Social science

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 History of the social science

The history of the social sciences has its origins in the common stock of Western philosophy and

shares various precursors, but began most intentionally in the early 18th century with the positivist

philosophy of science. Since the mid-20th century, the term "social science" has come to refer more

generally, not just to sociology but to all those disciplines which analyze society and culture, from

anthropology to psychology to media studies.

The idea that society may be studied in a standardized and objective manner, with scholarly rules

and methodology, is comparatively recent. Philosophers such as Confucius had long since

theorised on topics such as social roles, the scientific analysis of human society is peculiar to the

intellectual break away from the Age of Enlightenment and toward the discourses of Modernity.

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 beginnings of the

social sciences in the 18th century are reflected in the grand encyclopedia of Diderot, with articles

from Rousseau and other pioneers.

Around the start 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.

(2)  Examples of boundary

blurring include emerging disciplines like social studies of medicine, biocultural anthropology,

neuropsychology, 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 first half of the 20th century, statistics became a free-standing discipline of applied

mathematics. Statistical methods were used confidently.

In the contemporary period, 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.

Antiquity

Plato's Republic is an influential treatise on political philosophy and the just life.

Aristotle published several works on social organization, such as his Politics, and Constitution of the

Athenians.

Islamic developments

Significant contributions to the social sciences were made in Medieval Islamic civilization. Al-Biruni

(973–1048) wrote detailed comparative studies on the anthropology of peoples, religions and

cultures in the Middle East, Mediterranean and South Asia.

[3] Biruni has also been praised by several

scholars for his Islamic anthropology.

[4]

Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) worked in areas of demography,

[5] 

historiography,

[6]

the philosophy of

history,

[7] 

sociology,

[5][7] and economics. He is best known for his Muqaddimah.

Modern period

Early modern

Near the Renaissance, which began around the 14th century, Jean Buridan and Nicole Oresme 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 Lugo, and particularly Luis Molina wrote on

economic topics. These writers focused on explaining property as something for "public good".

[8]

Representative figures of the 17th century include David Hartley, Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes,

John Locke, and Samuel von Standard. 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 18th 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, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Giambattista Vico, William Godwin,

Ti

 Late moder

[8]

Late modern

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 reality. For examples see Blaise Pascal, Gottfried Leibniz and Johannes Kepler,

each of whom took mathematical examples as models for human behavior directly. In Pascal's

case, the famous wager; for Leibniz, the invention of binary computation; and for Kepler, the

intervention of angels to guide the planets .

In the realm of other disciplines, this created a pressure to express ideas in the form of

mathematical relationships. Such relationships, called "Laws" after the usage of the time (see

philosophy of science) became the model which other disciplines would emulate.

19th century

The term "social science" was coined in French by Mirabeau in 1767, before becoming a distinct

conceptual field in the nineteenth century.

[9] 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 

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.