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The Nature and Function of Social Science: A Perspective of the Sociology of Knowledge

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1 What are the social sciences?

Learning Objectives for this Chapter

After reading this Chapter, you should be able to:

• understand what the social sciences are, including some fundamental concepts and values,
• understand and apply the concept of ‘phronesis’ to thinking about the purpose and value of the social sciences.

History and philosophy of the social sciences

Some of the earliest written and spoken accounts of human action, values, and the structure of society can be found in Ancient Greek, Islamic, Chinese and indigenous cultures. For example, Ibn Khaldoun , a 14th-century North African philosopher, is considered a pioneer in the field of social sciences. He wrote the book Muqaddimah , which is regarded as the first comprehensive work in the social sciences. It charts an attempt to create a universal history based on studying and explaining the economic, social, and political factors that shape society and discussed the cyclical rise and fall of civilisations. Moreover, indigenous peoples across the world have contributed in various and significant ways to the development of scientific knowledge and practices (e.g., see this recent article by Indigenous scholar, Jesse Popp – How Indigenous knowledge advances modern science and technology ). Indeed, contemporary social science has much to learn from indigenous knowledges and methodologies (e.g., Quinn 2022 ), as well as much reconciling to do in terms of its treatment of indigenous peoples the world over (see Coburn, Moreton-Robinson, Sefa Dei, and Stewart-Harawira, 2013 ).

Nevertheless, the dominant Western European narrative of the achievements of the enlightenment still tends to overlook and discredit much of this knowledge. Additionally, male thinkers have tended to dominate within the Western social sciences, while women have historically been excluded from academic institutions and their perspectives largely omitted from social science history and texts. Therefore, much of the history of the social sciences represent a predominantly white, masculine viewpoint. That is not to say that the concepts and theories developed by these male social scientists should be outright discredited. Nevertheless, in engaging with them we must understand this context; they are not the only voices, nor necessarily the most important. Indeed, it is crucial therefore that the history of the social sciences is continually re-examined through a critical lens, to identify gaps within social scientific knowledge bases and allow space for critical revisions that broaden existing concepts and theories beyond an exclusively masculine, Western-centric perspective. We seek to adopt such an approach throughout this book. However, to critique and question Western social scientific perspectives, we must first understand them.

Social sciences in the Western world

The study of the social sciences, as developed in the Western world, can be said to emerge from the Age of Enlightenment in the late 17th Century. Beginning with René Descartes (1596-1650), both the natural and social sciences developed from the concept of the rational, thinking individual. These early Enlightenment thinkers argued that human beings use reason to understand the world, rather than only referring to religion. Other thinkers around this time such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau  (1712-1778), M. de Voltaire (1694-1778) and Denis Diderot (1713-1784), began to develop different methodologies to scientifically explain processes in the body, the structure of society, and the limits of human knowledge. It was during this period that the social sciences grew out of moral philosophy, which asks ‘how people ought to live’, and political philosophy, which asks ‘what form societies ought to take’. Rather than only focusing on descriptive scientific questions about ‘how things are’, the social sciences also sought answers to normative questions about ‘how things could be’. This is one of the central differences between the natural sciences and the social sciences. This era of Enlightenment marked an important turning point in history that gave way to further developments in both the natural and social sciences.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is often regarded as one of the most influential philosophers for the development of the social sciences. In his work, Kant develops an epistemology that accounts for the objective validity of knowledge, due to the capacities of the human mind. In other words, how can we as individual people come to know facts about the world that are true for all of us. Social scientists, such as Émile Durkheim (1858-1917) and Max Weber (1864-1920) critically developed the work of Kant to explain social relations between individuals.

Émile Durkheim prioritised the validity of social facts over the values themselves, continuing the tradition of ‘ positivism ‘ (an ontological position that we discuss later in this Chapter). Durkheim argued that there is a distinction between social facts and individual facts. Rather than viewing the structure of the human mind as the basis for knowledge like Kant, Durkheim argued that it is society itself that forms the basis for the social experience of individuals. Social facts should therefore, “be treated as natural objects and can be classified, compared and explained according to the logic of any natural science” (Rose, 1981: 19). Durkheim developed his methodology using analogies to the natural sciences. For example, he borrowed concepts from biology to understand society as a living organism.

TRIGGER WARNING

The following section contains content which may be triggering for certain people. It focuses on the sociology of suicide, including discussion of self-harm and different forms of suicide as it exists within society.

Durkheim and Suicide

Emile Durkheim’s 1879 text ‘Suicide: a Study in Sociology’ is a foundational work for the study of social facts. Durkheim explores the phenomenon of suicide across different time periods, nationalities, religions, genders, and economic groups. Durkheim argues that the problem of suicide can not be explained through purely biological, psychological or environmental means. Suicide must, he concludes, “necessarily depend upon social causes and be in itself a collective phenomenon” (Durkheim 1897: 97). It was and continues to be a work of great impact that demonstrates that, what most would consider an individual act is actually enmeshed in social factors.

In his text, Durkheim identifies some of the different forms suicide can take within society, four of which we discuss below.

Egoistic Suicide

Egoistic suicide is caused by what Durkheim terms “excessive individuation” (Durkheim 1897: 175). A lack of integration within a particular community or society at large leads human beings to feel isolated and disconnected from others. Durkheim argues that “suicide increases with knowledge”(Durkheim 1897: 123). This is not to say that a particular human being kills themselves because of their knowledge; rather it is because of the decline of organised religion that human beings desire knowledge outside of religion. It is thus, for Durkheim the weakening organisation of religion that detaches people from their (religious) community, increasing social isolation. According to Durkheim, the capacity of religion to prevent suicide does not result from a stricter prohibition of self-harm. Religion has the power to prevent someone from committing suicide because it is a community, or a ‘society’ in Durkheim’s words. The collective values of religion increases social integration and is just one example of the importance of community in decreasing rates of suicide. Isolation of individuals, for Durkheim, is a fundamental cause of suicide: “The bond attaching man [sic] to life relaxes because that attaching him [sic] to society is itself slack” (Durkheim 1897: 173).

Altruistic Suicide

Durkheim notes another kind of suicide that stems from “insufficient individuation” (Durkheim 1897: 173). This occurs in social situations where an individual identifies so strongly with their beliefs of a group that they are willing to sacrifice themselves for what they perceive to be the greater good. Examples of altruistic suicide include suicidal sacrifice in certain cultures to honour their particular God, soldiers who go to war and die in honour of their country, or the ancient tradition of Hara-kiri in Japan. As such, Durkheim notes that some people have even refused to consider altruistic suicide a form of self-destruction, because it resembles “some categories of action which we are used to honouring with our respect and even admiration”(Durkheim 1897: 199).

Anomic Suicide

The third kind of suicide Durkheim identifies is termed anomic suicide. This type is the result of the activity of human beings “lacking regulation”, and “the consequent sufferings” that are felt from this situation (Durkheim 1897: 219). Durkheim notes the similarities between egoistic and anomic suicide, however he notes an important distinction: “In egoistic suicide it is deficient in truly collective activity, thus depriving the latter of object and meaning. In anomic suicide, society’s influence is lacking in the basically individual passions, thus leaving them without a check-rein” (Durkheim 1897: 219). 

Fatalistic Suicide

There is a fourth type of suicide for Durkheim, one that has more historical meaning than current relevance. Fatalistic suicide is opposed to anomic, and is the result of  “excessive regulation, that of persons with futures pitilessly blocked and passions violently choked by oppressive discipline” (Durkheim 1897: 239). These regulations occur during moments of crises, including economic and social upheaval, that destabilise the individual’s sense of meaning.  It is the impact of external factors onto the individual, where meaning is thrown to the wind for the individual, that characterises fatalistic suicide.

Durkheim’s sociological study of suicide was a groundbreaking work for social sciences. His methodology, multivariate analysis, provided a way to understand numerous interrelated factors and how they relate to a particular social fact. His findings, particularly the higher suicide rates of Protestants, compared to Jewish and Catholic people, was correlated to the higher rates to individualised consciousness and the lower social control. This study, despite criticisms of the generalisations drawn from the results, has had a remarkable impact on sociology and remains a seminal text for those interested in the social sciences.

Max Weber was also influenced by the work of Kant. Unlike Durkheim, Weber “transformed the paradigm of validity and values into a sociology by giving values priority over validity” (Rose, 1981: 19). Culture is thus understood as a value that structures our understanding of the world. According to Weber, values cannot be spoken about in terms of their truth content. The separation between values and validity means that values can only be discussed in terms of faith rather than scientific reason. For Weber, only when a culture’s underpinning values are defined can facts about the social world be understood.

The philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831) also greatly shaped the development of the social sciences. As argued by Herbert Marcuse (1941: 251-257), Hegel instigated the shift from abstract philosophy to theories of society. According to Hegel, human beings are not restricted to the pre-existing social order and can understand and change the social world. Our natural ability to reason allows human beings to create theories about our world that are universal and true.

Karl Marx (1818-1883), often regarded as the founder of conflict theory, was deeply influenced by the philosophy of Hegel. For example, Hegel emphasises that labour and alienation are essential characteristics of human experience, and Marx applies this idea more concretely to a material analysis of society, dividing human history along the lines of the forces of production. In other words, Marx understood that labour was divided in capitalist society according to two classes that developed society through a perpetual state of conflict: the working class, or ‘ proletariat’ , and the class of ownership, or ‘ bourgeoisie’ (we talk more about Marx’s conflict theory in Chapter 3).

Overall, the social sciences have a long and complex history, influenced by many different philosophical perspectives. As alluded to earlier, however, any account of the historical beginnings of the social sciences must be understood to be embedded within dominant systems of power, including for example colonisation, patriarchy, and capitalism. Indeed, any history of the social sciences is already situated within a narrative, or ‘discourse’. Maintaining a critical lens will allow for a deeper understanding of the genesis of the social sciences, as well as the important ability to question social scientific approaches, understandings, findings, and methods. It is this disposition that we seek to cultivate throughout this book. After all, as Marx famously wrote, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.”

Defining Key Terms

Descriptive : A descriptive claim or question seeks to explain how things work, what causes them to work that way, and how things relate to one another.

Normative : A normative claim or question seeks to explain how things ought to work, why they should work a certain way, and what should change for things to work differently.

Labour : For Marx, labour is the natural capacity of human beings to work and create things. Under capitalism, labour primarily produces profits for the ruling class. (Please note, we return to the notion of labour in later chapters, and explore other understandings and definitions of this term.)

Alienation : Workers, separated from the products of their labour and replaceable in the production process, become separated or ‘alienated’ from their creative human essence. (Please also see Chapter 3 for a further explanation of the concept of alienation under Marxism.)

What are the social sciences?

The social sciences are a ‘broad church’, including lots of different disciplinary and sub-disciplinary areas. These include, for example, sociology, anthropology, criminology, archaeology, social policy, human geography, and many more. At their core, they apply the ‘scientific method’ to the analysis of people, societies, power, and social change.

Before we move on, let’s touch briefly on what we mean by the scientific method . At its core, the scientific method is essentially a series of steps that scientists take in order to build and test scientific knowledge. These steps include:

• Observation :  Scientists observe the world around them, in order to better understand it. 
• Question :  Scientists ask ‘research questions’ about how the world works.
• Hypothesis: Scientists come up with ideas or theories about how they think the world works, which they then seek to test through their research.
• Experiment: In experimental research, scientists use a specific experimental design (which includes a control and experimental group) to test hypotheses. This is not always possible or desirable in the social sciences, so social scientists tend to rely on a broader array of methods to collect data that can help them test their hypotheses about the social world. 
• Analysis:  Scientists use various different approaches to analyse the data they collect; the approach to analysis depends on the kind of data collected, and what questions are being asked of the data. 
• Conclusions:  Scientists develop conclusions, based on the results of their analyses. They consider how these either reinforce or further develop existing knowledge and understandings, as well as what there is left to find out (the latter of which informs future research endeavours). 

Over time, social scientists have developed their own ontological and epistemological leanings, which in many ways represent a departure from the typical positivist approaches of the natural sciences. While the natural sciences tend to assume there are objective ‘truths’ waiting to be discovered through, for instance, sensory experience (seeing, looking), social scientists tend to understand truth as being socially constructed. Thus, social scientists tend to adopt interpretivist and constructivist approaches to understanding the world, seeing knowledge as being co-constructed, rooted in context, and an important source/expression of power.

Consolidate your learning: ‘Introduction to the social sciences’ video

To consolidate your understanding of the social sciences, watch the following short video – Introduction to the social sciences (YouTube, 8:34) .

