We explain what factual or empirical sciences are, their branches and how they are classified. Examples from different factual sciences.
The factual sciences turn to logic and formal processes as a tool.What is factual science?
The factual or factual sciences, or alsoempirical sciences, are those whose purpose is to achieve a reproduction (mental or artificial) of the phenomena of the nature that you want to study, in order to understand the forces and mechanisms that intervene in them.
Thus, it is about the sciences that deal with verifiable and experienceable reality, as its name indicates: "factual" comes from the term factum from Latin, which translates "facts"; and "empirical" from Greek empiric that translates experience. In this they clearly differ from formal sciences, whose object of study are the representation systems themselves logic and mental of the reality, such as the math wave philosophy, interested in abstract and mental objects.
The factual sciences, however, turn to logic and formal processes as a tool to support their studies, whose principle of non-contradiction of the exposed terms and whose methodological steps for experimentation constitute the so-called Scientific method.
Thus, the factual or empirical sciences turn to the experimentation as a way of approaching the universal laws of reality, but their results are always, at best, transitory: a new discovery may put them into question or change the way in which the results obtained are interpreted.
Types of factual science
There are two large groups of factual sciences:
- Natural Science. The natural sciences are those that are interested in understanding the dynamics of operation of natural reality, both of the living beings as of inanimate matter, and pursue universal answers about the composition of the life and nature. The biology is a good example of it.
- Social science. The social sciences, on the other hand, are interested from a scientific perspective in human phenomena, such as the constitution of the human mind, the history of civilizations or the rules of life. economy.
Examples of factual science
Some examples of factual or empirical sciences are the following:
- biology. The study of life and known living beings.
- Chemistry. The study of the formation of the matter and the reactions that occur between substances.
- Physical. The study of the forces that interact in the universe with matter and Energy.
- Economics or Economics. The study of the administration of resources in the societies and the formation and flow of wealth.
- Political science or Politology. The study of community management systems and government of the different human societies in their different epochs and their mechanisms of domination and change.
- Psychology. The study of the formation, functioning and dynamics of the human mind.
- Sociology. The study of human societies and their historical-social contexts, understood as identifiable systems.
- Sexology. The study of sex and human sexual relations, not only from an anatomical and biological point of view, but also from a cultural and social point of view.
- Legal Sciences or Law. The study of the Justice, that is, of the mechanisms and ways in which human societies judge themselves and shape their ethical and legal codes.
- History. Although for many it is more of a humanity, there are many academics who defend belonging to the social Sciences of the study of the dynamics of change of humanity from the invention of writing to the present day.