Although Harvard University has featured a "Department of Social Relations" (in which Talcott Parsons played a prominent role), and although the term "social relations" is frequently used in social sciences, there is no commonly agreed meaning for this concept (see also the entry social). Harvard, see Harvard (disambiguation) Harvard University is a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA and a member of the Ivy League. ... Talcott Parsons (December 13, 1902, Colorado Springs, USA - May 8, 1979, Munich, Germany) was the best-known sociologist in the United States, and one of the best-known in the world for many years. ... The term social is derived from the Latin word socius, which as a noun means an associate, ally, business partner or comrade and in the adjectival form socialis refers to a bond between people (such as marriage) or to their collective or connected existence. ...

It could be argued though that a social relation is, in the first instance, a relation between people, and more specifically (i) a relation between individuals insofar as they belong to a group, or (ii) a relation between groups, or (iii) a relation between an individual and a group. The group could be an ethnic or kinship group, a social institution or organisation, a social class or social stratum, a nation, or a gender etc. In metaphysics and statistics, the word individual, while sometimes meaning a person, more typically describes any numerically singular thing. ... The term group can refer to several concepts: Look up Group in Wiktionary, the free dictionary In music, a group is another term for band or other musical ensemble. ... An ethnic group is a group of people who identify with one another, or are so identified by others, on the basis of a boundary that distinguishes them from other groups. ... Kinship is a biological and/or familial relationship between two organisms. ... A social institution is any institution in a socity that works to socialize the groups or people in it. ... Alternative meaning: Organisation (band). ... Social class refers to the ranking of people into a hierarchy within a culture. ... For publications of this name, see also Nation (disambiguation) The most popular modern ethical and philosophical doctrines state that all humans are divided into groups called nations. ... Gender, for the purposes of this article, is the perceived or projected (self-identified) masculinity or femininity of a person. ...

In this sense, a social relation is therefore not identical with a unique interpersonal relation or a unique individual relation, although all these types of relations presuppose each other; a social relation refers precisely to something that people have in common.

However, the difficulties only start here, because now it needs to be established how these social relations exist, how we know they exist, what kinds of social relations there are, and how we can find out about them, verify them or identify them. About these questions researchers often disagree and debate, proposing different kinds of methodology to obtain knowledge. The word Methodology is used in several ways. ... Knowledge is the awareness and understanding of facts, truths or information gained in the form of experience or learning (a posteriori), or through introspection (a priori). ...

At one end of the spectrum, Karl Marx approvingly quotes Giambattista Vico's argument that humans can understand their society in its totality because "they made it themselves"; the limits to what humans can know are mainly practical in nature. At the other end of the spectrum, Karl Popper rejects the possibility of objective knowledge about society as a whole, suggesting that methodological holism must lead to totalitarianism; progressive social change can only be achieved through the small steps of piecemeal social engineering. Karl Marx Karl Marx (May 5, 1818 Trier, Germany – March 14, 1883 London, UK) was an influential German philosopher, political economist, and revolutionary organizer of the International Workingmens Association. ... Giambattista Vico or Giovanni Battista Vico (June 23, 1668—January 23, 1744) was a Neapolitan philosopher, historian, and jurist. ... ... Karl Popper Sir Karl Raimund Popper (July 28, 1902 – September 17, 1994), was an Austrian-born, British philosopher of science. ... Holism (from holon, a Greek word meaning entity) is the idea that the properties of a system cannot be determined or explained by the sum of its components alone. ... A totalitarian régime or state attempts to control nearly every aspect of personal, economic, and political life. ... Social change refers to acts of advocacy for the cause of changing society in a positive way. ... Social engineering has several meanings: Social engineering (political science) Social engineering (computer security) This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. ...

