Anthropology

Of the three, human nature is the most general, for it is, in its content, universal. It may be asserted that all (normal) men and women have the same human nature (although it is not proved or universally admitted that this is the case). But it cannot be asserted that all men have the same personality or that all groups have the same culture, although it is properly asserted that all men have personalities and that all continuing groups of people who communicate with one another are characterized by culture. By human nature we mean that nature which everyone (after infancy) of our species has, if provided with the usual capacities, when he is brought up in a society characterized by culture. It is the nature we assume we shall meet in every man or woman, no matter where we meet him or her. We assume, and rightly, that every human being has something of which he may be proud and something of which he may be ashamed. Before we have even tried to communicate with him, we know that if we hit upon what he finds amusing or shocking he will be amused or shocked; that he will desire praise, and that he will give up present pleasures for some deferred good which he values highly. We cannot predict these qualities of the animals we meet (unless domesticated dogs, having been made just a little human, are a small exception), but we know we shall find these qualities and many others in the tribe as in the city, among peasants as among princes. This human nature is a thing built up on the basis of that original nature which we can never see quite clearly in mankind because it begins to change into human nature soon after birth.

This important and essential characteristic aspect of the nature of mankind seems never to have been very carefully investigated by anyone who looked much farther than inside himself. In recent times some of the psychologists have learned a good deal about the mechanisms whereby original nature gets made over into human nature, and the study of this process from the point of view of those concerned with relations between persons in the family and the neighborhood, and with the cultures of the groups within which the process occurs, has been enlightening. Some sociologists have collected material throwing light on the nature of human nature, and some have tried to study those exceptional members of our species, feral men, who grew up without acquiring human nature. But the content of human nature is not well understood.

Of course its existence is assumed by anyone who talks about human beings at all. It is a commonplace that philosophers and writers about social problems makes assumptions about what human nature is like that vary greatly from one another, and the views of literary people on this subject are quite as various. One thinks of the different views of human nature suggested by Hobbes, Rousseau, Bentham, and Dostoevski.

The anthropologist demonstrates the existence of human nature whenever he finds out what an exotic people are thinking and feeling. He can do this only by supposing that they have in common with him certain acquired propensities of attitude; these are human nature. To be able to find out what it is that a Zulli Indian is ashamed of, one must first know what it is to be ashamed. Although anthropologists commonly make assertions to the effect that “human nature is infinitely malleable” or speak of “the refutation of human nature” as an achievement of their science, they in fact recognize its existence every day.

The sources as to the nature of human nature are the records of human living. They exist in ethnography and in history; they exist in biography and in psychiatric case records; and they exist in creative literature. No one is more deeply engaged in the examination and understanding of human nature than are the dramatist and the novelist. In learning about human nature, men of literature and men of social science share a common effort, a common interest. It may be doubted if the results so far achieved by the social scientists are more communicative of the truth about human nature than are the results achieved by the more personal and imaginative methods of the artist.

The common interest of social scientist and of creative artist exists similarly in the study of personality, the organization of human nature and of culture in any particular individual. Here also it is the man of literature and art who has the longest interest in the subject. A personality wholly invented, like Madame Bovary or Huckleberry Finn, provides a record of a human individual that tells us much about the nature of human personality, of its development in relation to other personalities, and to events. A biography may be so written, as that of Hervey Allen on Edgar Allan Poe or that by Marquis James on Andrew Jackson, as to show much of those relationships between original temperament, personal associations, the culture of the community, and the happenings of circumstance, as equally concern the students of personality who are social scientists.

It is perhaps in their common interest in what is called “culture” that the students of the humanities and many of the social scientists find their most obvious and fruitful field for co-operative endeavor. In considering this common interest of humanist and social scientist, one thinks of “culture” as the term has been developed in the comparative study of societies, in the sense which includes all the customs, institutions, and conventions whatsoever, “acquired by man as a member of society,” in Tyler’s familiar words. The conception is a sort of master-term that brings after it many of the more special concepts used by social sciences specializing in the study of families, markets, schools, law, and so forth.

The very differences between the humanities and the social sciences show us the areas of interest where those differences cease to be. We recognize that the humanities are more specially and emphatically concerned with the products of creative imagination, particularly as produced by individuals conscious of their effort, than are the social sciences.

