Prepared by Raizza Corpuz

in the Last Two Hundred Years

What is the Historical EVOLUTION of SOCIAL

SCIENCES in the last 200 years?

1. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF SOCIAL SCIENCE

2. THE ARCHETYPAL EPOCH of SOCIAL SCIENCE

3. THE SUBSTANTIVE EMERGENCE OF SOCIAL SCIENCE

I. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF SOCIAL

SCIENCE

BASIC QUERY

Towards the EPOCH

1700 1800 1900

Industrial RevolutionFrench Revolution

Industrial Revolution

RenaissanceRenaissance

ReformationReformation

Scientific RevolutionScientific Revolution

Civil Revolution

1500 1600 1700 1800 1900

1700 1900

Middle Ages & Renaissance Period

1. Humanistic and devoted to history

2. Christian theology were taken up by intellectual leaders

3. Humanism as the most significant aspect of ancient philosophy

IF WE LOOK BACK TO HISTORY

• 1620-1750: Early 17th century, during 150 years beginning in that decade there is already an achievements and innovations in the field of BIOLOGICAL and PHYSICAL SCIENCES while the SOCIAL SCIENCES remain

17th century• The observation-based natural philosophy

was replaced by natural science, which attempted to define and test scientific laws.

• Social science continued this trend, attempting to find laws to explain social behavior, which had become problematic with the decline of tradition and the rise of modernity and industrialization.

Sociology's origins in philosophy and the humanities are still evident in tensions between quantitative and qualitative sociology, positivist and interpretive sociology, and objective and critical sociology.

• Social science adopted quantitative measurement and statistical methods from natural science to find laws of social behavior, as demonstrated in Emile Durkheim's book Suicide.

• But sociology may also use qualitative methods

Positivist sociology (also known as empiricist) attempts to predict outcomes based on observed

variables. Interpretive sociology (which Max Weber

called verstehen, German for "understanding") attempts to

understand a culture or phenomenon on its own terms.

1700-1800

Mid 18th Century

Mid 18th Century

Capitalism Capitalism

Civil RevolutionCivil Revolution

Industrial RevolutionIndustrial Revolution

French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution

• the breakup of the old order—an order that had rested on kinship, land, social class, religion, local community and monarchy

ECONOMIC EFFECTS

Between the 1780s and 1849 • economic transformation that embraced the

first stages of the great Industrial Revolution and a still more general expansion of commercial activity

• Major economic change was spurred by western Europe’s tremendous population growth

Capitalism

Capitalism

Civil Revoluti

on

Civil Revoluti

on

Industrial

Revolution

Industrial

Revolution

Economy Socio-Politics

Society

Socio, economic political reformation

There are two views about human society

1. Social Sciences

2. Natural Sciences

2 views about Human Society

NATURAL SCIENCE

NATURAL SCIENCE

SOCIAL SCIENCESOCIAL

SCIENCE

Biological Origins of Society, explaining the evolutionary

terms

Biological Origins of Society, explaining the evolutionary

terms

Shaped by structure s like the economy or culture

Shaped by structure s like the economy or culture

SOCIAL SCIENCESOCIAL SCIENCE

19th-century• politics, industry and trade is basically about

the practical efforts of human beings to reconsolidate these elements

• so the history of social thought is about theoretical efforts to reconsolidate them—

: that is, to give them new contexts of meaning

and from there spread to other parts of the world.

• Industrial Revolution, in modern history, the process of change from an agrarian, handicraft economy to one dominated by industry and machine manufacture.

The first attempt to establish politics as social science

• Established political science as an empirical, positive discipline, by using a METHOD a theory that unified SOCIAL SCIENCE.

