| Dictionary: social science |
| 5min Related Video: social science |
| US Supreme Court: Social Science |
The increasing role of the courts in law and policy making has significant implications for the interaction of law and science. Even trial courts often require the assistance of science to decide a particular case. This need for science is still greater when litigation involving policy issues reaches the appellate level. Law and science, however, are rather unequal partners in the forensic enterprise. While law needs science considerably more than science needs the law, law controls the terms of the relationship. Science can participate in formal dispute resolution only at the invitation of the law and the interaction of the two disciplines takes place in legal territory and is conducted according to the principles and rules of the law. The only real choice scientists have is to participate or not.
Adjudication requires legal and factual determinations. The former is the province of the law; the latter is not. Through the testimony of lay (direct) or expert witnesses, litigants present evidence regarding the factual issues of the case. Lay witnesses testify on the basis of their personal knowledge of the relevant facts. Expert witnesses testify on the basis of their command of a general body of knowledge and/or the conduct of case‐oriented, special‐purpose inquiries.
Scientists, as expert witnesses, provide two types of testimony, one regarding case facts (adjudicative facts), the other scientific generalizations (legislative facts). Giving evidence about a defendant's blood type in a contested paternity case is an example of the former. Testifying about the differential application of the death penalty is an example of the latter (see Race Discrimination and the Death Penalty).
Many scientists are willing to assist the courts, but their testimony is not always welcome or well used. The record of the U.S. Supreme Court and other appellate courts shows non‐use and misuse of scientific evidence at least as often as proper utilization. The fault does not always lie with the courts. Sometimes the evidence is flawed or incoherent; sometimes no evidence is available. Sometimes neither the litigants nor the court know where to find the relevant evidence. They may not even realize that it is available or, even, that it is needed.
Often the adversarial process gets in the way of a clear and full presentation of the best available scientific evidence. The tactics of cross‐examination—ad hominem attacks, witness bullying, cutting answers short, deliberate deception and setting traps—are designed to confuse, discredit, and embarrass witnesses (who, of course, are unable to fight back), when their testimony cannot be otherwise refuted. Adversarial procedures do not seek truth but partisan advantage.
Scientists tend to misunderstand the primary purpose of the law. The objective is to resolve disputes, not to establish the truth. Scientists are committed to objective fact finding. Objectivity consists of neutrality and autonomy. Neutrality means that the scholar's own preferences will not influence the results of his work. Autonomy means that the preferences of outside agencies will not have such an influence. Of course, objectivity is a goal that is not always reached. In the forensic context, the greater threat is to autonomy. Attorneys want to win. Understandably, they tend to nudge their experts toward partisanship.
A number of procedural and structural reforms have been suggested to improve the interaction of law and science and to make scientific findings more correctly and more readily available to the courts—beginning, perhaps, with the “Brandeis brief.” These range from “science clerks” to panels of experts to assist judges and to special masters and monitors to supervise the development of scientific evidence and testimony. A greater use of courts of special jurisdiction and, even, “science courts” has also been advocated. Few such reforms have yet been tried or adopted, though some of them are authorized under current rules, for example, the appointment of special masters. In any case, judges should consider taking a more active role in assuring complete and accurate presentation of relevant evidence. The courts should also consider developing new (nonadversarial) procedures to test the validity of scientific evidence.
The special characteristics of social science deserve attention. The law's failure to use the findings of the social sciences has often been rationalized by pointing to the “softness” of these disciplines—in contrast to the “hardness” of the physical sciences and the “certainty” of the law. Both comparisons are less persuasive than might appear at first.
As regards scientific “hardness,” all scientific generalizations are probabilistic. No scientific discipline generates “absolutes.” It is a serious error to confuse the deductive certainties of mathematics with the inductive probabilities of science—as did Justice Felix Frankfurter, when he refused to accept psychological evidence because such evidence lacked “mathematical certainty” (Brown v. Board of Education, 1954).
As regards the “certainty” of the law, a reasonably close inspection exposes the fictitious nature of this claim. To believe that judges simply can deduce decisions from case law, statutes, and general principles—that two equally competent judges would necessarily arrive at the same decision—requires considerable blindness to the realities of the law: 5‐to‐4 decisions, reversals, overrulings, judge‐shopping, and the politics of judicial appointments.
The real problem is not the “softness” or the “uncertainty” of social science evidence. Rather, it is the way in which such evidence is introduced, processed, and tested. At the bottom of it all may well be the law's great reluctance to deal with the unaccustomed and unfamiliar.
Bibliography
— Peter W. Sperlich
| Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: social science |
For more information on social science, visit Britannica.com.
| Sports Science and Medicine: social science |
A discipline that involves the systematic study of society and individuals, or social phenomena. There is some disagreement on how far some disciplines, such as the history of sport, can be regarded as a social science or can be studied in a scientific manner.
| US History Companion: Social Sciences |
The idea that human society could be studied "scientifically" gained prominence throughout the Western world during the nineteenth century largely as a result of the triumphs of the sciences of nature, especially physics and biology. If the application of scientific method to the natural order increased our knowledge and enabled us to create new industries and technologies, might not the application of this method to human beings enable us to understand ourselves and bring our affairs under more rational control? Although the hope implied in this question was given its earliest and most influential formulations by European thinkers--especially Auguste Comte of France and John Stuart Mill of Great Britain--the United States proved to be the primary national setting in which the project of developing a "science of society" flourished. American intellectuals created a formidable complex of professional organizations, journals, and attendant institutions designed to advance this project. The history of social science, while in large part an episode in international history, is also a major episode in the intellectual history of the United States.