The more spontaneous productions of everyday life, the tools and the institutions that grow up of themselves, as it were, interest the sociologist, the anthropologist, and often the political scientist and the economist, more than they are likely to interest the student of the arts or of philosophy. The interest in a work of art, with reference to its manner of composition and its standard of excellence, is not so characteristically present in the social scientist; and it is the philosopher rather than the social scientist who deals with systems of thought as developed by reflective individuals. Nevertheless, we find no clear line of demarcation here either, and in anthropology one may find a Ruth Bunzel studying the aesthetic norms of individual Pueblo potters and Paul Radin studying the philosophy of Winnebago Indians; and economics may produce a Harold Innis who writes like a philosopher. As to institutions, on the whole social scientists have described their forms and their workings and have accounted for their beginnings in terms of previous social conditions and in terms of the communication of ideas from one group to another. Perhaps they will become more interested than they have been in the way in which inventions and institutions arise in the minds of particular individuals and what conceptions of excellence have guided these productions. If they do so, their work will again become more like that of the humanistic scholars. The juvenile court is, among other things, a work of creative imagination and might be studied as such, as the student of architecture studies the building in which such a court may be housed.

The existence of psychology, in part a social science, and the great current scientific interest in studying human personality prevent one from asserting too strongly that it is the humanist who is concerned with man as an individual while social science regards him as a collectivity. Yet it is true that the humanities, academically recognized, are characteristically concerned with the productions of the few, while the social sciences are for the most part interested in the productions of the many. It is partly a difference between an interest in what is common to members of a society and an interest in what is made by a few of them and perhaps enjoyed by only a few of them. It is partly a difference between an interest in any and every product of man’s collective life, no matter how good or bad it seems to the investigator, and an interest in what is better. A responsibility for the development of appreciation, for the improvement of taste, is more apt to be felt by a student of art and literature, as a part of his work, than it is apt to be felt by an economist or a psychologist or an anthropologist. The social scientist studies markets, cannibalism, ward politics, taxi dance halls, nursery rhymes, and art forms and social life of the juke-box set, but is not likely to be followed in these directions by professors of art, literature, or philosophy. On the other hand, folklore exists as a study of popular productions occasionally under humanistic academic auspices, and psychologists’ studies of symbolic behavior are studies of the creations of individuals. There is more than a little in common between one of Freud’s cases, as he wrote them down for us to read, and Lowes’s study of Coleridge’s creative mind, The Road to Xanadu.

The relationship which the social sciences have with the other sciences is of course undiminished by what has here been written about a relationship in another direction. The former relationship exists in the scientific point of view and in the similarities of method, as to both observation and analysis. The relationship with the humanities, as should appear from these pages, exists chiefly in the sharing of the same subject matter: humanity. This suggests one easy sentence in which one might perhaps summarize the two comparisons: Social science is a discipline with the methods of the natural sciences and the subject matter of the humanities.

Like many other such easy sentences, this one is no better than an approximation. It requires qualification in both its parts. By no means all of the subject matter that the social scientists take up for study is humanity. As has already been recognized here, much that is around or outside of humanity they find to be their business too: population statistics; the market as a function of supply and demand; military power and its influence; congenital reflexes.

And the assertion that social science has the method of the natural sciences requires modification also. Social science method is like physical science method in that it describes; it does not evaluate. Like physics and chemistry it strives for objectivity, system, and comprehensiveness. It uses precise methods where it can, and where it can it experiments, and where it can it measures. But it differs in its method from the methods of all the physical and biological sciences for reasons that follow from the difference in its subject matter. In most of social science, human nature is itself a part of the method. One must use one’s own humanity as a means to understanding. The physicist need not sympathize with his atoms, nor the biologist with his fruit flies, but the student of people and institutions must employ his natural sympathies in order to discover what the people think or feel and what the institution means. This is what C. F. von Weizsacker has in mind when he says, in “The Experiment,” that a philologist trying to understand the meaning an author puts into a text, or a historian seeking the intention of an acting man, enters “as an T into the discourse with a ‘Thou.’ This kind of meeting with its object, physics does not know, because it does not encounter its object as a subject. This personal understanding is a mode of experience which is accessible to us in regard to our fellow man; but not in regard to the stone, the star and the atom.”

The management of this human sympathy, this meeting of the object as subject, is a part of the art or scientific craft of the social scientist. Years ago Cooley gave it the name “sympathetic introspection.” It is a part of the scientist’s art, and, one may add, it is also in cases a personal difficulty or problem, for the social science field worker experiences in that part of his professional life an internal conflict between the yielding to human sympathy, as required by his method, and the standing apart, as science requires so as to look objectively at that which he sympathizes. This is not a problem of the physicist.

