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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia:
social science |
For more information on social science, visit Britannica.com.
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
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 |
The social sciences are the fields of academic scholarship which explore aspects of human society.[1] Social sciences may draw upon empirical methods and attempt to emulate the standards of conventional scientific practice. By contrast, other social scientists employ critical analysis or hermeneutic methods to study objects of enquiry they regard as inconsistent with the conventional approach.
Social science is commonly used as an umbrella term to refer to a plurality of fields outside of the natural sciences. These fields include: anthropology, archaeology, comparative musicology, communication studies, cultural studies, demography, economics, history, human geography, international development, international relations, linguistics, media studies, philology, political science, psychology (at least in part), social work, social policy and sociology.
The term may be used, however, in the specific context of referring to the original sciences of society established in 19th century sociology. Émile Durkheim, Karl Marx and Max Weber are typically cited as the principal architects of modern social science by this definition.[2] Positivist sociologists attempt to emulate the natural sciences as a model for understanding society, and so define "science" in its stricter modern sense. Antipositivists, by contrast, use social critique or symbolic interpretation rather than raw empirical observation, and thus treat "science" in its broader, classical sense. In modern academic practice theorists are often eclectic, using multiple methodologies. In the terms of sociologists Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, social scientists seek an understanding of the Social Construction of Reality.
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The history of the social sciences begins in the roots of ancient philosophy. In Ancient history, there was no difference between mathematics and the study of history, poetry or politics. Significant contributions to the social sciences were made by Muslim scientists in the Islamic civilization during the Middle Ages. This unity of science as descriptive remains and deductive reasoning from axioms created a scientific framework.
The Age of Enlightenment saw a revolution within natural philosophy, changing the basic framework by which individuals understood what was "scientific". In some quarters, the accelerating trend of mathematical studies presumed a reality independent of the observer and worked by its own rules. Social sciences came forth from the moral philosophy of the time and was influenced by the Age of Revolutions, such as the Industrial revolution and the French revolution.[1] The social sciences developed from the sciences (experimental and applied), or the systematic knowledge-bases or prescriptive practices, relating to the social improvement of a group of interacting entities.[3][4]
The beginnings of the social sciences in the 18th century are reflected in various grand encyclopedia of Diderot, with articles from Rousseau and other pioneers. The growth of the social sciences is also reflected in other specialized encyclopedias. In the modern period, the term "social science" first used as a distinct conceptual field.[5]. Social science was influenced by positivism,[1] focusing on knowledge based on actual positive sense experience and avoiding the negative; metaphysical speculation was avoided. Auguste Comte used the term "science social" to describe the field, taken from the ideas of Charles Fourier; Comte also referred to the field as social physics.[1][6]
Following this period, there were five paths of development that sprang forth in the Social Sciences, influenced by Comte or other fields.[1] One route that was taken was the rise of social research. Large statistical surveys were undertaken in various parts of the United States and Europe. Another route undertaken was initiated by Émile Durkheim, studying "social facts", and Vilfredo Pareto, opening metatheoretical ideas and individual theories. A third means developed, arising from the methodological dichotomy present, in which the social phenomena was identified with and understood; this was championed by figures such as Max Weber. The fourth route taken, based in economics, was developed and furthered economic knowledge as a hard science. The last path was the correlation of knowledge and social values; the antipositivism and verstehen sociology of Max Weber firmly demanded on this distinction. In this route, theory (description) and prescription were non-overlapping formal discussions of a subject.
Around the turn of the 20th century, Enlightenment philosophy was challenged in various quarters. After the use of classical theories since the end of the scientific revolution, various fields substituted mathematics studies for experimental studies and examining equations to build a theoretical structure. The development of social science subfields became very quantitative in methodology. Conversely, the interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary nature of scientific inquiry into human behavior and social and environmental factors affecting it made many of the natural sciences interested in some aspects of social science methodology.[7] Examples of boundary blurring include emerging disciplines like social research of medicine, sociobiology, neuropsychology, bioeconomics and the history and sociology of science. Increasingly, quantitative research and qualitative methods are being integrated in the study of human action and its implications and consequences. In the first half of the 20th century, statistics became a free-standing discipline of applied mathematics. Statistical methods were used confidently.
