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- For more, see: Social science#History
In ancient philosophy, there was no difference between the liberal arts of mathematics and the study of history, poetry or politics—only with the development of mathematical proof did there gradually arise a perceived difference between "scientific" disciplines and others, the "humanities" or "liberal arts". Thus, Aristotle studies planetary motion and poetry with the same methods, and Plato mixes geometrical proofs with his demonstration on the state of intrinsic knowledge. The history of science investigates the historical record of human events that are pertinent to the cultural context and the secular development of what is currently called science, namely, a body of empirical and theoretical knowledge, produced by a global community of researchers, making use of specific techniques for the...
Image File history File links Download high resolution version (1020x1508, 359 KB) Book cover Frontispiece of : Tabulae Rudolphinae : quibus astronomicae . ...
The sociology and philosophy of science, as well as the entire field of science studies, have in the 20th century been preoccupied with the question of large-scale patterns and trends in the development of science, and asking questions about how science works both in a philosophical and practical sense. ...
The historiography of science is the study of the history of science (often overlapping with the history of technology, history of medicine, and history of mathematics), generally in an academic context as part of the discipline of the history of science and technology (HST), history and philosophy of science (HPS...
A pseudoscience is any body of knowledge purported to be scientific or supported by science but which fails to comply with the scientific method. ...
The Ptolemaic system of celestial motion, from Harmonia Macrocosmica, 1661. ...
In prehistoric times, advice and knowledge was passed from generation to generation in an oral tradition. ...
The history of science in the Middle Ages refers to the discoveries in the field of natural philosophy throughout the Middle Ages - the middle period in a traditional schematic division of European history. ...
Leonardo da Vincis Vitruvian Man, an example of the blend of art and science during the Renaissance. ...
In the history of science, the scientific revolution was the period that roughly began with the discoveries of Kepler, Galileo, and others at the dawn of the 17th century, ended with the publication of the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1687 by Isaac Newton, and led into a new period...
Natural philosophy or the philosophy of nature, known in Latin as philosophia naturalis, is a term applied to the objective study of nature and the physical universe before the development of modern science. ...
Table of astronomy, from the 1728 Cyclopaedia Astronomy is probably the oldest of the natural sciences, dating back to antiquity, with its origins in the religious practices of pre-history: vestiges of these are still found in astrology, a discipline long interwoven with astronomy, and not completely separate from it...
The history of biology dates as far back as the rise of various civilization as classic philosophers did their own ways of biology as a system of understanding life. ...
Portrait of Monsieur Lavoisier and his Wife, by Jacques-Louis David The history of chemistry may be said to begin with the distinction of chemistry from alchemy by Robert Boyle in his work The Skeptical Chymist, which was written after a long and tearfilled talk with his father, and alchymist...
ÛEcology is generally spoken of as a new science, having only become prominent in the second half of the 20th Century. ...
The growth of physics has brought not only fundamental changes in ideas about the material world, mathematics and philosophy, but also, through technology, a transformation of society. ...
The term economics was coined around 1870 and popularized by Alfred Marshall, as a substitute for the earlier term political economy which has been used through the 18th-19th centuries, with Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Karl Marx as its main thinkers and which today is frequently referred to as...
Efforts to describe and explain the human language faculty have been undertaken throughout recorded history. ...
Antecedents of political science While the study of politics is first found in the Western tradition in Ancient Greece, political science is a late arrival in terms of social sciences. ...
The history of psychology consists of a prescientific and a scientific epoch. ...
Sociology is a relatively new academic discipline among other social sciences including economics, political science, anthropology, and psychology. ...
The wheel was invented circa 4000 BC, and has become one of the worlds most famous and most useful technologies. ...
Agronomy today is very different from what it was before about 1950. ...
The history of computer science began long before the modern discipline of computer science that emerged in the 20th century. ...
The History of materials science is rooted in the history of the Earth and the culture of the peoples of the Earth. ...
All human societies have medical beliefs that provide explanations for, and responses to, birth, death, and disease. ...
Alternative meanings: Timeline is a 1999 science fiction novel by Michael Crichton Timeline is a 2003 film based on the novel. ...
The social sciences are groups of academic disciplines that study the human aspects of the world. ...
In the history of education, the seven liberal arts comprise two groups of studies, the trivium and the quadrivium. ...
This unity of science as descriptive remains, for example, in the time of Thomas Hobbes who argued that deductive reasoning from axioms created a scientific framework, and hence his Leviathan was a scientific description of a political commonwealth. What would happen within decades of his work was a revolution in what constituted "science", particularly the work of Isaac Newton in physics. Newton, by revolutionizing what was then called "natural philosophy", changed the basic framework by which individuals understood what was "scientific". Hobbes redirects here. ...