Flyvbjerg (2001) referred to the ‘science wars’, by which he meant the ongoing battle between the natural and social sciences. Often in public and political discourse, the natural sciences are seen as being more ‘scientific’ and a source of ‘stronger’ or ‘more objective’ knowledge than the social sciences. However, the reality is that both have equally important but different things to offer. As Flyvbjerg (2001: 3) argued:

…the social sciences are strongest where the natural sciences are weakest: just as the social sciences have not contributed much to explanatory and predictive theory, neither have the natural sciences contributed to the reflexive analysis and discussion of values and interests…

As Flyvbjerg (2001) sees it, social scientists should not try to replicate the natural sciences but should instead embrace their ability to take a different ontological and epistemological outlook, which enables deep, reflexive, and contextualised analysis about people and societies as a point of departure for values-based action . He called this ‘phronetic social science’ (which we elaborate on later in the Chapter).

Defining key terms

‘Ontology’: Ontology is the study of reality and being. When we refer to ‘ontology’, we are not just talking about people’s views of the world, but also their lived experience and actual being in the world, as well as their beliefs and claims about the nature of their existence. Some key questions are ‘what and who exists in the world?’ and ‘what are the relationships between them’?

‘Epistemology’ : Epistemology concerns the origin and nature of knowledge, including how knowledge claims are built and made. Some key questions are ‘what is knowledge?’ and ‘how is knowledge acquired’?

Positivism: Positivism is an ontology that assumes there is an objective ‘truth’ waiting to be discovered. Positivism involves, therefore, the search for a universal/generalisable ‘truth’.

Constructivism: Constructivism is an ontology that assumes that there are multiple ‘truths’ that are subjective and socially constructed. Truths are not, therefore, universal but are instead rooted in social, historical, and geographical context. These ‘truths’ are also bound up with power. For instance, those who hold power get to say what is ‘true’ and what isn’t.

In addition to the above,  Argentine-Canadian philosopher Mario Bunge ‘s (2003: 285ff) glossary of key terms includes a range of ontological concepts used in the social sciences that are useful to think with:

“Definitions of Twelve Ontological Concepts

•   Ontology: The philosophical study of being and becoming.
•   Realism (ontological): The thesis that the world outside the student exists on its own.
•   Phenomenalism (ontological): The philosophical view that there are only phenomena (appearances to someone).
•   Constructivism (ontological): The view that the world is a human (individual or social) construction.
•   Dialectics: The ontological doctrine, due to Hegel and adopted by Marx and his followers, according to which every item is at once the unity and struggle of opposites.
•   Materialism: The family of naturalist ontologies according to which all existents are material.
•   Naturalism: The family of ontologies that assert that all existents are natural-hence none are supernatural.
•   Idealism. The family of ontologies according to which ideas pre-exist and dominate everything else.
•   Subjectivism. The family of philosophies according to which everything is in a subject’s mind (subjective idealism).
•     Holism: The family of doctrines according to which all things come in unanalyzable wholes.
•     Individualism: The view that the universe is an aggregate of separate individuals: that wholes and emergence are illusory.
•     Systemism (ontological): The view that everything is either a system or a component of some system.”

Source: Bunge, M. (2003). E mergence and Convergence: Qualitative Novelty and the Unity of Knowledge . University of Toronto Press. Pp. 285ff

Reflection exercise

Take a few moments to think about what you have read above. Then, write a short (~100 word) reflection explaining:

• primary ways in which the natural and social sciences differ, and
• some things that the social sciences offer that the natural sciences cannot.

Why study the social sciences?

In their 2019 publication, Carré asked, ‘what are the social sciences for’? In response, they propose a framework for thinking about the different approaches and contributions of social science research, which encompasses three continuums: 1) return on investment versus intrinsic value; 2) citizen (societal) relevance versus academic relevance; and 3) applied research versus basic research (see the Figure below, adapted from Carré [2019: 23]).

While Carré (2019) argues that social scientists move along these continuums, he also suggests that there is good justification for finding middle grounds between the extremes. For instance, while applied research will tend to focus on and find solutions for specific social issues (e.g. youth crime), ‘basic’ research tends to adopt a more high-level theoretical approach to shaping how we understand the world, which can lead to longer-term substantive change (such as changing the way we think about and understand youth crime). As Carré (2019: 22) explains: “either research is conducted to directly solve pressing social issues, or it takes a full step back from the social word, in order to reflect about it without directly meddling [and] being involved in its events and discussions.” However, both are incredibly useful for moving knowledge forward and making crucial contributions. Similarly, they can have important symbiotic relationships; applied research might be informed and guided by the knowledge created through basic research, and conversely, applied research studies might be meta-analysed (a type of combined analysis) to inform broader theoretical development that is often the purview of basic research.

A central question raised by Carré (2019) is, what should social science ‘give back’ to the society that supports it? Take a piece of paper and write down some responses to this, based on your own views and beliefs.

According to Flyvbjerg (2001), and as also covered by Schram (2012), the concept of ‘phronetic social science’ can help bring social scientists back to the central value of the social sciences, rather than seeing them try to emulate the natural sciences and their search for universal and generalisable theories and truths. Instead, phronetic social science recognises that ‘truth’ is dependent on context, is in constant flux, and is bound up with power. This is not to say that we live in a ‘post-truth’ world where anything goes, but merely that we need to interrogate how knowledge and truth are created and how societies and social structures can play a role in this. Famous sociologist, Michel Foucault (1926-1984) referred to this as a ‘politics of truth’: something we’ll continue to discuss in greater detail over coming chapters.

‘Phronetic’ social science

Phronetic social science draws on the concept of phronesis, a term coined by Aristotle (384-322 BC) to refer to practical wisdom that arises from experience. Thus, phronetic social science “is designed not to substitute for, but instead to supplement, practice wisdom and to do so in ways that can improve society” (Schram 2012: 16). In terms of improving society, phronetic social science is then also concerned with praxis, or the practical application of knowledge to the betterment of society. Finally, phronetic social science is not attached to particular methods (e.g. quantitative versus qualitative), instead being “open to relying on a diversity of data collection methods in order to best inform attempts to promote change related to the issues being studied” (Schram 2012: 20).

Schram (2012: 18-19) presents four justifications for phronetic social science as follows:

• “Given the dynamic nature of human interaction in the social world, social inquiry is best practiced when it does not seek general laws of action that can be used to predict courses of action, but instead offer a critical assessment of values, norms and structures of power and dominance. Social inquiry is better when it is linked to questions of the good life, that is, to questions of what we ought to do.
• While the social world is dynamic, social research is best seen as dialogical. Social inquiry is not a species of theoretical reason but of practical reason. Practical reason stays within a horizon of involvements in social life. For Flyvbjerg, this entails a context-dependent view of social inquiry that rests on the capacity for judgement. Understanding can never be grasped analytically; it is a holistic character. Understanding also has intrinsic subjective elements requiring researchers to forgo a disinterested position of detachment and enter into dialogue with those they study.
• As the study of dynamic social life, dialogical social inquiry is best practiced when we give up traditional notions of objectivity and truth and put aside the fact-value distinction. Instead, we should emphasise a contextual notion of truth that is pluralistic and culture-bound, further necessitating involvement with those we study.
• Dialogical social inquiry into a dynamic and changing social world provides a basis for emphasising that interpretation is itself a practice of power, one that if conducted publicly and in ways that engage the public can also challenge power and inform efforts to promote social change.”

This concept of phronetic social science is a helpful means of understanding how the social sciences differ to the natural sciences, and can add value in different ways. However, it doesn’t tell us  how  to do  social science, or how to  be  social scientists. What tools, for instance, might we use to undertake the sort of dialogical social inquiry that Schram refers to above? And how might we start ‘thinking’ like social scientists? We turn to these questions in the chapter that follows.

‘Phronesis’: Described by Aristotle as ‘practical wisdom’, and juxtaposed with techn é (‘know how’ of practice) and epistem é (abstract and universal knowledge).

‘Dialogical’: Exploring the meaning of things and creating knowledge through dialogue/conversation.

‘Quantitative’ : A term used to describe research methods that typically involve measurement and counting of phenomena, regularly involving numerical data.

‘Qualitative’: A term used to describe research methods that typically involve understanding and interpretation of lived experiences (how people think, feel, act), regularly involving textual data.

Think about the concept of phronetic social science. Write a short paragraph (~30-40 words) to explain it in your own words. Then read back over the content in this chapter content to check your understanding.

Resources to support further learning

Relevant readings:

• Gorton, W. ‘ The Philosophy of Social Science .’
• Flyvbjerg, B. 2001. ‘The science wars: a way out.’ In. Flyvbjerg, B. Making social science matter, chapter 1. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.
• Carré, D. 2019. ‘ Social sciences, what for? On the manifold directions for social research .’ In. Valsiner, J. (Ed.) Social philosophy of science for the social sciences, pp. 13-29. Springer: Cham.
• Schram, S. 2012. ‘Phronetic social science: an idea whose time has come.’ In Flyvbjerg, B., Landman, T. and Schram, S. (Eds.) Real social science: applied phronesis. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.
• Bunge, M. (2003). E mergence and Convergence: Qualitative Novelty and the Unity of Knowledge . University of Toronto Press.

Other resources:

• Video: Soomo, ‘An animated introduction to social science’ (YouTube, 4:35) .
• Video: ‘Introduction to the social sciences’ (YouTube, 8:34) .
• Podcast: Theory and Philosophy Podcast, ‘Bent Flyvbjerg – Making Social Science Matter’ (YouTube, 44:06) . (Note, discussion of  phronesis  starts at 7:51)
• Video: ‘Importance of social science with Professor Cary Cooper’ (YouTube, 4:13) .

Introduction to the Social Sciences Copyright © 2023 by The University of Queensland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Effects of theology

Effects of the classics and of cartesianism.

• Heritage of the Enlightenment
• Major themes resulting from democratic and industrial change
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• Political science
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• Early attempts at a science of humanity: Durkheim and Weber
• Humanity as a symbolic phenomenon
• Identity, will, and the thinking self
• Institutions, nations, and civilizations
• Applications of the science of humanity: nationalism, economic growth, and mental illness

• Where was Émile Durkheim educated?
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• Table Of Contents

What is a social science?

A social science is any branch of academic study or science that deals with human behaviour in its social and cultural aspects. Usually included within the social sciences are cultural (or social) anthropology, sociology, psychology, political science, and economics.

What is the relationship between the terms behavioral science and social science ?

Beginning in the 1950s, the term behavioral sciences was often applied to disciplines categorized as social sciences. Some favored this term because it brought these disciplines closer to some of the sciences, such as physical anthropology, which also deal with human behavior.

Who named the social science discipline of sociology?

Auguste Comte gave the social science of sociology its name and established the new discipline in a systematic fashion.

What is cultural anthropology's relationship to the social sciences?

Cultural anthropology is a branch of the social sciences that deals with the study of culture in all of its aspects and that uses the methods, concepts, and data of archaeology, ethnography and ethnology, folklore, and linguistics.

What was Adolphe Quetelet's contribution to the social sciences?

Adolphe Quetelet was a key figure in the social statistics branch of the social sciences. He was the first person to call attention, in a systematic manner, to the kinds of structured behavior that could be observed and identified only through statistical means.

Recent News

social science , any branch of academic study or science that deals with human behaviour in its social and cultural aspects. Usually included within the social sciences are cultural (or social) anthropology , sociology , psychology , political science , and economics . The discipline of historiography is regarded by many as a social science, and certain areas of historical study are almost indistinguishable from work done in the social sciences. Most historians, however, consider history as one of the humanities . In the United States , focused programs, such as African-American Studies, Latinx Studies, Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, are, as a rule , also included among the social sciences, as are often Latin American Studies and Middle Eastern Studies, while, for instance, French, German, or Italian Studies are commonly associated with humanities. In the past, Sovietology was always considered a social science discipline, in contrast to Russian Studies.

Beginning in the 1950s, the term behavioral sciences was often applied to the disciplines designated as the social sciences. Those who favoured this term did so in part because these disciplines were thus brought closer to some of the sciences, such as physical anthropology and physiological psychology , which also deal with human behaviour.

Strictly speaking, the social sciences, as distinct and recognized academic disciplines, emerged only on the cusp of the 20th century. But 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 . The heritage of both Greece and Rome is a powerful one in the history of social thought, as it is in other areas of Western society. Very probably, apart from the initial Greek determination to study all things in the spirit of dispassionate and rational inquiry, there would be no social sciences today. True, 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.

Heritage of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

The same impulses that led people in that age to explore Earth , the stellar regions, and the nature of matter led them also to explore the institutions around them: state, economy, religion , morality , and, above all, human nature itself. It was the fragmentation of medieval philosophy and theory, and, with this, the shattering of the medieval worldview that had lain deep in thought until about the 16th century, that was the immediate basis of the rise of the several strands of specialized social thought that were in time to provide the inspiration for the social sciences.