In the contemporary period, Karl Popper and Talcott Parsons influenced the furtherance of the social sciences.[1] Researchers continues to search for a unified 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; for more, see consilience. At present though, the various realms of social science progress in a myriad of ways, increasing the overall knowledge of society. The social sciences will for the foreseeable future be composed of different zones in the research of, and sometime distinct in approach toward, the field.[1]
Social science may refer either to the specific sciences of society established by thinkers such as Comte, Durkheim, Marx, and Weber, or general to all disciplines outside of noble science and arts. In the late 19th century, academic social sciences initially were constituted of five fields: jurisprudence and amendment of the law, education, health, economy and trade, and art.[3]
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The following are problem areas and discipline branches within the social sciences.[1]
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The Social Science disciplines are branches of knowledge which are taught and researched at the college or university level. Social Science disciplines are defined and recognized by the academic journals in which research is published, and the learned Social Science societies and academic departments or faculties to which their practitioners belong. Social Science fields of study usually have several sub-disciplines or branches, and the distinguishing lines between these are often both arbitrary and ambiguous.
Anthropology is the holistic "science of man". The discipline deals with the integration of different aspects of the Social Sciences, Humanities, and Human Biology. In the twentieth century, academic disciplines have often been institutionally divided into three broad domains. The natural and biological sciences seek to derive general laws through reproducible and verifiable experiments. The humanities generally study local traditions, through their history, literature, music, and arts, with an emphasis on understanding particular individuals, events, or eras. The social sciences have generally attempted to develop scientific methods to understand social phenomena in a generalizable way, though usually with methods distinct from those of the natural sciences.
The anthropological social sciences often develop statistical descriptions rather than the general laws derived in physics or chemistry, or they may explain individual cases through more general principles, as in many fields of psychology. Anthropology (like some fields of history) does not easily fit into one of these categories, and different branches of anthropology draw on one or more of these domains.[8] 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."
The goal of anthropology is to provide a holistic account of humans and human nature. Since anthropology arose as a science in Western societies that were complex and industrial, a major trend within anthropology has been a methodological drive to study peoples in societies with more simple social organization, sometimes called "primitive" in anthropological literature, but without any connotation of "inferior."[9] Today, most anthropologists use terms such as "less complex" societies or refer to specific modes of subsistence or production, such as "hunter-gatherer" or "forager" or "simple farmer" to refer to humans living in non-industrial, non-Western cultures, such people or folk (ethnos) remaining of great interest within anthropology.
The quest for holism leads most anthropologists to study a particular folk or people in detail, using biogenetic, archaeological, and linguistic data alongside direct observation of contemporary customs.[10] In the 1990s and 2000s, calls for clarification of what constitutes a culture, of how an observer knows where his or her own culture ends and another begins, and other crucial topics in writing anthropology were heard. It is possible to view all human cultures as part of one large, evolving global culture. These dynamic relationships, between what can be observed on the ground, as opposed to what can be observed by compiling many local observations remain fundamental in any kind of anthropology, whether cultural, biological, linguistic or archaeological.[11]
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Economics is a social science that seeks to analyze and describe the production, distribution, and consumption of wealth.[12] 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 or 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.[13][14]
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.[15]
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.[16] 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.[17]
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).[18] However the National Research Council classifies History as a Social science.[19] 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.[20] 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",[21] as an "interpretive concept"[22] to achieve justice, as an "authority"[23] to mediate people's interests, and even as "the command of a sovereign, backed by the threat of a sanction".[24] 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[25] and the adjective legal comes from the Latin word lex.[26]
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), morphology (the study of the structure of words), 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 behaviour. Fields and subfields of political science include positive 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 that branch of one, which deals with the study of politics, analysis of its system and behaviour.
Political science is methodologically diverse. Although recent years have witnessed an upsurge in the use of the scientific method [2]. That is the proliferation of formal-deductive model building and quantitative hypothesis testing. Approaches to the discipline include rational choice, 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/econometrics, case studies, and model building. Herbert Baxter Adams is credited with coining the phrase "political science" while teaching history at Johns Hopkins University.
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.
Sociology is the scientific or systematic study of society and human social action. 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 "companion", or society in general.
