Hossein Jorjani
First publication: 2026 – 07 – 18
The traditional division of the human mind into faculties such as sensation, perception, memory, imagination, understanding, reason, judgment, emotion, and will should not be understood as a map of sharply separated regions within the brain. These faculties are better regarded as functional distinctions: analytical categories used to describe different modes of mental activity. In actual cognition, they overlap continuously. Reason may employ imagination; perception is shaped by memory; judgment may be influenced by emotion. Their separation is therefore partly natural, insofar as distinguishable functions can be identified, and partly pedagogical, insofar as those functions are isolated for purposes of analysis and instruction.
A similar qualification applies when academic disciplines are related to mental faculties. The relation is not one-to-one. No discipline exercises only a single faculty. Nevertheless, certain disciplines may be associated predominantly with certain modes of cognition. History is especially connected with memory, because it preserves and reconstructs the past. Poetry and the arts are especially connected with imagination and emotion. Philosophy is especially connected with reason, conceptual analysis, and judgment. This broadly resembles Bacon’s well-known division of learning according to memory, imagination, and reason, corresponding respectively to history, poetry, and philosophy.
Science cannot be assigned to reason alone. Scientific inquiry may be described more precisely as reason disciplined by systematic empirical evidence, obtained through sensation and perception in observation and, where possible, experiment. Imagination generates hypotheses and models; memory preserves previous findings; judgment evaluates evidence; but scientific claims remain accountable to experience. The different faculties may therefore be said to stand at different epistemological distances from observation and experiment. Sensation and perception are closest to empirical contact, whereas imagination and abstract reason can operate more freely from it. Scientific method serves partly to bring these freer operations back under empirical constraint.
This distinction also clarifies why not every academic discipline is a scientific discipline. Universities contain several legitimate forms of organized inquiry, each with its own objects, methods, and standards of validation. Philosophy, jurisprudence, literature, music, and film history may be rigorous academic disciplines without being empirical sciences. Their claims are assessed primarily through argument, interpretation, textual evidence, coherence, precedent, or aesthetic judgment rather than through observation and experiment.
A crude division of the major academic fields may therefore be stated as follows:
- Natural sciences: disciplines whose claims are primarily tested against systematic empirical evidence, especially through observation and experiment.
- Social sciences: disciplines whose claims concerning human societies, behaviour, and social institutions are primarily tested against systematic empirical evidence.
- Humanities: disciplines whose claims are primarily assessed through textual, historical, conceptual, linguistic, or aesthetic forms of evidence and argument.
- Formal disciplines: disciplines whose claims are established primarily through definition and deduction.
- Professional and applied disciplines: fields such as law, medicine, engineering, and education, which organize knowledge toward practical action and may draw upon both scientific and non-scientific forms of reasoning.
- Creative and artistic disciplines: fields centred on artistic production, performance, expression, and aesthetic judgment.
These divisions are themselves pedagogical rather than absolute. Their boundaries overlap, just as the mental faculties upon which they depend also overlap.
Not every university scholar is a scientist. Universities encompass several distinct forms of scholarship, of which science is only one. A philosopher is not a scientist by virtue of working at a university; nor is a lawyer, historian, linguist, or art historian. They are scholars whose disciplines pursue knowledge by methods other than systematic observation and experiment.
The distinction among academic disciplines is therefore methodological rather than hierarchical. Different disciplines cultivate different mental faculties, pursue different kinds of questions, and employ different standards of justification. None of them is inherently more important, more valuable, or more worthy than the others. Their differences lie in their aims, methods, and standards of validation, not in their intrinsic worth.
Hossein Jorjani 