What is this “humanity” that both the social scientist and the student of art, literature, or philosophy strive to understand? In what that is susceptible of systematic observation does humanity manifest itself, and what are the most inclusive words that can be used to denote its principal manifestations? No generally accepted answer to these questions can be put on behalf of the social sciences or of the humanities. For the latter an answer would perhaps be a naming of the forms of art and thought which recur in many or all times and places. If the answer to represent social science should be sought of a social anthropologist or sociologist, it might be offered in something like the following words.

Humanity presents itself to our scientific notice as it appears in all men; as it appears in particular individual men; and as it appears in the conventional ways of life of particular continuing groups of men. Three terms are commonly used, nowadays, to point in the direction of these three different but interrelated manifestations of humanity: Human Nature, Personality, and Culture.

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.

In these lectures I propose to talk about the nature of social science. I am reporting something of what I have learned about social science in the twenty years or more during which I have had something to do with it. Into the report will go experience in teaching, in research, and in administration, for it has been my good luck to see social science from the viewpoint which each of these activities provides. But especially will my remarks be shaped by the presumptions and habits of mind of the anthropologist. An anthropologist may study social science just as he would study anything else in a society. Social science is one of the many systems of attitudes and practices that make up a culture and a society. In our present-day society it is an institution, just as the market, the family, and the church are institutions. In these lectures I invite you to consider with me what is done by economists and sociologists and psychologists and other social scientists-all that they study and teach-in the same spirit and asking the same questions that were represented when Professor Fei Hsiao-tung studied the agricultural and industrial institutions of communities in Yunnan, China, or that were represented when Professor Everett C. Hughes studied the familial and industrial institutions of a French-Canadian town. Social science and social scientists as a part of modern society and culture: that is my subject.

In investigating this subject we are prepared, as anthropologists of some experience, for the necessity to look at our subject freshly, as if we had not seen it before. We must come to it from the outside, so as to free ourselves from the limiting effects of our own close association with it. We know we cannot accept, as full understanding of what social science is, what the social scientists themselves are in the habit of saying about it. We cannot do this any more than the student of the kinship system of an unfamiliar people can accept as a complete and adequate understanding of the nature of that system what the people who use that system say about it. What they say about it only partly represents the scientific “truth.” Social scientists, until they come to study the actual nature of their social science, as it really is in our society, may merely repeat what they have learned to say about their social science. No, now we must approach social science as if we were anthropologists come to study this society, and we must look at what particular people, social scientists and others, in fact do think and feel about social science. We must look to see how the social science that is taught and studied actually affects the lives of social scientists and people who are not social scientists. It is a kind of anthropological field work.

It is useful to have some preliminary concepts to guide us in arranging our facts and in reaching our conclusions. I propose to adopt a distinction that is common among anthropologists: the distinction between structure and function. When we look at the structure of a cultural object or institution, we need not consider any of the other objects or institutions of the society in which we find it. We consider it as if it were alone, and, having recognized it as something separable from all else, we attend to the way in which its parts are related to each other. We are concerned with its internal order. I can recognize a table, and describe its structure by describing the way in which the legs support the top. I can describe the structure of a clock by showing how its parts go together so as to produce the movements which make a clock something different from a phonograph. But in doing this I need not take account of what use people make of a clock or what they think and feel about clocks as regulators of their lives or perhaps disturbers of their sleep.

When we consider the function of the clock or the table or the institution, we do have to think of what it means in the lives of the people of that society. Then we ask ourselves what contribution this thing that we are studying makes toward fulfilling the needs and desires of people. Also we look to see what contribution it makes toward enabling all the parts and institutions of the society to work together so as to enable the society to persist. The function of anything, in this sense, is its place in making up the going concern in which the activity of that thing is one element.

In speaking of the “structure” of social science, we are then concerned with its internal order. We attend to the way in which men use their minds, the way in which they apprehend and make order of their experiences of man in society when they do what we recognize as “science.” As this way is constituted of rules and habits of observing and thinking, we might speak of the structure of a science as its “logic.” We distinguish the scientific ways of getting understanding of man in society from other ways of getting such understanding by looking at the rules and habits of observing and reasoning-and also of communicating-which characterize science.

