How do you think Social Science starts?

The history of the social sciences begins in the Age of Enlightenment after 1650,[2] which saw a
revolution within natural philosophy, changing the basic framework by which individuals
understood what was scientific. Social sciences came forth from the moral philosophy of the
time and were influenced by the Age of Revolutions, such as the Industrial Revolution and the
French Revolution.[3] 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.[4][5]

The beginnings of the social sciences in the 18th century are reflected in the grand encyclopedia
of Diderot, with articles from Jean-Jacques Rousseau and other pioneers. The growth of the
social sciences is also reflected in other specialized encyclopedias. The modern period saw
"social science" first used as a distinct conceptual field.[6] Social science was influenced by
positivism,[3] focusing on knowledge based on actual positive sense experience and avoiding the
negative; metaphysical speculation was avoided. Auguste Comte used the term science sociale to
describe the field, taken from the ideas of Charles Fourier; Comte also referred to the field as
social physics.[3][7]

Following this period, five paths of development sprang forth in the social sciences, influenced
by Comte in other fields.[3] 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 social phenomena were identified with and
understood; this was championed by figures such as Max Weber.[8] 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 this distinction. In this route, theory (description) and
prescription were non-overlapping formal discussions of a subject.

The foundation of social sciences in the West implies conditioned relationships between
progressive and traditional spheres of knowledge. In some contexts, such as the Italian one,
sociology slowly affirms itself and experiences the difficulty of affirming a strategic knowledge
beyond philosophy and theology.[9]

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. The interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary nature of scientific inquiry into human
behaviour, social and environmental factors affecting it, made many of the natural sciences
interested in some aspects of social science methodology.[10] 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.[3] Researchers continue 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 that, with considerable success, continue to provide usable frameworks for
massive, growing data banks; for more, see consilience. The social sciences will for the
foreseeable future be composed of different zones in the research of, and sometimes distinct in
approach toward, the field.[3]

The term "social science" may refer either to the specific sciences of society established by
thinkers such as Comte, Durkheim, Marx, and Weber, or more generally to all disciplines outside
of "noble science" and arts. By the late 19th century, the academic social sciences were
constituted of five fields: jurisprudence and amendment of the law, education, health, economy
and trade, and art.[4]

Around the start of the 21st century, the expanding domain of economics in the social sciences
has been described as economic imperialism.[11]

Branches of social sciences

Anthropology

Main articles: Anthropology and Outline of anthropology

Anthropology is the holistic "science of man", a science of the totality of human existence. 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. Firstly, the natural sciences seek to derive general laws
through reproducible and verifiable experiments. Secondly, the humanities generally study local
traditions, through their history, literature, music, and arts, with an emphasis on understanding
particular individuals, events, or eras. Finally, 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 nuanced 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.[12] Within the United States, anthropology is divided into four sub-fields:
archaeology, physical or biological anthropology, anthropological linguistics, and cultural
anthropology. It is an area that is offered at most undergraduate institutions. The word anthropos
(ἄνθρωπος) in Ancient Greek means "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. This
means that, though anthropologists generally specialize in only one sub-field, they always keep
in mind the biological, linguistic, historic and cultural aspects of any problem. 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".[13] Today, anthropologists use terms such as "less
complex" societies or refer to specific modes of subsistence or production, such as "pastoralist"
or "forager" or "horticulturalist" 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 people in detail, using biogenetic,
archaeological, and linguistic data alongside direct observation of contemporary customs.[14] 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.[15]

Communication studies

Main articles: Communication studies and History of communication studies

Communication studies deals with processes of human communication, commonly defined as the
sharing of symbols to create meaning. The discipline encompasses a range of topics, from face-
to-face conversation to mass media outlets such as television broadcasting. Communication
studies also examine how messages are interpreted through the political, cultural, economic, and
social dimensions of their contexts. Communication is institutionalized under many different
names at different universities, including communication, communication studies, speech
communication, rhetorical studies, communication science, media studies, communication arts,
mass communication, media ecology, and communication and media science.

Communication studies integrate aspects of both social sciences and the humanities. As a social
science, the discipline often overlaps with sociology, psychology, anthropology, biology,
political science, economics, and public policy, among others. From a humanities perspective,
communication is concerned with rhetoric and persuasion (traditional graduate programs in
communication studies trace their history to the rhetoricians of Ancient Greece). The field
applies to outside disciplines as well, including engineering, architecture, mathematics, and
information science.

Economics
Main articles: Economics and Outline of economics

Economics is a social science that seeks to analyze and describe the production, distribution, and
consumption of wealth.[16] The word "economics" is from the Ancient 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 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 relationship between ends and scarce means which have 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 behavior".

Buyers bargain for good prices while sellers put forth their best front in Chichicastenango
Market, Guatemala.

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 other social situations 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 heterodox schools of thought, such as institutional
economics, green economics, Marxist economics, and economic sociology, make other
grounding assumptions. For example, Marxist economics assumes that economics primarily
deals with the investigation of exchange value, of which human labour is the source.

The expanding domain of economics in the social sciences has been described as economic
imperialism.[11][17]

Education
Main articles: Education and Outline of education

A depiction of world's oldest university, the University of Bologna, in Italy

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.[18]

Geography

Main articles: Geography and Outline of geography

Map of the Earth

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. This may involve cultural geography, transportation, health, military operations, and
cities. The latter examines the natural environment and how the climate, vegetation and life, soil,
oceans, water and landforms are produced and interact.[19] Physical geography examines
phenomena related to the measurement of earth. 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.[20] Other branches of geography include social geography, regional
geography, and geomatics.