Medieval theology , especially as it appears in St. Thomas Aquinas ’s Summa theologiae (1265/66–1273), contained and fashioned syntheses from ideas about humanity and society—ideas indeed that may be seen to be political, social, economic, anthropological, and geographical in their substance. But it is partly this close relation between medieval theology and ideas of the social sciences that accounts for the different trajectories of the social sciences, on the one hand, and the trajectories of the physical and life sciences, on the other. From the time of the English philosopher Roger Bacon in the 13th century, there were at least some rudiments of physical science that were largely independent of medieval theology and philosophy. Historians of physical science have no difficulty in tracing the continuation of this experimental tradition, primitive and irregular though it was by later standards, throughout the Middle Ages . Side by side with the kinds of experiment made notable by Bacon were impressive changes in technology through the medieval period and then, in striking degree , in the Renaissance . Efforts to improve agricultural productivity; the rising utilization of gunpowder , with consequent development of guns and the problems that they presented in ballistics; growing trade , leading to increased use of ships and improvements in the arts of navigation , including use of telescopes ; and the whole range of such mechanical arts in the Middle Ages and Renaissance as architecture , engineering , optics , and the construction of watches and clocks —all of this put a high premium on a pragmatic and operational understanding of at least the simpler principles of mechanics , physics , astronomy , and, in time, chemistry .

In short, by the time of Copernicus and Galileo in the 16th century, a fairly broad substratum of physical science existed, largely empirical but not without theoretical implications on which the edifice of modern physical science could be built. It is notable that the empirical foundations of physiology were being established in the studies of the human body being conducted in medieval schools of medicine and, as the career of Leonardo da Vinci so resplendently illustrates, among artists of the Renaissance, whose interest in accuracy and detail of painting and sculpture led to their careful studies of human anatomy .

Very different was the beginning of the social sciences. In the first place, the Roman Catholic Church , throughout the Middle Ages and even into the Renaissance and Reformation , was much more attentive to what scholars wrote and thought about the human mind and human behaviour in society than it was toward what was being studied and written in the physical sciences. From the church’s point of view, while it might be important to see to it that thought on the physical world corresponded as far as possible to what Scripture said—witnessed, for example, in the famous questioning of Galileo—it was far more important that such correspondence exist in matters affecting the human mind, spirit, and soul . Nearly all the subjects and questions that would form the bases of the social sciences in later centuries were tightly woven into the fabric of medieval Scholasticism , and it was not easy for even the boldest minds to break this fabric.

Then, when the hold of Scholasticism did begin to wane, two fresh influences, equally powerful, came on the scene to prevent anything comparable to the pragmatic and empirical foundations of the physical sciences from forming in the study of humanity and society. The first was the immense appeal of the Greek classics during the Renaissance, especially those of the philosophers Plato and Aristotle . A great deal of social thought during the Renaissance was little more than gloss or commentary on the Greek classics. One sees this throughout the 15th and 16th centuries.

Second, in the 17th century there appeared the powerful influence of the philosopher René Descartes . Cartesianism , as his philosophy was called, declared that the proper approach to understanding of the world, including humanity and society, was through a few simple, fundamental ideas of reality and, then, rigorous, almost geometrical deduction of more complex ideas and eventually of large, encompassing theories, from these simple ideas, all of which, Descartes insisted, were the stock of common sense—the mind that is common to all human beings at birth. It would be hard to exaggerate the impact of Cartesianism on social and political and moral thought during the century and a half following publication of his Discourse on Method (1637) and his Meditations on First Philosophy (1641). Through the Enlightenment into the later 18th century, the spell of Cartesianism was cast on nearly all those who were concerned with the problems of human nature and human society.

Great amounts of data pertinent to the study of human behaviour were becoming available in the 17th and 18th centuries. The emergence of nationalism and the associated impersonal state carried with it ever growing bureaucracies concerned with gathering information, chiefly for taxation , census , and trade purposes. The voluminous and widely published accounts of the great voyages that had begun in the 15th century, the records of soldiers, explorers, and missionaries who perforce had been brought into often long and close contact with indigenous and other non-Western peoples, provided still another great reservoir of data. Until the beginning of the 19th century, these and other empirical materials were used, if at all, solely for illustrative purposes in the writings of the social philosophers. Just as in the equally important area of the study of life, no philosophical framework as yet existed to allow for an objective and comprehensive interpretation of these empirical materials. Only in physics could this be done at the time.

An Analysis of Interactions between the Natural Sciences and the Social Sciences

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Ever since the time of Aristotle, the natural sciences and medicine have furnished analogies for studies of governments, classifications of constitutions, and analyses of society.* One of the fruits of the Scientific Revolution was the vision of a social science — a science of government, of individual behavior, and of society — that would take its place among the triumphant sciences, producing its own Newtons and Harveys. The goal was not only to achieve a science with the same foundations of certain knowledge as physics and biology; there was thought to be a commonality of method that would advance the social sciences in the way that had worked so well in the physical and biological sciences. Any such social science, it was assumed, would be based on experiments and critical observations, would become quantitative, and would eventually take the highest form known to the sciences — expression in a sequence of mathematical equations.

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The Order of Social Sciences: Sociology in Dialogue with Neighbouring Disciplines

Why Social Science is Biological Science

Sociology for whom, once more.

All of the examples introduced in this introductory section are discussed in full, with bibliographic documentation, in the succeeding sections.

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On Cournot’s important contributions to mathematical economics, see Claude Ménard: La formation d’une rationalité économique: A.A. Cournot (Paris: Flammarion, 1978); also Joseph Schumpeter: History of Economic Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954).

See Note on Natural Science & Social Science on pp. xxv-xxxvi.

On the history of the concept of behavioral sciences, see Bernard Berelson on “Behavioral Sciences” in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences , ed. David L. Sills, vol. 2 (New York: The Macmillan Company & The Free Press, 1968), pp. 41–45; also Herbert J. Spiro: “Critique of Behavioralism in Political Science,” pp. 314–327 of Klaus von Beyme (ed.): Theory and Politics , Theorie und Politik , Festschrift zum 70. Geburtstag für Carl Joachim Friedrich (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971).

An admirable discussion of the differences in these three usages is given in John Theodore Merz: A History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century (Edinburgh/London: W. Blackwood and Sons, 1903–1914; reprint, New York: Dover Publications, 1965; reprint, Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1976), vol. 1, chs. 1, 2, 3.

See Marie Boas Hall: All Scientists Now: the Royal Society in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984); also Dorothy Stimpson: Scientists and Amateurs: A History of the Royal Society (New York: Henry Schuman, 1948). The Royal Society, however, originally had a large proportion of non-scientists as Fellows, including poets (e.g., John Dryden), doctors, and peers of the realm. After the reorganization of 1847 the non-scientific categories of membership were eliminated, although exceptions are still made (e.g. Prince Philip and the financier-philanthropist Isaac Wolfson).

See n. 21 infra; also Chapter 12 infra.

See Roger Hahn: The Anatomy of a Scientific Institution: The Paris Academy of Sciences (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971).

At first there were four classes: “Physica” (including chemistry, medicine, and other natural sciences), “Mathematica” (including astronomy and mechanics), German philos- ophy, and literature (especially oriental literature). Later these classes were regrouped into two major divisions: the natural sciences and mathematics in one and “philosophical and historical” domains in the other. See Erik Amburger (ed.): Die Mitglieder der Deutschen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin , 1700–1950 (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1960); Kurt-Reinhard Biermann & Gerhard Dunken (eds.): Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berl in: Biographischer Index der Mitglieder (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1960). On the history and vicissitudes of the German Academy, see Werner Hartkopf & Gerhard Dunken: Von der Brandenburgischen Sozietät der Wissenschaften zur Deutschen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1967); the standard history is Adolph Harnack: Geschichte der Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin , 3 vols. (Berlin: Reichsdruckerei, 1990).

See note 2 supra.

See Samuel Johnson: A Dictionary of the English Language , 2 vols. (London: printed by W. Strahan for J. and P. Knapton, T. and T. Longman, C. Hitch and L. Hawes, A. Millar and R. and J. Dodsley, 1755; photo-reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1979).

The Works of Lord Macaulay , ed. Lady Trevelyan, vol. 5 (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1871), p. 677. In 1829 Macaulay wrote (ibid, p. 270) that the “noble Science of Politics” was “of all sciences… the most important to the welfare of the nations,” the science which “most tends to expand and invigorate the mind.” Additionally, he declared, the “Science of Politics” is notable among “all sciences” because it “draws nutriment and ornament from every part of philosophy and literature, and dispenses in return nutriment and ornament to all.” See also Stefan Collini, Donald Winch, & John Burrow: That Noble Science of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), passim, but esp. pp. 102-103, 120. The negative version of Macaulay’s statement occurs in the oft-quoted remark made by Bismarck in the Prussian Chamber on 18 December 1863, “Die Politik ist keine exakte Wissenschaft,” that is, “Politics is not an exact science.” Early in the eighteenth century, in Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Jonathan Swift regretted that the ignorant Brobdignagians had not as yet “reduced Politicks into a Science.”

“ A Letter to a Noble Lord,” in Edmund Burke: The Works (London: John C. Nimmo, 1887; reprint, Hildesheim/New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1975), vol. 5, p. 215; David Hume: A Treatise of Human Nature , ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1896 and reprints), pp. ix and xix—xx. In An Inquiry Concerning the Human Understanding , ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894), pp. 83–84, Hume wrote of historical “records” as “so many collections of experiments, by which the politician or moral philosopher fixes the principles of his science, in the same manner as the physician or natural philosopher becomes acquainted with the nature of plants, minerals, and other external objects, by the experiments which he forms concerning them.” On Hume and a science of politics, the studies of Duncan Forbes are of primary importance, notably his introduction to the reprint of Hume’s History of Great Britain (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970); “Sceptical Whiggism, Commerce and Liberty,” pp. 179–201 of A.S. Skinner & T. Wilson (eds.): Essays on Adam Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976); “Hume’s Science of Politics,” pp. 39–50 of G.P. Morice (ed.): David Hume , Bicentenary Papers (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1977). See also James E. Force & Richard H. Popkin: Essays on the Context , Nature , and Influence of Isaac Newton’s Theology (Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990), ch. 10, “Hume’s Interest in Newton and Science” (by J.E. Force).

John Harris, Lexicon Technicum (London: printed for Dan. Brown, Tim. Goodwin, John Walthoe,…, Benj. Tooke, Dan. Midwinter, Tho. Leigh, and Francis Coggan, 1704; reprint, New York/London: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1966 — The Sources of Science, no. 28) defines “Science” as “Knowledge founded upon, or acquir’d by clear, certain and self-evident Principles.” Harris says that “Natural Philosophy” is “the same with what is usually call’d Physicks , viz . That Science which contemplates the powers of Nature, the properties of Natural Bodies, and their mutual action one upon another.”

James S. Coleman: Foundations of Social Theory (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1990), p. xv. On this general topic, see Robert K. Merton: Social Theory and Social Structure (Enlarged edition, New York: The Free Press, 1968), ch. 1, “On the History and Systematics of Sociological Theory.”

Robert K. Merton: “The Mosaic of the Behavioral Sciences,” pp. 247–272 of Bernard Berelson (ed.): The Behavioral Sciences Today (New York/London: Basic Books, 1963), esp. p. 256.

A. Hunter Dupree: Science in the Federal Government: A History of Policies and Activities (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1957; revised reprint, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).

Reported in Henry W. Riecken: “The National Science Foundation and the Social Sciences,” Social Science Research Council Items , Sept. 1983, 37(2/3): 39–42, esp. p. 40a.

For example, the association of “sociology” with “socialism” is discussed in Albion W. Small & George E. Vincent: An Introduction to the Study of Society (New York/Cincinnati/Chicago: American Book Company, 1894), pp. 40–41, where it is stated that “Systematic Socialism has both directly and indirectly promoted the development of Sociology.”

Riecken (n. 17 supra), p. 406.

See Chapter 12 infra.

The Ninth Annual Report of the National Science Foundation announced that “during the fiscal year 1959 [in December 1958], the Foundation established an Office of Social Sciences to support research and related activities in the social science disciplines.” The Eleventh Annual Report announced that “The Office of Social Sciences was reconstituted as the Division of Social Sciences during fiscal year 1961 [the year ending on 30 June 19611.” The new Division replaced “the previous Social Science Research Program” and was said to represent “a further step in the development of Foundation activities in the area.” The social sciences did not maintain this independent importance, however, and there is still some debate on how best to fit the social sciences into the structure of the National Science Foundation. A note in Science (16 Aug. 1991, 253: 727) on “a proposal to give the social sciences more clout within the agency” summarized the findings of a draft report by a “task force composed of 20 outside social and behavioral scientists and biologists” who recommended the removal of the social and behavioral sciences from their position as part of the Directorate for Biological, Behavioral and Social Sciences. Although most “social scientists” were in favor of this proposal, which would “give them an advocate at the highest level of the agency and win them more funding and respect,” some social scientists — it was noted — “don’t want to leave the fold.” On 23 Oct. 1991, The Chronicle of Higher Education (pp. A-23, A-25) reported that the reorganization had occurred, including the establishment of a new Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences. NSF Director Walter E. Massey expressed high hopes that the creation of a “separate new office” would “lead to an increase in funds for those sciences.” Although many “social scientists said the change would lead to more recognition and higher budgets,” support for the change “was not unanimous” (according to the Chronicle’s report) even among the social scientists concerned.