Science is one of the ways men have to make sense of experience. It is, perhaps emphatically, a method, a kind of procedure for getting understanding. Also we think of “science” as the product of that method: this is “science” in the sense of “scientific knowledge.” And also we sometime, use the word “science” as in the phrase “A Science of Society,” in the title of a book which records this kind of knowledge; “a science” is one kind of written work.

Let us here think of science as method, as a way of understanding.

From what other ways of understanding, of making order of experience, is it to be distinguished? For one thing, it is to be distinguished from common sense, and for another it is to be distinguished from mysticism. Common sense and mysticism are also ways of getting understanding of society as of anything else; the one is open to everybody with normal wits, common sayings perhaps to the contrary; the other is open, apparently, only to those having the inclinations and the powers of the mystic. The mystic’s ordering of experience is on the whole a matter private to him-its very incommunicability is the test of its mystic nature-while common sense has a considerable currency: what one man learns by that way he can in many cases make known to others.

It is from common sense that we feel the need to distinguish science.

The nature of that distinction is a commonplace in treatises on scientific method. There we read how scientific method is objective. It requires a detachment of the scientist’s personal attitudes from his subject matter and from his conclusions. Science is “impersonal.” The scientist must deliberately doubt his own thoughts on the matter at hand and subject his procedures and his conclusions to testing. He has the word “hypothesis” to dignify these temporary conclusions in process of testing. Moreover, we are told that science aims for perfect communicability-so far as possible the propositions must be formulated so that they will mean the same thing to any two scientists. So propositions in the form of numbers have high value in science: 92 per cent, we are told, is 92 per cent to everybody.

We are talking also of the form or logic of science when we say that it tends to become systematic and comprehensive. Common-sense knowledge is a medley, a collection. But scientific knowledge seems always to be struggling toward an architecture of description. Its effort is to represent the world in the form of propositions that are related to each other by a sort of natural order. Lesser generalizations are marshaled under generalizations of wider scope. A proposition that follows from acceptance of an anterior proposition is declared and shown to be so related. The connections between some particular facts and more inclusive propositions are made plain, and like matters are grouped because they are alike. The likeness is felt to arise within the facts, and without necessary relation to the practical interests of men. The movement is toward compendency, toward linking of propositions with one another; and at the same time toward comprehensiveness: the propositions are widened as observations authorize the widening. For a comprehensive proposition that scientists are at the time not interested in proving or disproving, we have the phrase “natural law.”

This characterization of science in its formal or logical nature, made familiar to us in treatises on the subject, applies to social science. It applies, but not so well as it applies to physics or mathematics. In coming to understand man in society we can use more than common sense and more (or shall we say less!) than the occasional private insight of the seer. Social scientists are in no small part engaged in making order of experience, an order that is objective, systematic, and comprehensive. For society, as for matter and organisms, there grows a structured body of knowledge that belongs to no one thinker, that is accessible to all who will study it, and that is the work of many men. The result is perhaps less objective than is the corresponding result ill physics or biology, for it is harder to be objective about a famine or the threat of war than it is about a star or a starfish. In some of his work the physicist or the chemist may be as anxious about the results of what he does as is the social scientist. The physicists and chemists who saw their studies of nuclear energy go into the making of atomic bombs were certainly anxious. But the situation of the social scientist is different in that many, probably most, of his scientific problems are also problems of immediate practical concern and in the further fact that his very subject matter is made up of human beings, rather than of matter or animal life. As the subject matter of social science is humanity, it would be inhuman not to care. Indeed, in my opinion, a good social scientist does care. He cares about the race relations or the village economy that he studies; he would not do as good a job if he looked at the village or the racial situation with inhuman indifference to it. At the same time he must be self-critical; he must be ready to give up any conclusion for another nearer the truth. Now this is harder to do when the very thing you are looking at, as scientist, is a thing that as a man you feel for and with. Yet it is done, and as it is done social science results.

Nor is social science as systematic or as comprehensive as physics or biology, and in my opinion it is not likely to catch up with the “natural” sciences in these qualities. Perhaps the generalization in social science has there a somewhat different role to play. Perhaps it is not so much a final or nearly final summing up of accepted understanding as it is a provider of a more tentative and yet illuminating point of view. Perhaps the generalization in social science is a sort of searchlight on each particular case. It throws light on it-from one side-but it does throw light. Another generalization, also tentative and not too substantially reported, will perhaps be offered to illuminate the case from another side. I think that in much of social science the generalizations tend to be constructions some considerable way from thoroughly acceptable “truth.” They guide us among real cases that always escape the generalization, and escape by amounts and in ways that are less definable than is the departure of an actual falling stone from the law of falling bodies. But we grasp and deal with the case the better for looking at it with the generalization.

