For the review, to see Social sciences (review)

• the social sciences , or social sciences , are a whole of Science S, of indefinite number, having a direct or indirect report/ratio with the Man.

• the Social sciences gather all the disciplines which touch the culture of the human being and all its achievements.

Definition

Sciences have, in a general way for object to release from the recurring general information, to define concepts. The laws and the systems always start with the recognition of the preexistent reports/ratios to deviate some insidiously and pose absolutes a priori, which Kuhn calls of the “paradigms”.

A vision mechanist, causalist, environment, seemed completely conceivable as lately as yesterday for all the fields, but it is not it nowadays any more. A consensus thus emerged to introduce an applied science which all while being interested in the phenomena which touch with human (Psychologie, Perception, Cognition…) or with the groups of men (Sociology, History, Geography, etc) would use only parameters which one could not deduce from a unit from phenomena. The social sciences were released for, prudently, clearing the ground of unperceivable, of immeasurable, while being satisfied to refer to the knowledge of the moment.

It is discovered whereas there exists a kind of “independent” reality, i.e. who cannot be apprehended in the actual position of our sensitive tools of observation and conceptual S. This “metareality” does not belong to the fields studied by the Science, and, although influencing our daily newspaper, it will be able to never make perceptible. One worked out several cognitive theories thus to decipher and sweep the space which goes from perceived to the Intelligible to the recognizable one: how does one pass of the Phénomène to the object, of the observation to the Déduction of general laws? If the Connaissance questions the phenomena, she perhaps especially questions, through them, our vision of the world, i.e. the relations between a “subject” and a “object”. The social sciences thus measure the dimension of the human spirit and take the step on reflections before reserved for the Philosophie.

List social sciences

In a general way, 10 disciplines form the central point of the Social sciences:

How to present a discipline of the social sciences?

There exist several ways of approaching a social science in a text or a work, but in a general way, the following presentation is most suitable:

Ex: The Archéologie is a discipline of the Social sciences whose object of study is…

For the subcategories of sciences:

Ex: The Céramologie is a discipline of the Social sciences related with the Archéologie whose object of study is…

Problem of delimitation of the social sciences

It is difficult to release from the characteristics common to all the social sciences and alone; consequently, one can legitimately wonder whether the label of social science indicates something of positive well, or if it is a question simply of a convenient label to facilitate the classification of sciences.

For example, the economy makes it possible to describe rare human phenomena, but not exclusively, because it can also describe animal phenomena. Or, Psychology animal and ethology find with limit of social sciences, whereas they relate on animals and not to men, which invites to relativize the opposition animal man/, and consequently the denomination of “human” sciences specifically.

One can consider that the label of “social sciences” is a negative class, which is used to indicate the whole of sciences which are not Natural science (Physique, Chimie, Biologie, Météorologie, etc). But there still, certain disciplines tend to make burst this opposition, in particular with the Sociobiologie.

One can thus declare that the social sciences gather:

1. in a positive way, sciences treating exclusively of the man (history, psychoanalysis, ethnology…) ;
2. in a negative way (partly for institutional reasons, to facilitate the classification of the disciplines at the university and in the libraries), sciences which are not exclusively natural.

Practical

Cognition and perception

To the efforts of the psychophysicists to represent quantitative accumulation by a qualitative modification of our knowledge, were opposed critical philosophies with regard to the Déterminisme of the conscience. Thereafter, the theories psychoanalytical revealed the Inconscient, and allowed the discovery of facts observable, likely to contradict certain reducing designs (in particular the theories psychophysiologists which allotted to our brain localized functions connecting certain data conscious to precise areas of the cortical surface).

Physical with the Psychology, science with art, futurology with the History, all the fields where the human project must be concretized is thus marked seal of the risk, blur of the knowledge of the human things, chaos of the thought, in short of an inoperative value for the deduction and which however plays a part of most important like cognitive dimension of the man.

Only spirits human, able to be abstracted from reality, to affix their representation of the world on a particular phenomenon could succeed in passing from concrete to the theory, of the experiment to the conceptualization. They reached that point only while locating this intuition, this formation of an assumption, out of the field of the applied research, of the only causal deduction.

Experimentation

The emergence of these Science S human and social starting from the end of the 19th century and with the 20th century proposed the difficulty in applying the scientific Méthode to these fields. The company is not expérimentable, and the human one either: indeed the experimentation consists in isolating from the parameters and varying them separately to observe what occurs. To isolate from the variables is not always feasible in social sciences. But it is sometimes possible to do it, for example in Psychologie, where one can include cognitive mechanisms in a system and carry out statistical measurements (Perception, memory,…).

Observation

In social sciences, the phenomena are not observable in their globality:

• Is the phenomenon is too vast ( What a family? are ), is the phenomenon intimate, is hidden ( Which the motivations to form a couple? do ) is the phenomenon is unperceivable, infra-ordinary ( Comment organize the pieces of housework? )

To mitigate this difficulty the researchers try to isolate the variables, to restrict the field of study: rather than the family one will restrict with the Bi-parental family in Provence in the popular classes in the Eighties . These restrictions bring two additional difficulties:

1. While too restricting one is likely to be deprived of the comprehension of the phenomenon.
2. to restrict one uses categories which can lead to directed interpretations, one is not thus more completely in the observation but already in the analysis.

Checking or refutation by the experiment

For ethical reasons, the man as an object of experimentation cannot be handled under limiting conditions (one badly sees applying parameters being able to lead to the suicide or the divorce).

History

At the XIXe century the field of the Science “was separated” from that of the Littérature. Then sciences of nature, the life and the economy were separated from other disciplines - Linguistique, Ethnologie, Sociologie, etc Certaines of these disciplines claims under social sciences and company.

Starting from proposals of Michel Foucault ( Words and the things , 1966), it is possible to carry out a diagram of filiation between disciplines.

The “official” situations of the disciplines are different according to the countries from the francophonie in particular.

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