The work of scientists and social scientists mentioned briefly in various sections of this chapter is discussed at greater length and with bibliographical documentation in subsequent chapters or in other sections of this chapter.

Wilhelm Ostwald: Energetische Grundlagen der Kulturwissenschaften (Leipzig: Verlag von Dr. Werner Kilinkhardt, 1909). On Ostwald’ s “Kulturwissenschaften” see Philip Mirowski: More Heat than Light: Economics as Social Physics , Physics as Nature’s Economics (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 454–57, 132–133, 268. There were many scientists and social scientists who saw in the new “energetics” a basis for a reconstitution of economics, sociology, history, and so on. A notable example was Henry Adams, who attempted to use J. Willard Gibbs’s memoir on the “Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances” as the basis of a study on “The Rule of Phase Applied to History.” This essay is reprinted along with Adam’s “A Letter to American Teachers of History” in Brooks Adams (ed.): The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1920).

See Chapter 2 infra.

See John Brewer: The Sinews of Power: War , Money and the English State , 1688–1783 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), ch. 8, “The Politics of Information, Public Knowledge and Private Interest”; Keith Thomas: “Numeracy in Early Modern England,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , 1987, 37: 103–132.

See Chapter 4, §3, infra.

See Jacques Roger: Buffon (Paris: Fayard, 1989), pp. 234, 296.

Stephen M. Stigler: The History of Statistics: The Measurement of Uncertainty before 1900 (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1986), ch. 3, “Inverse Probability.” See further, Helen M. Walker: Studies in the History of Statistical Method (Baltimore: The Williams & Wilkins Company, 1929; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1975), pp. 31–38; Hyman Alterman: Counting People: The Census in History (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969).

Keith M. Baker: Condorcet , from Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), ch. 4.

See Chapter 3 infra. In addition to Stigler’s History of Statistics (n. 28 supra), ch. 5, see Theodore M. Porter: The Rise of Statistical Thinking , 1820–1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), esp. pp. 2, 4; Ian Hacking: The Taming of Chance (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), chs. 13, 14, 19, 21; Frank H. Hankins: Adolphe Quetelet as Statistician (New York: Columbia University Press, 1908 — Studies in History, Economics and Public Law; reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1968). 31 Baker (n. 29 supra), p. 202.

Mirowski (n. 23 supra), ch. 5. Mirowski’s thesis has not produced universal acceptance by economists. Not only is it considered extreme, but it is faulted because it does not apply to all founders of neoclassical economics, for example, Karl Menger, and even Léon Walras (see n. 33 infra and §1.5 infra).

See further, §1.6 infra. Walras, we shall have occasion to note, argued for the similarity of economics and rational mechanics but (see n. 143 infra) did so only after he had produced his system of economics. That is, he did not create his economics by attempting to imitate rational mechanics.

See §1.5 infra.

William Breit & Roger W. Spencer (eds.): Lives of the Laureates: Seven Nobel Economists (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), p. 74. This topic is developed further in §1.6 infra.

In addition to the works cited in nn. 28, 30 supra, see Gerd Gigerenzer, Zeno Swijtink, Theodore Porter, Lorraine Daston, John Beatty, and Lorenz Krüger: The Empire of Chance: How Probability Changed Sciences and Everyday Life (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989); William Coleman: Death is a Social Disease: Public Health and Political Economy in Early Industrial France (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982).

David Brewster: Letters on Natural Magic (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1843), p. 181. In The Glaciers of the Alps (Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1861), p. 285, John Tyndall wrote that “the analogy between a river and glacier moving through a sinuous valley is therefore complete.”

Richard Owen defined these two terms as follows: analogue — “A part or organ in one animal which has the same function as another part or organ in a different animal”; homologue — “The same organ in different animals under every variety of form and function.” Richard Owen: On the Archetypes and Homologies of the Vertebrate Skeleton (London: Richard & John E. Taylor, 1848), p. 7. Despite Owen’s phrasing here, the terms “similarity of form” or “sameness of structure” may be used to represent the kind of likeness exemplified by “the same organ.” See further n. 40 infra; also Mayr (n. 40 infra), p. 464.

In Darwinian evolution, analogy is the result of parallel adaptation, the way in which different organisms in separate but parallel evolutionary stages have developed, independently of one another, different ways of “adapting themselves to the same external circumstances” or needs. An example is given by an organ of vision, in which a lens concentrates light on special sensitive tissue. Konrad Lorenz has noted that this “invention” had been made independently by animals of four different phyla, in two of which (the vertebrates and the cephalopods) this kind of “eye” has “evolved into the true, image-projecting camera through which we ourselves are able to see the world.” See Konrad Z. Lorenz: “Analogy as a Source of Knowledge,” Science , 1974, 185 : 229234.

See Ernst Mayr: The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity , Evolution , and Inheritance (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 45, where it is noted that the “term `homologous’ existed already prior to 1859, but it acquired its currently accepted meaning only when Darwin established the theory of common descent. Under this theory the biologically most meaningful definition of `homologous’ is: `A feature in two or more taxa is homologous when it is derived from the same (or a corresponding) feature of their common ancestor.’”

“Homology” appears with special meanings in several sciences. In addition to the general evolutionary or biological sense, there is the chemical usage (referring to a family of organic compounds in which each member is distinguished from the next in the sequence by some constant factor, notably, a CH 2 group), the mathematical usage (a topological classification), and a special usage in genetics (to indicate the same linear sequence of genes in two or more chromosomes).

It should be noted that the terms “analogue” and “homologue” are not being used in the present context in the strict sense of evolutionary biology, since in the analysis of the interactions of the social and the natural sciences there is no consideration of “common descent.” Furthermore, because “analogy” is often used to designate various types of correspondence, it is sometimes necessary, especially in quoting or paraphrasing the work of others, to employ this term to indicate likeness in more general senses than those specified above.

Henry C. Carey: Principles of Social Science (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1858), vol. 1, pp. 42–43.

Carey’s exact words are: “Gravitation is here, as everywhere else in the material world, in the direct ratio of the mass, and in the inverse one of the distance.” In vol. 3, ch. 55, p. 644, Carey recapitulates his physics and social science. He begins by stating “simple laws which govern matter in all its forms, and which are common to physical and social science.” The first of these reads: “All particles of matter gravitate towards each other — the attraction being in the direct ratio of the mass, and the inverse one of the distance.” Incidentally, it may be observed that Carey has also misunderstood the Newtonian explanation of orbital or curved motion, under the actions of a centripetal force, such as a planet moving under the action of the sun’s gravity plus its own component of inertia. Carey says: “All matter is subjected to the action of the centripetal and the centrifugal forces — the one tending to the production of local centres of action, the other to the destruction of such centres, and the production of a great central mass, obedient to but a single law.” We may take note that Carey also introduced ratios other than direct and inverse proportion. Thus, in vol. 1, p. 389, he wrote: “The motion of society, and the power of man, tend to increase in a geometrical ratio….”

Although “fallacy” is often used in a narrow technical sense to denote a flaw (or type of flaw) that “vitiates a syllogism,” a primary meaning in every dictionary I have consulted (OED ,OED-suppl., OED — 2nd ed.; Concise Oxford Dictionary — 6th ed.; Webster’s New International — 2d & 3d eds.) is a misleading argument, or a delusion or error, or some unsoundness or delusiveness or disappointing character of an argument or belief. The American Heritage Dictionary gives as the first meaning: “An idea or opinion founded on mistaken logic or perception; a false notion”; other meanings include “the quality of being deceptive” and “incorrectness of reasoning or belief.” The only example given is a “romantic fallacy, that Shakespeare was superhuman.” This example displays features in common with two frequently encountered uses of “fallacy” today: John Ruskin’s notion of the “pathetic fallacy” (in which inanimate objects are supposed to have human emotions) and W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley’s “intentional fallacy” (overstressing the author’s intentions in assessing a literary work). These usages are somewhat similar to Alfred North Whitehead’s “fallacy of misplaced concreteness” as presented in Science and the Modern World (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1931), ch. 4, pp. 82, 85.

Newton’s concept of mass has two separate aspects: one (inertial mass in post-Einstein terminology) is a measure of body’s resistance to being accelerated or being made to undergo a change in “state,” while the other (gravitational mass) is a measure of a body’s response to a given gravitational field (i.e., the weight). For details see my The Newtonian Revolution: with Illustrations of the Transformation of Scientific Ideas (Cambridge/ London/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980). Newton recognized that in ordinary (i.e., non-relativistic) rational mechanics there is no logical reason why these two concepts or measures of mass should be equivalent. Accordingly, he instituted a series of experiments to show that one is always proportional to the other, that at any given location mass is proportional to weight. These experiments are described in Book 3, prop. 6, of the Principia , which reports how he experimented with “gold, silver, lead, glass, sand, common salt, wood, water, and wheat” and could have easily detected a variation of as little as one part in a thousand. Newton, of course, did not use such terms as “gravitational mass” or “inertial mass” but rather proved that for all such materials the ratio of the “weight” to “quantity of matter” (or mass) was the same.

William Jaffé: “Léon Walras’s Role in the `Marginal Revolution’ of the Late 1870s,” pp. 115–119 of R.D. Collison Black, A.W. Coates, and Craufurd D.W. Goodwin (eds.): The Marginal Revolution in Economics: Interpretation and Evaluation (Durham: Duke University Press, 1973).

For a later attempt by Walras to argue that his economics is analogous to Newtonian rational mechanics, see Philip Mirowski & Pamela Cook: “Walras’ ‘Economics and Mechanics’: Translation, Commentary, Context,” pp. 189–224 of Warren J. Samuels (ed.): Economics as Discourse (Boston/Dordrecht/London: Kluwer, 1990).

Berkeley, for example, produced a very significant critique of the foundations of Newton’s theory of fluxions, that is, Newton’s version of the calculus. His Siris was an attempt “to assimilate Newtonian concepts to the more complex phenomena of chemistry and animal physiology.” In his De motu he analyzed “Newtonian concepts of gravitational attraction, action and reaction, and motion in general.” See Gerd Buchdahl: “Berkeley, George,” Dictionary of Scientific Biography , vol. 2 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970), pp. 16–18.

See §1.9 infra.

For Newton, the motion resulting from an equilibrium of forces can only be constant speed along a straight line, not curved motion as along a planetary orbit. Newton’s analysis of orbital or curved motion was based on the concept of two independent components. One is an initial component of inertial (or linear) motion, the other a constantly accelerated motion of falling inward toward the center of force. A planet or other orbiting body, of course, does not actually move inward away from the orbit, even though it is constantly falling toward the center; the reason is that the forward motion along the tangent carries that body ahead at such a rate that it continually “falls” away from the tangent to the orbit. Newton said he gave the centrally directed force the name “vis centripeta” in honor of Christiaan Huygens who had made use of the opposite kind of force, “vis centrifuga.” For details, see my Newtonian Revolution (n. 46 supra). Since orbital motion involves the constant inward (or centrally directed) acceleration of falling, there is no condition of equilibrium.

Berkeley fully understood Newton’s explanation. He gave the correct Newtonian reason why the planets do not actually fall inward so as to join together at the center. They “are kept from joining together at the common centre of gravity,” he wrote, “by the rectilinear motions the Author of nature hath impressed on each of them.” This tangential or linear component, he continued, “concurring with the attractive principle,” produces “their respective orbits round the sun.” He concluded that if this linear component of motion should cease, “the general law of gravitation that is now thwarted would show itself by drawing them all into one mass” (George Berkeley: “The Bond of Society,” Works , ed. A.A. Luce and T.E. Jessop, vol, 7 [London/Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1955], pp. 226–227).

Ibid., pp. 225–228; cf. George Berkeley: “Moral Attraction,” Works , ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser, vol. 4 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901), pp. 186–190.

For additional materials concerning Berkeley’s Newtonian sociology, see my “Newton and the Social Sciences, with special reference to Economics: The Case of the Missing Paradigm,” to appear in Philip Mirowski (ed.): Markets Read in Tooth and Claw (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993 [in press]) — Proceedings of a Symposium at Notre Dame on “Natural Images in Economics,” October 1991.

The eminent sociologist Pitirim A. Sorokin translated Berkeley’s correct Newtonian physics into a hodgepodge of incorrect pre-Newtonian explanations. Sorokin not only would have Berkeley make use of the misleading notion of a balance of centrifugal and centripetal forces, but continued his travesty by saying that Berkeley concluded that “Society is stable when the centripetal forces are greater than the centrifugal.” This is plainly nonsense even in pre-Newtonian physics; if the centripetal forces should be greater than the centrifugal forces, then obviously there would be no stability but an instability, a lack of balance or equilibrium, and a resultant motion inward, as Berkeley clearly stated would be the case under such circumstances. See Pitirim A. Sorokin: Contemporary Sociological Theories (New York/London: Harper & Brothers, 1928), p. 11.

See the writings of Duncan Forbes and of James E. Force (n. 12 supra).

