Social science is what? What do social sciences study? System of Social Sciences

Science, as one of the forms of cognition and explanation of the world, is constantly evolving: the number of its branches and directions is steadily growing. This development is especially vividly demonstrated by the development of social sciences, which open up new facets of the life activity of the modern society. What are they? What is the subject of their study? Read more about this in the article.

Social science

This concept appeared relatively recently. Scientists associate its occurrence with the development of science as a whole, which began in the 16th and 17th centuries. It was then that science embarked on its own path of development, combining and absorbing the whole system of the pseudo-scientific knowledge that was being formed at that time.

It should be noted that social science is an integral system of scientific knowledge, which in its basis contains a number of disciplines. The task of the latter is a comprehensive study of society and its constituent elements.

The rapid development and sophistication of this category in the last couple of centuries poses new challenges for science. The emergence of new institutions, the complication of public relations and relations require the introduction of new categories, the establishment of dependencies and regularities, and open up new branches and sub-sectors of this kind of scientific knowledge.

What is studying?

The answer to the question of what constitutes the subject of the social sciences is already laid in it. This part of scientific knowledge concentrates its cognitive efforts on such a complex concept as society. The essence of it is most fully revealed due to the development of sociology.

The latter is often presented as a science of society. However, such a broad interpretation of the subject of this discipline does not allow us to get a complete picture of it.

What is society and sociology?

The answer to this question was tried to give many researchers, both modern and past centuries. Modern sociology can "boast" a huge number of theories and concepts that explain the essence of the concept of "society". The latter can not consist only of one individual, an indispensable condition here is the aggregate of several beings that must necessarily be in the process of interaction. That is why today scientists represent society as a kind of "clot" of all kinds of connections and interactions that entangle the world of human relations. There are a number of distinctive characteristics of society:

• The presence of a certain social community, reflecting the social side of life, the social identity of relations and all kinds of interactions.
• The presence of regulatory bodies, which sociologists call social institutions, the latter are the most stable ties and relationships. A vivid example of such an institution is the family.
• A special social space. Territorial categories are not applicable here, since society can go beyond them.
• Self-sufficiency is a characteristic that makes it possible to distinguish society from other similar social formations.

Considering the detailed representation of the basic category of sociology, one can expand the notion of it as a science. This is not just a science about society, but an integrated system of knowledge about various social institutions, relationships, communities.

Social sciences study the society, forming a diverse view of it. Each considers the object from its side: political science - political, economics - economic, cultural studies - cultural, etc.

Causes

Since the 16th century, the development of scientific knowledge has become quite dynamic, and by the middle of 19, the process of differentiation has been observed in already separated science. The essence of the latter was that separate branches were being formed in the course of scientific knowledge. The foundation for their formation and, in fact, the reason for separation was the selection of the object, the subject and the methods of investigation. On the basis of these components, the disciplines were centered around two main spheres of human life: nature and society.

What are the reasons for separating from scientific knowledge what is known today as social science? This is primarily the changes that occurred in society in the 16th-17th century. It is then that its formation begins in the form in which it has survived to the present day. The obsolete structures of a traditional society are replaced by a mass one, which requires a lot of attention, since it became necessary not only to understand social processes, but also to be able to manage them.

Another factor contributing to the emergence of social sciences was the active development of natural sciences, which in some way "provoked" the emergence of the former. It is known that one of the characteristic features of scientific knowledge at the end of the 19th century was the so-called naturalistic understanding of society and the processes taking place in it. The peculiarity of this approach was that social scientists tried to explain within the categories and methods of the natural sciences. Then there is sociology, which its creator, Auguste Comte, calls social physics. The scientist, when studying society, tries to apply to him natural-scientific methods. Thus, social science is a system of scientific knowledge that developed later natural (natural) and developed under its direct influence.

Development of social sciences

The rapid development of knowledge about society in the late 19 - early 20 th century was due to the desire to find levers of management in a rapidly changing world. Natural sciences, failing to cope with the explanation of social facts and processes, find their inconsistency and limitation. Formation and development of social sciences allow to receive answers to many questions of both past and present. New processes and phenomena that take place in the world require new approaches to studying, as well as applying the latest technologies and techniques. All this stimulates the development of both scientific knowledge in general and social sciences in particular.

Given that the stimulus for the development of social sciences has become natural, it is necessary to find out how to distinguish one from the other.

Sciences about nature and society: distinctive characteristics

The main difference, which allows you to relate a particular knowledge to a particular group, is, of course, the object of study. In other words, what the attention of science is directed to, in this case, these are the two different spheres of being.