European social scientists have often claimed to possess more philosophical sophistication than do their American colleagues, to have pursued projects of greater theoretical significance, and to have maintained a more critical perspective on the power structure of their own societies. Although these comparisons have sometimes been overdrawn, it is true that American social scientists have excelled in data-gathering, in the development of research institutions, and in the volume of research completed. It was by means of a creativity more institutional than intellectual that American social science established itself decisively between about 1880 and World War I. During those years American scholars created a variety of specialized professional organizations (e.g., the American Economic Association, founded 1885; the American Political Science Association, 1903; and the American Sociological Society, 1905) and coordinated the activities of these organizations with the operation of two other vital institutions developed simultaneously: the journals in which social science research could be published (e.g., the American Journal of Sociology and the American Political Science Review) and the discipline-defined departments (e.g., economics, sociology, and psychology) in universities around which both doctoral and undergraduate programs were organized. No individual American social scientist of this era made intellectual contributions remotely as original or as enduring as those made in Germany by Max Weber, in England by Alfred Marshall, or in France by Émile Durkheim. Nevertheless, in America the enterprise of specialized, professional social science was firmly and extensively in place.
A major source of the growth of social science in the United States was the widespread hope of middle-class reformers that "experts" would be able to solve many of the social problems that had become manifest in an urban, industrial society with a largely immigrant labor force. Could poverty, corruption, crime, monopoly, and inefficiency be contained by new knowledge and by expert administration? Not only might the social sciences help legislatures and philanthropists address these problems; they might produce a class of "social engineers" ready to manage human affairs. Especially during the Progressive Era, public discussion of social science emphasized this potential contribution to public policy and administration.
Although this technocratic impulse remained prominent within American social science and in the outlook of many people who supported it, two rather different impulses gained strength in the 1920s and proved equally enduring. One was the conviction that the business of social scientists was simply to advance knowledge. In this view, knowledge might be put to good use by politicians, journalists, and everyday citizens, but the role of social scientists themselves was strictly research and theoretical analysis. This "pure science" perspective was evident, for example, in Recent Social Trends (1933), a massive analysis of American society and its problems commissioned by President Herbert Hoover. This perspective became more sharply etched in what came to be called the "behaviorist" and "empiricist" movements of the post-World War II era, as exemplified in quantitative studies of voting behavior. The classic study of this sort was The American Voter (1960), by Angus Campbell, Philip Converse, William Miller, and Donald Stokes.
The second nontechnocratic impulse installed the social scientist in the role of public moralist previously filled by the clergy and by men and women of letters. Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) combined an anthropologist's report of fieldwork in the South Pacific with a social critic's opinions concerning the basic values that ought to inform the lives of Americans. Mead developed a genre of social scientific writing for a large public that was later adopted by a great many of her contemporaries and successors, including the psychologist B. F. Skinner, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, and the sociologists David Riesman and Daniel Bell. Some of these scholars were said to be too journalistic by their pure science contemporaries within American social science, but the latter, in turn, were accused of being narrowly scientistic and of exaggerating their own methodological affinities with physicists.
Although the distinctions among technocrats, pure researchers, and public moralists cut across disciplinary lines, it is those lines between disciplines that have most defined the work and self-image of American social scientists since the Progressive Era. By that time, the sociologists, political scientists, and economists had sorted themselves out from one another and from the historians, with whom the political scientists especially had been closely associated. By that time, also, the psychologists were becoming more sharply set apart from the philosophers, with whom they often continued to share university departments. Anthropology had always been a distinctive enterprise in America, having begun with museums rather than with universities and reform organizations as its primary institutional home. Yet by 1920 the anthropologists were advancing quickly into academia, even if by means of departments shared with sociologists. Hence much of the history of American social science is a history of specific disciplines, each of which has maintained its own agendas for research and its own shifting theoretical premises. Each of these disciplines, moreover, has become increasingly specialized into subdisciplines, each possessed of its own journals and national professional societies. This is especially true of psychology: some university departments of psychology have become little more than administrative devices for the management of what amounts to four or five distinctive, departmentlike programs in undergraduate education as well as graduate training and research.
Some of these American social scientific disciplines became known throughout the world for distinctive intellectual orientations that endured for decades. American anthropologists, for example, were distinguished by their practice of cross-cultural analysis, which undermined the claims to absolute validity made on behalf of the norms of any particular culture. This anthropology of the Boasian school (so called for its leader, Franz Boas) supplanted an "evolutionary" school dominant in the nineteenth century. The Boasians largely controlled American anthropology from the era of World War I until the 1960s. Even thereafter, the most widely discussed American anthropologist of the 1970s and 1980s, Clifford Geertz, worked in the Boasian tradition.
American psychologists were sharply divided into several competing schools, the most prominent of which from the 1930s through the 1970s was the anti-introspective behaviorist school led by Clark Hull and B. F. Skinner. Many of the advances made by the behaviorists resulted from research carried out on laboratory animals, especially rats.
