Instruct: Given a question, retrieve documents that can help answer the question.
Query: What are the social sciences?
Social science is a category of academic disciplines, concerned with society and the relationships among individuals within a society. Social science as a whole has many branches. These social sciences include, but are not limited to: anthropology, archaeology, communication studies, economics, history, human geography, jurisprudence, linguistics, political science, psychology, public health, and sociology. The term is also sometimes used to refer specifically to the field of sociology, the original "science of society", established in the 19th century. For a more detailed list of sub-disciplines within the social sciences see: Outline of social science.
If it is unclear what counts as science, how the process of confirming theories works, and what the purpose of science is, there is considerable scope for values and other social influences to shape science. Indeed, values can play a role ranging from determining which research gets funded to influencing which theories achieve scientific consensus. For example, in the 19th century, cultural values held by scientists about race shaped research on evolution, and values concerning social class influenced debates on phrenology (considered scientific at the time). Feminist philosophers of science, sociologists of science, and others explore how social values affect science.
Philosophies of the particular sciences range from questions about the nature of time raised by Einstein's general relativity, to the implications of economics for public policy. A central theme is whether one scientific discipline can be reduced to the terms of another. That is, can chemistry be reduced to physics, or can sociology be reduced to individual psychology? The general questions of philosophy of science also arise with greater specificity in some particular sciences. For instance, the question of the validity of scientific reasoning is seen in a different guise in the foundations of statistics. The question of what counts as science and what should be excluded arises as a life-or-death matter in the philosophy of medicine. Additionally, the philosophies of biology, of psychology, and of the social sciences explore whether the scientific studies of human nature can achieve objectivity or are inevitably shaped by values and by social relations.
Evolutionary psychology has been entangled in the larger philosophical and social science controversies related to the debate on nature versus nurture. Evolutionary psychologists typically contrast evolutionary psychology with what they call the standard social science model (SSSM). They characterize the SSSM as the "blank slate", "relativist", "social constructionist", and "cultural determinist" perspective that they say dominated the social sciences throughout the 20th century and assumed that the mind was shaped almost entirely by culture.
While some have criticized the humanistic coefficient approach as too close to subjectivism, Znaniecki himself saw is as anti-subjectivist; he noted that social facts like cultural systems can exist even if nobody perceives their existence. He was also critical of any value coming from personal, subjective observations, arguing that such observations have value only if they can be objectively described. Both natural and social sciences operate within the bounds of the humanistic coefficient, but the natural sciences may abstract the pheomena they analyze from it, while the social sciences are methodologically obliged to account for it. Thus Znaniecki argued that the difference between natural and social sciences lies not in the difference between objective and subjective experiences, but in the subject of what is being studied: for Znaniecki, natural sciences studied things, and social sciences – cultural values. He saw sociology as a nomothetic science that should be able to use a similar methodology as natural sciences.
Development communication policy science is a thriving and a contemporary field in social sciences. It is the application of the policy sciences to improve policy development, implementation and evaluation in the development communication context. According to Flor (1991), development communication and policy sciences are regarded as distinct and mutually exclusive areas of study but are inextricably linked. He added that development communication and the policy sciences, although different in scope, stem from the same rationale: the need for actively applying knowledge from the principles of social sciences in solving large-scale societal problems under conditions of social change. Separately, development communication is a purposive, pragmatic, and value-laden development intervention while the policy sciences are the scientific study of policies and policy-making for the social good. Both endorse a normative or prescriptive role for the social sciences, work to alleviate societal problems and recognize communication's important function (Ongkiko & Flor, 2006). As an academic discipline, development communication policy science is the study of the use of the art and the science of policy in the development communication context.
