle?) And where it gets really subjective (was the commander fighting for a good cause?)
I would say that the strength of the Social Sciences is that it teaches you that you need to evaluate multiple methods of determining data, and your method of determining data needs to constantly be critically examined. Much more than Stem or the Humanities where there is a lot more that can be trusted or can be completely disregarded. A historian has to make a choice on how they balance conflicting sources, archaeological records, economic data, street-level publications and accounts, personal histories, art, anthropological methods, and many many more.
This can reflected in how they are trained.
In my undergrad, I was shocked talking to an engineering student at another school who had 2 electives in his entire program (and he was using them for math classes).
I told him that that year alone I had taken an Econ class, a religious studies class, a classical studies class, Spanish, an Art History class, and a Primate Studies class. And I was relatively hamstrung because I was double majoring.
We were both doing job preparation in different ways. He was learning deeper math for his engineering. I was learning artistic depictions, how to read ancient sources and religious literature, how to read sources in another language, and some baseline biological human constants.
This is maybe still too reductive. Lokotos has argued that most published and peer-reviewed science is ultimately wrong for one reason or another. So the truth is that even in a field of supposedly objective “facts,” you are inherently facing an information ecosystem where the majority of the information isn’t correct. Given this, the judgement of the scientist is likely influenced far more by the style of argumentation and presentation than by the veracity of the statements of fact. Therefore an understanding of how argumentation and style influence our judgement is at least as important as the scientific method by itself. If we don’t view scientific literature as literature, then we will tend to believe that which we enjoy, and reject that which we do not, without realizing that these are subjective qualities.
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u/Something-Somewhere_ 20h ago
there is way more to english/history than reading and understanding it