While all disciplines can be called disciplines because their members pursue knowledge in this systematic fashion, the methods or investigative procedures specific to certain disciplines can and will differ. Thus, the way a historian writes a research paper the development of labor unions can differ from the way a botanist writes about peach trees, and both can differ from the way a cultural anthropologist writes research papers on traditional dances in Bali. Differences in the methodologies of each can be explained in part by obvious differences in those aspects of our world that each field has taken on as its object of study. But these differences are also the result of differences in the way that historians and biologists and cultural anthropologists have come to define valid and meaningful knowledge. As you take courses across the curriculum, you will become aware that a major dividing line separates the sciences and the humanities and often bisects the social sciences. This dividing line, created by critical differences in how one arrives at meaningful and valid knowledge, distinguishes the "hard" from the "soft" sciences.
The hard sciences-the pure and applied natural sciences and areas of the social sciences-are so called because they prefer empirical modes of testing, modes that rely on mathematical models and/or the use of instruments. Whenever you find yourself in a laboratory, collecting data by recording numbers produced by a piece of equipment or through some other precise means of weighing, measuring, or observing, you are engaged in testing procedures fundamental to hard science. You are seeing similar hard science procedures at work when your reading for a social science course includes a report on the results of a survey in which the quantifiable data gathered have been submitted to rigorous statistical analysis.
By contrast, the objectives of the humanities have led members of these fields to quite different methods of investigation and analysis in research papers. The humanities take as their subject of inquiry artifacts of conscious human construction: paintings, musical compositions, the work of architects and choreographers, and written texts that range from Plato's Republic to the poetry of Wordsworth to the Bhagavad Gita to historical documents such as royal proclamations, nineteenth-century newspapers, or letters and diaries. In the humanities, meaningful knowledge about these artifacts is determined by "reading" them through the framework of an accepted mode of interpretation, a mode derived from a particular theory. The validity of such interpretations is tested and demonstrated, not in any quantifiable way but by using standards of logic.
