Question

what do you mean by social science give answer in 1200 words

Answer 1

1. Is social science really a science?

Social science may be defined (broadly) as the rational and systematic study of human society in all its forms with the aim of arriving at an enduring understanding, acknowledged as such by a broad consensus of researchers, of social phenomena.

One of the properties which is necessary to a science is that the activities of its practitioners results in a substantial body of organised "knowledge". One of the qualities of what qualifies as "knowledge" is that there is a broad consensus among interested parties concerning this "knowledge". Thus if social science did not arrive at an enduring understanding of social phenomena, acknowledged as such by a broad consensus of researchers, it would fail to qualify as a science.

As an initial attempt to define "science" one might say that it is the collective activity, and the enduring results of that activity, in which the aim is to describe, analyse and understand (in a way which is intelligible to any person with the necessary mental abilities and training) a particular field of empirical phenomena (its qualities, properties, nature and anything else about it which captures our attention and interest), and if possible to predict accurately the development of systems within this field from particular states or in response to particular changes.

2. What is society?

All humans are born into a society of one form or another, and live within society, but their view is usually just that of their immediate surroundings, and their intellectual understanding of the society they live in is usually derived from what they read in the newspapers.

When we attempt to characterise society from a more "scientific" viewpoint we may say that society is an assembly (enduring over time) of individual organisms, each with some degree of awareness and autonomy, interacting in usually complex ways and producing artefacts and forms of organisation which in turn influence and constrain their experience and their actions.

3. Does scientific knowledge accord with objective reality?

Most scientists tacitly assume that they study something which is independent of their inquiry, which has an existence in itself, and has pre-existing properties which are revealed by their inquiry.6 The problem with this is to identify this "reality", with which scientific knowledge is supposed to accord, other than by some process of "scientific" inquiry itself. If reality is what is known by means of scientific inquiry, then it is tautologous to say that scientific knowledge accords with reality.

Reality is what is intersubjectively verifiable, and enduringly so. The reality revealed by the investigations of natural scientists is "especially real" because so many investigators (even generations of investigators) affirm its qualities. Anyone, it is said, with the proper ability to learn and the proper training can confirm what it says in the textbooks of physics, chemistry and biology.

As regards social science in particular, there is less agreement than in natural science as to what constitutes social reality (as distinct from the reality of human individuals and the material objects that they produce). Emile Durkheim attempted to distinguish social science from other forms of science by drawing attention (as he supposed) to a special kind of "fact", a "social fact", which he held to be different from the kinds of facts studied in the natural sciences. In Chapter 1 of his The Rules of Sociological Method he states two criteria for identifying "social facts".