Since the mid-20th century, the term "social science" has come to refer more generally, not just to sociology but to all those disciplines which analyze society and culture, from anthropology to psychology to media studies.
Philosophers such as Confucius had long since theorised on topics such as social roles, the scientific analysis of human society is peculiar to the intellectual break away from the Age of Enlightenment and toward the discourses of Modernity.
[1] The beginnings of the social sciences in the 18th century are reflected in the grand encyclopedia of Diderot, with articles from Rousseau and other pioneers.
[2] Examples of boundary blurring include emerging disciplines like social studies of medicine, biocultural anthropology, neuropsychology, and the history and sociology of science.
Al-Biruni (973–1048) wrote detailed comparative studies on the anthropology of peoples, religions and cultures in the Middle East, Mediterranean and South Asia.
[8] Representative figures of the 17th century include David Hartley, Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Samuel von Putendorf.
Figures of the time included François Quesnay, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Giambattista Vico, William Godwin, Gabriel Bonnet de Mably, and Andre Morellet.
While he was merely the archetype of an accelerating trend, the important distinction is that for Newton, the mathematical flowed from a presumed reality independent of the observer, and working by its own rules.
In Pascal's case, the famous wager; for Leibniz, the invention of binary computation; and for Kepler, the intervention of angels to guide the planets [citation needed].
The term "social science" was coined in French by Mirabeau in 1767, before becoming a distinct conceptual field in the nineteenth century.
[10] He had earlier used the term "social physics", but that had subsequently been appropriated by others, most notably the Belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet.
Comte believed a positivist stage would mark the final era, after conjectural theological and metaphysical phases, in the progression of human understanding.
Biology had, seemingly, resisted mathematical study, and yet the theory of natural selection and the implied idea of genetic inheritance—later found to have been enunciated by Gregor Mendel, seemed to point in the direction of a scientific biology based, like physics, chemistry, astronomy, and Earth science on mathematical relationships.
The first thinkers to attempt to combine inquiry of the type they saw in Darwin with exploration of human relationships, which, evolutionary theory implied, would be based on selective forces, were Freud in Austria and William James in the United States.
Though Comte is generally regarded as the "Father of Sociology",[11] the discipline was formally established by another French thinker, Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), who developed positivism in greater detail.
The first thinkers to attempt to combine inquiry of the type they saw in Darwin with exploration of human relationships, which, evolutionary theory implied, would be based on selective forces, were Freud in Austria and William James in the United States.
This idea, based on his theory of how organisms respond, states that there are three phases to the process of inquiry: With the rise of the idea of quantitative measurement in the physical sciences, for example Lord Rutherford's famous maxim that any knowledge that one cannot measure numerically "is a poor sort of knowledge", the stage was set for the conception of the humanities as being precursors to "social science".
Examples of boundary blurring include emerging disciplines like social studies of medicine, neuropsychology, biocultural anthropology, and the history and sociology of science.
Coupled with this pragmatic need was the belief that the clarity and simplicity of mathematical expression avoided systematic errors of holistic thinking and logic rooted in traditional argument.
This trend, part of the larger movement known as modernism provided the rhetorical edge for the expansion of social sciences.