Social sciences

From Hobson's Choice

The social sciences are a class of theories and hypotheses related to the functioning of societies. The pursuit of these theories and hypotheses is divided into many branches, such as economics, sociology, anthropology, and so on. The divisions are understandably subject to change, as each discipline tends to broaden its scope of research and develop hypotheses that conflict.

1 Disciplines of the Social Sciences
2 Scope and Evolution
3 Criticisms
4 External Links

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Disciplines of the Social Sciences

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Scope and Evolution

The social sciences may be divided into three rough categories: those disciplines that address the individual, the society, and the human race. There is some ambiguity to this, as psychology (for example) addresses both individuals and all humankind. Much 20th-century research in linguistics is directed to the psychological or neurological basis of language acquisition. However, throughout its history linguistics has also pursued the study of linguistic evolution among societies where it is spoken. Hence, linguistics unites study of individual minds, peculiar social institutions, and universal laws binding across all humankind.

These three categories arise from division of any hypothesis that a scientist may make into a special version and a [general theory|general version]]. A special theory applies to a peculiar case of ambient conditions, while the general theory applies to all conditions. Hence, a psychologist may wish to examine how different social institutions lead to psychological processes peculiar to that society (from the individual to the social), and extrapolate from this a general principle of how prior mental states led to those peculiar social institutions (from the social to the universal). The psychologist, in the last case, has crossed a boundary from psychology to sociology. Retaining one's one former methodology in such cases is risky, because then all prior literature is in another branch of the social sciences, and one has to "translate" from roughly comparable methodologies.

This difficulty of interpenetration and homologization of social research has led to (a) the older fields remaining intact, and (b) newer ones emerging. Many of these, such as development studies, are multidisciplinary, i.e., incorporate research from multiple disciplines. Others, such as evolutionary psychology, emerged as the result of a conflict between psychological methods and physiological methods.

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Criticisms

There are essentially two main criticisms of the social sciences. The first is that they are not really sciences, since it is fairly unusual for hypotheses to be subject to systematic falsification. While social sciences frequently conduct studies with regression analyses, these produce stylized facts that remain subject to the deductive reasoning of the discipline. Hypotheses are more usually retired because they are not useful, or because of a major political shift, than because they were properly discredited.

The other criticism is that social sciences are essentially tools employed to maintain a particular class authority. For example, economics is essentially a formal rationale of rightwing; propositions that challenge the essential virtue of the capitalist system are not admissible. Prior to the 1970's, when psychology had not become dominated by neuropsychology, many of the Freudian and Neo-Freudian schools of psychology came under fire as effective handmaids of patriarchy.

For this reason, many of the social sciences have evolved a [Radicalism|radical] school, such as Marxian psychology, Feminist psychology, and so on.

James R MacLean (18:06, 3 September 2007 (PDT))

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