Development communication's ultimate goal is to catalyze local development activities, local development planning and implementation, and local communication to smoothen the path to development. It is the science which uses communication to educate, change and motivate people's attitudes and values leading to developmental goals Policy is a term which frames the action rather than simply describing it (Colebatch, 2002). Thus, it labels what we see so that we can make sense of it in a particular way. Understanding policy means understanding the way in which practitioners use it to shape action. It leads us to ask who is involved in what setting, how the action is framed and what significance in this process of the idea of authorized purpose, and not simply an outcome. Indeed, the "approach of the policy science is forward-looking and anticipatory".
Schmidt's interest in institutional theory and epistemology, and her highly innovative "discursive institutionalism", began with her PhD dissertation, which was focused on the philosophy of science and its implications for explanation in the social sciences, and political science in particular. It argued that rather than looking at what philosophers of science say about science, which often idealizes the lawlike approach of physics, we should look at what they do, which is to use the four primary methodological approaches in the social sciences to explain science —lawlike, sociological, historical, and interpretive. This insight served her well when the "methodological wars" began in political science in the 1990s, and comparative political scientists were enjoined no longer to do what they had long done, which was to intertwine interests, institutions, culture, and ideas and discourse into problem-oriented research on politics and policy. Instead, they split into different "neo-institutionalist" camps, focused on rational institutionalist incentive structures, historical institutionalist path dependency, or sociological institutionalist cultural framing. Left out was any overarching institutionalist theory for the ideational constructs of meaning, let alone the discursive dynamics of communication. Schmidt sought to fill this gap with what she has called "discursive institutionalism", which she developed in stand-alone articles, most notably in two highly cited articles in the Annual Review of Political Science and the European Political Science Review, as well as in her work on democracy and political economy.
Psychology is a very broad science that is rarely tackled as a whole, major block. Although some subfields encompass a natural science base and a social science application, others can be clearly distinguished as having little to do with the social sciences or having a lot to do with the social sciences. For example, biological psychology is considered a natural science with a social scientific application (as is clinical medicine), social and occupational psychology are, generally speaking, purely social sciences, whereas neuropsychology is a natural science that lacks application out of the scientific tradition entirely. In British universities, emphasis on what tenet of psychology a student has studied and/or concentrated is communicated through the degree conferred: B.Psy. indicates a balance between natural and social sciences, B.Sc. indicates a strong (or entire) scientific concentration, whereas a B.A. underlines a majority of social science credits. This is not always necessarily the case however, and in many UK institutions students studying the B.Psy, B.Sc, and B.A. follow the same curriculum as outlined by The British Psychological Society and have the same options of specialism open to them regardless of whether they choose a balance, a heavy science basis, or heavy social science basis to their degree. If they applied to read the B.A. for example, but specialized in heavily science-based modules, then they will still generally be awarded the B.A.
This unity of science as descriptive remains, for example, in the time of Thomas Hobbes who argued that deductive reasoning from axioms created a scientific framework, and hence his "Leviathan" was a scientific description of a political commonwealth. What would happen within decades of his work was a revolution in what constituted "science", particularly the work of Isaac Newton in physics. Newton, by revolutionizing what was then called "natural philosophy", changed the basic framework by which individuals understood what was "scientific".
The report has recommended to clarify and establish guidelines on what is meant by "transformative science", measure success and ensure accountability, improve grant accountability, reduce duplication, consolidate the Directorate for Education & Human Resources and most controversially, eliminate the Social, Behavioral, and Economics Directorate which receives a total of $200–300 million per year. The press release noted that "The social sciences should not be the focus of our premier basic scientific research agency". Coburn questioned whether "these social sciences represent obvious national priorities that deserve a cut of the same pie" as the natural sciences.
Beginning in the 1990s, a separate approach to quantum social science was taken by a number of interdisciplinary researchers, working in what became known as quantum cognition, who argued that quantum probability theory was better than classical probability theory at accounting for a range of cognitive effects of the sort studied in behavioral economics. Others worked on developing “weak” or “generalised” versions of quantum theory which extended concepts such as complementarity and entanglement to the social domain. In their 2013 book Quantum Social Science, Emmanuel Haven and Andrei Khrennikov developed mathematical formalisms for the application of quantum models to topics including psychology, economics, finance, and brain science.
