Anthropology

The social sciences occupy uneasy seats at the American feast of learning between the physical and biological sciences on their right and the humanities on their left. Sociology and political science hold the center and do not often make formal connection with either group of neighbors. On the right, psychology is uncertain whether to emphasize its associations with biology or with social science, and geography makes a link between other studies of mankind and other earth sciences. History and archeology, often claimed by both groups between which we imagine them to sit, have their places immediately to the left of the other social sciences and connect them with the scholars of literature and the arts. And anthropology, a far-reaching claimant of territory of interest, will be found in one chair or another along the entire row. It sends representatives to the Social Science Research Council; it is seated with biologists and astronomers in the National Research Council; and it also has membership in the third of the three great academic federations, the American Council of Learned Societies, where it takes part in the work of the students of arts and literatures.

This distribution of seats does not produce a well-balanced conversational arrangement. On the whole social scientists in America have turned a rather cold shoulder to the scholars of the humanities who sit on their left hand, as the “natural” scientists on the whole have turned a not very warm shoulder on them. In part these attitudes express he hierarchy of status that exists among the disciplines. Like other differences of kind between human societies, those between disciplines tend to be regarded as superiority and inferiority. Certain sciences are “harder” than others, and so better. The “hardness” may have somehow to do with the intellectual difficulty of the discipline or the mathematical character of the work. The prestige of economists as compared with some other social scientists appears to be so derived. But the “hardness” which goes with superior status also has something to do with the subject matter of the discipline: physical or biological subject matter is appropriate to a “harder” science. Anthropologists and psychologists, marginal biologists both, are joined together in one of the sections of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and do well there; but the section or sections in which other social scientists are grouped have little importance and low status. As for the students of art and literature, they are of course unrepresented in the Association. The rough generalization which emerges is that nobody concerned with human beings, as such, is felt to belong to the company of scientists. Only anthropologists, of the social scientists, are admitted to Sigma Xi, presumably because they have something to do with skulls; their interest in the attitudes and sentiments of men may be overlooked. These facts suggest a sort of antipathy felt to exist between the subject matter, humanity, and the method, science.

In Germany the social sciences and the humanities are often thought of as belonging together and the word Geisteswissenschaften then includes them both. In England common origins of the humanistic studies and the social sciences in the study of the classical cultures are not forgotten. But in America the social scientists have for the most part urged only their likeness to the “natural” sciences. Whatever the physicists and chemists think of them, they think of themselves as similar to physicists and chemists. The claim of kinship, or even identity, is made by showing that the methods of the social scientists are the same as the methods of other scientists. It is declared that the social scientists describe-which is true; they have nothing to do with values-which are untrue. The social scientists have developed the use of questionnaires, tables, measurements, and statistics. The building in which are housed the social sciences at the University of Chicago bears over its doorway a text from Lord Kelvin to the effect that knowledge that cannot be measured is meager and unsatisfactory. A social scientist put that text there. It has sometimes appeared that in order to succeed the social sciences would have to become as much like physics as possible and, even, that they were succeeding.

The comparison of the social sciences with the natural sciences exclusively, and with the natural sciences in terms of the similarity of method, goes on so frequently and is made so competently that there is no necessity to repeat it here. Two recent treatments of the theme, one by Lewis White Beck (”The Natural Science Ideal in the Social Sciences,” The Scientific Monthly, LXVIII [June, 1949],386-94), and the other by Donald G. Marquis (”Scientific Methodology in Human Relations,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, LXXXXII, [No.6, December, 1948], 411-16) show us that in their ways of formulating problems and solving them there are only differences in degree between the two kinds of sciences. Both writers are impressed with the similarity of the methods of the social sciences to those of the natural sciences, and both look forward confidently to a development of the social sciences in which the guiding example of the natural sciences will continue to be helpful.

Emulation of the natural sciences and emphasis on formal method brought about the differentiation of the social sciences from other kinds of thinking and investigating out of which they grew. The detachment of psychology from philosophy by way of the laboratory and the development of the social survey into the more precise methods that sociologists now have for studying communities are examples of this development. The striving to make knowledge systematic and comprehensive is a good thing. And that social scientists teach their students how to perform such controlled observation and rigorous analysis as are represented in sampling and other statistical techniques, in the construction of questionnaires and tests, in the marginal analysis used in economics, and in the construction of indexes showing the position of individuals in social classes, is not to be deplored. Every form of knowledge may become as precise and systematic as the application of its methods to its matter makes possible.

On the other hand, as Professor Beck says while himself illustrating the truth of his remark; it is fashionable nowadays to underestimate the differences between the social sciences and the natural sciences. In America at least, the emphasis on formal method and the imitation of the physical and biological sciences has proceeded to a point where the fullest development of social science is hampered. The emphasis on formal method sometimes carries the social scientist into exercises in which something not very important is done very well. There sometimes appears in the use of statistical methods in psychology or anthropology or sociology an exercise of the intellect in which nothing very much is found out about human beings or societies. The knowledge is measured; yet is somehow meager and unsatisfactory.

The identification with the natural sciences alone shelters the contemporary American social scientist from a stimulation from philosophy and the arts and literature which social science needs. Partly because of this, the sense of problem in American social science has diminished. Because small matters can be precisely done, large matters are left unconsidered. American political science has departed so far from philosophy that now, in many departments of the subject, central problems as to justice or as to the relations of the individual and the state gets little attention. Anthropology, a science currently enjoying success in many fields of inquiry, has almost nothing considered to say as to the nature of human nature. And psychology, as Sidney Olivier complained, having named itself the science of the soul, substituted the study of behavior-which is another thing.

The stimulation which the social sciences can gain from the humanities can come from the arts and literatures themselves and through an understanding of some of the problems which interest philosophers and the more imaginative students of the creative productions of mankind. It is not argued here that the humanities have ways of studying mankind which social scientists should adopt. It is not denied that many academic students of Chaucer or of the French language emphasize the mastery of formal method to a degree that they too are shut away from the humanity of man and from consideration of the important questions about man. Pedantry and formalism are weaknesses of humanistic learning as of social science. What is here asserted is that the arts and literatures of the world are sources of understanding of man in society from which social scientists may enrich their insights and their sense of problem. It is also asserted that among the professional humanists are many whose work is as similar to that of many social scientists in spirit and purpose as to suggest that some deliberate cultivation of their common interests, now that the scientific character of the social sciences is well established, would enrich and improve the work of both. Let the social scientists turn and talk for a time to their neighbors on their left.