Definition of (Social) Science

Beberapa petikan dari Encyclopedia of Sociology.  Volume 4.  Edgar H.  Borgotta and Marie L.  Borgotta.  Macmillan Library Reference, New York.  1992.

Science.  Sociologist of science study the social organization of science, the relations between science and other social institutions, social influences on the context of scientific knowledge, and public policy about science.  The definition of science is problematic.  It can refer to changing body of certified knowledge about nature or to the methods used to obtain that knowledge.  As such, science has existed for millennia. Sociologists are more likely to define science in institutional terms, and most research in the area studies those who work in differentiated social institutions (p:1705).

During the 1930s and 1940s, the dominant view of science was ‘radial positivism’, which view science as a process based only on inductive generalization and empirical verification (p:1716)

Because science is social and cultural activity, it is grounded in an everyday, taken-for-granted reality.  Scientists can perceive ‘facts’ only in a particular social and cultural  (p:1717)

Science can be seen as primarily a social activity, an interplay between empirical observation and broad theoretical ‘paradigms’. (Khun, 1970; Fleck 1979) (p:1717)

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Ada catatan dari support for social science (hal 2016) di bawah table dengan judul “federal obligation for research in science (current dollars)

Ada kolom tentang “all science”  dan ada kolom ‘Social science’

Note:  social science includes sociology, anthropology, economics, political science, linguistic, research in education, research in history, socioeconomic geography, and research on the impact of legal system.  Psychology, since 1959, is a separate category.

Sumber lain,

Schwandt, Thomas A.  2001. Dictionary of Qualitative Inquiry.  Second Edition.  .  Sage Publications. California.

Science.  One aspect of the contemporary debate about the academic status of qualitative inquiry is whether it can properly be called a science.  In this regard, it is worth noting that German term for Science (Wissenschaft) has a much broader sense than that associated with English use of the term science, which is typically restricted to physics, chemistry, biology, and so forth.  Wissenschaft, however, is not narrowly limited to those forms of science that employ the empirical methods of observation and experimentation but refers to any systematic, rational form of inquiry with rigorous and inter-subjectively agrred on procedures for validation.  Wissenschaft includes both the sciences of mathematics and logic and the hermeneutic and phenomeno-logical disciplines concerned with the interpretation of meaning and description of experience, respectively.  The intellectual tradition encompassing all methodological and epistemological concerns of the natural sciences is referred to as Naturwissenschafen, and that tradition sets them apart from the tradition of human or social sciences or Geisteswissenschaften.  Naturalism is a defense of the former tradition, whereas anti-naturalism defends the latter.  Many post-structuralists would likely disavow any and all attempts to form something called science of any kind, viewing such attempts as nothing more than linguistic inventions of totalizing, all-encompassing  worldviews or meta-narratives (p:234).