Introduction & Disciplines of Social Sciences

• Social Sciences


  Study and explain human relations
• Branches of Human Knowledge

  • Natural Sciences
  • Social Sciences
  • Humanities
  • Applied Professions
• Natural Sciences


  • Explain the physical world
  • Use fields like physics, chemistry, biology
• Social Sciences


  • Study and explain human relations
  • Use fields like anthropology, sociology, economics
• Humanities


  • Humanize humans through expression of oneself
  • Use fields like music, literature
• Applied Professions


  • Concerned with the application of theories
• It is inherent for people to bond and socialize with one another
• Social Sciences


  Scientific study of the society people live in
• Social Sciences utilize scientific methods and inquiry in understanding and explaining the world
• Social Sciences try to discover and explore human behaviors and study human relations to other humans, environment, and society
• Natural Sciences


  Scientifically explain the natural world
• Social Sciences


  Use more qualitative methods compared to the quantitative methods of Natural Sciences
• Neither Natural Sciences nor Social Sciences are superior to one another
• Natural Sciences study the physical world but Social Sciences see the connection between the world and humans
• An example is natural scientists studying global warming and needing social scientists to explore how it affects human lives
• Anthropology


  Study of humans
• Physical/Biological Anthropology


  • Focuses on human biology and evolutionary studies
  • Includes paleoanthropology, genetics, primatology, osteology, paleopathology, forensic anthropology
• Cultural/Social Anthropology


  • Concerned with the study and comparative study of preliterate societies, including all aspects of human behavior
  • Employs ethnography as a means to study and record the different ways of life of human societies
• Archaeology


  • Study of culture of the past, especially in prehistory, through retrieving and examining the material remains of the ancient human societies
• Linguistic Anthropology


  • Study of human speech and language and its development throughout history
• Economics


  Discipline that concentrates on how a particular society solves its problem of scarcity of resources
• Microeconomics


  • Focused on economic behavior of much smaller units (individuals, etc.)
• Macroeconomics


  • Focused on economic behavior of much larger units (corporations, geography, etc.)
• Geography


  Study of the physical features of the earth and human activities
• Physical Geography


  • Talks about the physical features of the earth
• Human Geography


  • Focuses on the human aspect of geography - humans and their culture, and how humans change their environment
• History


  Branch of knowledge that attempts to ascertain, record, and explain facts and events that happened in the past
• There is a long standing debate if history is an art or science
• History


  A branch of knowledge that attempts to ascertain, record, and explain facts and events that happened in the past
• History originated from the Greek word historia meaning "inquiry"
• History is one of the oldest social sciences tracing its origin in the myths and traditions of early people that were passed from generations
• Historians may need to work hand in hand with archaeologists, anthropologists, and linguists in order to reconstruct the past
• There is a long standing debate if history is an art or science

  Greek writers may have treated history as an art in their ancient works but quite a number of historians also tried to be scientific in their methods of writing historical accounts of historiography
• Historians have applied similar techniques employed in natural science like data gathering and validation of hypotheses, while narrating stories in accurate and clear manner
• Herodotus and Thucydides


  Forerunners of the discipline of history
• Linguistics


  A field of knowledge involving the scientific study of language as a universal and recognizable aspect of human behavior and capacity
• Linguistics branches


  • Theoretical Linguistics
  • Applied Linguistics
• Theoretical Linguistics


  • Phonology
  • Morphology
  • Phonetics
  • Syntax
  • Semantics
• Applied Linguistics


  • Sociolinguistics
  • Psycholinguistics
  • Historical linguistics
• Political Science


  A relatively recent academic discipline compared to other branches of knowledge despite the fact that politics is probably as old as the appearance of human polity in the ancient past