SOC4

• In Pre-1700 (Dark Ages), explanations of things are based on faith and not on fact.
• In "Age of Enlightenment" (1700), leaders look back to the darkness of past and wanted to shed light on the society, thus giving rise to change and allow progress for the future.
• Two branches of development of knowledge:

  *Physical science

  *Pre-Social Science
• If reason and science can be used to discover laws of nature, reason and science can be slso used to discover laws about humans and their unique behaviours.
• Asking questions about human behaviour and studying human using reason and scientific method, forms the basis for the scientific study of social behaviour and give us, the origins of social science.
• *Physical science

  *Philosophy (Pre-social science)

  *Social science
• Social science as the study of society

  *Social science are the fields of human knowledge that deal with all aspects of the group life of human beings.
• Beginning in the 1950's, the term behavioural sciences was often applied to the disciplines designated as the social sciences.
• The social sciences do not precede the 19th century that is, as distinct and recognized disciplined of thought, one must go back farther in time for the origins of some of their fundamental ideas and objectives.
• In the largest sense, the origins go all the way back to the Ancient Greeks and their rationalist inquiries into human nature, the state, and morality.
• Very probably, apart from the initial Greek determination to study all the things in the spirit of dispassionate and rational inquiry, there would be no social sciences today.
• There have been long periods of time, as during the Western Middle Ages, when the Greek rationalist temper was lacking.

  But the recovery of this temper, through texts of the great classical philosophers, is the very essence of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment in modern European history.

  With the Enlightenment, in the 17th and 18th centuries, one may begin.
• Natural science vs Social science

  Natural sciences use the scientific method in order to study the world around us. Subjects like Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Geology, etc.
• Social science is a bit of misnomer. What it refers to is disciplines that study human interactions like Sociology, Economics, etc. but they do not use the Scientific Method.
• Social science is perhaps referred to as such due to the involvement of mathematics, specifically statistics in their studies.
• It's important to note that this is not a criticism of the value of Social science.It is just an important distinction to draw when considering conclusions raised by the different disciplines.
• It is also important to note that not everything studied on the Natural sciences uses the scientific method. There are areas where it is not possible to construct a meaningful experiment, either because the subject is too complex, or because the technology does not exist.
• Humanities vs Social sciences

  *Humanities and social sciences deal with human aspects like politics, law, linguistics, economics, and psychology.

  One of the major differences between the two is that humanities involve a more critical and analytical approach whereas social sciences deal with more of a scientific approach.
• When talking about social sciences, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber are credited with giving it a modern definition.
• Social sciences was influenced by the French revolution and the Industrial revolution.
• Social sciences was developed from prescriptive practices that were related to a group's social improvement, or through applied and experimental sciences, or through the methodical knowledge of bases.
• Anthropology

  *The European Age of Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries marked the rise of scientific and rational thought.
• Enlightenment thinkers (John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau) based their work on philosophical reason rather than religious authority and asked important anthropological questions. Rousseau, for instance, wrote on the moral qualities of "primitive" societies and about human inequality.
• Economics

  *The effective birth of economics as a separate discipline may be traced to the year 1776, when the Scottish philosopher Adam Smith published "An inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations."
• The Greeks made significant contributions, as did the medieval scholastics, and from the 15th to the 18th century an enormous pamphlet literature discussed and developed the implications of economic nationalism (mercantilism).
• Geography

  *The earliest geographers were concerned with exploring unknown areas and with describing the observable features of different places. Such as ancient peoples as the Chinese, Egyptians, and Phoenicians made long journeys and recorded their observations as strange lands.
• One of the first known maps was made on a clay tablet in Babylonia about 2300 BC.
• Linguistics

  *In the early 20th century, linguistics expanded to include the study of unwritten languages.
• In the United States linguists and anthropologists began to study the rapidly disappearing spoken languages of Native North Americans. Because many of these languages were unwritten, researchers could not use historical analysis in their studies.
• Political science

  *The systematic study of politics dates to ancient times.The oldest legal and administrative code that survives in its entirely is the Coconut of Hammurabi, inscribed on a plar of black basalt.
• Hammurabi, a Babylonian king who ruled from 1792 to 1750 BC, described the laws in his code as enabling "stable government and good rule."
• Psychology

  *From about 600 to 300BC, Greek philosophers inquired about a wide range of psychological topics. They were especially interested in the nature of knowledge and how human beings come to know the world; a field of philosophy known as epistemology.
• Sociology

  *The first definition of sociology was advanced by the French philosopher Auguste Comte.
• In 1838, Comte coined the term sociology to describe his vision of a new science that would discover laws of human society resembling the laws of nature by applying the methods of factual investigation that had proved so successful in the physical sciences.
• The British philosopher Herbert Spencer adopted both Comte's term and his mission.
• Social Sciences Disciplines

  *Anthropology

  *Economics

  *Geography

  *History

  *Linguistics

  *Political Science

  *Psychology

  *Sociology

  *Demography
• Anthropology

  *The study of origins, organizations, institutions, and development of human beings and how these findings apply to society today.

  Greek word

  Anthropos meaning "human" and logos meaning "word" or "study of".

  Therefore, Anthropology is "the study of human."
• 2 fields of Anthropology

  *Physical Anthropology

  -studies the past and the present evolution of the human species and is especially concerned with understanding the causes of present human diversity.

  *Cultural Anthropology

  -is concerned with the study of human societies and cultures and their development.
• Economics

  *It aims to study how to manage the limited resources to satisfy the unlimited wants of individuals. It is also seen as the production, consumption, and transfer of goods.

  Greek word

  Oikos meaning "house" and nomos meaning "custom or law".
• 2 fields of Economics

  *Microeconomics

  -is the part of economics concerned with single factors and effects of individual decisions.

  *Macroeconomics

  -is concerned with the large-scale or general economic factors, such as interest rates and national productivity.