Frontispiece of Leviathan Leviathan was a book written in 1651 by Thomas Hobbes, is one of the most famous and influential books of political philosophy. ...
Sir Isaac Newton, President of the Royal Society, (4 January 1643 – 31 March 1727) [OS: 25 December 1642 – 20 March 1727] was an English mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, chemist, inventor, and natural philosopher who is generally regarded as one of the greatest scientists and mathematicians in history. ...
While he was merely the archetype of an accelerating trend, the important distinction is that for Newton, the mathematical flowed from a presumed reality independent of the observer, and working by its own rules. For philosophers of the same period, mathematical expression of philosophical ideals was taken to be symbolic of natural human relationships as well: the same laws moved physical and spiritual reality. For examples see Blaise Pascal, Gottfried Leibniz and Johannes Kepler, each of whom took mathematical examples as models for human behavior directly. In Pascal's case, the famous wager; for Leibniz, the invention of binary computation; and for Kepler, the intervention of angels to guide the planets. Blaise Pascal (June 19, 1623 – August 19, 1662) was a French mathematician, physicist, and religious philosopher. ...
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (also Leibnitz or von Leibniz)[1] (July 1 (June 21 Old Style) 1646 – November 14, 1716) was a German polymath. ...
Johannes Kepler Johannes Kepler (December 27, 1571 – November 15, 1630), a key figure in the scientific revolution, was a German mathematician, astrologer, astronomer, and an early writer of science fiction stories. ...
In the realm of other disciplines, this created a pressure to express ideas in the form of mathematical relationships. Such relationships, called "Laws" after the usage of the time (see philosophy of science) became the model which other disciplines would emulate. Philosophy of science is the branch of philosophy that studies the philosophical assumptions, foundations, and implications of science, including the formal sciences, natural sciences, and social sciences. ...
August Comte (1797-1857) argued that ideas pass through three rising stages, Theological, Philosophical and Scientific. He defined the difference as the first being rooted in assumption, the second in critical thinking, and the third in positive observation. This framework, still rejected by many, encapsulates the thinking which was to push economic study from being a descriptive to a mathematically based discipline. Karl Marx was one of the first writers to claim that his methods of research represented a scientific view of history in this model. Auguste Comte Auguste Comte (full name Isidore Marie Auguste François Xavier Comte) (January 17 (recorded January 19), 1798 _ September 5, 1857) was a positivist thinker and a founder of the discipline of sociology. ...
Karl Heinrich Marx (May 5, 1818, Trier, Germany – March 14, 1883, London) was an immensely influential German philosopher, political economist, and socialist revolutionary. ...
Science in the broadest sense refers to any knowledge or trained skill, especially (but not exclusively) when this is attained by verifiable means. ...
With the late 19th century, attempts to apply equations to statements about human behavior became increasingly common. Among the first were the "Laws" of philology, which attempted to map the change over time of sounds in a language.
It was with the work of Darwin that the descriptive version of social theory received another shock. Biology had, seemingly, resisted mathematical study, and yet the Theory of Natural Selection and the implied idea of Genetic inheritance - later found to have been enunciated by Gregor Mendel, seemed to point in the direction of a scientific biology based, like physics and chemistry, on mathematical relationships. Gregor Johann Mendel Gregor Johann Mendel (July 20[1], 1822 – January 6, 1884) was an Augustinian abbot who is often called the father of genetics for his study of the inheritance of traits in pea plants. ...
In the first half of the twentieth century, statistics became a free-standing discipline of applied mathematics. Statistical methods were used confidently, for example in an increasingly statistical view of biology. (19th century - 20th century - 21st century - more centuries) Decades: 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s The 20th century lasted from 1901 to 2000 in the Gregorian calendar (often from (1900 to 1999 in common usage). ...
A graph of a bell curve in a normal distribution showing statistics used in educational assessment, comparing various grading methods. ...
Applied mathematics is a branch of mathematics that concerns itself with the mathematical techniques typically used in the application of mathematical knowledge to other domains. ...
Biology is the branch of science dealing with the study of life. ...
The first thinkers to attempt to combine inquiry of the type they saw in Darwin with exploration of human relationships, which, evolutionary theory implied, would be based on selective forces, were Freud in Austria and William James in the United States. Freud's theory of the functioning of the mind, and James' work on experimental psychology would have enormous impact on those that followed. Freud, in particular, created a framework which would appeal not only to those studying psychology, but artists and writers as well. Sigmund Freud His famous couch Sigmund Freud (May 6, 1856 - September 23, 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of the psychoanalytic school of psychology, a movement that popularized the theory that unconscious motives control much behavior. ...
William James William James (January 11, 1842 – August 26, 1910) was a pioneering American psychologist and philosopher. ...