COMPARATIVE METHOD

1. Clannishness of many social scientist• professional jealousy, rigid thinking, vested

interest in theories2. Lack of common concepts or conceptual

apparatus

2 MAIN HINDRANCES in THE UNIFICATION of SOCIAL SCIENCE

3 Characteristic FEATURE of the History of SOCIAL

SCIENCE in the 19th century

The various disciplines of SOCIAL SCIENCE became elaborated

and CONSCIOUS

3 Conditions of the Formation of NEW SPECIALIZED DISCIPLINE

Stages in the course of development of the various social-

science disciplines in the `19th century, is the same with the

“older “natural sciences

1. Recognition of the new set of problems

2. the conscious attempt to lie down and perfect methods of research and investigation of the discipline

3. the unification of both the theoretical rivalries tend to be submerged and to elaborate Propositions in bridging differences

First Systematic Theory

= EXAMINATION OF LAWS OF MOVEMENT

• NEWTONIAN THEORY• PHYSICAL THEORY• THEORY of RELATIVITY • QUANTUM THEORY• WAVE MECHANICS • ATOMIC THEORY

NATURAL SCIENCE

NATURAL SCIENCE

LATE 18th and 19th century SYTEMATIC ECONOMIC THEORY

• Centered around the social product• KARL MARX , CLASSICAL ECONOMICS • 1870’s- the principles of Marginalism

ABSTRACT THEORY• problems of methodology in economics have

tended to drop from the literature

MARX

• Marxism is not attempting simply to understand society; it does not only predict the rise of a revolutionary proletariat that will overturn capitalism, but also actively mobilizes persons to do this.

• It intervenes to change the world

PSYCHOLOGY

• systematic science of personality• the combination of ideas in the study

of mental diseases etc • Contributed for the development of

several psychological theories• 1914, psychoanalysis• Behaviourism • Development of Gestalt Psychology

in 1920

• FREUDIAN THEORY• Psychology—different views of biological or

sociological factors rather than to conflicts over theory between social science and sociological theory

ANTHROPOLOGY and SOCIOLOGY

• sciences which, from the very outset had to deal with such a vast array of methodological considerations

2 PROBLEMS in the HISTORY of the SOCIAL SCIENCES in the 19th

century1. Examination of the situation existing at the

time of the various disciplines split off the mainstream of social theory

2. Description of the institutional acceptance of the disciplines as self-contained independent whole

1st half of the 19th century

• Coordinated programs of study and research

2nd half of the 19th century• Eloquent evidence of the progressive

recognition of the social science disciplines• The academic influence in the professional

journal is overwhelming

The change of the 18th to 20th century truly is

significant

• Social scientist has become specialized academic professional

• Changes the whole society and the educational system of the advanced counties

• Brought great progress in scientific knowledge, it also shown defects and weaknesses

• It enhances the clannishness of academic specialists

• Tended to make the limits between the disciplines more rigid

• To perpetuate specialties which have lost much of their original reason for being

The CONCEPT OF EVOLUTION

• provided a basis for empirical research in the realm of physical development of man, but it also suggested the like hood of discovering new knowledge about human society, it was applied

to CULTURAL CHANGE

ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY• Unified body of thought • Combination of the data collected by

ethnographic and archeological research of many men

• The analogy between historical stages of culture and contemporary cultures on different levels led to the

• The development of human personality from birth on was interpreted in analogy with the progress of the HUMAN SPIRIT in history

ANALYSIS OF THE IMPACT OF THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION on the

emergence of:

• Anthropology• Psychology• Sociology

THE ARCHETYPAL EPOCH of SOCIAL SCIENCE

Synthesis of the SCIENCES of Man and SOCIETY

• COMTE, SPENCER and MARX even MILL (later in the century) and German sociology attempted to produce a synthetic social science.

Social scientists began to adopt the scientific method to make sense of the rapid changes accompanying

modernization and industrialization.

COMTE

• he argued that SOCIOLOGY was to be the “queen science” that would stand at the top of a hierarchy of all sciences—

The Law of Three Stages

It states that society as a whole, and each particular science develops through three mentally conceived stages:

(1)the theological stage, (2) the metaphysical stage, (3) the positive stage.

SPENCER• Social Darwinism and Spencer• Herbert Spencer created what he

called "sociology," a synthetic philosophy that tried to find a set of rules explaining social behavior.

• extended Darwin's ideas about evolution into social life and ethics, hence the term "social Darwinism."

• to Spencer's synthetic philosophy, the laws of nature applied without exception to the organic realm as much as the inorganic, and to the human mind as much as the rest of creation.