American economists have excelled in the refinement and mathematical modeling of laws believed to operate in capitalist economies. Although the maverick Thorstein Veblen is a famous counterexample, most leading economists in modern America have been called neoclassical because of their broad affinities with the highly rationalist classical theorists (e.g., Adam Smith and David Ricardo) of the early era of capitalist development. Among the most influential of these American neoclassical theorists in the period since World War II have been the Nobel laureates Paul Samuelson, Kenneth Arrow, and Herbert Solow.
Sociology and political science have been more intellectually diverse than the other social scientific disciplines in the United States. Between the 1930s and the 1970s, however, the functionalist orientation of Talcott Parsons and Robert K. Merton defined a large portion of the work done by American sociologists. The functionalists tended to see society as an equilibrium of forces and interests, subject to change through adaptation to novel conditions. The diversity of American political scientists was narrowed in the 1960s by the behaviorist revolution of which The American Voter, cited above, was an exemplary agent. Traditionalists committed to the study of political theory and political institutions sometimes resisted the behaviorists' emphasis on quantitative, large-data-base research with the result that political science became the most contentious of the disciplinary communities within American social science.
Yet for all their disciplinary identity, American social scientists carried out two cross-disciplinary projects of considerable public importance during the third quarter of the twentieth century. The first was the critique of the theoretical and empirical bases for racial discrimination in the United States. Some of the relevant social scientific research was cited by the U.S. Supreme Court in its pivotal 1954 ruling against segregated public schools, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. In the ensuing era, intensive public discussion of race in American life drew upon the work of social scientists of every discipline. Sociologists were especially successful in demonstrating the falsity of many traditional ideas about race, and their work charted the destructive effects of racism on the lives of black Americans.
The second major cross-disciplinary project was directed at what were often called the developing nations of the third world. The experience of postcolonial societies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America was interpreted within the terms of a theory of modernization, according to which every society passes successively through the stages already seen in the modern history of the industrialized West. In this view, the basic social structural, economic, and cultural transformations that took place in Great Britain, Germany, France, and the United States could be expected to unfold in Ghana, Kenya, Indonesia, and other modernizing nations. This theory was articulated in the shadow of the American-Soviet rivalry and was sometimes offered frankly as the basis for an anticommunist program of world economic development. This was true, for example, of one of the most widely cited formulations of the theory, The Stages of Economic Growth (1959) by the economist Walter W. Rostow. The refinement and critical revision of modernization theory was carried out by the political scientist David Apter, the sociologist Daniel Lerner, and a host of scholars in many disciplines.
The intellectual diversity that always characterized social science in America remains more pronounced than ever and renders more difficult any effort to generalize about it as a single entity. Although the concept of social science was originally a means of encouraging and enabling what was once a novel and specific set of projects devoted to the scientific study of society, this set of projects, once firmly established and elaborated by several generations of energetic and creative scholars, outgrew the late nineteenth century's notion of what it meant to be scientific. By the late twentieth century individuals and groups within many of the social science disciplines were doing work very similar to that being carried out simultaneously by historians, philosophers, and other humanistic scholars, even literary critics. The line between science and nonscience that meant so much to early sociologists and political scientists, especially, seemed less portentous to their well-established successors. That "blurred genres" were a prominent feature of the 1970s and 1980s was suggested by Clifford Geertz, and many people came to regard the concept of social science as little more than a convenient administrative category for dealing with a sprawling expanse of enterprises not easily absorbed into natural science, nor into the even more multitudinous humanities.
Author:
David A. Hollinger
| Columbia Encyclopedia: social science |
Bibliography
See C. M. Bonjean, ed., Social Science in America (1976); T. L. Haskell, The Emergence of Professional Social Science (1977); R. S. Lynd, Knowledge for What? (1939, repr. 1986); R. D. Luce et al., ed., Leading Edges in Social and Behavioral Science (1989); D. Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (1991).
| Science Dictionary: social science |
The study of how groups of people behave, often in an effort to predict how they will behave in the future. The social sciences include economics, anthropology, sociology, political science, and aspects of psychology and history.
| Wikipedia: Social sciences |
 |
This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (December 2008) |
The social sciences comprise academic disciplines concerned with the study of the social life of human groups, animals and individuals including anthropology, archeology, communication studies, cultural studies, demography, economics, human geography, history, linguistics, media studies, political science, psychology, social work, and sociology.
Contents |
The word "science" is older than its modern use. Through the influence of positivism, the word has become a short-form for "natural science". It is a recent development that society has become the object of an organized body of knowledge which can be standardized and taught objectively, while following its own rules and methodology.
In ancient philosophy, there was no difference between mathematics and the study of history, poetry or politics.[1] Only with the development of mathematical proof did there gradually arise a perceived difference between "scientific" disciplines and others. Thus, Aristotle studied planetary motion and poetry with the same methods, and Plato mixed geometrical proofs with his demonstration on the state of intrinsic knowledge.
Augustine of Hippo wrote the City of God in the 5th century AD. Bruce Haddock, in 'The Political Classics: Essential Texts from Plato to Rousseau' (OUP 1992), describes the work as a veritable encyclopedia of late Roman culture... [a] penetrating account of human motivation...