There are at least three problems in understanding social relations. The first is that many social relations are not directly observable by an individual, and can only be inferred with the aid of abstractions. Another is one of reflexivity: in the case of social science, the scientist is in a very obvious way himself or herself part of the social world being studied. A third kind of problem is that animals and insects for example also display a kind of "social" behaviour, so that social relations are not necessarily uniquely human relations (cf. the insights of sociobiology). In physics, particularly in quantum physics a system observable is a property of the system state that can be determined by some sequence of physical operations. ... An abstraction is an idea, concept, or word which defines the phenomena which make up the concrete events or things which the abstraction refers to, the referents. ... In mathematics, a binary relation R over a set X is reflexive if for all a in X, a is related to itself. ... The word Animals when used alone, has several possible meanings in the English language. ... Orders Subclass Apterygota Symphypleona - globular springtails Subclass Archaeognatha (jumping bristletails) Subclass Dicondylia Monura - extinct Thysanura (common bristletails) Subclass Pterygota Diaphanopteroidea - extinct Palaeodictyoptera - extinct Megasecoptera - extinct Archodonata - extinct Ephemeroptera (mayflies) Odonata (dragonflies and damselflies) Infraclass Neoptera Blattodea (cockroaches) Mantodea (mantids) Isoptera (termites) Zoraptera Grylloblattodea Dermaptera (earwigs) Plecoptera (stoneflies) Orthoptera (grasshoppers, crickets... Binomial name Homo sapiens Linnaeus, 1758 Subspecies Homo sapiens idaltu (extinct) Homo sapiens sapiens Human beings define themselves in biological, social, and spiritual terms. ... Sociobiology is a synthesis of scientific disciplines that attempts to explain behavior in all species by considering the evolutionary advantages of social behaviors. ...

In broad terms, we can distinguish six basic levels of human awareness: (1) subconscious awareness; (2) conscious subjective awareness (dissociated, focusing inward on the inner world, or expressing an inner state outwards); (3) intersubjective awareness (an awareness which occurs in association with other people and is internal to that association); (4) objective awareness (dissociated, focusing outward to a world that exists mind-independently); (5) reality-transforming awareness (transitions in practical action reframing the boundaries of different forms of awareness and changing consciousness, or connecting different forms of awareness) (6) transcendent awareness (going beyond personal knowledge or experience). In film, reframing is changing the view of a subject. ...

Corresponding to these levels of human awareness, we could also define different kinds of social relations, i.e. different ways in which humans might experience the connections among their own kind: (1) subconscious social relations (for example at the level of the collective unconscious or between parents and children, (2) social relations which exist only in subjective awareness or subjective perceptions, (3) intersubjective social relations, (4) objective social relations, (5) static and dynamically changing social relations, (6) spiritual social relations of some kind. Collective unconscious is a term of analytical psychology, and was originally coined by Carl Jung. ... Parenting comprises all the tasks involved in raising a child to an independent adult. ... A male Caucasian toddler child A child (plural: children) is a young human. ... See: Spirituality Spiritual music Spiritual dance The Age of Spiritual Machines Spiritual possession The Four Spiritual Laws Wholism External links Spiritual service This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. ...

As illustration, we can apply the foregoing to the notion of a group. A person might almost out of instinct identify with a group or relate to it; s/he might imagine being a member of a group, regardless of whether this is really the case; a group might exist only in the form of intersubjective relations among its members; a group might exist as an objective description, or as an objective reality, even regardless of whether one was aware of belonging to it; a group might be forming or dissolving, or both at once; and a group might also exist at the level of a common spiritual affinity or identification. Instinct is the word used to describe inherent dispositions towards particular actions. ...

However the group may exist, or be perceived to exist - with the consequences that has for the kinds of social relations involved - it is clear that understanding different kinds of group relations require different methods of inquiry and verification. Precisely because social relations may be experienced at different levels of awareness, they are not necessarily transparent at all. Indeed, Karl Marx wrote ironically in this respect that "science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided". In the context of hardware and software systems, formal verification is the act of proving or disproving the correctness of a system with respect to a certain formal specification or property, using formal methods. ... See: transparency (optics) alpha compositing GIF#Transparency transparency (overhead projector) market transparency transparency (telecommunication) transparency (computing) For X11 pseudo-transparency, see pseudo-transparency. ... Karl Marx Karl Marx (May 5, 1818 Trier, Germany – March 14, 1883 London, UK) was an influential German philosopher, political economist, and revolutionary organizer of the International Workingmens Association. ...

References

• Dick Houtman, Class and Politics in Contemporary Social Science: Marxism Lite and Its Blind Spot for Culture
• Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities
• Karl Marx, Grundrisse
• Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies
• Frank Furedi, Where have all the intellectuals gone?