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A non-science is an area of study that is not scientific, especially one that is not a natural science or a social science that is an object of scientific inquiry. In this model, history, art, and religion are all examples of non-sciences.[1][2]
Since the 17th century, some writers have used the word science to exclude some areas of studies, such as the arts and the liberal arts.[3] The word nonscience, to describe non-scientific academic disciplines, was first used in the middle of the 19th century.[4]
In some cases, it can be difficult to identify exact boundaries between science and non-science. The demarcation problem is the study of the difficulties in determining whether certain fields of study, near the boundaries of science and non-science, should be considered as one or the other. No single test has yet been devised that can clearly separate science from non-science, but some factors, taken as a whole and evaluated over time, are commonly used.[5] In the view of Thomas Kuhn, these factors include the desire of scientists to investigate a question as if it were a puzzle. Kuhn's view of science is also focused on the process of scientific inquiry, rather than the result.[5]
Boundary-work is the process of advocating for a desired outcome in the process of classifying fields of study that are near the borders. The rewards associated with winning a particular classification suggest that the boundary between science and non-science is socially constructed and ideologically motivated rather than representing a stark natural difference between science and non-science.[6] The belief that scientific knowledge (e.g., biology) is more valuable than other forms of knowledge (e.g., ethics) is called scientism.[7]
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Non-science includes all areas of study that are not science.[1] Non-science encompasses all of the humanities, including:
- history,[1][2] including the history of science,
- the language arts, such as literature and language learning,
- philosophy, ethics, and religion, and
- art, including music, performing arts, fine arts, and crafts.
The philosopher Martin Mahner proposed calling these academic fields the parasciences, to distinguish them from disreputable forms of non-science, such as pseudoscience.[1]
Non-sciences offer information about the meaning of life, human values, the human condition, and ways of interacting with other people, including studies of cultures, morality and ethics.[8][9]
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Philosophers disagree about whether areas of study involving abstract concepts, such as pure mathematics, are scientific or non-scientific.[10][11]
Interdisciplinary studies may cover knowledge-generating work that includes both scientific and non-scientific studies. Archaeology is an example of a field that borrows from both the natural sciences and history.[1]
Fields of inquiry may change status over time. For many centuries, alchemy was accepted as scientific: it produced some useful information, and it supported experiments and open inquiry in the pursuit of understanding the physical world. Since the 20th century, it has been considered a pseudoscience.[12][13] Modern chemistry, which developed out of alchemy, is considered a major natural science.
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Some philosophers, such as Paul Feyerabend, object to the effort to classify knowledge into science and non-science.[14] The distinction is artificial, as there is little or nothing that ties together all of the bodies of knowledge that are called "sciences".[14]
Some systems of organizing knowledge separate systematic knowledge from non-systematic methods of knowing or learning something, such as personal experiences, intuition, and innate knowledge. Wissenschaft is a broad concept that encompasses reliable knowledge without making a distinction between subject area.[1] The Wissenschaft concept is more useful than the distinction between science and non-science in distinguishing between knowledge and pseudo-knowledge, as the errors made in all forms of pseudo-scholarship, from pseudohistory to pseudoscience, are similar.[1] This Wissenschaft concept is used in the 2006 list of Fields of Science and Technology published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, which defines "science and technology" as encompassing all humanistic disciplines, including religion and fine art.[15]
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- Boundary object – an item, such as an animal hide, that can be legitimately studied in different ways by different fields of study
- Branches of science
- Liberal arts
- Hard and soft science
- Carper's fundamental ways of knowing
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