Significant contributions to the social sciences were made by Muslim scientists in the Islamic civilization. Al-Biruni (973–1048) has been called "the first anthropologist".[2] He wrote detailed comparative studies on the anthropology of peoples, religions and cultures in the Middle East, Mediterranean and South Asia. Al-Biruni's anthropology of religion was only possible for a scholar deeply immersed in the lore of other nations.[3] Biruni has also been praised by several scholars for his Islamic anthropology).[4]
Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) is regarded as the father of demography,[5] historiography,[6] the philosophy of history,[7] sociology,[5][7] and the social sciences,[8] and is viewed as one of the forerunners of modern economics. He is best known for his Muqaddimah (Prolegomenon in Greek).
After the fall of Rome, which did little in the way of science, theorizing was transferred to the priesthood and a group of scholars known as the scholastics. Prominent thinkers of the Dark Ages such as Abelard, Erigena, St. Anselm and John of Salisbury made few comments on economic analysis. Thomas Aquinas of the 13th century expressed interest in political sociology and wrote on some economics. Near the Renaissance which began around the 14th century Buridanus and Oresmius wrote on money. In the 15th century St. Atonine of Florence wrote of a comprehensive economic process. In the 16th century Leonard de Leys (Lessius), Juan de Lego, and particularly Luis Molina wrote on economic topics. These writers focused on explaining property as something for "public good".[9]
Representative figures of the 17th century include David Hartley, Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Samuel von Putendorf. Thomas Hobbes argued that deductive reasoning from axioms created a scientific framework, and hence his Leviathan was a scientific description of a political commonwealth. In the eighteenth century social science was called moral philosophy, as contrasted from natural philosophy and mathematics, and included the study of natural theology, natural ethics, natural jurisprudence, and policy ("police"), which included economics and finance ("revenue"). Pure philosophy, logic, literature, and history were outside these two categories. Adam Smith was a professor of moral philosophy, and he was taught by Francis Hutcheson. Figures of the time included François Quesnay, Rousseau, Giambattista Vico, William Godwin, Gabriel Bonnet de Mably, and Andre Morellet. The Encyclopédie of the time contained various works on the social sciences.[9]
The term "social science" first appeared in the 1824 book An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth Most Conducive to Human Happiness; applied to the Newly Proposed System of Voluntary Equality of Wealth by William Thompson (1775–1833). Auguste 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 over time of sounds in a language.
It was with the work of Charles Darwin that the descriptive version of social theory received another shock. Biology had, seemingly, resisted mathematical study, and yet the theory of natural selection and the implied idea of genetic inheritance - later found to have been enunciated by Gregor Mendel, seemed to point in the direction of a scientific biology based, like physics and chemistry, on mathematical relationships.
In the first half of the 20th century, statistics became a free-standing discipline of applied mathematics. Statistical methods were used confidently, for example in 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, he abandoned Hegelian constructs. Influenced by both Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, he joined the movement in America called pragmatism. He then formulated his basic doctrine, enunciated in essays such as "The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy" (1910).
This idea, based on his theory of how organisms respond, states that there are three phases to the process of inquiry:
With the rise of the idea of quantitative 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."
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[citation needed], through those who do not believe in statistical science of any kind[citation needed], through those who disagree with the methodology and kinds of conclusion of social science[citation needed], to those who believe the entire framework of scientificizing these disciplines is mostly from a desire for prestige.
Some social science subfields have become very quantitative in methodology. Conversely, the interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary nature of scientific inquiry into human behavior and social and environmental factors affecting it have made many of the natural sciences interested on some aspects of social science methodology.[10] Examples of boundary blurring include emerging disciplines like social studies of medicine, sociobiology, neuropsychology, bioeconomics and the history and sociology of science. Increasingly, quantitative and qualitative methods are being integrated in the study of human action and its implications and consequences.
In 1924, prominent social scientists established the Pi Gamma Mu honor society for the social sciences. Among its key objectives were to promote interdisciplinary cooperation and develop an integrated theory of human personality and organization. Toward these ends, a journal for interdisciplinary scholarship in the various social sciences and lectureship grants were established.
Theodore Porter argued in The Rise of Statistical Thinking that the effort to provide a synthetic 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. It is unclear precisely what is being measured, but the measurement is useful in that it predicts success in various endeavors.
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 effects of industrialization itself. The perceived senselessness of the "Great War" as it was then called, of 1914–18, now called World War I, based in what were perceived to be "emotional" and "irrational" decisions, provided an immediate impetus for a form of decision making that was more "scientific" and easier to manage. 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 interpreted more quickly and moved more efficiently than long texts. Conversely, the interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary nature of scientific inquiry into human behavior and social and environmental factors affecting it have made many of the so-called hard sciences dependent on social science methodology. Examples of boundary blurring include emerging disciplines like social studies of medicine, neuropsychology, bioeconomics and the history and sociology of science. Increasingly, quantitative and qualitative methods are being integrated in the study of human action and its implications and consequences.
In the 1930s 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 were 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.
There continues to be little movement toward consensus on what methodology might have the power and refinement to connect a proposed "grand theory" with the various midrange theories which, with considerable success, continue to provide usable frameworks for massive, growing data banks. See consilience.
Universities throughout the world consider the study of the social sciences as vital for the future of society, and most cater for many degrees in the multiplicity of social science fields.
