**Are the Social Sciences Really- and Merely- Sciences?**

Jeffrey Foss *University of Victoria Canada* 

### **1. Introduction**

Are the social sciences (psychology, political science, economics, anthropology, sociology, etc.), really sciences? I will argue that the answer is yes, they really are sciences—but not *merely* sciences. The defining subject of the social sciences, the human being, makes them sciences of a special sort, for the human being is an insoluble mystery with inviolable rights. On one hand this denies social science complete knowledge of its subject, the human being, and on the other gives it responsibilities for humankind.

One philosophically deep truth—the real lowdown, as they say—is that the human being, viewed as a physical system, is chaotic (Foss 1992). This means that physics as such cannot predict the behavior of the human being as a physical system, even if its onboard computer, the brain, is included—or we should say *because* the brain is included, for that beguiling chunk of biological information processing matter between our ears makes us an essentially open system. As it turns out, we are informavores (Miller 1983, Dennett 1996) of considerable sophistication, with deeply imbedded social systems that satisfy our craving for knowledge and belief—however well or poorly informed. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors hunted information with their eyes and gathered it with their ears. With the printing press we learned to consume books, and nowadays we graze on the internet.

Because we are informavores, science (whether physical or social) has to cooperate (or compete) with the humanities to explain the behavior of the human being—and this has enormous implications for the ethics of the social sciences, and in particular its interpretation of scientific objectivity. Light travelling from a distant star, to take just one example from infinitely many, is just light from a physical point of view. Because we can see it, we can extract information from it, and so it carries information for us—even though the light may have been emitted by the star before our species even existed. Physical science cannot specify the information carried by the light, but only its physical parameters, its wavelength, frequency, energy, momentum, speed, etc. Even more striking is the fact that there is no way to define or specify the information it carries—the *meaning* of the light—for that varies with the perceiver. The child sees only a point of light, whereas the adult sees a star, and the astrophysicist sees a red giant on the point of exploding, and so on.

What anything means depends on what the perceiver can take from it—and that could be anything. For example, the meaning of light from a star for a soldier in a trench may be this: the sky is clearing, so we will be attacking. In other words, the meaning of anything depends on

Are the Social Sciences Really- and Merely- Sciences? 5

Physics defines the ontology of the other natural sciences, the fundamental particles and forces of which everything is made, their causal connections, even space and time themselves. Physics is unified and complete, exhaustively spanning its domain with precision and accuracy. Physics unlocks the mysteries of chemistry, tracks the past through isotope dating, unravels the DNA control codes at the heart of each cell, and reveals the

To the extent that knowledge is power, physical science represents this power—and all its consequent authority—to our species. Physical science gave us the atomic bomb, the transistor, the information age, and social networking. It has transfigured the globe and *Homo sapiens*. For the many (to coin Aristotle's useful term), science is identified with physics, and so for them the answer to our question is clear: since knowledge is power, the social sciences are not sciences, or at least are not successful sciences. This view, although quite reasonable given its paradigm of science, is nevertheless misleading— and that difference between social and physical science is something for which we may (and perhaps

What is the paradigm of the social sciences? What stands to them as physics stands to the physical sciences? Which of them could claim to define the ontology of all of the social sciences, and provide the key to their success? As we can readily observe, the social sciences are more problematic than the physical sciences even when it comes to their definition: none can claim to be the paradigm of the social sciences as a whole. In Kuhn's terminology (Kuhn 1962), the social sciences are in their pre-paradigmatic stage, where none has achieved dominance over the others to such an extent that it defines the social domain in the way physics defines the physical domain. In pre-paradigmatic science, Kuhn claimed, "…though the field's practitioners were scientists, the net result of their activity was something less than science" (Kuhn 1962, p.13). As fecund as this historical observation of Kuhn's has been,

I will argue the contrary view that the social sciences are *more* than science, not less.

True, the individual social sciences are more diverse, more *independent* from one another than the physical sciences. Psychology, political science, economics, anthropology, sociology, etc., remain science*s* in the plural, and resist unification under a particular, paradigm-dominant, social science. They are *competing* programs to explain human behavior. There is no hierarchy in the social sciences (unlike the physical sciences). None has achieved anything like the powers of explanation, prediction, and control achieved in physics—and it is just such power that made physical science monolithic, and permitted it to extend the rule of the "fundamental

in university calendars and other academic contexts)—as though *Homo sapiens*, the paradigm of the social sciences, were not natural. This is an intellectual hangover from the days of Galileo and Descartes, who secured a place within human cognition for the physical sciences by declaring the soul outside the reach of physics, and safely within the domain of religion and the Church. But nowadays it is plain that human beings are naturally occurring animals, visible to the naked eye, with a location in space and time, composed largely of complex hydrocarbons that grow or decay depending on their physical circumstances according to well known physical laws. The social sciences are therefore *within* the natural sciences, properly understood. The proper logical complement to the social sciences is not

firings of our neurons as we ponder it all.

**4. The role of the social sciences in human life** 

forces and/or particles" over the entire physical domain.

natural science, but *physical* science.

should) be grateful.

how it's interpreted, and there are always infinitely many possible interpretations. So, because we are informavores, physical science cannot understand us, for meaning and interpretation are not within its scope, but lie within the domain of human interests and feelings—the domain, traditionally, of the humanities (literature, history, philosophy, languages, drama, art, etc.). Because *Homo sapiens* employs meaning in most aspects of its behavior, the social sciences lie athwart the boundary between the humanities and the physical sciences. (Foss 2007, 2011).