David Hume: A Treatise of Human Nature (n. 12 supra), pp. 12–13.

If, as Hume believed, human behavior and social action are regulated by social laws, there is implied the possibility of a social science, one in which — as Hume wrote — “consequences almost as general and certain may sometimes be deduced… as any which the mathematical sciences afford us.” Seeking to establish a kind of psychology of individual action, Hume seems to have envisioned the construction of a new theoretical science that would ultimately find expression in practice. On the certainty of social laws compared to mathematics, see David Hume: “That Politics may be Reduced to a Science,” Essays: Moral , Political , and Literary , ed. T.H. Green & T.H. Grose (London: Longman, Green and Co., 1882; reprint, Aalen [Germany]: Scientia Verlag, 1964), vol. 1, p. 99.

Cf. Design for Utopia: Selected Writings of Charles Fourier , intro. Charles Gide, new foreword by Frank E. Manuel, trans. Julia Franklin (New York: Shocken Books, 1971 [orig. Selections from the Works of Fourier (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1901]), esp. p. 18; The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier: Selected Texts on Work , Love , and Passionate Attraction , trans., ed., intro. Jonathan Beecher and Richard Bienvenu (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), esp. pp. 1, 8, 10, 81, 84; Harmonian Man: Selected Writings of Charles Fourier , ed. Mark Poster, trans. Susan Hanson (Garden City: Doubleday & Company — Anchor Books, 1971). On Fourier, see Nicholas Y. Riasanovsky: The Teachings of Charles Fourier (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969) and Frank E. Manuel: The Prophets of Paris (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962).

It is a fact of record that groups of idealists actually founded Fourierist utopian colonies along the bizarre lines he suggested and that Fourierism became a considerable political force in several countries.

Emile Durkheim: The Division of Labor in Society , trans. George Simpson (New York: The Free Press, 1933; reprint 1964), p. 339. Cf. Durkheim, De la division du travail social: étude sur l’organisation des sociétés supérieures (Paris: Félix Alcan, Éditeur, 1893), p. 378; Durkheim, De la division du travail social , 5th ed. (Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan, 1926), p. 330. The first and fifth editions are identical at this point.

Ibid., trans., p. 262. In the Principia Newton defines a measure of matter which he calls “quantity of matter” (used as a synonym for “body” or “mass”) and which he says is proportional to the volume (or “bulk”) and density. Durkheim seems to use both volume and mass in the sense of volume; cf., e.g., trans., pp. 262, 266, 268, 339.

Ibid., trans., p. 268. Furthermore (p. 270), the “division of labor is… a result of the struggle for existence, but it is a mellowed dénouement . Thanks to it, opponents are not obliged to fight to a finish, but can exist one beside the other. Also, in proportion to its development, it furnishes the means of maintenance and survival to a greater number of individuals who, in more homogeneous societies, would be condemned to extinction.”

Ibid., trans., pp. 256–282.

Ibid., trans., p. 266. The example was taken, with a direct citation, from Darwin’s Origin of Species . Darwin, according to Durkheim, found that “in a small area, opened to immigration, and where, consequently, the conflict of individuals must be acute, there is always to be seen a very great diversity in the species inhabiting it. He found turf three feet by four which had been exposed for long years to the same conditions of life nourishing twenty species of plants belonging to eighteen genera and eight classes. This clearly proves how differentiated they are.” This was offered in proof of Darwin’s observations “that the struggle between two organisms is as active as they are analogous.” Since they have “the same needs” and pursue “the same objects,” they are rivals. Eventually, as their numbers increase, the resources available no longer suffice for all, and a struggle for survival ensues. But, “if the co-existing individuals are of different species or varieties,” they “do not feed in the same manner, and do not lead the same kind of life,” and so they “do not disturb each other.” What is perhaps most remarkable about Durkheim’s argument based on Darwin is the fact that he referred to Darwin at all. It must be kept in mind that at this time, and for many decades afterwards, Darwinian evolution based on natural selection was not regarded with favor by the French scientific establishment.

Durkheim (n. 61 supra, trans.),p. 336; cf. p. 339.

On the uses of organic analogies, see further *1.7 infra. For Theodore Roosevelt, see his Biological Analogies in History (New York: Oxford University Press; London: Henry Frowde, 1910); also Works , vol. 12 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1926), pp. 25–60. A. Lawrence Lowell’s organismic views of society may be found in numerous works, notably “An Example from the Evidence of History,” pp. 119–132 of Factors Determining Human Behavior (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1937).

Thomas Carlyle: Sartor Resartus , introd. H. D. Traill, The Works of Thomas Carlyle , 30 vols. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1896–1899; reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1969), vol. 1, p. 172. See Frederick W. Roe: The Social Philosophy of Carlyle and Ruskin (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1921); also David George Hale: The Body Politic: A Political Metaphor in Renaissance English Literature (The Hague/Paris: Mouton, 1971), pp. 134–135.

Thomas Carlyle: Past and Present (London: Chapman and Hall, 1843); Works (n. 68 supra), vol. 10, p. 137; “Chartism,” Works , vol. 29, p. 129.

A brief account of Bluntschli’s life and career by Carl Brinkmann can be found in Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences , vol. 2 (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1937), p. 606. See also Francis William Coker: Organismic Theories of the State (New York: Columbia University; Longmans, Green & Co., Agents; London: P.S. King & Son, 1910 — Studies in History, Economics and Public Law, vol. 38, no. 2, whole n. 101), pp. 104–114. See, further, J.C. Bluntschli: Denkwürdiges aus meinen Leben , 3 vols. (Nördlingen: C. H. Beck, 1884); also Friedrich Meili: J.C. Bluntschli und seine Bedeutung für die moderne Rechtswissenschaft (Zurich: Drell Füssli, 1908).

Johann Caspar Bluntschli: Lehre vom modernen Staat , 6th ed. (Stuttgart: J.G. Cotta, 1885–1886), the first volume of which was translated into English as Theory of the State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1892); Psychologische Studien über Staat und Kirche (Zurich/Frauenfeld: C. Beyel, 1844). Bluntschli was also author of a widely used reference work, Deutsches Staats-Wörterbuch (Stuttgart/Leipzig: Expedition des Staats-Wörterbuchs, 1857–1870).

On Rohmer, see Coker (n. 70 supra), pp. 49–60.

Bluntschli’s discussion of the sixteen psychological functions of the state was pilloried by Charles E. Merriam: “The Present State of the Study of Politics,” The American Political Science Review , 1921, 15 : 173–185. Merriam (p. 183) wrote of “Bluntschli’s fearfully and wonderfully made `political psychology,’ in which he compared sixteen selected parts of the human body with the same number or organs in the body politic.”

Psychologische Studien über Staat und Kirche (n . 71 supra), pp. 54, 86–87, cited in translation in Werner Stark: The Fundamental Forms of Social Thought (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), pp. 61–62.

On Lilienfeld’s life and career see §1.8 infra and esp. n. 182 infra.

Paul von Lilienfeld: La pathologie sociale (n. 183 infra), p. 59.

Ibid., pp. 59–60.

J. D. Y. Peel: Herbert Spencer: The Evolution of a Sociologist , (New York: Basic Books , 1971); J.W. Burrow : Evolution and Society: A Study in Victorian Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970); David Wiltshire: The Social and Political Thought of Herbert Spencer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978). Of a wholly different sort is the analysis of Spencer in Robert J. Richards: Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 1987). Richards has made a careful study of Spencer’s ideas based on extensive reading and analysis; in particular he has given us a new understanding of Spencer’s social views and biological concepts in relation to the main currents of thought in these areas during Spencer’s lifetime. For an anti-Spencerian point of view, see Derek Freeman: “The Evolutionary Theories of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer,” Current Anthropology , 1974, 15 : 211–221. See, further, John C. Greene: Science , Ideology and World View: Essays in the History of Evolutionary Ideas (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1981), ch. 4, “Biology and Social Theory in the Nineteenth Century: Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer”; for a rebuttal, see Ernst Mayr: Toward a New Philosophy of Biology: Observations of An Evolutionist (Cambridge/London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1988), essay 15, “The Death of Darwin?”.

Peel (n. 81 supra), p. 178.

Ibid.; see Herbert Spencer: Essays: Scientific , Political , and Speculative , vol. 1 (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1883), “The Social Organism,” pp. 287–289.

See Peel (n. 81 supra), ch. 7 “The Organic Analogy,” with comparative examples of Spencer’s use of analogies from physics. For the context of Spencer’s analogies, see Richards (n. 81 supra).

Spencer (n. 83 supra), pp. 277–279, 283–286.

Herbert Spencer: Essays Scientific , Political , and Speculative , vol. 3 (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1896), “Specialized Administration,” pp. 427–428.

René Worms: Organisme et société (Paris: V. Giard & W. Brière, 1896), p. 73.

Walter Cannon: “Relations of Biological and Social Homeostasis,” pp. 305–324 in his The Wisdom of the Body (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1932; revised in 1939).

Ibid., pp. 309–310. The significance of the cell theory as a source of analogues for social theory is discussed in §1.8 infra.

Ibid., pp. 312, 314.

See Merton (n. 14 supra), ch. 3, pp. 101n, 102–103.

Walter Cannon: “The Body Physiologic and the Body Politic,” Presidential Address to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in Science , 1941, 93: 1–10.

Henry C. Carey: The Unity of Law (Philadelphia: Henry Carey Baird, 1872), pp. 116–127; for a derisive critique see Stark (n. 74 supra), pp. 156–160.

See the discussion of the Newtonian style at the end of §1.5 infra and in my article on “Newton & the Social Sciences,” cited in n. 54 supra.

In fact, there are systems of social thought based on models from physics that seem just as ridiculous as those based on biological models, such as Carey’s extravagant electrical analogy (n. 94 supra). Another type of extreme model is set forth in Bradford Peck: The World a Department Store: A Story of Life Under a Cooperative System (Lewiston [Me.]: B. Peck, c1900).

See the valuable discussion of these topics in Claude Ménard: “La machine et le coeur: essai sur les analogies dans le raisonnement économique,” in Analogie et Connaissance , vol. 2: De la poésie à la science (Paris: Maloine éditeur, 1981 — Séminaires Interdisciplinaires du Collège de France), pp. 137–165; also trans. Pamela Cook & Philip Mirowski as “The Machine and the Heart: An Essay on Analogies in Economic Reasoning,” Social Concept , December 1988, 5 (no. 1): 81–95. Especially since the translation omits the mathematical appendix and the discussion, it is well to consult the original.

Stark (n. 74 supra), pp. 73–74.

In this connection we may recall once more Whitehead’s presentation of the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness”; cf. n. 45 supra.

Works on metaphor include Max Black: Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language and Philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962); Arjo Klamer (ed.): Conversations with Economists (Totowa, [NJ.]: Rowman & Lilienfeld, 1983); Donald N. McCloskey: If You’re So Smart: The Narrative of Economic Expertise (Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 1990); and Andrew Ortony: Metaphor and Thought (Cambridge/ London/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979). For a brief but incisive history of the uses of metaphor from antiquity to the present, see Mark Johnson (ed.): Philosophical Perspectives on Metaphor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), introd. This topic also appears in discussions of economics, notably in Mirowski (n. 23 supra).

Herbert Spencer: The Principles of Sociology , 3rd ed. (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1897), vol. 1, part 2, §1, “What is a Society?”, §2, “A Society is an Organism.”

See Schlanger (n. 160 infra).

Poetics , 14576, 1459a, 148a.

That is, Aristotle held that analogy was a special kind of metaphor that involves a four-term ratio. Let the ratio be evening: day:: old age: life or evening is to day as old age is to life rom which we obtain old age is the evening of life. Here we have a metaphor in which something (evening) is attributed to something (life) to which it does not belong. The same would be true for evening is the old age of day. Jevons (n. 138 infra), p. 627, gives a similar example, based on a prime minister of a state and a captain of a ship, obtaining the relation that a prime minister is captain of the state.

There are a number of works dealing with rhetoric, especially in relation to the science of the seventeenth century, among them David Johnston: The Rhetoric of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes and the Politics of Cultural Transformation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); Alan G. Gross: The Rhetoric of Science (Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press, 1990); Peter Dear (ed.): The Literary Structure of Scientific Argument (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991); Steven Shapin & Simon Schaffer: Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes , Boyle , and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); Marcello Pera: Scienza e retorica (Rome/Bari: Laterza, 1991); and M. Pera & William R. Shea (eds.): Persuading Science: The Art of Scientific Rhetoric (Canton, [Mass.]: Science History Publications, USA, 1991). 106 James I: “Speech of 1603,” in Charles H. Mcllwain (ed.): The Political Works of James I (Cambridge: Harvard University Press; London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, 1918), p. 272; see Hale (n. 68 supra), p. 111.

On the history of the concept of the body politic, see Hale (n. 68 supra).

