Do We Need A New Social Science?

Summary

The disciplinary fields in the social sciences – economics, political science, anthropology, sociology, psychology – were assembled a century or more ago, mostly around the ideas of 18th and 19th century scholars with distinct interests and perspectives on how to study social systems. In the intervening years, these disciplines have each developed their own distinctive methodological perspectives, standards of evidence, institutions and cultures. At root these field divisions are time capsules, preserving century-old ideas about how driving forces in social systems should be taxonomized and preserving very old disagreements about how they should be approached.

Since these fields were established, our understanding of our biology, genetics, neurology, evolution and history have been fundamentally changed by advances in the natural sciences. Efforts have been made within the social sciences to incorporate many of these findings, but disciplinary boundaries and traditions have prevented the fields from being transformed by findings in the natural sciences. Over the same span of time, the domain of each of the social sciences has expanded, causing the fields topically bleed into and overlap one another. But, again, methodological, conceptual and sociological differences have prevented the disciplines from integrating their specialized knowledge with one another in anything like a comprehensive way.

Have the disciplinary boundaries of the social sciences outlived their usefulness? Are they preventing us from understanding ourselves and how we can best improve our societies? What would a modern social science discipline look like and how might we construct one? Which of the disciplinary boundaries still make intellectual sense and which are holding us back? How would a modern social science root itself more firmly in the natural sciences? What would we pull from each of the existing social sciences to make a new synthetic social science and which would we leave behind?

We will assemble 7-10 of the top interdisciplinary scholars working in the social sciences to ask these questions. Our aim will be to “build” a new, modern social science and answer some first questions about how, concretely, one might make progress on launching it. Our aim in doing this will be not only to propose the establishment of a new field, but also to cast sharp light on the limitations in the current organization of the social sciences