**Section 1**

**Science and Interdisciplinarity**

**1**

Jeffrey Foss

*Canada* 

*University of Victoria* 

**Are the Social Sciences**

**Really- and Merely- Sciences?** 

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,

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

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

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

and on the other gives it responsibilities for humankind.

we learned to consume books, and nowadays we graze on the internet.

star, and the astrophysicist sees a red giant on the point of exploding, and so on.

**1. Introduction** 