In the United States, a degree candidate who has studied a field within the social sciences may earn a Bachelor of Arts degree, particularly if the field was within one of the traditional "liberal arts" - such as history - or may earn a Bachelor of Science degree, as the social sciences constitute one of the two main branches of "science" (the other being the "natural sciences"). In addition, beginning in the 20th century, specialized degrees have been created at some institutions specifically for a social science - such as Bachelor of Economics degree, though such specialized degrees are relatively rare in the United States.
The Bachelor of Social Science, BSocSc or B.Soc.Sc is a degree targeted at the social sciences in particular, it is often more flexible and in-depth than other degrees which also include social science subjects. The Bachelor of Social Science can be studied at the University of Adelaide, University of Waikato (Hamilton, New Zealand), University of Sydney (Sydney, (Australia), University of New South Wales (Sydney), [University of Hong Kong]] (Hong Kong, China), University of Manchester (Manchester, England), Lincoln University (Christchurch, New Zealand), National University of Malaysia (Bangi, Malaysia), and University of Queensland (Brisbane, austrilla xD
|
|
This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (March 2009) |
 |
This section requires expansion. |
Anthropology is the holistic discipline that deals with the integration of different aspects of the Social Sciences, Humanities, and Human Biology. It includes Archaeology, Prehistory, Physical or Biological Anthropology, Anthropological Linguistics, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Ethnology and Ethnography. It is an area that is offered at most undergraduate institutions. The word anthropos (άνθρωπος) is from the Greek for "human being" or "person." Eric Wolf described sociocultural anthropology as "the most scientific of the humanities, and the most humanistic of the sciences."
Economics is a social science that seeks to analyze and describe the production, distribution, and consumption of wealth.[11] The word "economics" is from the Greek οἶκος [oikos], "family, household, estate," and νόμος [nomos], "custom, law," and hence means "household management" or "management of the state." An economist is a person using economic concepts and data in the course of employment, or someone who has earned a university degree in the subject. The classic brief definition of economics, set out by Lionel Robbins in 1932, is "the science which studies human behavior as a relation between scarce means having alternative uses." Without scarcity and alternative uses, there is no economic problem. Briefer yet is "the study of how people seek to satisfy needs and wants" and "the study of the financial aspects of human behaviour."
Economics has two broad branches: microeconomics, where the unit of analysis is the individual agent, such as a household, firm and macroeconomics, where the unit of analysis is an economy as a whole. Another division of the subject distinguishes positive economics, which seeks to predict and explain economic phenomena, from normative economics, which orders choices and actions by some criterion; such orderings necessarily involve subjective value judgments. Since the early part of the 20th century, economics has focused largely on measurable quantities, employing both theoretical models and empirical analysis. Quantitative models, however, can be traced as far back as the physiocratic school. Economic reasoning has been increasingly applied in recent decades to social situations where there is no monetary consideration, such as politics, law, psychology, history, religion, marriage and family life, and other social interactions.
This paradigm crucially assumes (1) that resources are scarce because they are not sufficient to satisfy all wants, and (2) that "economic value" is willingness to pay as revealed for instance by market (arms' length) transactions. Rival schools of thought, such as heterodox economics, institutional economics, Marxist economics, socialism, green economics, and economic sociology, make other grounding assumptions, such as that economics primarily deals with the exchange of value, and that labor (human effort) is the source of all value.
The expanding domain of economics in the social sciences has been described as economic imperialism.[12][13]
Education encompasses teaching and learning specific skills, and also something less tangible but more profound: the imparting of knowledge, positive judgement and well-developed wisdom. Education has as one of its fundamental aspects the imparting of culture from generation to generation (see socialization). To educate means 'to draw out', from the Latin educare, or to facilitate the realization of an individual's potential and talents. It is an application of pedagogy, a body of theoretical and applied research relating to teaching and learning and draws on many disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, computer science, linguistics, neuroscience, sociology and anthropology.[14]
The education of an individual human begins at birth and continues throughout life. (Some believe that education begins even before birth, as evidenced by some parents' playing music or reading to the baby in the womb in the hope it will influence the child's development.) For some, the struggles and triumphs of daily life provide far more instruction than does formal schooling (thus Mark Twain's admonition to "never let school interfere with your education"). Family members may have a profound educational effect — often more profound than they realize — though family teaching may function very informally.
Geography as a discipline can be split broadly into two main sub fields: human geography and physical geography. The former focuses largely on the built environment and how space is created, viewed and managed by humans as well as the influence humans have on the space they occupy. The latter examines the natural environment and how the climate, vegetation & life, soil, water and landforms are produced and interact.[15] As a result of the two subfields using different approaches a third field has emerged, which is environmental geography. Environmental geography combines physical and human geography and looks at the interactions between the environment and humans.[16]
Geographers attempt to understand the earth in terms of physical and spatial relationships. The first geographers focused on the science of mapmaking and finding ways to precisely project the surface of the earth. In this sense, geography bridges some gaps between the natural sciences and social sciences. Historical geography is often taught in a college in a unified Department of Geography.
Modern geography is an all-encompassing discipline, closely related to GISc, that seeks to understand humanity and its natural environment. The fields of Urban Planning, Regional Science, and Planetology are closely related to geography. Practitioners of geography use many technologies and methods to collect data such as GIS, remote sensing, aerial photography, statistics, and global positioning systems (GPS).