Sociology was originally established by Auguste Comte (1798–1857) in 1838.[27] Comte endeavoured to unify history, psychology and economics through the scientific understanding of the social realm. He proposed that social ills could be remedied through sociological positivism, an epistemological approach outlined in The Course in Positive Philosophy [1830–1842] and A General View of Positivism (1844). Though Comte is generally regarded as the "Father of Sociology", the discipline was formally established by another French thinker, Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), who developed positivism in greater detail. Durkheim set up the first European department of sociology at the University of Bordeaux in 1895, publishing his Rules of the Sociological Method. In 1896, he established the journal L'Année Sociologique. Durkheim's seminal monograph, Suicide (1897), a case study of suicide rates amongst Catholic and Protestant populations, distinguished sociological analysis from psychology or philosophy.[28]
Karl Marx rejected Comtean positivism but nevertheless aimed to establish a science of society based on historical materialism, becoming recognised as a founding figure of sociology posthumously as the term gained broader meaning. At the turn of the 20th century, the first wave of German sociologists, including Max Weber and Georg Simmel, developed sociological antipositivism. The field may be broadly recognised as an amalgam of three modes of social scientific thought in particular: Durkheimian positivism and structural functionalism; Marxist historical materialism and conflict theory; Weberian antipositivism and verstehen analysis. American sociology broadly arose on a separate trajectory, with little Marxist influence, an emphasis on rigorous scientific methodology, and a closer association with pragmatism and social psychology. In the 1920s, the Chicago school developed symbolic interactionism. Meanwhile in the 1930s, the Frankfurt School pioneered the idea of critical theory, an interdisciplinary form of Marxist sociology drawing upon thinkers as diverse as Freud and Nietzsche. Critical theory would take on something of a life of its own after WW2, influencing literary criticism and the Birmingham School establishment of cultural studies.
Sociology evolved as an academic response to the challenges of modernity, such as industrialization, urbanization, secularization, and a perceived process of enveloping rationalization.[29] Because sociology is such a broad discipline, it can be difficult to define, even for professional sociologists. The field generally concerns 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. 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; and political sociology studies the interaction between society and state.
Since its inception, sociological epistemologies, methods, and frames of enquiry, have significantly expanded and diverged.[30] Sociologists use a diversity of research methods, drawing upon either empirical techniques or critical theory. Common modern methods include 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, environmental sociology, network analysis, actor-network theory and a growing list, many of which are cross-disciplinary in nature.
Additional Social Science disciplines and fields of study include:
Some social scientists emphasize 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. It is noted the importance of measurement and analysis, focusing on the (difficult to achieve) goal of objective research or statistical hypothesis testing. A mathematical model uses mathematical language to describe a system. The process of developing a mathematical model is termed 'mathematical modelling' (also modeling). Eykhoff (1974) defined a mathematical model as 'a representation of the essential aspects of an existing system (or a system to be constructed) which presents knowledge of that system in usable form'.[31] Mathematical models can take many forms, including but not limited to dynamical systems, statistical models, differential equations, or game theoretic models.
These and other types of models can overlap, with a given model involving a variety of abstract structures. The system is a set of interacting or interdependent entities, real or abstract, forming an integrated whole. The concept of an integrated whole can also be stated in terms of a system embodying a set of relationships which are differentiated from relationships of the set to other elements, and from relationships between an element of the set and elements not a part of the relational regime. Dynamical system modeled as a mathematical formalization has fixed "rule" which describes the time dependence of a point's position in its ambient space. Small changes in the state of the system correspond to small changes in the numbers. The evolution rule of the dynamical system is a fixed rule that describes what future states follow from the current state. The rule is deterministic: for a given time interval only one future state follows from the current state.
Other social scientists emphasize the subjective nature of research. These writers share social theory perspectives that include various types of the following:
Other fringe social scientists delve in alternative nature of research. These writers share social theory perspectives that include various types of the following:
Most universities offer degrees in social science fields.[32] The Bachelor of Social Science is a degree targeted at the social sciences in particular. It is often more flexible and in-depth than other degrees which include social science subjects.[33]
In the United States, a university may offer a student who studies a social sciences field a Bachelor of Arts degree, particularly if the field is within one of the traditional liberal arts such as history, or 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, some institutions have degrees for a particular social science, such as the Bachelor of Economics degree, though such specialized degrees are relatively rare in the United States.
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The social sciences are at times criticized as being less rigorous than other natural sciences, in that they are seen as being less empirical in their methods.[citation needed] This claim has been made in the so-called Science Wars. This is most commonly made when comparing social sciences to wholly different 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. Some physicists have expressed their view that social sciences do not qualify as science.[34] Characterized as observational, the social sciences 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.
Most social scientists, however, themselves recognise their fields do not constitute 'sciences' in the modern sense of the word, but rather in the classical sense. Social science is thus an archaic term that "stuck". It may be argued that the strongest critiques of positivism and social empiricism have arisen from within the social sciences, through hermeneutics, neo-Kantianism, phenomenology, antipositivism, critical theory, and, at a later stage, post-structuralism. 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.
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For further detail, see "The pleasure of finding things out: the best short works of Richard P. Feynman", by Richard Phillips Feynman, Jeffrey Robbins, Freeman Dyson, Contributor Freeman Dyson. Da Capo Press, 2000. ISBN 0738203491, 9780738203492. 270 pages."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."
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