What is a Social Science?

Economists do like to compare themselves to the natural scientists. No Humanities, please, we are Scientists! This comparison of economics to the natural sciences elicits lots of derision, even from with the fold. Frank Knight, for example:

In the field of social policy, the pernicious notion of instrumentalism, resting on the claim or assumption of a parallelism between social and natural sciences, is actually one of the most serious of the sources of danger which threaten destruction to the values of what we have called civilization.

Knight wrote that in 1942. When you think of other possible threats to the values of civilization which were occurring in 1942, that claim is a little over-the-top. But even if we moderate the tone a bit, it is exactly the sort of thing that really begs the question: what is a social science?

A little history of the development of knowledge in the West is enough to show that the question of whether Economics is more akin to Chemistry or English Literature is not really as vital a question as most people imagine. It is really more interesting to ask whether Chemistry is really different than English Literature. Answer that, and the Economics question gets a lot easier.

When the idea of the liberal arts were being developed in Ancient Greece, there was not a distinction made between the three modern divisions in the Academy (Humanities, Sciences, Social Sciences). From Plato and Aristotle through Leonardo, it was common to see educated people working across what we now consider to be disparate disciplines. The liberal arts had great unity.

The beginnings of the Scientific Revolution mark an important break point. Newton’s massively important work commonly known simply as the Principia, was formally entitled Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. The title is important because first it shows the connection to the past in that Newton was writing what was considered to be a philosophical work, studying a branch of philosophy called “Natural Philosophy.” However, the work’s emphasis that Natural Philosophy is best understood using mathematical principles points to the future. Natural Philosophy subsequently had a different method than other types of philosophy. As Galileo expressed it earlier, the book of the universe is written in mathematics. (It is worth noting that Newton ended the Principia, which simultaneously invented calculus and explained the motions of the planets in the solar system, with a discussion of the implications of this work, saying that this massive book on the mathematical principles of natural philosophy proved that there was a God. Newton did not see himself as something other than a philosopher.)

Francis Bacon’s role in the development of science as something distinct from the humanities is also important to note. In “The Advancement of Learning” (which, recall, was published in 1605, 82 years before the Principia), Bacon articulated what we now call the scientific method. This was a new idea in the history of thought, that natural philosophy, or science, used a different method than the study of other areas. Bacon further proposed the creation of a scientific academy, memorably describing a fictional academy of this sort in The New Atlantis.

Looking at the work of these pioneers in the evolution of natural philosophy into a separate subject that we now call “science,” it is hard to overestimate how profound a break this was in the way we think about learning. In Aristotle, for example, there is no difference in method between his Physics, Poetics, Politics, or even Nicomachean Ethics. All these works read the same way. In the 21st century, there is no confusion about whether a particular book is a work of science or humanities. The methods themselves are quite different. The change was not instantaneous with the advent of the scientific revolution. The important scientific works of the 18th and 19th century were still written to be accessible to the generally educated reader. However, the specialization of the 20th century made these divisions complete. This is most evidenced by seeing the difference between the works of Einstein and Newton, both towering figures in the history of physics. Einstein’s important works are in technical articles written for specialists while Newton wrote expansive books written for everyone.

As the scientific method was being developed in the 19th century, people began to realize that the methods of science might also be useful to study things other than natural phenomenon. This realization was the birth of what we now call the Social Sciences. Note the name. The idea was to use scientific methods to study social phenomenon. Auguste Comte is often thought of as the most important pioneer in the development of something we can call the social sciences, but his importance is easily overstated. With the excitement of the discovery of all sorts of natural phenomena using these new methods of study, it was inevitable that people would begin to use the methods to study human interactions.

As the idea of using scientific methods to study social phenomena took hold, the disciplines we now group together in the social sciences gradually became distinct from both the humanities and the sciences. This idea of a distinct area called Social Science was also a novel idea in the history of thought. Adam Smith, for example, is generally credited as being the first economist on the basis of his book, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, which is, it is well worth noting, a vastly more extensive book than people who have never read it in its entirety would realize. This book was Smith’s second book, however. His first, also a massively important text in the Scottish Enlightenment, was Theory of Moral Sentiments. Smith did not view himself as an “economist,” in other words. He was an old fashioned philosopher.

The philosophers of the 19th century who we now consider to be “economists” would similarly have rejected the idea they were writing in a narrow discipline for a specialized audience. One can profitably read Malthus and Ricardo and Marx and Mill regardless of one’s area of modern specialization. The break in economics came in the early 20th century, not insignificantly at the very time Einstein was creating a break in the writing about physics. The early 20th century, led by extremely influential books by Alfred Marshall (in England) and Leon Walras (in France), set economics on the path to becoming a separate discipline within the broader realm of the social sciences. The participants of this broader transition in the study of economics figured out how to use mathematics as a vehicle for uncovering regularities in economics and social behavior. They were, in other words, explicitly using the scientific methods pioneered by the early scientists to study social phenomena. Perhaps the laws of society, like the laws of nature, are also written in the language of mathematics.

As the discipline of economics grew, this emphasis on using mathematics and statistics to create and test models of reality has become the defining characteristic of the field. In other words, it is the very fact that economics uses tools of this sort that makes it a social science instead of one of the disciplines in the humanities.

Is economics then a science? This has been an extensively debated question in the philosophy of science. The proposition that it is a science is difficult to defend without using a definition of science so broad that it would include any application of mathematics and statistics to understanding the world. As the terms become understood in the 20th century, the social sciences were distinct from the sciences by the nature of their objects of study. While both the sciences and social sciences study people, the historical distinction was that the sciences studied the mechanical aspects of people while the social sciences studied the results of the decisions made by people.

There is, as we have seen, no natural reason to divide the liberal arts into three categories. There is no reason at all other than historical tradition that we do not have 2 or 4 or 12 divisions in the Academy. Moreover, the walls between the realms of knowledge are constantly under assault. Sociobiology, for example, argues that science can be used to explain all of human history, that the discipline of history itself should really be considered to be a subject of biology. These assaults on the walls of separation are not surprising given the relatively recent history of the walls themselves. As Robert Frost noted, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” (Incidentally, for an added bonus, think about when this poem was published relative to the other works discussed in this section. Not a coincidence.)