The field of geography is generally split into two distinct branches: physical and human. Physical geography examines phenomena related to climate, oceans, soils, and the measurement of earth. Human geography focuses on fields as diverse as Cultural geography, transportation, health, military operations, and cities. Other branches of geography include Social geography, regional geography, geomatics, and environmental geography.
History is the continuous, systematic narrative and research of past events as relating to the human species; as well as the study of all events in time, in relation to humanity. There is much debate over history's classification of academe, for instance in the United States the National Endowment for the Humanities includes history in its definition of a Humanities (as it does for applied Linguistics)[17]. However the National Research Council classifies History as a Social science.[18] History can be seen as the sum total of many things taken together and the spectrum of events occurring in action following in order leading from the past to the present and into the future. The historical method comprises the techniques and guidelines by which historians use primary sources and other evidence to research and then to write history.
Law in common parlance, means a rule which (unlike a rule of ethics) is capable of enforcement through institutions.[19] The study of law crosses the boundaries between the social sciences and humanities, depending on one's view of research into its objectives and effects. Law is not always enforceable, especially in the international relations context. It has been defined as a "system of rules",[20] as an "interpretive concept"[21] to achieve justice, as an "authority"[22] to mediate people's interests, and even as "the command of a sovereign, backed by the threat of a sanction".[23] However one likes to think of law, it is a completely central social institution. Legal policy incorporates the practical manifestation of thinking from almost every social sciences and humanity. Laws are politics, because politicians create them. Law is philosophy, because moral and ethical persuasions shape their ideas. Law tells many of history's stories, because statutes, case law and codifications build up over time. And law is economics, because any rule about contract, tort, property law, labour law, company law and many more can have long lasting effects on the distribution of wealth. The noun law derives from the late Old English lagu, meaning something laid down or fixed[24] and the adjective legal comes from the Latin word lex.[25]
Linguistics investigates the cognitive and social aspects of human language. The field is divided into areas that focus on aspects of the linguistic signal, such as syntax (the study of the rules that govern the structure of sentences), semantics (the study of meaning), phonetics (the study of speech sounds) and phonology (the study of the abstract sound system of a particular language); however, work in areas like evolutionary linguistics (the study of the origins and evolution of language) and psycholinguistics (the study of psychological factors in human language) cut across these divisions.
The overwhelming majority of modern research in linguistics takes a predominantly synchronic perspective (focusing on language at a particular point in time), and a great deal of it—partly owing to the influence of Noam Chomsky—aims at formulating theories of the cognitive processing of language. However, language does not exist in a vacuum, or only in the brain, and approaches like contact linguistics, creole studies, discourse analysis, social interactional linguistics, and sociolinguistics explore language in its social context. Sociolinguistics often makes use of traditional quantitative analysis and statistics in investigating the frequency of features, while some disciplines, like contact linguistics, focus on qualitative analysis. While certain areas of linguistics can thus be understood as clearly falling within the social sciences, other areas, like acoustic phonetics and neurolinguistics, draw on the natural sciences. Linguistics draws only secondarily on the humanities, which played a rather greater role in linguistic inquiry in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Ferdinand Saussure is considered the father of modern linguistics.
Political science is an academic and research discipline that deals with the theory and practice of politics and the description and analysis of political systems and political behavior. Fields and subfields of political science include political economy,political theory and philosophy, civics and comparative politics, theory of direct democracy, apolitical governance, participatory direct democracy, national systems, cross-national political analysis, political development, international relations, foreign policy, international law, politics, public administration, administrative behavior, public law, judicial behavior, and public policy. Political science also studies power in international relations and the theory of Great powers and Superpowers.
Political science is methodologically diverse. Approaches to the discipline include classical political philosophy, interpretivism, structuralism, and behavioralism, realism, pluralism, and institutionalism. Political science, as one of the social sciences, uses methods and techniques that relate to the kinds of inquiries sought: primary sources such as historical documents and official records, secondary sources such as scholarly journal articles, survey research, statistical analysis, case studies, and model building. Herbert Baxter Adams is credited with coining the phrase "political science" while teaching history at Johns Hopkins University.
|
|
This section does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (March 2009) |
One of the main branches of political science, public administration can be broadly described as the development, implementation and study of branches of government policy. The pursuit of the public good by enhancing civil society and social justice is the ultimate goal of the field. Though public administration has historically referred to as government management, it increasingly encompasses non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that also operate with a similar, primary dedication to the betterment of humanity.
Differentiating public administration from business administration, a closely related field, has become a popular method for defining the discipline. First, the goals of public administration are more closely related to those often cited as goals of the American founders and democratic people in general. That is, public employees work to improve equality, justice, security, efficiency, effectiveness, and, at times, for profit. These values help to both differentiate the field from business administration, primarily concerned with profit, and define the discipline. Second, public administration is a relatively new, multidisciplinary field. Woodrow Wilson's The Study of Administration is frequently cited as the seminal work. Dr. Wilson advocated a more professional operation of public officials' daily activities. Further, the future president identified the necessity in the United States of a separation between party politics and good bureaucracy, which has also been a lasting theme.
