Social
Sciences

Back there in 18th century, Christian Wolff differentiated three types of ontological metaphysics, regarding the spirit, the world and God. Later on, Wilhelm Dilthey divided two types of science: Human science and Natural science. Since then, we witness a great schism between what is considered to be, on the one hand, subjective and on the other – objective studies. The gap between Human and Natural sciences became bigger with the idea of falsifiability introduced by Karl Popper in 20th century.

In that picture, we could imagine that Social Sciences lay, somewhat, in the middle between the two already mentioned. The majority of the Social Sciences exploit the scientific methods borrowed from Natural Sciences (Antipositivism, or Interpretivism, is an exception), whereas Humanities mostly use critique, speculation and comparative historical methodology.

There is a large dispute on what the main disciplines within Social Sciences are and what goes beyond the definition into the area of Humanitarian studies. Nevertheless, we could outline the scope of Social Sciences. The foremost subdomains are Anthropology, Psychology, Economics, Archaeology, Cultural Studies, Political Science, Social History, and Sociology. On the behalf of Humanities, these are Philosophy, History, Linguistics and Language Studies, Literature and Arts.

Although these two domains are diametrically opposite ways of fathoming the world’s phenomena, they could lend a lot to each other. Nowadays, science becomes more and yet more interdisciplinary. Therefore, one significant breakthrough in some of the branches of Social Sciences could surge a great inspiration for Arts and vice versa.

There are many examples of that effect as the immense spurs that Marxism or Psychoanalysis were for a multitude of artists, or how science fiction or “stream of consciousness” literature provoked various types of research and discoveries.

As the world is not divided into subjects and objects, and the human being is not made out of two parts – body and soul, but they are entities the same way, we should not, categorically, separate Human and Natural sciences or Social Sciences and Arts. Although differentiation is obligatory for our mind to comprehend and seize its targets, we produce meaningful ideas when all the analysed parts are put back together.

Similarly, we should reconcile the different aspects of knowledge to further understand the Universe within and without us.