One of the most persuasive advocates for the view of scientific treatment of philosophy would be John Dewey (1859-1952). He began, as Marx did, in an attempt to weld Hegelian idealism and logic to experimental science, for example in his "Psychology" of 1887. However, it is when he abandoned Hegelian constructs, and joined the movement in America called Pragmatism, possibly under the influence of William James' "Principles of Psychology" that he began to formulate his basic doctrine, enunciated in essays such as "The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy" (1910). John Dewey (October 20, 1859 – June 1, 1952) was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer, whose thought has been greatly influential in the United States and around the world. ...
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William James William James (January 11, 1842 – August 26, 1910) was a pioneering American psychologist and philosopher. ...
This idea, based on his theory of how organisms respond, states that there are three phases to the process of inquiry:
- Problematic Situation, where the typical response is inadequate.
- Isolation of Data or subject matter.
- Reflective, which is tested empirically.
With the rise of the idea of quantitative measurement in the physical sciences, for example Lord Rutherford's famous maxim that any knowledge that one cannot measure numerically "is a poor sort of knowledge", the stage was set for the conception of the humanities as being precursors to "social science." Ernest Rutherford Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson, OM, PC, FRS (August 30, 1871 – October 19, 1937), was a New Zealand nuclear physicist. ...
This change was not, and is not, without its detractors, both inside of academia and outside. The range of critiques begin from those who believe that the physical sciences are qualitatively different from social sciences, through those who do not believe in statistical science of any kind, through those who disagree with the methodology and kinds of conclusion of social science, to those who believe the entire framework of scientificizing these disciplines is solely, or mostly, from a desire for prestige and to alienate the public. Physical science is the branch of science including chemistry and physics, usually contrasted with the social sciences and sometimes including and sometimes contrasted with natural or biological science. ...
Rise Theodore Porter argued in "The Rise of Statistical Thinking" that the effort to provide a synthetic social science is a matter of both administration and discovery combined, and that the rise of social science was, therefore, marked by both pragmatic needs as much as by theoretical purity. An example of this is the rise of the concept of Intelligence Quotient, or IQ, a test which produces a number which it is not clear what, precisely, is being measured, except that it has pragmatic utility in predicting success in certain tasks. IQ redirects here; for other uses of that term, see IQ (disambiguation). ...
The rise of industrialism had created a series of social, economic, and political problems, particularly in managing supply and demand in their political economy, the management of resources for military and developmental use, the creation of mass education systems to train individuals in symbolic reasoning and problems in managing the effects of industrialization itself. The perceived senselessness of the "Great War" as it was then called, of 1914-1918, now called World War I, based in what were perceived to be "emotional" and "irrational" decisions, provided an immediate impetus for a form of decision making that was more "scientific" and easier to manage. Simply put, to manage the new multi-national enterprises, private and governmental, required more data. More data required a means of reducing it to information upon which to make decisions. Numbers and charts could be interpreted more quickly and moved more efficiently than long texts. Combatants Allied Powers: British Empire France Italy Russia United States Central Powers: Austria-Hungary Bulgaria Germany Ottoman Empire Casualties Military dead: 5 million Civilian dead: 3 million Total dead: 8 million Military dead: 4 million Civilian dead: 3 million Total dead: 7 million The First World War, also known as...
In the 1930s this new model of managing decision making became cemented with the New Deal in the US, and in Europe with the increasing need to manage industrial production and governmental affairs. Institutions such as The New School for Social Research, International Institute of Social History, and departments of "social research" at prestigious universities were meant to fill the growing demand for individuals who could quantify human interactions and produce models for decision making on this basis. This article or section is missing references or citation of sources. ...
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The New School for Social Research is the name of the graduate division of The New School. ...
The International Institute of Social History (Dutch: Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis, abbreviation: IISG) is situated in Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and was founded in 1935 by Nicolaas Posthumus. ...
Coupled with this pragmatic need was the belief that the clarity and simplicity of mathematical expression avoided systematic errors of holistic thinking and logic rooted in traditional argument. This trend, part of the larger movement known as Modernism provided the rhetorical edge for the expansion of social sciences. Modernism is a cultural movement that generally includes the progressive art and architecture, music, literature and design which emerged in the decades before 1914. ...
Present state There continues to be little movement toward consensus on what methodology might have the power and refinement to connect a proposed "grand theory" with the various midrange theories which, with considerable success, continue to provide usable frameworks for massive, growing data banks. See consilience. Consilience, or the unity of knowledge (literally a jumping together of knowledge), has its roots in the ancient Greek concept of an intrinsic orderliness that governs our cosmos, inherently comprehensible by logical process, a vision at odds with mystical views in many cultures that surrounded the Hellenes. ...
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