The multidisciplinary nature of public administration is related to a third defining feature: administrative duties. Public administrators work in public agencies, at all levels of government, and perform a wide range of tasks. Public administrators collect and analyze data (statistics), monitor fiscal operations (budgets, accounts, and cash flow), organize large events and meetings, draft legislation, develop policy, and frequently execute legally mandated, government activities. Regarding this final facet, public administrators find themselves serving as parole officers, secretaries, note takers, paperwork processors, records keepers, notaries of the public, cashiers, and managers. Indeed, the discipline couples well with many vocational fields such as information technology, finance, law, and engineering. When it comes to the delivery and evaluation of public services, a public administrator is undoubtedly involved.
Psychology is an academic and applied field involving the study of behavior and mental processes. Psychology also refers to the application of such knowledge to various spheres of human activity, including problems of individuals' daily lives and the treatment of mental illness.
Psychology differs from anthropology, economics, political science, and sociology in seeking to capture explanatory generalizations about the mental function and overt behaviour of individuals, while the other disciplines focus on creating descriptive generalizations about the functioning of social groups or situation-specific human behavior. In practice, however, there is quite a lot of cross-fertilization that takes place among the various fields. Psychology differs from biology and neuroscience in that it is primarily concerned with the interaction of mental processes and behavior, and of the overall processes of a system, and not simply the biological or neural processes themselves, though the subfield of neuropsychology combines the study of the actual neural processes with the study of the mental effects they have subjectively produced. Many people associate Psychology with Clinical Psychology which focuses on assessment and treatment of problems in living and psychopathology. In reality, Psychology has myriad specialties including: Social Psychology, Developmental Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Industrial-Organizational Psychology, Mathematical psychology, Neuropsychology, and Quantitative Analysis of Behaviour to name only a few. The word psychology comes from the ancient Greek ψυχή, psyche ("soul", "mind") and logy, study).
Psychology is a very broad science that is rarely tackled as a whole, major block. Although some subfields encompass a natural science base and a social science application, others can be clearly distinguished as having little to do with the social sciences or having a lot to do with the social sciences. For example, biological psychology is considered a natural science with a social scientific application (as is clinical medicine), social and occupational psychology are, generally speaking, purely social sciences, whereas neuropsychology is a natural science that lacks application out of the scientific tradition entirely. In British universities, emphasis on what tenet of psychology a student has studied and/or concentrated is communicated through the degree conferred: B.Psy. indicates a balance between natural and social sciences, B.Sc. indicates a strong (or entire) scientific concentration, whereas a B.A. underlines a majority of social science credits.
Social Work is concerned with social problems, their causes, their solutions and their human impacts. Social workers work with individuals, families, groups, organizations and communities. Social Work is the profession committed to the pursuit of social justice, to the enhancement of the quality of life, and to the development of the full potential of each individual, group and community in society. Social refers to human society or its organization. stem "soci-" which is from the Latin word socius, meaning member, friend, or ally, thus referring to people in general. It is a social science involving the application of social theory and research methods to the study and improve the lives of people, groups, and societies. Social work is unique in that it seeks to simultaneously navigate across and within micro , mezzo, and macro systems -in order to sufficiently address and resolve social issues at every level. Social work incorporates and utilizes all of the social sciences as a means to improve the human condition.
Social work bases its methodology on a systematic body of evidence-based knowledge derived from research and practice evaluation, including local and indigenous knowledge specific to its context. It recognizes the complexity of interactions between human beings and their environment, and the capacity of people both to be affected by and to alter the multiple influences upon them including bio-psychosocial factors. The social work profession draws on theories of human development and behaviour and social systems to analyse complex situations and to facilitate individual, organizational, social and cultural changes. (International Federation of Social Workers).
In social work research there is a great deal of traditional research, both qualitative and quantitative being carried out, primarily by university-based researchers, but also in different fields, by researchers based in institutes, foundations, or social service agencies. Meanwhile, the majority of social work practitioners continue to look elsewhere for knowledge. This is a state of affairs that has persisted since the outset of the profession in the first decade of the twentieth century. One reason for the practice-research gap is that practitioners deal with situations that are unique and idiosyncratic, while research deals with regularities and aggregates. The translation between the two is often imperfect. A hopeful development for bridging this gap is the compilation in many practice fields of collections of "best practices," largely taken from research findings, but also distilled from the experience of respected practitioners.
One of the most prominent organizations promoting social work research science is The Society for Social Work and Research (http://www.sswr.org/) which is a non-profit professional society incorporated in the State of New York in 1993. The Society is devoted to the involvement of social workers, other social work faculty, and social work students in research and to promotion of human welfare through research and research applications.
Sociology is the study of society and human social action. It generally concerns itself with the social rules and processes that bind and separate people not only as individuals, but as members of associations, groups, communities and institutions, and includes the examination of the organization and development of human social life. The sociological field of interest ranges from the analysis of short contacts between anonymous individuals on the street to the study of global social processes. Most sociologists work in one or more subfields.
The meaning of the word comes from the suffix "-ology" which means "study of," derived from Greek, and the stem "soci-" which is from the Latin word socius, meaning member, friend, or ally, thus referring to people in general. It is a social science involving the application of social theory and research methods to the study of the social lives of people, groups, and societies, sometimes defined as the study of social interactions. It is a relatively new academic discipline which evolved in the early 19th century.
Because sociology is such a broad discipline, it can be difficult to define, even for professional sociologists. One useful way to describe the discipline is as a cluster of sub-fields that examine different dimensions of society. For example, social stratification studies inequality and class structure; demography studies changes in a population size or type; criminology examines criminal behavior and deviance; political sociology studies government and laws; and the sociology of race and sociology of gender examine society's racial and gender cleavages.