One of the enduring difficulties with defining "social epistemology" that arises is the attempt to determine what the word "knowledge" means in this context. There is also a challenge in arriving at a definition of "social" which satisfies academics from different disciplines. Social epistemologists may exist working in many of the disciplines of the humanities and social sciences, most commonly in philosophy and sociology. In addition to marking a distinct movement in traditional and analytic epistemology, social epistemology is associated with the interdisciplinary field of science and technology studies (STS).
The history of the social sciences begins in the Age of Enlightenment after 1650,[1] which saw a revolution within natural philosophy, changing the basic framework by which individuals understood what was "scientific". Social sciences came forth from the moral philosophy of the time and were influenced by the Age of Revolutions, such as the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution.[2] The social sciences developed from the sciences (experimental and applied), or the systematic knowledge-bases or prescriptive practices, relating to the social improvement of a group of interacting entities.[3][4]
Baert's earlier work deals with the philosophy of social sciences. He argues against several existing contributions to the philosophy of social sciences. Against those philosophies of social science that infer prescriptions for the social sciences based on attempts to demarcate science from non-science, he argues that developments in the history and sociology of science have undermined the validity of the notion of demarcation. Contrary to those social scientists who liken their empirical research to an arbitration court that helps to decide the fate of the theory or research programme under consideration, he contends that research in the social sciences relies on theoretical presuppositions which are contestable – and contested – to such an extent that empirical research cannot be regarded as a straightforward testing device. In opposition to what he coins ‘the social cartography model’ (according to which high-quality social research captures the inner essence of the social world as accurately and completely as possible and social theory provides the conceptual building blocks for this representation), he argues that it is not fruitful to conceive of research in terms of the passive recording of the external world, and that this representational model ultimately leads to theoretical ossification.
Structure and agency forms an enduring debate in social theory: "Do social structures determine an individual's behaviour or does human agency?" In this context 'agency' refers to the capacity of individuals to act independently and make free choices, whereas 'structure' refers to factors which limit or affect the choices and actions of individuals (such as social class, religion, gender, ethnicity, and so on). Discussions over the primacy of structure or agency relate to the very core of social ontology ("What is the social world made of?", "What is a cause in the social world, and what is an effect?"). One attempt to reconcile postmodern critiques with the overarching project of social science has been the development, particularly in Britain, of critical realism. For critical realists such as Roy Bhaskar, traditional positivism commits an 'epistemic fallacy' by failing to address the ontological conditions which make science possible: that is, structure and agency itself.
Theodore Porter argued in "The Rise of Statistical Thinking" that the effort to provide a synthetic social science is a matter of both administration and discovery combined, and that the rise of social science was, therefore, marked by both pragmatic needs as much as by theoretical purity. An example of this is the rise of the concept of Intelligence Quotient, or IQ. It is unclear precisely what is being measured by IQ, but the measurement is useful in that it predicts success in various endeavors.
Although the term socialism has come to mean specifically a combination of political and economic science, it is also applicable to a broader area of science encompassing what is now considered sociology and the humanities. The distinction between utopian and scientific socialism originated with Marx, who criticized the utopian characteristics of French socialism and English and Scottish political economy. Engels later argued that utopian socialists failed to recognize why it was that socialism arose in the historical context that it did, that it arose as a response to new social contradictions of a new mode of production, i.e. capitalism. In recognizing the nature of socialism as the resolution of this contradiction and applying a thorough scientific understanding of capitalism, Engels asserted that socialism had broken free from a primitive state and become a science. This shift in socialism was seen as complementary to shifts in contemporary biology sparked by Charles Darwin and the understanding of evolution by natural selection—Marx and Engels saw this new understanding of biology as essential to the new understanding of socialism and vice versa.