The remarks so far made may be reduced to a sentence: Social science, looked at with regard to its inner or logical nature, as one of the ways men use to understand the world around them, has the chief formal characteristics of other sciences, although in less degree, although as modified because of the peculiar humanity of its subject matter.

In these lectures I propose to talk about the nature of social science. I am reporting something of what I have learned about social science in the twenty years or more during which I have had something to do with it. Into the report will go experience in teaching, in research, and in administration, for it has been my good luck to see social science from the viewpoint which each of these activities provides. But especially will my remarks be shaped by the presumptions and habits of mind of the anthropologist. An anthropologist may study social science just as he would study anything else in a society. Social science is one of the many systems of attitudes and practices that make up a culture and a society. In our present-day society it is an institution, just as the market, the family, and the church are institutions. In these lectures I invite you to consider with me what is done by economists and sociologists and psychologists and other social scientists-all that they study and teach-in the same spirit and asking the same questions that were represented when Professor Fei Hsiao-tung studied the agricultural and industrial institutions of communities in Yunnan, China, or that were represented when Professor Everett C. Hughes studied the familial and industrial institutions of a French-Canadian town. Social science and social scientists as a part of modern society and culture: that is my subject.

In investigating this subject we are prepared, as anthropologists of some experience, for the necessity to look at our subject freshly, as if we had not seen it before. We must come to it from the outside, so as to free ourselves from the limiting effects of our own close association with it. We know we cannot accept, as full understanding of what social science is, what the social scientists themselves are in the habit of saying about it. We cannot do this any more than the student of the kinship system of an unfamiliar people can accept as a complete and adequate understanding of the nature of that system what the people who use that system say about it. What they say about it only partly represents the scientific “truth.” Social scientists, until they come to study the actual nature of their social science, as it really is in our society, may merely repeat what they have learned to say about their social science. No, now we must approach social science as if we were anthropologists come to study this society, and we must look at what particular people, social scientists and others, in fact do think and feel about social science. We must look to see how the social science that is taught and studied actually affects the lives of social scientists and people who are not social scientists. It is a kind of anthropological field work.

It is useful to have some preliminary concepts to guide us in arranging our facts and in reaching our conclusions. I propose to adopt a distinction that is common among anthropologists: the distinction between structure and function. When we look at the structure of a cultural object or institution, we need not consider any of the other objects or institutions of the society in which we find it. We consider it as if it were alone, and, having recognized it as something separable from all else, we attend to the way in which its parts are related to each other. We are concerned with its internal order. I can recognize a table, and describe its structure by describing the way in which the legs support the top. I can describe the structure of a clock by showing how its parts go together so as to produce the movements which make a clock something different from a phonograph. But in doing this I need not take account of what use people make of a clock or what they think and feel about clocks as regulators of their lives or perhaps disturbers of their sleep.

When we consider the function of the clock or the table or the institution, we do have to think of what it means in the lives of the people of that society. Then we ask ourselves what contribution this thing that we are studying makes toward fulfilling the needs and desires of people. Also we look to see what contribution it makes toward enabling all the parts and institutions of the society to work together so as to enable the society to persist. The function of anything, in this sense, is its place in making up the going concern in which the activity of that thing is one element.

In speaking of the “structure” of social science, we are then concerned with its internal order. We attend to the way in which men use their minds, the way in which they apprehend and make order of their experiences of man in society when they do what we recognize as “science.” As this way is constituted of rules and habits of observing and thinking, we might speak of the structure of a science as its “logic.” We distinguish the scientific ways of getting understanding of man in society from other ways of getting such understanding by looking at the rules and habits of observing and reasoning-and also of communicating-which characterize science.

Science is one of the ways men have to make sense of experience. It is, perhaps emphatically, a method, a kind of procedure for getting understanding. Also we think of “science” as the product of that method: this is “science” in the sense of “scientific knowledge.” And also we sometime, use the word “science” as in the phrase “A Science of Society,” in the title of a book which records this kind of knowledge; “a science” is one kind of written work.

Let us here think of science as method, as a way of understanding.