For James’s statement concerning the spleen, see “Speech in Star Chamber, 1616,” Political Works , p. 343; Hale (n. 68 supra), p. 111, n. 19. See on this subject Marc Bloch: The Royal Touch; Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France , trans. J. E. Anderson (London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1973).

Cf. §1.5 supra and §§1.7 and 1.8 infra.

See the example of Desaguliers in §10 infra. On this subject see Otto Mayr: Authority , Liberty , & Automatic Machinery in Early Modern Europe (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); John Herman Randall, Jr.: The Making of the Modern Mind: A Survey of the Intellectual Background of the Present Age (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968), ch. 13.

Quoted from Robert S. Hamilton’s Present Status of the Philosophy of Society (1866) in L. L. Bernard & Jessie Bernard: Origins of American Sociology: The Social Science Movement in the United States (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1943), p. 711; see p. 265 for a similar quotation concerning “the true PRINCIPIA MATHEMATICA PHILOSOPHIAE SOCIALIST’ Hamilton (ibid., p. 258) believed in two sociological principles, one an analogue of the Copernican system, the other an analogue of Newton’s law of universal gravity; he did not, however, fully understand Newtonian science and wrote of ”centripetal“ and centrifugal” forces as balanced “action” and “reaction.” It is observed by the Bernards that in this respect Hamilton’s law resembles the law of Carey and the law of “cosmic” attraction of Arthur Brisbane. Although Hamilton expressed admiration for Newton, and even held that he himself had propounded Copernican and Newtonian principles of sociology, he also believed that social science might become more nearly an analogue of geology than of sciences such as astronomy, physics, and chemistry. In this regard his opinion was similar to that of R.J. Wright (Bernard & Bernard, p. 306), who held that social science “ought to be compared not with… Chemistry, or Astronomy, or even Moral Philosophy, or Political Economy; but rather with… Geology or Metaphysics.”

The Newtonian style is discussed at length in my Newtonian Revolution (n. 46 supra) and in my article cited in n. 114 infra.

For a more complete discussion of Malthus’s Newtonianism, see my article in Mirowski (n. 54 supra). See, also, Anthony Flew: Thinking about Social Thinking: the Philosophy of the Social Sciences (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), ch. 4, §1.

Thomas Robert Malthus: An Essay on the Principle of Population as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society (London: printed for J. Johnson, 1798). This work, published anonymously and often known as the “first essay,” is readily available in two reprints, one of which, edited by Antony Flew (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970), contains also Malthus’s A Summary View of the Principle of Population (London: John Murray, 1830), which was originally published with the author’s name on the title-page. The other, without notes, but with a foreword by Kenneth E. Boulding, is entitled Population: the First Essay (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1959). The text of the second edition (1803) was so completely revised and expanded that it is generally considered “almost a new book,” sometimes referred to as the “second essay.” The text of this version (reprinted from the seventh edition, 1872, but without the appendices) is available as An Essay on the Principle of Population , intro. T.H. Hollingsworth (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1914 — Everyman’s Library). On Malthus, see Thomas Robert Malthus: An Essay on the Principle of Population — Text , Sources and Background , Criticism , ed. Philip Appleman (New York/London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1976 — Norton Critical Editions in the History of Ideas).

See Flew (n. 114 supra).

W. Stanley Jevons: The Theory of Political Economy , 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan and Co., 1879), preface; see this preface in later editions, e.g. (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1965 — reprint of the fifth edition, 1911), pp. xi—xiv. Jevons was defending himself against the specific charge that in his book “the equations in question continually involve infinitesimal quantities, and yet they are not treated as differential equations usually are, that is integrated” (p. 102). On Jevons’s economics, see Margaret Schabas: A World Ruled by Number: William Stanley Jevons and the Rise of Mathematical Economics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).

Mary P. Mack: Jeremy Bentham: An Odyssey of Ideas , 1748–1792 (London: Heinemann, 1962), p. 264.

This episode and its significance are discussed in I.B. Cohen: Revolution in Science (Cambridge, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1985), suppl. §14.1.

See Shapin & Schaffer (n. 105 supra).

See Mirowski (n. 23 supra); !lamer (n. 100 supra); McCloskey (n. 100 supra). 122 Mack (n. 118 supra), pp. 275–281.

Explained in Sigmund Freud: “A Note upon the `Mystic Writing Pad, — The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works ,vol. 19 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1961), p. 228. Two decades after The Interpretation of Dreams , in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud understood more clearly (as he phrased it in 1924) that ”the inexplicable phenomenon of consciousness arises in the perceptual system instead of permanent traces“ (ibid). See also ed. cit., vol. 5, p. 540, and vol. 18, p. 25; in the latter Freud noted further that this distinction had already been made by Breuer.

Ibid. This pad consisted of a resin or plastic plate, covered with two sheets, one of tissue paper and the other of celluloid, on which one could write with a pointed stylus. Lifting the sheets erased the message, but Freud discovered that the erased message could actually be read in the pad’s “memory.” This mechanical analogue served two functions often found in the use of analogues: (1) to make his earlier hypothetical conjecture seem reasonable enough for him to set forth his ideas in full, and (2) to make his difficult concept of the structure of memory understandable and thus acceptable, to the psychoanalytic community.

Freud: “Civilization and Its Discontents,” Standard Edition (n. 123 supra), vol. 21, p. 144. See Donald M. Kaplan: “The Psychoanalysis of Art: Some Ends, Some Means,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association , 1988, 36: 259–302, esp. 259260.

Brian Vickers: “Analogy versus Identity: The Rejection of Occult Symbolism, 1580–1680,” pp. 95–163 of Brian Vickers (ed.): Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

Translated by Vickers from Kepler’s Ad Vitellionem Paralipomena (Gesammelte Werke , vol. 1), p. 90.

Letter to Michael Maestlin, 5 March 1605, quoted in Alexandre Koyré: The Astronomical Revolution: Copernicus — Kepler — Borelli , trans. R. E. W. Maddison (Paris: Hermann; Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973), p. 252 (from Kepler’s Gesammelte Werke , vol. 15, pp. 171–172).

These “Rules” appeared in all three editions as part of the introduction of Book Three, “On the System of the World,” but they were called “Rules” only in the second (1713) and third (1726) editions.

Laplace’s System of the World , vol. 2, p. 316, as in Jevons (n. 138 infra), p. 638.

Charles Darwin: The Origin of Species (London: John Murray, 1859; reprint, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964), ch. 3, p. 63. This is a case of analogy rather than of generalization because it extends a property observed in one group of entities (humans) to other groups of different entities (plants and animals), whereas a generalization extends a property of some members of a given class to other (or, even, to all) members of that class, as in the generalization that all men are mortal. Darwin drew on the argument from analogy in other parts of the Origin . The concept of natural selection was introduced in analogy with man’s process of “artificial” selection in breeding pigeons, horses, dogs, and various ornamental and useful plants. A classic use of analogy, as opposed to generalization, occurs in the final chapter of the Origin , in Darwin’s presentation of the theory of “common descent.” He first concluded that all animals had “descended from at most only four or five progenitors, and plants from an equal or lesser number.” This led him to remark, “Analogy would lead me one step further, namely, to the belief that all animals and plants have descended from one prototype.” He was aware, as he wrote, that “analogy may be a deceitful guide.” Yet he found the evidence for common descent to be very persuasive, noting that “all living things have much in common, in their chemical composition, their germinal vesicles, their cellular structure, and their laws of growth and reproduction.” This evidence justified his inference “from analogy that probably all the organic beings that have ever lived on this earth have descended from one primordial form, into which life was first breathed.”

See Nagel (n. 136 infra), pp. 107–110.

James Clerk Maxwell: “On Faraday’s Lines of Force”, in W. D. Niven (ed.): The Scientific Papers of James Clerk Maxwell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1890; reprint, New York: Dover Publications, 1965), vol. 1, p. 156.

This was the occasion for Maxwell to make what may be considered the classic statement about the use of what he called “physical analogies” in science. According to Maxwell, “physical analogies” provide a means “to obtain physical ideas without adopting a physical theory.” Ernest Nagel (n. 136 infra, p. 109) has explained that Maxwell meant that he could obtain physical ideas without invoking a “theory formulated in terms of some particular model of physical processes.” In other words, by “physical analogies” he implied no more than “that partial similarity between the laws of one science and those of another which makes each of them illustrate the other.”

On this point, see especially articles and books by Mirowski.

Ernest Nagel: The Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation (New York/Burlingame: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961), pp. 107–117.

See Maxwell (n. 133 supra). See also J. Robert Oppenheimer, “Analogy in Science,” The American Psychologist 1956, 11: 127–135, an address to psychologists in which the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer stated boldly and unequivocally that “analogy is indeed an indispensable and inevitable tool for scientific progress” (p. 129). He at once narrowed the sense of his assertion, trying to make clear what he meant. “I do not mean metaphor,” he added, “I do not mean allegory; I do not even mean similarity.” Rather, he intended “a special kind of similarity which is the similarity of structure, the similarity of form, a similarity of constellation between two sets of structures, two sets of particulars, that are manifestly very different but have structural parallels.”

W. Stanley Jevons: The Principles of Science: A Treatise on Logic and Scientific Method (2nd and final edition, reprint, New York: Dover Publications, 1958), p. 631.

Ibid., p. 632.

Jevons (1965; n. 117 supra), p. 102. It was even suggested by Jevons (n. 138 supra, p. 633), on the authority of Lacroix, that “the discovery of the Differential Calculus was mainly due to geometrical analogy, because mathematicians, in attempting to treat algebraically the tangent of a curve, were obliged to entertain the notion of infinitely small quantities.” See Schabas (n. 117 supra), pp. 84–88, “Mechanical Analogies.”

Jevons (1965; n. 117 supra), p. 105.

Léon Walras: “Economique et mécanique”, Bulletin de Société Vaudoise des Sciences Naturelles , 1909, 45 : 313–325; Mirowski & Cook (n. 48 supra), pp. 189–224. Francis Ysidro Edgeworth proposed the same kind of analogy between his “mathematical psychics” (as he called his brand of economics) and mathematical physics, declaring that “every psychical phenomenon is the concomitant, and in some sense the other side of a physical phenomenon.” He had no doubt that “`Mécanique Sociale’ may one day take her place along with `Mécanique Céleste,’ throned each upon the double-sided height of one maximum principle, the supreme pinnacle of moral as of physical science.” See F. Y. Edgeworth’s Mathematical Psychics: An Essay on the Application of Mathematics to the Moral Sciences (London: C. Kegan & Co., 1881), esp. pp. 9, 12.

See Claude Ménard (n. 97 supra).

Vilfredo Pareto: “On the Economic Phenomenon: A Reply to Benedetto Croce,” translated from Italian by F. Priuli in Alan Peacock, Ralph Turvey, & Elizabeth Henderson (eds.): International Economic Papers , vol. 3 (London: Macmillan and Company, 1953), p. 185. For a discussion of Pareto’s point of view see Mirowski (n. 23 supra), pp. 221–222; also Bruna Ingrao: “Physics and Pareto’s Economics,” to be published in Mirowski (n. 54 supra).

Vilfredo Pareto: Sociological Writings , ed. S. E. Finer, trans. Derick Mirfin (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966), pp. 103–105, selected from Pareto’s Cours d’économic politique (Lausanne, 1898), vol. 2, §§580, 588–590.

Ibid. See also Bruna Ingrao: “L’analogia meccanica nel pensiero di Pareto,” in G. Busino (ed.), Pareto oggi (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1991); and her chapter cited in n. 145 supra.

J.E. Cairnes: The Character and Logical Method of Political Economy (New York: Harper & Bros., 1875) p. 69. See Mirowski (n. 23 supra), p. 198.

Leonard Huxley (ed.): Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley , vol. 1 (London: Macmillan, 1900), p. 218.

See Mirowski (n. 23 supra), pp. 218–219, 287; William Stanley Jevons: The Principles of Economics (London: Macmillan and Co., 1905), p. 50; Jevons: The Theory of Political Economy (1965; n. 117 supra), pp. 61–69; Jevons: The Principles of Science (n. 138 supra), pp. 325–328; Jevons: Papers and Correspondence of William Stanley Jevons , vol. 7, ed. R.D. Collison Black (London: Macmillan, in association with the Royal Economic Society, 1981), p. 80.

Léon Walras: Elements of Pure Economics , trans. William Jaffé (Homewood [Ill.]: Richard D. Irwin; London: George Allen & Unwin; reprint, Philadelphia: Orion Editions, 1984), Preface to the fourth edition, pp. 47–48; also p. 71.

Ménard (n. 97 supra).

Albert Jolink: “`Procrustean Beds and All That’: The Irrelevance of Walras for a Mirowski-Thesis,” to appear in 1993 in a special issue of History of Political Economy , edited by Neil de Marchi, containing papers presented at a symposium (held at Duke University in April 1991) on Mirowski’s More Heat than Light .

Pareto (n. 146 supra), Sociological Writings ,p. 104; Cours , vol. 2, §592; see the article by Bruna Ingrao, cited in n. 145 supra.

