Issue132 自以为是的东东，大家批批

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Issue132  
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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.
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The university community consists of three different worlds—the sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences. Although each world operates on its own assumptions and has its own special habits of thinking, certainly there is meaningful interaction among the three.

Tracing back to ancient Greece, there is no division of knowledge and thoughts as specific disciplines. Socrates imparted his doctrine to his disciple, without in his mind such a notion as I belong to this field and let that domain alone. He simply sought “philosophy”, which means love of wisdom in Greek. That is to say, anything concerned with wisdom, or broadly speaking, with knowledge and thoughts would get a welcome reception in front of this sage. In some sense, all the human knowledge and thoughts origin from their curiosity, wondering and inquiring about the unknown, from the physical world to the mankind itself to the mysterious, from which in relative modern time the natural sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences derive. So the three seemly different worlds have their common genesis which underlies their inherent interaction.

Over time, man has accumulated a great deal of knowledge and thoughts. Gradually, they realized that the boundless ocean of the unknown necessitates specialization. When this specialization goes further, correspondingly come into being three different worlds—the sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences, with each its own assumption and special habits of thinking. Even so, these three different worlds do have inextricable meaningful interaction with one another.

One can easily see tight connection between humanities and social sciences. Even the boundary between them seems fuzzy. Say, anthropology and history are sometimes classified as humanities or as social science. The sociology which belongs to social science can not do without the involvement of history, religion, literature and art, which belongs to humanities. On the other hand, literature can generate a new genre with the participation of psychology.

Some experts said, in order to extricate itself out of humanities to become “scientific”, social science import research approaches, methodologies and models from mathematics and natural science. It also embraces similar deduction, induction and other relevant reasoning quite close to sciences. See, there lies meaningful interaction.

Nowadays the cross-disciplines, hybrid disciplines and interdisciplinary studies in university communities as well as in academia best illustrate extensive and intensive interaction among the sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences. Economics borrows much from mathematics and lends itself to many applied fields in sciences. And the Law of thermodynamics in physics may serve in sociology in that they have the similar assumption that things are develop toward chaos. Still, archaeology needs the help of geography, geology, anthropology, biochemistry, etc. When it comes to the transgene and cloning in biology, there is a bioethics dealing with the controversy among them.

Despite their inborn nexus with each another, man’s knowledge and thoughts was once divided into many fields or specialties—broadly, the sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences. The fragmentation due to overspecialization should be reversed by integration of the three worlds. And this trend has emerged and meaningful interaction among them has been intensifying.