Jump to content
Science Forums

Is Political Science really science?


BrianG

Recommended Posts

From the wiki:

 

Political science is a social science concerned with the theory and practice of politics and the description and analysis of political systems and political behavior. It is often described as the pragmatic application of the art and science of politics defined as "who gets what, when and how", leaving out of the picture most of the "why".[1] Political science has several subfields, including: political theory, public policy, national politics, international relations, and comparative politics.

 

Political science is methodologically diverse, to the discipline include classical political philosophy, positivism, interpretivism, structuralism, and behavioralism, realism, pluralism, and institutionalism. Political science, as one of the social sciences, uses methods and techniques that relate to the kinds of inquiries sought: primary sources such as historical documents and official records, secondary sources such as scholarly journal articles, survey research, statistical analysis, case studies and model building.

 

"As a discipline" political science, possibly like the social sciences as a whole, "lives on the fault line between the 'two cultures' in the academy, the sciences and the humanities."[2] Thus, in some American colleges where there is no separate School or College of Arts and Sciences per se, political science may be a separate department housed as part of a division or school of Humanities or Liberal Arts.

 

Political Science is not a "pure" science like physics or chemistry, but it is a science nonetheless. Of course, pundits can claim to be "political scientists", but this is not the same as being the head of the Political Science department at a major university.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Is social science really a science? What happened to social studies? Have the liberal arts departments at "major universit[ies]", to use freeztar's term, taken over science?

 

Sociology - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

Sociology is the study of human societies.[1] It is a social science (with which it is informally synonymous) that uses various methods of empirical investigation[2] and critical analysis[3] to develop and refine a body of knowledge and theory about human social activity, often with the goal of applying such knowledge to the pursuit of social welfare. Subject matter ranges from the micro level of agency and interaction to the macro level of systems and social structures.[4]

 

Sociology is both topically and methodologically a very broad discipline. Its traditional focuses have included social stratification (i.e. class relations), religion, secularization, modernity, culture and deviance, and its approaches have included both qualitative and quantitative research techniques. As much of what humans do fits under the category of social structure and agency, sociology has gradually expanded its focus to further subjects, such as medical, military and penal institutions, the internet, and even the role of social activity in the development of scientific knowledge. The range of social scientific methods has also broadly expanded. The linguistic and cultural turns of the mid-20th century led to increasingly interpretative, hermeneutic, and philosophic approaches to the analysis of society. Conversely, recent decades have seen the rise of new mathematically and computationally rigorous techniques, such as agent-based modelling and social network analysis.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
×
×
  • Create New...