Mirowski (n. 23 supra), pp. 222–231. Extracts from this manuscript, preserved in the Sterling Library, Yale University, are quoted by Mirowski (pp. 228–229, 409 n. 5).

See, e.g., Hal Varian’s review of Mirowski’s More Heat than Light in the Journal of Economic Literature , 1991, 29 : 595–596.

This was part of an article on “Distribution and Exchange” in the Economic Journal for March 1898 and reprinted in A. C. Pigou (ed.): Memorials of Alfred Marshall (London: Macmillan and Co., 1925), pp. 312–318.

Marshall was repeating here the sentiments he had expressed in his inaugural lecture as professor of economics at Cambridge University, printed in Pigou (n. 157 supra; see §1.8 infra).

I have chosen these three organismic sociologists — one Russian, one Austrian, and one French — because their writings exemplify the main issues in the interactions of the natural and the social sciences. There are many others whose writings show the same features, notably the Germany biologist Oscar Hertwig and the Italian sociologist Corrado Gini.

On organismic sociology see F. W. Coker: “Organismic Theories of the State: Nineteenth Century Interpretations of the State as Organism or as Person,” Studies in History , Economics and Public Law (New York: Columbia University, 1910), vol. 38, no. 2, whole number 101; Ludovic Gumplowicz: Geschichte der Staatstheorien (Innsbruck: Universitäts-Verlag Wagner, 1926); Sorokin (n. 55 supra), ch. 4, “Biological Interpretation of Social Phenomena”; Werner Stark (n. 74 supra), part 1, “Society as an Organism”; Judith Schlanger: Les métaphores de l’organisme (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1971). Some further major secondary sources on the subject of organismic sociology are: Arnold Ith: Die menschliche Gesellschaft als sozialer Organismus: Die Grundlinien der Gesellschaftslehre Albert Schdffles (Zurich/Leipzig: Verlag von Speidel & Wurzel, 1927); Niklas Luhmann: Die Wirtschaft der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988); N. Luhmann: Die Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1990); D. C. Phillips: “Organicism in the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries,” Journal of the History of Ideas , 1970, 31 : 413–432; E. Scheerer: “Organismus,” pp. 1330–1358 of J. Ritter (ed.): Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1971). Still valuable as sources of information are certain older works, notably Ezra Thayer Towne: Die Auffassung der Gesellschaft als Organismus , ihre Entwicklung und ihre Modifikationen (Halle: Hofbuchdruckerei von C. A. Kammerer & Co., 1903); Erich Kaufmann: Über den Begriff des Organismus in der Staatslehre des 19. Jahrhunderts (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1908). None of these works, however, pays any attention to the specific relation of these nineteenth-century organismic social scientists to the currents of discovery in the life sciences in their own time.

Alfred Marshall: The Present Position of Economics: An Inaugural Lecture Given in the Senate State House at Cambridge , 24 February , 1885 (London: Macmillan and Co., 1885), pp. 12–14; this lecture is reprinted in Pigou (n. 157 supra), pp. 152–174.

As most people are aware (because of the interest which Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer had in this subject), hysteria was a major focus of psychiatric attention in the nineteenth century. An example of hysteria has been introduced in §1.4.

As explained in the Preface to this volume, there is no attempt to discuss all aspects of biological science that have interacted with the natural sciences. I have not dealt with the subject of Darwinian evolution because this interaction is far too complex to be considered in a summary fashion and because it is already the subject of a vast literature that is a continuing part of the current Darwin “industry.” Some major aspects of this subject, with special reference to America, are developed in an important way in Robert Richards’ s Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (n. 81 supra), a work that can be especially commended for its methodological approach. Among recent contributions to this general area are Carl N. Degler: In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), and Dorothy Ross: The Origins of American Social Thought (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Also worthy of mention is Cynthia Eagle Russett: Darwin in America: The Intellectual Response , 1865–1912 (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1976).

Auguste Comte: The Foundations of Sociology ,ed. Kenneth Thompson (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1975), p. 142. The text is taken from the English translation of Auguste Comte’s System of Positive Polity ,4 vols (London: Longmans Green, 1877), translated by a group of scholars from Système de politique positive (Paris, 1848–1854), vol. 2, pp. 367–382. Comte believed that Broussais’s principle of continuity was especially important in considering the “opposite” mental states of `reason and madness.“ If the mind surrendered itself to the sense impressions of the external world ”with no due effort of the mind within,“ the result would be ”pure idiocy.“ Madness, in all its intermediate degrees results from the relative failure of the ”apparatus of meditation“ to `correct the suggestions made by the apparatus of observation.” This phenomenon could, he asserted, be studied better in Cervantes’s Don Quixote “than in any treatise of biology.” It could also be traced to “the great principle of Broussais” and could then be “applied to society” as Comte had “now done for the first time.” See Comte’s Cours de philosophie positive (Paris, 1830–1842), quoted in Gertrud Lenzer (ed.): Auguste Comte and Positivism: The Essential Writings (New York/Evanston/San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1975), p. 191, taken from The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte , trans. [and condensed by] Harriet Martineau (London: Longmans, Green, 1853), book 5, ch. 6.

In Lenzer (n. 164 supra), p. 191.

See Edmund Beecher Wilson: The Cell in Development and Heredity (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1896; reprint of 3rd ed., New York: The Macmillan Company, 1934), esp. pp. 1–2. Although preliminary steps can be traced to earlier scientists, it was not until the 1840s — largely as a result of the work of J.M. Schleiden and especially Theodor Schwann — that biologists generally began to give cell theory full serious consideration.

In nineteenth-century thought the principle of division of labor was usually credited to Adam Smith, who displayed it in a dramatic fashion in the opening pages of The Wealth of Nations , even though there were other contenders for the invention, including both Benjamin Franklin and Sir William Petty.

This difference is discussed by all organicist sociologists, e.g., Spencer, Lilienfeld, Schäffle.

René Worms called attention to two limitations of this analogy which had been stressed by Herbert Spencer. The first is that, although each individual in the social organism has consciousness, in the animal organism only the organism as a whole, and not the individual cell, has this property. The second: in the social organism the purpose of society, or the organism as a whole is to sustain the lives of the individuals, whereas in the animal or plant the lives of the individual cells serve to support the life of the organism as a whole. Despite these dissimilarities, the cell theory seemed to provide nature’s own model on the microscopic scale for the study of human societies, much as the social behavior of ants has done in our own days.

As in societies, the development of the embryo produces special cells and groups of cells with forms and structures suited to their function. This concept of “division of labor,” as we have seen (n. 61 supra), originated in social science, then was transferred to the life science and finally migrated back to the social sciences. This transfer is the subject of chapter 10 infra.

On von Baer see the article by Jane Oppenheimer in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography , vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Son, 1970), pp. 385–389.

See Steven J. Gould: Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977).

In this section I have not dealt particularly with Herbert Spencer, although he is perhaps the most important of all the organicist social scientists. One reason is that, unlike many other organic sociologists, he did not concentrate attention on bio-medical discoveries relating to the cell theory, although he did make use of cell biology in his writings on sociology. Some of Spencer’s uses of biological science in relation to sociology are discussed in §1.4 supra and §1.8 infra. On Spencer’s use of analogies, see ch. 8 infra. On the subject of Spencer and sociology, see Richards (n. 81 supra). Cf. also n. 208 infra.

Herbert Spencer: First Principles (London: Williams and Norgate, 1862), §119. Spencer evidently learned this law from William Carpenter; see Richards (n. 81 supra), p. 269. Richards observes that Carpenter thought that von Baer’s law (that “a heterogeneous structure arises out of one more homogeneous”) had great generality. Carpenter wrote that “if we watch the progress of evolution [i.e., embryonic development], we may trace a correspondence between that of the germ in its advance towards maturity, and that exhibited by the permanent condition of the races occupying different parts of the ascending scale of creation.”

Herbert Spencer, “Reasons for Dissenting from the Philosophy of M. Comte,” Essays: Scientific , Political , and Speculative , vol. 2 (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1896), pp. 118–144.

Ibid., pp. 137–138. It should be noted also that cellular embryology reinforced another principle of organismic sociology. Embryologists revealed that as an individual organism progresses through more and more complex forms, the component cells exhibit structures suitably adapted for their special function, that is, they show the form necessary for the “division of labor.” Spencer held that even before encountering von Baer’s “law,” he had begun to conceive of both “the development of an individual organism and the development of the social organism” as an advance from “independent parts to mutually-dependent unlike parts — a parallelism implied by Milne-Edwards’ doctrine of the `physiological division of labor.”’

For Virchow, the concept of the “cell state” was particularly significant because there was always a close parallel between his “biological views and his liberal political opinions.” See Owsei Temkin: “Metaphors of Human Biology,” in Robert C. Stauffer (ed.): Science and Civilization (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1949), p. 172. Temkin is summarizing Ernst Hirschfeld, “Virchow,” Kyklos: Jahrbuch des Instituts für Geschichte der Medizin an der Universität Leipzig , 1929, 2 : 106–116. See also Erwin H. Acherknecht: Rudolf Virchow: Doctor , Statesman , Anthropologist (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1953); reprint (New York: Arno Press, 1981).

Rudolf Virchow: Cellular Pathology As Based upon Physiological and Pathological Histology , trans. Frank Chance (New York: Robert M. DeWitt, 1860), p. 40; also (London: John Churchill), pp. 13–14.

Virchow, we may note, was not the only nineteenth-century biologist to use social analogies in scientific discourse. Thomas Henry Huxley made use of a social analogy in describing the sponge, which — he said — represented a kind of sub-aqueous city, “in which the people are arranged about the streets and roads, in such a manner, that each can easily appropriate his food from the water as its passes along.” This is an example of the use of analogy to illustrate a scientific concept, making such a concept easier to visualize or to understand.

See Temkin (n. 177 supra), p. 175.

Paul von Lilienfeld, or Paul de Lilienfeld, or Pavel Fedorovich Lilienfeld-Toailles, or Pavel Fedorovich Lilienfel’d Toal’ (1829–1903), was a Russian civil servant who held responsible government posts and whose avocation was sociology. He published a book in Russian on the elements of political economy in 1860 under the pseudonym “Lileyewa.” Another work, appearing first in 1872 in Russian, under the initials P. L., bore the title, Thoughts on the Social Science of the Future , which was expanded into a five-volume German version, Gedanken über die Socialwissenschaft der Zukunft (vols. 1–4: Mitau: E. Behre’s Verlag, 1873–1879; vol. 5: Hamburg: Gebr. Behre’s Verlag; Mitan: E. Behre’s Verlag, 1881). Of particular importance are La pathologie sociale (Paris: V. Giard & E. Brière, 1896) and Zur Vertheidigung der organischen Methode in der Sociologie (Berlin: Druck und Verlag von Georg Reimer, 1898). In 1897–1898 Lilienfeld was president of the Institut International de Sociologie. See Otto Henne am Rhyn: Paul von Lilienfeld (Gdansk, Leipzig, Vienna: Carl Hinstorff’s Verlagsbuchhandlung [n.d.] — Deutsche Denker und ihre Geistesschöpfungen, ed. Adolf Hinrichsen, vol. 6). For further bibliography related to Lilienfeld, see Howard Becker: “Lilienfeld-Toailles, Pavel Fedorovich,” Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences , vol. 9 (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1933, 1937), p. 474. See also n. 160 supra for a list of publications relating to organismic sociology. (The first four volumes of the Gedanken in one of the sets in the Harvard University Library contain book plates indicating that they were “bought with the income from the bequest of James Walker… former president of Harvard College; ‘preference being given to works in the intellectual and moral sciences.’”)

Trans. from Gedanken , vol. 1, p. V.

Trans. from Pathologie , p. xxii.

Ibid., p. 8.

Ibid., pp. 8–11. Lilienfeld was noted in his own time for his discussion of social diseases that were analogues of diseases of the nervous system, particularly psychological disorders. We have seen (§1.4 supra) an example of his suggestion of a parallel between medical and social disorders in the social analogue of the intellectual and moral state of women suffering from hysteria.

Ibid., pp. 20–21.

Ibid., p. 21.

Ibid., p. 24.

Ibid., pp. 46–47.

Ibid., p. 307.

Bau und Leben des socialen Körpers: Encyclopädischer Entwurf einer realen Anatomie , Physiologie und Psychologie der menschlichen Gesellschaft mit besonderer Rücksicht auf die Volkswirthschaft als socialen Stoffwechsel , 4 vols. (Tübingen: H. Laupp’sche Buchhandlung, 1875–1878). Albert Eberhard Friedrich Schäffle (1831–1903), a German sociologist and economist, was a professor at the University of Tübingen, later moving to the University of Vienna. He was, for a while, a member of the Austrian cabinet. He edited a journal entitled Zeitschift für die Gesamte Staatswissenschaft . He envisioned a “rational social state,” a kind of utopian blend of capitalism and socialism. He was known in his own times primarily for his exposition of organismic social theory, especially his use of specific biological analogies. See the article on him by Fritz Karl Mann in Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences , ed. Edwin R.A. Seligman (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1934), vol. 13, pp. 562–563. There is no biography of Schäffle in the more recent International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences . See Arnold Ith (n. 160 supra) and Stark (n. 74 supra), pp. 62–72.