Sociological methods, theories, and concepts may inspire sociologists to explore the origins of commonly accepted conventions. Sociology offers insights about the social world that extend beyond explanations that rely on individual quirks and personalities. Sociologist may find general social patterns in studying the behaviour of particular individuals and groups. This specific approach to social reality is sometimes called the sociological perspective.[citation needed]
Sociologists use a diversity of research methods, including case studies, historical research, interviewing, participant observation, social network analysis, survey research, statistical analysis, and model building, among other approaches. Since the late 1970s, many sociologists have tried to make the discipline useful for non-academic purposes. The results of sociological research aid educators, lawmakers, administrators, developers, and others interested in resolving social problems and formulating public policy, through subdisciplinary areas such as evaluation research, methodological assessment, and public sociology. New sociological sub-fields continue to appear - such as community studies, computational sociology, network analysis, actor-network theory and a growing list, many of which are cross-disciplinary in nature.
Many social scientists emphasize the subjective nature of research. These writers share social theory perspectives that include various types of critical theory, dialectical materialism, feminist theory, phronetic social science, assorted branches of Marxist theory such as revolutionary theory and class theory, post-colonial theory, postmodernism as well as the related intellectual criticalism and scientific criticalism, rational choice theory, rational criticalism, social constructionism, structuralism, and structural functionalism.
And many scientists emphasize the (difficult to achieve) goal of objective research or statistical hypothesis testing. These scientists emphasize the importance of measurement and analysis. Research methods attempt to reduce quantitative and qualitative aspects of social phenomena into numerical variables. Questionnaires, field-based data collection, archival database information and laboratory-based data collections are some of the measurement techniques used.
|
|
This section does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (July 2007) |
The social sciences are sometimes criticized as being less scientific than the natural sciences, in that they are seen as being less rigorous or empirical in their methods. This claim has been made in the so-called Science Wars and is most commonly made when comparing social sciences to fields such as physics, chemistry or biology in which corroboration of the hypothesis is far more incisive with regard to data observed from specifically designed experiments. Social sciences can thus be deemed to be largely observational, in that explanations for cause-effect relationships are largely subjective. A limited degree of freedom is available in designing the factor setting for a particular observational study. Social scientists however, argue against such claims by pointing to the use of a rich variety of scientific processes, mathematical proofs, and other methods in their professional literature. Flyvbjerg (2001) has argued that the discussion of whether natural science is more scientific than social science is futile; social science is best practiced as phronesis, whereas natural science is best practiced as episteme, in the classical Greek meaning of the terms, and both have important if different roles to play in the production of knowledge in society.
It has been argued that the social world is much too complex to be studied as one would study static molecules. The actions or reactions of a molecule or chemical substance are always the same when placed in certain situations. Humans, on the other hand, are much too complex for these traditional scientific methodologies. Humans and society do not have certain rules that always have the same outcome and they cannot guarantee to react the same way to certain situations.
A third criticism is that social sciences tend to be compromised more frequently by politics, since results from social science may threaten certain centers of power in a society, particularly ones which fund the research institutions. Further, complexity exacerbates the problems, since observed social data may be the result of factors which are hard to evaluate in isolation.
Not all institutions recognize some fields listed above as social sciences or as being only social scientific. Some disciplines have characteristics of both the humanities, social and natural sciences: for example some subfields of anthropology, such as biological anthropology, are closely related to the natural sciences whereas archaeology and linguistics are social sciences, while cultural anthropology is very much linked with the humanities. Note that social science methodologies are being incorporated into so-called hard science fields like medicine, where a three-legged stool to the understanding of physical well-being is now emphasized in the medical curriculum: biological, socio-psychological, and environmental.
Some scientists have expressed their view that social sciences do not even qualify as science, for example, physics Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman said: [26]
"Because of the success of science, there is, I think, a kind of pseudoscience. Social science is an example of a science which is not a science; they don't do things scientifically, they follow the forms—or you gather data, you do so-and-so and so forth but they don't get any laws, they haven't found out anything."
 |
Wikipedia:Books has a book on: Social sciences |
The beginnings of the social sciences in the 18th century are reflected in the grand encyclopedia of Diderot, with articles from Rousseau and other pioneers. The growth of the social sciences is also reflected in its specialised encyclopedias. The older editions are therefore of strong historical interest while the newest reflects current discussions and methodologies.
|
|||||
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
 | sociologic |
| economics (industrial engineering) |
| Critique |
Copyrights:
 |
 | Dictionary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2007. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. Read more |
 |
| US Supreme Court. The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States. Copyright © 1992, 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. Read more |
 |
| Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved. Read more |
|
| Sports Science and Medicine. The Oxford Dictionary of Sports Science & Medicine. Copyright © Michael Kent 1998, 2006, 2007. All rights reserved. Read more |
 |
| US History Companion. The Reader's Companion to American History, Eric Foner and John A. Garraty, Editors, published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. Read more |
 |
| Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/ Read more |
 |
| Science Dictionary. The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition Edited by E.D. Hirsch, Jr., Joseph F. Kett, and James Trefil. Copyright © 2002 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin. All rights reserved. Read more |
 |
| Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Social sciences". Read more |
Mentioned in
|
