Social Studies

The social sciences are a group of academic disciplines that study human aspects of the world. They diverge from the arts and humanities in that the social sciences tend to emphasize the use of the scientific method in the study of humanity, including quantitative and qualitative methods. more...

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The social sciences, in studying subjective, inter-subjective and objective or structural aspects of society, were traditionally referred to as soft sciences. This is in contrast to hard sciences, such as the natural and physical sciences, which may focus exclusively on objective aspects of nature. Nowadays, however, the distinction between the so-called soft and hard sciences has become muted or largely irrelevant. Many of the social sciences, such as economics, psychology, and anthropology have become largely quantitative in methodology and predictive or behavioral in approach. Conversely, the interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary nature of scientific inquiry into human behavior and social and environmental factors affecting it have made many of the so-called hard sciences dependent on social science methodology. One example consists of such emerging disciplines like the history and sociology of science, social studies of medicine, neuropsychology, bioeconomics, and biological basis of behavior which view the social and natural sciences as conceptual partners in understanding human action and its implications and consequences. There is also the incorporation of social science methodology 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-pyschological, and environmental.

History of the social sciences

Ancient Greece

In ancient philosophy, there was no difference between mathematics and the study of history, poetry or politics. Only with the development of mathematical proof did there gradually arise a perceived difference between "scientific" disciplines and others, the "humanities" or the liberal arts. Thus, Aristotle studies planetary motion and poetry with the same methods, and Plato mixes geometrical proofs with his demonstration on the state of intrinsic knowledge.

The Enlightenment

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".

Read more at Wikipedia.org