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 Geographic Information

Science, 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 Geographic Information
Systems, remote sensing, aerial photography, statistics, and global positioning systems.

History

Main articles: History and Outline of history

History is the continuous, systematic narrative and research into past human events as interpreted
through historiographical paradigms or theories. When used as the name of a field of study,
history refers to the study and interpretation of the record of humans, societies, institutions, and
any topic that has changed over time.

Traditionally, the study of history has been considered a part of the humanities. In modern
academia, whether or not history remains a humanities-based subject is contested. In the United
States the National Endowment for the Humanities includes history in its definition of
humanities (as it does for applied linguistics).[21] However, the National Research Council
classifies history as a social science.[22] The historical method comprises the techniques and
guidelines by which historians use primary sources and other evidence to research and then to
write history. The Social Science History Association, formed in 1976, brings together scholars
from numerous disciplines interested in social history.[23]

Law

Main articles: Law and Outline of law

A trial at a criminal court, the Old Bailey in London

The social science of law, jurisprudence, in common parlance, means a rule that (unlike a rule of
ethics) is capable of enforcement through institutions.[24] However, many laws are based on
norms accepted by a community and thus have an ethical foundation. 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",[25] as an "interpretive concept"[26] to
achieve justice, as an "authority"[27] to mediate people's interests, and even as "the command of a
sovereign, backed by the threat of a sanction".[28] 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 science and the humanities. 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 Old English lagu, meaning something laid down or fixed[29] and the
adjective legal comes from the Latin word lex.[30]

Linguistics

Main articles: Linguistics and Outline of linguistics

Ferdinand de Saussure, recognized as the father of modern linguistics

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

Main articles: Political science, Outline of political science, and Politics

Aristotle asserted that man is a political animal in his Politics.[31]

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 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 behaviour, public law, judicial behaviour, and public policy. Political science also
studies power in international relations and the theory of great powers and superpowers.

Political science is methodologically diverse, although recent years have witnessed an upsurge in
the use of the scientific method,[32][page  needed] 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 behaviouralism, 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, interviews, and official records, as well as secondary sources such as scholarly
articles, are used in building and testing theories. Empirical methods include survey research,
statistical analysis or econometrics, case studies, experiments, and model building.

Psychology

Main articles: Psychology and Outline of psychology

Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt was the founder of experimental psychology.

Psychology is an academic and applied field involving the study of behaviour 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.
The word psychology comes from the Ancient Greek ψυχή ([[Psyche (psychology)|psyche]],
"soul" or "mind") and the suffix logy ("study").

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 behaviour. 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
behaviour, 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,
educational psychology, industrial-organizational psychology, mathematical psychology,
neuropsychology, and quantitative analysis of behaviour.

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: BPsy indicates a balance between natural and social sciences, BSc indicates a strong
(or entire) scientific concentration, whereas a BA underlines a majority of social science credits.
This is not always necessarily the case however, and in many UK institutions students studying
the BPsy, BSc, and BA follow the same curriculum as outlined by The British Psychological
Society and have the same options of specialism open to them regardless of whether they choose
a balance, a heavy science basis, or heavy social science basis to their degree. If they applied to
read the BA. for example, but specialized in heavily science-based modules, then they will still
generally be awarded the BA.

Sociology

Main articles: Sociology and Outline of sociology

Émile Durkheim is considered one of the founding fathers of sociology.

Sociology is the systematic study of society, individuals' relationship to their societies, the
consequences of difference, and other aspects of human social action.[33] The meaning of the
word comes from the suffix -logy, which means "study of", derived from Ancient Greek, and the
stem soci-, which is from the Latin word socius, meaning "companion", or society in general.

Auguste Comte (1798–1857) coined the term sociology to describe a way to apply natural
science principles and techniques to the social world in 1838.[34][35] Comte endeavoured to unify
history, psychology and economics through the descriptive 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 as a foundation to practical social research. 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 among Catholic and Protestant
populations, distinguished sociological analysis from psychology or philosophy.[36]

Karl Marx rejected Comte's positivism but nevertheless aimed to establish a science of society
based on historical materialism, becoming recognized as a founding figure of sociology
posthumously as the term gained broader meaning. Around the start of the 20th century, the first
wave of German sociologists, including Max Weber and Georg Simmel, developed sociological
antipositivism. The field may be broadly recognized as an amalgam of three modes of social
thought in particular: Durkheimian positivism and structural functionalism; Marxist historical
materialism and conflict theory; and Weberian antipositivism and verstehen analysis. American
sociology broadly arose on a separate trajectory, with little Marxist influence, an emphasis on
rigorous experimental 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 Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche.
Critical theory would take on something of a life of its own after World War II, 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.[37] 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. In the terms of
sociologists Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, social scientists seek an understanding of
the Social Construction of Reality. 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 population size or type; criminology examines criminal behaviour 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.[38] Sociologists use a diversity of research methods,
collecting both quantitative and qualitative data, draw upon empirical techniques, and engage
critical theory.[35] 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 purposes beyond the academy. 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.

In the early 1970s, women sociologists began to question sociological paradigms and the
invisibility of women in sociological studies, analysis, and courses.[39] In 1969, feminist
sociologists challenged the discipline's androcentrism at the American Sociological Association's
annual conference.[40] This led to the founding of the organization Sociologists for Women in
Society, and, eventually, a new sociology journal, Gender & Society. Today, the sociology of
gender is considered to be one of the most prominent sub-fields in the discipline.

New sociological sub-fields continue to appear — such as community studies, computational

sociology, environmental sociology, network analysis, actor-network theory, gender studies, and
a growing list, many of which are cross-disciplinary in nature.[41]