Jerome Kagan The Three Cultures Analysis

How does the knowledge produced by the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities differ? Dr Jerome Kagan systemically analyze this question in his book,The Three Cultures, in terms of semantic differences to different patterns. His opinions provide me a new sight to overview the knowledge I learned, am learning and will learn. When I started thinking about the disciplines I have learned, it is exciting that differences are transparent and worthwhile comparing. Karan holds the opinion that the primary concerns, sources of evidence, and concepts remain the most important nodes of differences among natural scientists, social scientists and humanists. As far as I am concerned, I will talk about this question in term of study orientation,

There are two approaches to study different cultures. The approach has big affects on study results. According to Kagon, the three cultures think about the same event in different ways. Let me illustrate this view more clearly. Suppose that one kind of pestilence happens in country A and country B, the medicine experts will investigate symptom on both countries’ people and generalize the common symptom, discover the common pathogen and suit the remedy to the case. For economists, what they interest is how this pestilence affects the goods price in the market, for example, the decrease of labor cause the increase of goods price, the more people need medicine cause the increase of medicine price. For the history, some interest the context in country A such as how uniqueness of this pestilence and the role of leader C plays in solving the pestilence. Generally speaking,natural science need nomothetic approach to generalize and explain outcomes as following from general rules and patters; humanities use idiographic approach which means to specify one event, on person and understand the meaning of unique, continent, and often subjective outcomes. Nomothetic approach can identify similarities and structures that underlie apparently diverse cases while idiographic approach can reveal differences between apparently similar cases. The social sciences can apply both of approaches in the way of generalizing, summarizing the universality as well as specifying, taking one event a the key point. Besides this approach, I also want to mention the application of tropes to different cultures. As Kagan mentioned, tropes can be categorized as satisfying or unsatisfying, coherent or incoherent, but cannot be evaluated as true or false. The natural science is scientific logical and precise whereas humanities contain many personal emotion, different comments from different perspectives,