How To Read A Book- A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading - Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren [141]
is to train for professional work outside of the university, while the previously mentioned departments are more exclusively dedicated to the pursuit of systematic knowledge of human society, an activity that usually goes on within the university.
There is presently a trend in universities toward the establishment of centers and institutes for interdisciplinary studies. These centers cut across the conventional social science departments and professional schools, and include studies in the theories and methods of statistics, demography, psephology ( the science of elections and polling ), policy- and decision-making, recruitment and treatment of personnel, public administration, human ecology, and many more. Such centers are producing studies and reports that incorporate findings of a dozen or more of these specialties. Considerable sophistication is required even to discern the various strands of these efforts, let alone judge the validity of the findings and conclusions.
What about psychology? Those social scientists who interpret their field strictly tend to exclude psychology on the grounds that it concerns itself with individual and personal characteristics, while the social sciences proper focus on cultural, institutional, and environmental factors. Those who are less strict, while conceding that physiological psychology should be subsumed under the biological sciences, hold that psychology, both normal and abnormal, should be regarded as a social science on the grounds of the inseparability of the individual from his social environment.
Psychology, incidentally, is a prime example of a social science area that is currently enjoying great popularity among students. It is possible that enrollments in psychology across the country are larger than in any other subject. And the literature of psychology, at every level from the most technical to the most popular, is enormous.
What of the behavioral sciences? Where do they fit into the social science picture? As originally used, the term be-How to Read Social Science 299
havioral science included sociology and anthropology and the behavioral aspects of biology, economics, geography, law, psychology and psychiatry, and political science. The accent on behavior served to emphasize observable, measurable behavior capable of being systematically investigated and of producing verifiable findings. Recently, the term behavioral sciences has come to be used almost as a synonym of the term social sciences, but many purists object to this usage.
Finally, what about history? It is acknowledged that the social sciences draw on the study of history for data and for exemplifications of their generalizations. However, although history, viewed as accounts of particular events and persons, may be scientific in the minimal sense of constituting systematic knowledge, it is not a science in the sense that of itself it yields systematic knowledge of patterns or laws of behavior and development.
Is it possible, then, to define what we mean by social science? We think so, at least for the purposes of this chapter.
Such fields as anthropology, economics, politics, and sociology constitute a kind of central core of social science, which almost all social scientists would include in any definition. In addition, we think it would be conceded by most social scientists that much, though not all, of the literature of such fields as law, education, and public administration, and some of the literature of such fields as business and social service, together with a considerable portion of psychological literature, falls within the confines of a reasonable