humanities strikes me as a field of study which is both normative and empirical.
There's a lot of prescriptive stuff going on in humanities "what ought to be" type arguments - but I don't know if there is much empirical work in humanities departments, if any at all. You can generally tell whether there is much empirical work by looking at whether any math/statistics subjects are required to major in a particular discipline. The one exception i can think of is psychology though it's methods of inquiry have gotten more and more rigorous over the years that it is now generally considered more of a science than a humanities.
Furthermore only very recently have empirical methods have been used in traditionally humanities/sociology related fields - and only in very selected fields. Take for example the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies which was established in 2004 - just 5 years ago. Most of the empirical methods have been borrowed from economics too.
Maybe in your PhB @ ANU students both have the ability and are encouraged to think empirically, but i doubt that most humanities students have the ability to think empirically at all. Reading a lot of the literature on public policy i find it astounding just how often people, with much academic credentials typically in the humanities / social science areas (excluding economics), will infer causation from correlation.
I don't really mean 'empirical' in the strict sense of experimentation and data collation, although in fields like sociology, that does happen (sociology is technically a social science though - I'm not sure if this thread's use of 'humanities' excludes social sciences or not. If it does, we're limiting our discussion to only a few fields of study). I mean it as the philosophical branch of 'empiricism', as in, knowledge arises through observation and subsequent description. Evidence is still required, the only difference is the type of evidence that is used. In the case of the humanities, for example, someone might analyse a speech or text and try to come to a conclusion on what it is the text/speech is doing. This is a descriptive function of the humanities. It certainly attempts to describe how things are, and there is still a great deal of evidence required to do this.
I think many people in social science disciplines do have a tendency to think that correlation is equal to causation. My politics readings did that so often that it started to frustrate me. However, I think this is more of a case of 'bad writers' rather than 'bad discipline'. Especially if the writer is blinded by their own prejudices, they're more likely to say 'see, this proves it', rather than 'this could suggest...'. And certainly, in fields like philosophy and anthropology, you really can't get away with doing that. I remember one anthropology lecture where we were told that we can't say things like 'smoking causes cancer' because not everyone who smokes gets cancer, even if the two things have a well-established link. I'm not sure exactly, but with the exception of postmodernist political scientists (and surprisingly few exist in the discipline) political science still likes to think that it can actually find definitive answers that are simply true, so when you write something that might undermine this, like saying 'when I'm arguing X, I am assuming Y for Z reason' (so, you've justified the assumption, but you know that it's still an assumption and you say so - it needs to happen sometimes to get anywhere) marks would definitely be taken off, you're supposed to pretend that you aren't assuming anything. Whereas, in philosophy, this would be commended.
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