• Spencer conceptualized society as a "social organism" that evolved from a simpler state to a more complex one, according to the universal law of evolution.

• Spencer is perhaps best known for coining the term "survival of the fittest " elaborating what came to be known as the philosophy of social Darwinism

Marxist History – Historical Materialism

• Marxist history is based strictly on a scientific view of the world, incorporating the science of evolution and the dialectic path of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.

• Marxist evolution shapes its view of history based on the belief that humanity, as well as other living things, is constantly improving and will continue to do so.

• Marx sees society evolving through stages

• He focuses on dialectical class conflict to control the means of production as the driving force behind social evolution.

18th century

• there was history, not social sciences• the founders of Political Economy (Smith,

Cantillon, Hume, Physiocrats) discovered regularity in the operations of the market which opened the possibility of investigating human actions from a different than moral judgment, namely in terms of human choice and preference

• the elements of social cognition are abstract and not reducible to concrete images one would like to have metaphors.

• These are based in positivist view of social science that holds that social science should be built up by experimental method as ideally applied in Newtonian physics.

ARGUMENT:

• Social sciences have a distinct method, praxeology and verstehen, due to the special character of their objects, and owe their progress through it and do not have to and cannot use the method of the natural sciences.

Economics

• deals with human action, not with objects (as physics does) such as commodities, economic quantities or prices.

Verstehen• Verstehen was introduced into philosophy and

the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften)• He first made a distinction between nature

and history in terms of the categories of space and time.

The method of the natural sciences is explanation (erklären), while that of history is understanding (verstehen).

• The concept of Verstehen was later used by the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey to:

describe the first-person participatory perspective that agents have on their individual experience as well as their

culture, history, and society.

• it is developed in the context of the theory and practice of interpretation (as understood in the context of hermeneutics)

• and contrasted with the external objectivating third-person perspective of explanation (das Erklären) in which human agency, subjectivity, and its products are analyzed as effects of impersonal natural forces in the natural sciences and social structures in sociology.

METHOD

SCIENCE is the method of the natural sciences is explanation.

HISTORY is understanding (verstehen)explanation (erklären),

The 19th century

• The fundamental ideas, themes, and problems of the social sciences

to the problem of order that was created in men’s minds by the weakening of the old order, or European society, under the twin blows of the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution

Auguste Comte French philosopher

known as the founder of sociology and of positivism. Comte gave the science of sociology its name and established the new subject in a systematic fashion

Concluding Remarks

• The main problem with social sciences is the discontinuity between the laws governing society and the laws of the natural world

• social sciences, the natural world and the social world are interlinked and mutually related, but they remain essentially different.

• Their relationship is one of resources, weather, climate, etc. but not of nature. The nature of society, in social sciences, is essentially different from the nature of the world.

• And the main problem with the natural sciences, is that they tend to reduce the laws governing social organisation to lower order of organisation, like biological explanations

REFLECTIVE ANALYSIS

THE SUBSTANTIVE EMERGENCE OF SOCIAL

SCIENCE

Social Science

Human ScienceHuman Science

Natural ScienceNatural Science

SOCIAL SCIENCE to the FIELD of its OWN: the PROBLEM???

ANACHRONISM

WHY?

• Only in the 19th century was philosophy separated from 'science', and only in the early years of the 20th did 'social science' emerge as a set of disciplinary practices which could become the object of 'philosophy'.

• This is more than a quibble over terms, since there never was a time when issues regarding the nature and methods of acquiring knowledge of the human condition were not contested.

• Moreover, since the lines between a philosophy of social science, a social philosophy, and a social science are also blurred, we consider these matters rather broadly.

• Until lines were drawn, there were no boundaries--and even today the boundaries are fuzzy.

• The intellectual hegemony of Christianity in the West defined the character of inquiry into the human condition.

,Greater integration of the social sciences, each with a well-developed theoretical system of its own, holds out the hope that Comte’s dream of a generalized science of man and society may be achieved in practice

SOCIAL SCIENCE, a PARADIGM

Comte’s dream of a generalized

science of man and society may be achieved in

practice

THANK YOU! And GOD BLESS!