The social sciences are a group of academic disciplines that study human aspects of the world. They diverge from the
arts and humanities in that the social sciences tend to
emphasize the use of the scientific method in the study of humanity, including
quantitative and qualitative
methods.
The social sciences,[1] in studying subjective,
inter-subjective and objective or structural aspects of society, were traditionally referred to as soft sciences. This is in contrast to hard sciences, such
as the natural science, which may focus exclusively on objective aspects of nature.
Nowadays, however, the distinction between the so-called soft and hard sciences is blurred. Some social science subfields have
become very quantitative in methodology or behavioral in approach. 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.
History of the social sciences
-
The word "science" is older than its modern use, which is as a short-form for "natural science". Uses of the word "science",
in contexts other than those of the natural sciences, are historically valid, so long as they are describing an art or organized
body of knowledge which can be taught objectively. The use of the word "science" is not therefore always an attempt to claim that
the subject in question ought to stand on the same footing of inquiry as a natural science.
Ancient Greece
- See also: Ancient Greece
In ancient philosophy, there was no difference between 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 the liberal arts. Thus, Aristotle studied planetary motion and poetry with the same methods, and
Plato mixes geometrical proofs with his demonstration on the
state of intrinsic knowledge.
Islamic civilization
- Further information: Early Muslim sociology and Historiography of early Islam
Significant contributions to the social sciences were made by Muslim scientists in
the Islamic civilization. Al-Biruni
(973-1048) has been described as "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).
European enlightenment
- See also: Age of
Enlightenment
During the European Age of Enlightenment, 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 Isaac 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 philosophical ideals was taken to be symbolic of natural human
relationships as well: the same laws moved physical and spiritual realities. 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 emulate.
Nineteenth century
- See also: Nineteenth century
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.
Twentieth century
- See also: Twentieth century
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:
- Problematic Situation, where the typical response is inadequate.
- Isolation of Data or subject matter.
- Reflective, which is tested empirically.
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 solely, or mostly, from a desire for prestige and to alienate the public
[citation needed].
Rise
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 1914-1918, 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.
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.
Present state
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.
Social science disciplines
Anthropology
-
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 and
Paleontology, Physical or Biological Anthropology, Anthropological
Linguistics, Social and Cultural
Anthropology, Ethnology and Ethnography. 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
-
Economics is a social science that seeks to analyze and describe the production,
distribution, and consumption of wealth.[9] 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, and green economics,
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.
Education
-
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). Education means 'to draw out', facilitating realisation of self-potential and latent
talents of an individual. 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. [10]
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
-
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.[11] 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.[12]
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.
Modern geography is an all-encompassing discipline that seeks to understand how the world has changed in terms of human
settlement and natural patterns. The fields of Urban Planning, Regional Science, and Planetology are closely related to
geography. Practicioners of geography use many technologies and methods to collect data such as 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,
geomantics, and environmental geography.
Geography traverses the natural and social sciences. Historical geography is
often taught in a college in a unified Department of Geography.
History
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)[13].
However the National Research Council classifies History as a
Social science.[14] 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
-
Law in common parlance, means a rule which (unlike a rule of ethics) is capable of enforcement through institutions.[15] 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",[16] as an "interpretive concept"[17] to achieve justice, as an "authority"[18] to mediate people's interests, and even as "the command of a sovereign, backed by the threat of a
sanction".[19] 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[20] and the adjective legal
comes from the Latin word lex.[21]
Linguistics
-
Linguistics is a discipline that looks at the cognitive and social aspects of human language. The field is traditionally
divided into areas that focus on particular 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
-
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 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.
Psychology
-
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 rely more heavily on field studies and historical
methods for extracting descriptive generalizations. 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.
Sociology
-
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 mode