The social sciences are in a special difficulty because they cover the same field of human behavior as literature. As science, they must claim to improve upon the prejudice and superstition of common sense, and are therefore compelled to restate the language of common sense, full of implication and innuendo, in irreproachable, blameless, scientific prose innocent of bias or any other subtlety.

It seems that the best method of utilizing the sciences for purposes of analysis-and this would include the science of Administration - is to conceive of them as concentrating upon the relations existing between categories rather than as describing particular categories themselves. The various sciences or fields of investigation are not distinguished because they investigate different kinds of facts or subject matter; they differ because they have developed a specialized technique for observing different aspects of the same subject matter. A rock is an adequate subject of observation for any science whatsoever. What geology does, for example, is to restrict its observations to certain aspects of the rock; economics may look at the rock from another point-of-view, chemistry from still another, and so on through the entire range of science, Geology cannot break from the rock a fragment which is of geological interest only; the sciences are distinguished according to the viewpoint taken by each in observing the rock, not by a specific difference in content in the rock.

Why, then, is semantics so hard? In terms of the foregoing, I want to suggest that semantics is a typical social science. The sloppiness, the lack of precise theories and laws, the lack of mathematical rigor, are all characteristic of the social sciences today. A general and precise theory which answers the questions (i) why do words have the different sorts of functions they do? and (2) exactly how does conveying core facts enable one to learn the use of a word? is not to be expected until one has a general and precise model of a language-user; and that is still a long way off. But the fact that Utopia is a long way off does not mean that daily life should come to a screeching halt. There is plenty for us to investigate, in our sloppy and impressionistic fashion, and there are plenty of real results to be obtained. The first step is to free ourselves from the oversimplifications foisted upon us by the tradition, and to see where the real problems lie. I hope this paper has been a contribution to that first step.

Throughout the nineteenth century, apart from the division in theoretical sciences and arts, classifiers attempted to divide the sciences into two groups. Already they had before them the examples of Francis Bacon (speculative and descriptive) and Hobbes (quantitative and qualitative). For Coleridge, the sciences were either pure (Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric, Mathematics, Metaphysics) or mixed. Arthur Schopenhauer’s similar groups were called pure and empirical, Wilhelm Wundt in 1887 called them formal and empirical, Globot mathematical and theoretical, and the St. Louis Congress of Arts and Sciences (1904) normative and physical. made similar division of the sciences into abstract and concrete

[In science any model depends on a pre-chosen taxonomy] a set of classifications into which we divide the enormous complexity of the real world... Land, labor, and capital are extremely heterogeneous aggregates, not much better than earth, air, fire, and water.

After years of work in both areas of study, I concluded that the social sciences were different, in many important ways, from the natural sciences, but that the same scientific methods were applicable in both areas, and, indeed, that no very useful work could be done in either area except by scientific methods.

The relation between the social sciences and the natural sciences has long been fraught with difficulties. A minority of social scientists (including some anthropologists) regard their activity as an extension, or a branch, of biological research. Others argue that the social sciences ought to be sciences of the same kind as the natural sciences; that they should strive after the same kind of precision and the same kind of parsimonious clarity that can be achieved for instance in chemistry.

The thing that distinguishes social systems from physical or even biological systems is their incomparable (and embarrassing) richness in special cases. Generalizations in the social sciences are mere pathways which lead through a riotous forest of individual trees, each a species unto itself. The social scientist who loses this sense of the essential individuality and uniqueness of each case is all too likely to make a solemn scientific ass of himself, especially if he thinks that his faceless generalizations are the equivalents of the rich variety of the world.

The social sciences, ultimately, are about patterns, rules, and phenomena available to certain objective forms of explanation; the humanities, especially the study of literature, are about exceptional cases, singular works, and individuals that require subjective understanding.

The true line is not between “hard” natural science and “soft” social sciences, but between precise science limited to highly abstract and simple phenomena in the laboratory and inexact science and technology dealing with complex problems in the real world.

There is a noticeable general difference between the sciences and mathematics on the one hand, and the humanities and social sciences on the other. It's a first approximation, but one that is real. In the former, the factors of integrity tend to dominate more over the factors of ideology. It's not that scientists are more honest people. It's just that nature is a harsh taskmaster. You can lie or distort the story of the French Revolution as long as you like, and nothing will happen. Propose a false theory in chemistry, and it'll be refuted tomorrow.

No one has ever devised a completely satisfactory classification scheme, and it seems unlikely that anyone ever will. This failing has always been apparent, but in recent years it has taken on increasingly urgent importance as scholarly literature has grown more complex and information retrieval more sophisticated. The library profession has long been aware of the difficulties created by the schemes available, but Foskett, librarian at the University of London's Institute of Education, has now examined the matter thoroughly in specific relation to the social sciences. He has written an immensely stimulating book, providing a perceptive critique of each of the existing classifications as well as new insight into possible solutions to the problems of classifying social science materials. He is very much in the Ranganathan camp and believes that the "facet analysis" which Ranganathan devised can conceivably supply the key to a much improved classification. He is especially taken with the more refined versions of this approach found in the work of the British Classification Research Group, ,and particularly in the work of Barbara Kyle. A schedule fashioned along these lines, he believes, would reveal subject. subdivisions and the relationships between subjects much more satisfactorily than any schedule used today. He would have a classification of such flexibility that any two concepts in the area of the social sciences could be related and this relation indicated in the notation of the material.

Scientists, social scientists and historians are all engaged in different branches of the same study: the study of man and his environment, of the effects of man on his environment and of his environment on man. The object of the study is the same: to increase man’s understanding of, and mastery over, his environment. The presuppositions and the methods of the physicist, the geologist, the psychologist and the historian differ widely in detail; nor do I wish to commit myself to the proposition that, in order to be more scientific, the historian must follow more closely the methods of physical science. But historian and physical scientist are united in the fundamental purpose of seeking to explain, and in the fundamental procedure of question and answer.

Most of our so-called social sciences are not ‘sciences’ in any sense of the term: they are merely bad Christian theologies