From what other ways of understanding, of making order of experience, is it to be distinguished? For one thing, it is to be distinguished from common sense, and for another it is to be distinguished from mysticism. Common sense and mysticism are also ways of getting understanding of society as of anything else; the one is open to everybody with normal wits, common sayings perhaps to the contrary; the other is open, apparently, only to those having the inclinations and the powers of the mystic. The mystic’s ordering of experience is on the whole a matter private to him-its very incommunicability is the test of its mystic nature-while common sense has a considerable currency: what one man learns by that way he can in many cases make known to others.

It is from common sense that we feel the need to distinguish science.

The nature of that distinction is a commonplace in treatises on scientific method. There we read how scientific method is objective. It requires a detachment of the scientist’s personal attitudes from his subject matter and from his conclusions. Science is “impersonal.” The scientist must deliberately doubt his own thoughts on the matter at hand and subject his procedures and his conclusions to testing. He has the word “hypothesis” to dignify these temporary conclusions in process of testing. Moreover, we are told that science aims for perfect communicability-so far as possible the propositions must be formulated so that they will mean the same thing to any two scientists. So propositions in the form of numbers have high value in science: 92 per cent, we are told, is 92 per cent to everybody.

We are talking also of the form or logic of science when we say that it tends to become systematic and comprehensive. Common-sense knowledge is a medley, a collection. But scientific knowledge seems always to be struggling toward an architecture of description. Its effort is to represent the world in the form of propositions that are related to each other by a sort of natural order. Lesser generalizations are marshaled under generalizations of wider scope. A proposition that follows from acceptance of an anterior proposition is declared and shown to be so related. The connections between some particular facts and more inclusive propositions are made plain, and like matters are grouped because they are alike. The likeness is felt to arise within the facts, and without necessary relation to the practical interests of men. The movement is toward compendency, toward linking of propositions with one another; and at the same time toward comprehensiveness: the propositions are widened as observations authorize the widening. For a comprehensive proposition that scientists are at the time not interested in proving or disproving, we have the phrase “natural law.”

This characterization of science in its formal or logical nature, made familiar to us in treatises on the subject, applies to social science. It applies, but not so well as it applies to physics or mathematics. In coming to understand man in society we can use more than common sense and more (or shall we say less!) than the occasional private insight of the seer. Social scientists are in no small part engaged in making order of experience, an order that is objective, systematic, and comprehensive. For society, as for matter and organisms, there grows a structured body of knowledge that belongs to no one thinker, that is accessible to all who will study it, and that is the work of many men. The result is perhaps less objective than is the corresponding result ill physics or biology, for it is harder to be objective about a famine or the threat of war than it is about a star or a starfish. In some of his work the physicist or the chemist may be as anxious about the results of what he does as is the social scientist. The physicists and chemists who saw their studies of nuclear energy go into the making of atomic bombs were certainly anxious. But the situation of the social scientist is different in that many, probably most, of his scientific problems are also problems of immediate practical concern and in the further fact that his very subject matter is made up of human beings, rather than of matter or animal life. As the subject matter of social science is humanity, it would be inhuman not to care. Indeed, in my opinion, a good social scientist does care. He cares about the race relations or the village economy that he studies; he would not do as good a job if he looked at the village or the racial situation with inhuman indifference to it. At the same time he must be self-critical; he must be ready to give up any conclusion for another nearer the truth. Now this is harder to do when the very thing you are looking at, as scientist, is a thing that as a man you feel for and with. Yet it is done, and as it is done social science results.

Nor is social science as systematic or as comprehensive as physics or biology, and in my opinion it is not likely to catch up with the “natural” sciences in these qualities. Perhaps the generalization in social science has there a somewhat different role to play. Perhaps it is not so much a final or nearly final summing up of accepted understanding as it is a provider of a more tentative and yet illuminating point of view. Perhaps the generalization in social science is a sort of searchlight on each particular case. It throws light on it-from one side-but it does throw light. Another generalization, also tentative and not too substantially reported, will perhaps be offered to illuminate the case from another side. I think that in much of social science the generalizations tend to be constructions some considerable way from thoroughly acceptable “truth.” They guide us among real cases that always escape the generalization, and escape by amounts and in ways that are less definable than is the departure of an actual falling stone from the law of falling bodies. But we grasp and deal with the case the better for looking at it with the generalization.

The remarks so far made may be reduced to a sentence: Social science, looked at with regard to its inner or logical nature, as one of the ways men use to understand the world around them, has the chief formal characteristics of other sciences, although in less degree, although as modified because of the peculiar humanity of its subject matter.