Social
sciences
The social sciences comprise the scientific study
of the human aspects of the world. They are also known as social
studies.
Psychology studies the human mind,
sociology examines human
society,
political science studies the governing of groups and
economics concerns itself with the allocation of wealth in
society. Social sciences diverge from the
humanities in that the many in the social sciences emphasise the
scientific method or other rigorous standards of evidence in the
study of humanity, although many also use much more
qualitative methods.
The main social sciences include:
Anthropology and History are sometimes classified as social sciences or as
humanities. Furthermore,
anthropology is sometimes classified as a natural science.
Non-traditional approaches to social sciences include:
History of the Concept
In ancient philosophy, there was no difference between the
liberal arts of mathematics and the study of history, poetry or
politics - only with the development of mathematical proof did there
gradually arise a perceived difference between "scientific"
disciplines and others, the "humanities" or "liberal arts". Thus
Aristotle studies planetary motion and poetry with the same methods,
and Plato mixes geometrical proofs with his demonstration on the
state of intrinsic knowledge.
This unity of science as descriptive remains, for example, in the
time of
Thomas Hobbes who argued that deductive reasoning from axioms
created a scientific framework, and hence his
Leviathan was a scientific description of a political
commonwealth. What would happen within decades of his work was a
revolution in what constituted "science", particularly the work of
Newton in physics. Newton, by revolutionizing what was then called
"natural philosophy", changed the basic framework by which
individuals understood what was "scientific".
While he was merely the archetype of an accelerating trend, the
important distinction is that for Newton the mathematical flowed
from a presumed reality independent of the observer, and working by
its own rules. For philosophers of the same period, mathematical
expression of philsophical ideals was taken to be symbolic of
natural human relationships as well: the same laws moved physical
and spiritual reality. For examples see
Blaise Pascal,
Gottfried Leibniz and
Johannes Kepler, each of whom took mathematical examples as
models for human behavior directly. In Pascal's case the famous
wager, for Leibniz, the invention of binary computation and for
Kepler the intervention of angels to guide the planets.
In the realm of other disciplines, this created a pressure to
express ideas in the form of mathematical relationships. Such
relationships, called "Laws" after the usage of the time (see
philosophy of science) became the model which other disciplines
would emmulate.
August Comte (1797-1857) argued that ideas pass through three
rising stages, Theological, Philosophical and Scientific. He defined
the difference as the first being rooted in assumption, the second
in critical thinking, and the third in positive observation. This
framework, still rejected by many, encapsulates the thinking which
was to push economic study from being a descriptive to a
mathematically based discipline.
Karl Marx was one of the first writers to claim that his methods
of research represented a
scientific view of history in this model.
With the late 19th century, attempts to apply equations to
statements about human behavior became increasingly common. Among
the first were the "Laws" of philology, which attempted to map the
change overtime of sounds in a language.
It was with the work of Darwin that the descriptive version of
social theory received another shock. Biology had, seemingly,
resisted a basis as a mathematical study, and yet the Theory of
Natural Selection and the implied idea of Genetic inheritance -
later found to have been ennunciated by
Mendel, seemed to point in the direction of a scientific biology
based, like physics and chemistry, on mathematical relationships.
With the early 20th century, a wave of change came to science
that saw "statistical" study sufficiently mathematical to be
"science". This application of statistics to physics would yield
Quantum Dynamics and an increasingly statistical view of
biology.
The first thinkers to attempt to combine inquiry of the type they
saw in Darwin with exploration of human relationships, which,
evolutionary theory implied would be based on selective forces, were
Freud
in Austria and
William James in the United States. Freud's theory of the
functioning of the mind, and James' work on experimental psychology
would have enormous impact on those that followed. Freud, in
particular, created a framework which would appeal not only to those
studying psychology, but artists and writers as well.
One of the most persuasive advocates for the view of scientific
treatment of philosophy would be
John Dewey (1859-1952). He began, as Marx did, in an attempt to
weld Hegelian idealism and logic to experimental science, for
example in his "Psychology" of 1887. However, it is when he
abandoned Hegelian constructs, and joined the movement in America
called
Pragmatism, possibly under the influence of
William James' "Principles of Psychology" that he began to
formulate his basic doctrine, ennunciated in essays such as "The
Influence of Darwin on Philosophy" (1910).
This idea, base on his theory of how organisms respond, states
that there are three phases to the process of inquiry:
- Problematic Situation, where the typical response is
inadequeate.
- Isolation of Data or subject matter.
- Reflective, which is tested empirically.
With the rise of the idea of quantative measurement in the
physical sciences, for example
Lord Rutherford's famous maxim that any knowledge that one
cannot measure numerically "is a poor sort of knowledge", the stage
was set for the conception of the humanities as being precursors to
"social science" was set.
This change was not, and is not, without its detractors, both
inside of academia and outside. The range of critiques begin from
those who believe that the
physical sciences are qualitatively different from social
sciences, through those who do not believe in statistical science of
any kind, through those who disagree with the methodology and kinds
of conclusion of social science, to those who believe the entire
framework of scientificizing these disciplines is solely, or mostly,
from a desire for prestige and to alienate the public.
The Rise of Social Science
Theodore Porter argued in "The Rise of Statistical Thinking"
that the effort to provide a sythetic social science is a matter of
both administration and discovery combined, and that the rise of
social science was, therefore, marked by both pragmatic needs as
much as by theoretical purity. An example of this is the rise of the
concept of
Intelligence Quotient or IQ, a test which produces a number
which it is not clear what, precisely, is being measured, except
that it has pragmatic utility in predicting success in certain
tasks.
The rise of industrialism had created a series of social,
economic, and political problems, particularly in managing supply
and demand in their political economy, the management of resources
for military and developmental use, the creation of mass education
systems to train individuals in symbolic reasoning and problems in
managing the effeects of industrialization itself. The perceived
senselessness of the "Great War" as it was then called, of
1914-1918, now called
World War I, based in what were perceived to be "emotional" and
"irrational" decisions - provided an immediate impetues for a more
"scientific" and easier to manage form of decision making. Simply
put, to manage the new multi-national enterprises, private and
governmental, required more data. More data required a means of
reducing it to information upon which to make decisions. Numbers and
charts could be interpretted more quickly and moved more efficiently
than long texts.
In the
1930's
this new model of managing decision making became cemented with
The New Deal in the US, and in Europe with the increasing need
to manage industrial production and governmental affairs.
Institutions such as
The New School for Social Research,
International Institute of Social History and departments of
"social research" at prestigious universities was meant to fill the
growing demand for individuals who could quantify human interactions
and produce models for decision making on this basis.
Coupled with this pragmatic need, was the belief that the clarity
and simplicity of mathematical expression avoided systematic errors
of holistic thinking and logic rooted in traditional argument. This
trend, part of the larger movement known as
Modernism provided the rhetorical edge for the expansion of
social sciences.