Schäffle (n. 193 supra) vol. 1, p. 286; see Stark (n. 74 supra), p. 63. The extracts from Schäffle are quoted from Stark’s translation.

Schäffle, vol. 1, p. 286; Stark, pp. 63–64.

Preface to Lilienfeld’s La pathologie sociale (n. 182 supra), p. vii; cf. Stark, p. 63.

Schäffle, vol. 1, p. 286; Stark, p. 64.

Schäffle, vol. 1, p. 33; Stark, p. 66.

Schäffle, vol. 1, p. 57; Stark, p. 67.

Schäffle, vol. 1, p. 324; Stark, p. 67.

Schäffle, vol. 1, p. 335; Stark, p. 67.

Schäffle, vol. 1, pp. 327, 329; Stark, p. 68.

Schäffle, vol. 1, p. 94; Stark, p. 68.

René Worms (1869–1926), a French sociologist, was educated at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. In 1893 he founded both the Paris-based Institut International de Sociologie and the Revue Internationale de Sociologie . He also founded and edited a series of fifty books on sociological subjects by authors from many countries. He was known in his lifetime particularly for his views concerning the interrelations among “the three disciplines of psychology, social psychology, and sociology.” See the biography and critical analysis by Terry N. Clark in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences , ed. David L. Sills, vol. 16, pp. 579–581 (New York: The Macmillan Company & The Free Press, 1968). An account of the life and career of Rent Worms may be found in an article by V.D. Sewny in the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences , vol. 15 (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1934), pp. 498–499. See also Stark (n. 74 supra).

Worms (n. 87 supra), p. 43.

René Worms: Philosophie des sciences sociales (Paris: V. Giard & E. Brière, 1903), vol. 1, p. 53.

Ibid., chs. 2, 3.

See, especially, Derek Freeman, “The Evolutionary Theories of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer,” Current Anthropology , 1974, 15 : 211–237. Cf. also n. 173 supra. 209 Nature , 1982, 296 : 686–687.

J.W. Burrow: Evolution and Society: A Study in Victorian Social Theory (Cambridge: The University Of Cambridge Press, 1970), p. 182.

Peel (n. 81 supra), p., 174, including a quotation from Spencer’s Social Statics .

The organic metaphors predominate in many essays (notably “The Social Organism” [1860]) and in his books, especially Social Statics (1850), The Study of Sociology (1873), and The Principles of Sociology (1876). See Peel (n. 81 supra), ch. 7, esp. p. 174.

Quoted in Peel (n. 81 supra), p. 179.

Ibid., p. 178.

I have not felt the need to make a parade here of the mismatched homologies that appear in the writings of Lilienfeld, Schäffle, Worms, and Spencer (see §1.4 supra), because my aim has been to examine the historical use of analogies rather than merely to call attention to their extravances (as has been done in §1.4 supra).

Michel Foucault: Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings , 1972–1977 , ed. Colin Gordon (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980), p. 151.

See Small and Vincent (n. 18 supra).

Bryan S. Turner: The Body and Society: Explorations in Social Theory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), pp. 49–50; Louis Wirth: “Clinical Sociology,” American Journal of Sociology , 1931, 37: 49–66.

L.J. Henderson: “Physician and Patient as a Social System,” New England Journal of Medicine , 1935, 51 : 819–823; “The Practice of Medicine as Applied Sociology,” Transactions of the Association of American Physicians , 1936, 51 : 8–15. These and other papers of Henderson on similar subjects have been edited with an important introductory statement by Bernard Barber: L.J. Henderson on the Social System: Selected Writings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). See, on this subject, Talcott Parsons: The Social System (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1951) and “The Sick Role and the Role of the Physician Reconsidered,” Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly , 1975, 53 : 257–278.

Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Concorcet: Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain (Paris: Agasse, 1795); also Baker (n. 29 supra), pp. 348–349, 368–369.

In later editions Malthus, attempting to lessen the gloomy prospect he had set forth, introduced the power of “moral restraint” as a factor in population control. See n. 115 supra.

David Hume: “Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations,” vol. 1 of his Essays , Moral , Political , and Literary (Edinburgh: R. Fleming and A. Alison for A. Kincaid, 1742), p. 376. See Catherine Gallagher: “The Body versus the Social Body,” pp. 83–106 of Catherine Gallagher & Thomas Laqueur (eds.): The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987).

Carey (n. 43 supra); see §1.4 supra.

See Sorokin (n. 55 supra) and Stark (n. 74 supra).

The Spirit of the Laws , trans. Thomas Nugent (revised ed., London: George Bell and Sons, 1878; reprint, New York: Hafner Press, 1949), bk. 3, §7, “The Principle of Monarchy.”

On this score see Henry Guerlac: “Three Eighteenth-Century Social Philosophers: Scientific Influences on their Thought,” Daedalus , 1958, 87 : 6–24; reprinted in Henry Guerlac: Essays and Papers in the History of Modern Science (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), pp. 451–464.

Adam Smith: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976 — The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, II), bk. 1, ch. 7, p. 15 (§15). The “Cannan edition” — Adam Smith: An Inquiry into the Causes of the Wealth of Nations , ed. Edwin Cannan (London: Methuen & Co., 1904; reprint, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976; reprint New York: Modern Library, 1985) — is easier to read and has the advantage of useful postils. A postil (1976 ed., p. 65; 1985 ed., p. 59) repeats the message: “Natural price is the central price to which actual prices gravitate.”

Adam Smith: Essays on Philosophical Subjects , ed. W.P.D. Wightman & J.C. Bryce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980 — The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith), vol. 3, pp. 33–105, “The History of Astronomy.”

Ménard (n. 97 supra; 1988).

For details see my Introduction to Newton’s `Principla“’ (Cambridge: Harvard University Press; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), ch. 2, §1. Newton referred to the inertial property of bodies as both a ”vis inertiae“ or ”force of inertia“ and ”inertia.“ For him this was an ”internal“ rather than an ”external“ force and so could not — of and by itself — alter a body’s state of rest or of motion.

On Darwin and Lyell see Mayr (n. 40 supra); the details of Darwin’s transformation are discussed, along with other examples, in my Newtonian Revolution: With Illustrations of the Transformation of Scientific Ideas (New York/Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). This topic is explored also in my forthcoming Scientific Ideas (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1994).

Mirowski (n. 23 supra, pp. 241–254) has documented the way in which Joseph Bertrand and Hermann Laurent faulted Walras for his mathematical physics, as Laurent and Vito Volterra later faulted Pareto.

Journal of Economic Literature , 1991, 29: 595–596.

But even a severe critic like Hal R. Varian does admit that Mirowski’s “thorough search of the writings of Walras, Jevons, Fisher, Pareto, and other neoclassicals… has established, to almost anyone’s satisfaction that they recognized that `utility’ had some features in common with the then-current notions of `energy’.”

A. Lawrence Lowell: “An Example from the Evidence of History,” in Harvard Tercentenary Conference of Arts and Sciences (1936): Factors Determining Human Behavior (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1937), pp. 119–132.

Of course, one reason why an analogy may be inappropriate is that it is based on mismatched homology. Another reason might be that the analogy did not advance the subject to the same degree as a rival one.

Henry Guerlac once described it as one of the worst in the English language. Jean T. Desaguliers: The Newtonian System of the World , the Best Model of Government (Westminster: A. Campbell, 1728).

John Craig: Theologiae Christianae Principia Mathematica (London: impensis Tomothei Child, 1699). A translation of some major extracts by Anne Whitman is published (without the translator’s name) as “Craig’s Rules of Historical Evidence,” History and Theory: Studies in the Philosophy of History , Beiheft 4 (The Hague: Mouton, 1964). Craig once suggested to Newton a minor modification of the Principia ; see I. B. Cohen: “Isaac Newton, the Calculus of Variations, and the Design of Ships,” pp. 169–187 of Robert S. Cohen, J.J. Stachel, & M.M. Wartofsky (eds.): For Dirk Struik: Scientific , Historical , and Political Essays in Honor of Dirk J. Struik (Dordrecht/Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1974 — Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 15).

For two centuries and more, Craig’s book and its Newton-like laws have usually been presented as an example of the kind of aberration to which Newtonian science may lead. His whole book can, in fact, be considered an extended example of inappropriate analogy. Yet a recent study by Stephen Stigler (“John Craig and the Probability of History: From the Death of Christ to the Birth of Laplace,” Journal of the American Statistical Association , 1986, 81 : 879–887) has shown that Craig made a serious contribution to applied probability, “that his formula for the probability of testimony was tantamount to a logistic model for the posterior odds.”

I have not attempted to rewrite the history of this subject, displayed in many monographs, beginning with Richard Hofstadter: Social Darwinism in American Thought (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1944; rev. ed., Boston: Beacon Press, 1955). Some more recent works are Degler (n. 163 supra) and Robert C. Bannister: Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979); Howard L. Kaye: The Social Meaning of Modern Biology: From Social Darwinism to Social Biology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); Peter J. Bower: The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decades around 1900 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983).

Michael Ruse: “Social Darwinism: Two Roots,” Albion , 1980, 12 : 23–36.

Spencer: “The Study of Sociology,” No. XVI, “Conclusion,” Contemporary Review , 1873, 22 : 663–677, esp. p. 676.

Stephen Jay Gould: “Shoemaker and Morning Star: A Visit to the Great Reminder reveals some Painful Truths carved in Stone,” Natural History , December 1990, pp. 14–20, esp. p. 20.

Gould’s analogy rests on an imperfect homology. Lamarckian evolution in biology implies not only that each individual may modify his or her inheritance but that such modifications are transmitted to one’s offspring. Consider a catastrophe in which all material culture and all humans over the age of three would be destroyed. In a Lamarckian social world homologous with a Lamarckian biological world, the surviving individuals would have inherited the technological knowledge and skills acquired by centuries of evolutionary development. In the world of nature and of man, however, this would not be the case, as Gould is aware.

Additionally Gould alleges that the Lamarckian mode “of cultural transmission” is responsible for “all the ills of our current environment crisis” as well as “the joys of our confidently growing children.”

This example was brought to my attention by Neil Niman at a symposium on Natural Images in Economics. He, however, treats this episode in a wholly different way from mine. See his paper in Mirowski (n. 54 supra).

Armen A. Alchian: “Uncertainty, Evolution and Economic Theory,” Journal of Political Economy , 1950, 57 : 211–221.

Edith Tilton Penrose: “Biological Analogies in the Theory of the Firm,” The American Economic Review , 1952, 42 : 804–819, esp. p. 805.

Ibid., p. 807.

Ibid., p. 812.

Armen A. Alchian: “Biological Analogies in the Firm: Comment,” The American Economic Review , 1953, 43 : 600–603.

Edith T. Penrose: “Rejoinder,” ibid., pp. 603–609. Penrose quotes from Alchian’s original article to the effect that the “suggested approach embodies the principles of biological evolution and natural selection.”

William F. Ogburn: Social Change with Respect to Culture and Original Nature , 2d ed. (New York: Viking Press, 1950), Supplement.

Ménard (n. 97 supra; 1988), p. 91.

Equality of Educational Opportunity , 2 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Office of Education — U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare — U.S. Government Printing Office, 1966).

Quoted in Frederick Mosteller & Daniel P. Moynihan (eds.): On Equality of Educational Opportunities: Papers Deriving from the Harvard University Faculty Seminar on the Coleman Report (New York: Random House, 1972), pp. 4–5.

See the editors’ discussion of crude and refined statistics (ibid., pp. 12–14) and also ch. 11 by Christopher S. Jencks on “The Quality of the Data Collected by The Equality of Educational Opportunity Survey.” The second volume of the Coleman Report consisted of 548 pages of tables of means, standard deviations, and correlation coefficients, as a complement to the 373 pages of the first volume.

In Mosteller & Moynihan (n. 256 supra), p. 33, there is a critique of the statistics and their interpretation. Chapter Four, by James S. Coleman, is on “The Evaluation of Equality of Educational Opportunity.”

Mosteller & Moynihan (n. 256 supra), p. 32.

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Acknowledgements

This commentary is based on a talk T.C. gave at the 2021 Psychonomic Society Annual Meeting, sponsored by the SPARK society , where she discussed strategies for increasing the representation of minoritized populations in cognitive psychology. This work was funded by a National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) Building Infrastructure Leading to Diversity (BUILD) Initiative, grant number RL5GM118975.

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Department of Child and Adolescent Development, California State University, Northridge, CA, USA

Tissyana C. Camacho

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Camacho, T.C. Putting the social in social science. Nat Rev Psychol 1 , 435–436 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-022-00091-7

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Accepted : 27 June 2022

Published : 22 July 2022

Issue Date : August 2022

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-022-00091-7

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