Has there ever been a scientific revolution in the social sciences?

[Boojatta]

Poll question: Has there ever been a scientific revolution in the social sciences?

[jobycom]

1. The Annales School in history was quite a revolution.

One could also argue that social history in general was a revolution. Feminist history was something of an offshoot of social history combined with other trends in feminist philosophy and thought, so not so much a revolution, but still a radically new perspective in many ways.

[rox63]

2. Yes - There have been plenty in psychology

Which I believe is counted as a social science. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, for one.

And what sort of impact have carbon-dating and dna profiling had on the study of history?

[On the Road]

3. Revolutions Aren't as Clear in the Social Sciences

and take longer in transition.

Freudianism, for example, was a revolution. So was the movement away from it. Same with behaviorism. But different schools existed at the same time for decades.

It wasn't as clear-cut as, say, continental drift, that were huge controversies but were pretty much clearly proven one way or another.

[Runcible Spoon]

4. I would say the social sciences are a by-product of what we commonly refer to as...

the Scientific Revolution. Social sciences replaced religion as the main apparatus for studying and explaining culture and behavior, even if some religious organizations, such as the Franciscan monks, developed techniques for observation and record keeping much like modern ethnography.

I can only speak for anthropology, and by extension sociology and to some degree psychology, but we have had many mini-revolutions in thought, theory, methodology, etc. Some are more faithful to "hard" science, some are hybrid, and some call for a complete disintegration of "hard" approaches to social issues.

Why do you ask?

Or am I missing a joke or esoteric reference somewhere? :P

[Boojatta]

7. "Why do you ask?"

I'm wondering whether or not anybody agrees with Chomsky:

QUESTION: How would you assess your own contributions to linguistics?

CHOMSKY: They seem sort of pre-Galilean.

QUESTION: Like physics before the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century?

CHOMSKY: Yes. In the pre-Galilean period, people were beginning to formulate problems in physics in the right way. The answers weren't there, but the problems were finally being framed in a way that in retrospect we can see was right.

QUESTION: How "pre-" do you mean? Are you saying that linguistics is about where physics was in the sixteenth century? Or are we going back still further, to Aristotle and to other Greek ideas about physics?

CHOMSKY: We don't know. It depends, you see, on when the breakthrough comes. But my feeling is that someday someone is going to come along and say, "Look, you guys, you're on the right track, but you went wrong here. It should have been done this way." Well, that will be it. Suddenly, things will fall into place.

QUESTION: And then we'll have a scientific revolution in linguistics?

CHOMSKY: I would think so, although to speak of scientific revolutions occurring outside a small core of the natural sciences is rather misleading. In fact, there was one major scientific revolution in the seventeenth century and there have been a lot of outgrowths from it since then, including biochemistry and molecular biology. But that's it. Nothing remotely resembling a scientific revolution has ever occurred in the social sciences.

Source:
"Things No Amount of Learning Can Teach"
http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/198311--.htm

[Runcible Spoon]

8. Ah, I see.

I would pretty much agree that nothing has occurred which fundamentally has shaken social sciences to the core the way the the Scientific Revolution did in terms of supplanting religion. That's not to say that revolutionary thinkers aren't out there...there just hasn't been any seismic shift even though the tools, methodologies, and theories have gotten quite sophisticated.

I would venture to ask if it's even possible to imagine any kind of revolution that's analogous. Postmodernists, for the amount of hate they generated, were obsessed with the question and I'm kinda leaning towards the conclusion that if anything revolutionary was going to happen, it would have been a by-product of post-modern clashes in academia. With the amount of record keeping, computerization, and general technological integration there is in the world, how would we imagine a shift in fundamental thought that would relate to this? Could there truly be anything new that wasn't actually "hybrid" (ie, the trend of techno-religion)? Would a fundamental shift require abandonment of this level of record-keeping? Social memory is powerful.

Damn, I'm off on tangents.

Interesting question; I'll be following this thread.

[aikoaiko]

5. Depends on what you mean by scientific revolution.

The closest thing that I know us in psychology where behaviorism shifted to cognitivism, but its really unclear if it was a revolution per say. Thomas Kuhn outlined certain stages (Normal Science, Anomoly, Crisis, Re/Evolution in Science. Its not so clear that there have been unifying paradigms in psychology or other social sciences -- especially in comparison to the geo-heliocentrism, creationist-evolutionary paradigm shifts.

[HereSince1628]

6. By Hobbs! I've gotta Marx this thread before it is Locke-ed and de Spencered with

[Runcible Spoon]

9. Ouch the puns they hurt us precious!

:evilgrin:

[mix]

10. The "Scientific Revolution,"

or the shift away from theological propositions of truth as the sole source of knowledge, made the "social sciences" possible. Materialism and empiricism, foundations of social scientific method, replaced metaphysics as a way to understand society and culture, as someone pointed out elsewhere in this thread.

I voted the question was not clear enough, because the reason we call the social sciences as such is because of the rise and eventual domination of science and the scientific method as a way of interpreting the world.