Science capital has been framed around eight key dimensions, drawing on statistical analysis of survey data from UK school students:
These eight dimensions collapse into four 'types' of science capital: what you know (scientific literacy); how you think (attitudes and dispositions); what you do (science-related activities and behaviours); and who you know (social contacts and networks). The first three 'types' include habitus and cultural capital and the fourth, social capital. Research shows that measuring science capital provides a better prediction of science aspirations than a general measure of capital. 
In 1924, Dr. Leroy Allen, dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Southwestern College in Winfield, Kansas and Dr. William Angus Hamilton, dean of both the Law School and School of Business Administration at The College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia established an honor society to promote academic excellence and achieve "integration and humanization" in the social sciences. The early 1900s witnessed the autonomous development of the younger social science fields, including social work, international relations and criminal justice. Of greater concern among some of the leading scholars of the time was what they saw as the increasing tendency toward "sheer quantification" and "mensuration" in the traditional social science disciplines. The founders of the new honor society believed that "if the social sciences are to render any adequate service to humanity, factionalism, separatism and dehumanization in them must be overcome." 
Formal sciences are formal language disciplines concerned with formal systems, such as logic, mathematics, statistics, theoretical computer science, robotics, information theory, game theory, systems theory, decision theory, and theoretical linguistics. Whereas the natural sciences and social sciences seek to characterize physical systems and social systems, respectively, using empirical methods, the formal sciences are language tools concerned with characterizing abstract structures described by sign systems. The formal sciences aid the natural and social sciences by providing information about the structures the latter use to describe the world, and what inferences may be made about them.
Richardson (2007) argues that, as proponents of evolutionary psychology (EP), evolutionary psychologists developed the SSSM as a rhetorical technique: The basic move is evident in Cosmides and Tooby's most aggressive brief for evolutionary psychology. They want us to accept a dichotomy between what they call the "Standard Social Science Model" (SSSM) and the "Integrated Causal Model" (ICM) they favor ... it offers a false dichotomy between a manifestly untenable view and their own. Wallace (2010) has also suggested the SSSM to be a false dichotomy and claims that "scientists in the EP tradition wildly overstate the influence and longevity of what they call the Standard Social Science Model (essentially, behaviorism) of human cognition".
Yet another strand is what he called cognitive social sciences --- the re-unification of the cognitive and social sciences through grounding the social sciences in the cognitive sciences.
Sociologists have not been alone in debating the public role of social science. Similar debates have occurred recently in the disciplines of economics, political science, anthropology, geography and history, and various sub-disciplines, including political ecology. In an effort to move these various disciplines "toward a more public social science", Craig Calhoun, the President of the Social Science Research Council, has encouraged sociologists and other social scientists to "ask better social science questions about what encourages scientific innovation, what makes knowledge useful, and how to pursue both these agendas, with attention to both immediate needs and long-term capacities. Calhoun has also entered the debate about public sociology, critically evaluating the project of public sociology while acknowledging its specific "promise", and arguing that "how sociology matters in the public sphere is vital to the future of the field".
June 17–18, 2009. Conference. The Unexpected Link: Using Network Science to Tackle Social Problems Featured topics of the conference were networks linking nature and society; global networks of risk; teams of collaboration - creativity and collusion; the emergence of social order; organizations, markets, and governance; biological webs and human impacts on the environment; bridging the gap between social and biological networks, as well as future directions in network science and transnational - interdisciplinary collaborations: what should a center for network science aim at? 
Quantum social science is an emerging field of interdisciplinary research which draws parallels between quantum physics and the social sciences. Although there is no settled consensus on a single approach, a unifying theme is that, while the social sciences have long modelled themselves on mechanistic science, they can learn much from quantum ideas such as complementarity and entanglement. Some authors are motivated by quantum mind theories that the brain, and therefore human interactions, are literally based on quantum processes, while others are more interested in taking advantage of the quantum toolkit to simulate social behaviours which elude classical treatment. Quantum ideas have been particularly influential in psychology, but are starting to affect other areas such as international relations and diplomacy in what one 2018 paper called a “quantum turn in the social sciences.”