It is known that the natural sciences arose earlier than the social sciences, and their methods influenced the development of the latter's methodology. Its development took place in a different cognitive channel - by understanding the processes taking place in society, in contrast to the explanation that science offers about nature.

Another feature that emphasizes the differences between natural and social sciences is the provision of objectivity in the process of cognition. In the first case, the scientist is outside the subject of the study, observing it "from the outside." In the second, he often participates in the processes that occur in society. Here, objectivity is ensured by comparison with universal values and norms: cultural, moral, religious, political and others.

What are the social sciences?

Just note that there are some difficulties in determining where to assign this or that science. Modern scientific knowledge tends to the so-called interdisciplinarity, when sciences borrow methods from each other. That is why it is sometimes difficult to classify science as one or another group: both social and natural sciences have a number of characteristics that bring them together.

Since social science occurred later than natural sciences, at the initial stage of its development, many scientists believed that it was possible to investigate the society and the processes occurring in it by applying natural-scientific methods. A vivid example is sociology, which was called social physics. Later, with the development of their own system of methods, social (social) sciences moved away from the natural sciences.

Another feature that unites these branches of science is that each of them acquires knowledge in the same ways, among which:

• A system of such general scientific methods as observation, modeling, experiment;
• Logical methods of cognition: analysis and synthesis, induction and deduction, etc .;
• The reliance on scientific facts, the consistency and consistency of judgments, the unambiguousness of the concepts used and the rigor of their definitions.

Also, both spheres of science are related to what they differ from other types and forms of knowledge: the validity and systematic nature of the knowledge obtained, their objectivity, and so on.

System of scientific knowledge of society

All the totality of the sciences that study society are sometimes combined into one, which is called social science. This discipline, being complex, allows to form a general idea of the society and the place in it of the individual. It is formed on the basis of knowledge about various spheres of human life: economics, politics, culture, psychology and others. In other words, social science is an integrated system of social sciences that shapes the notion of such a complex and diverse phenomenon as society, the roles and functions of a person in it.

Classification of social sciences

On the basis of what social sciences belong to any level of knowledge about society or give an idea of almost all spheres of its life activity, scientists divided them into several groups:

• The first includes those sciences that give general ideas about the society itself, the laws of its development, the main components, etc. (sociology, philosophy);
• The second covers those disciplines that explore a single side of society (economics, political science, cultural studies, ethics, etc.);
• The third group includes sciences that permeate all areas of society's life (history, jurisprudence).

Sometimes social sciences are divided into two spheres: social and humanitarian. Both of them are closely interrelated, since they are related to society in one way or another. The first characterizes the most general patterns of social processes, and the second refers to the subjective level that examines a person with his values, motives, goals, intentions, etc.

Thus, we can say that social sciences study the society in a broader aspect, as part of the material world, and also in the narrow - at the level of the state, the nation, the family, associations or social groups.

The most famous social sciences

Considering the fact that the modern society is a rather complex and diverse phenomenon, it is impossible to study it in the framework of one discipline. This situation can be explained on the basis that the number of relations and connections in society today is enormous. We all face in our life with such spheres as: economy, politics, law, culture, language, history, etc. All this diversity is a vivid manifestation of how diverse modern society is. That is why it is possible to bring at least 10 social sciences, each of which characterizes one of the sides of the socium: sociology, political science, history, economics, jurisprudence, pedagogy, culturology, psychology, geography, anthropology.

Undoubtedly, the source of basic information about society is sociology. It is she who reveals the essence of this multifaceted object of investigation. In addition, today political science, which characterizes the political sphere, has gained sufficient popularity.

Jurisprudence allows to learn how to regulate relations in a society with the help of rules of conduct, fixed by the state in the form of legal norms. And psychology allows it to be done with the help of other mechanisms, studying the psychology of the crowd, the group and the person.

Thus, each of the 10 social sciences studies society from its side with the help of its own methods of research.

Scientific publications publishing studies of social sciences

One of the most famous is the journal "Social Sciences and Modernity". Today it is one of the few publications that allows you to get acquainted with a fairly wide range of the most diverse areas of modern science about society. There are articles on sociology and history, political science and philosophy, studies that raise the problems of the cultural and psychological plan.

The main distinguishing feature of the publication is the possibility of locating and acquaintance with interdisciplinary researches, which are carried out at the intersection of various scientific directions. Today, the globalizing world makes its demands: the scientist must leave the narrow framework of his industry and take into account the current trends in the development of the world society as a single organism.