Ah, I see this is a discussion thread, only it's on your page ;-)

Are all social sciences studies of different kinds of transactions?

This is an interesting question, one I wouldn't have thought of. I may have too literal interpretations of "transfer" as and exchange or transfer of goods and services. David Braden talks about "value flows" and perhaps you intend something like that in your use of "transfer."

I'm not so sure that I do think that all social science is about transactions or enabling transactions.

I like your list of social sciences, but can easily imagine other lists.

In a rude way "social science" refers to what they teach in the academy that isn't the natural sciences. And there is some use in that bifurcation. "Behavioral sciences" might or might not be a useful distinction. I'm probably too flip, but my sense of it is that the term grows out of the strong feeling that surely psychology is a natural science. And what separates the humanities boils down to method rather than subject.

If we think of behavior as "The actions or reactions of a person or animal in response to external or internal stimuli" that sort of gets close to your transactions. That is, except that "transactions" also sometimes implies that the stimuli might be as much of the subject of study as the actions and reactions of another subject.

In the natural sciences, in the world of stuff, billiard balls move in predictable ways, according to the laws of physics. It seems much more complicated once you come around to studying beings with minds. So it's one thing to kick a stone and quite another to kick a dog as far as predicting what happens next. Will the dog cower or attack? Sometimes people can be moved by nothing at all. Our literature is full of stories about the consequence of the letter that doesn't come.

I think that any definition of social science must include a discussion of method. Historically the method of social science presumed a unity of knowledge and borrowed methods from the natural or physical sciences. But the problem of mind is something that has troubled social sciences from the beginning. How do you study behavior when the stimulus, or at least the proximate cause, is nothing (as in the letter which does not arrive)?

The study of transactions surely is a legitimate area of study, but my hunches tell me not large enough to usefully describe social sciences.

Recently I read an essay by Deirdre McCloskey in Time Higher Eduction that I was eager to share with you because it seemed to touch on some of what we'd been talking about recently. I knew you were busy so I didn't bother you with it. I think it relevant to this discussion.

McCloskey got her PhD in economics and got a job teaching economics at The University of Chicago. The essay is a lighthearted telling of her discovery that prudence can't explain it all:

My first scientific eureka came when I was a sophomore at university, a very wise fool. As I started to learn the macho science of economics, I suddenly saw that mere prudence, "rationality", rules. Wow: that's so much simpler than attending to human meanings. Hurrah. Therefore, the sociologists, psychologists and anthropologists are idiots.

Snip

All that wandering away from the science of economics into the realms of arts suddenly didn't look so odd. An economics adequate to explain the modern world of plate glass, general elections, indoor plumbing and higher education is going to have to take language seriously as a maker of meanings. That is to say - my last scientific eureka - economics should become a humanistic science of the economy. My word! Exactly.

LOL do read the whole thing, it's not long. This phrase, "a humanistic science of the economy" maybe a bit too clever by half, but anyhow I do think it useful in thinking about social science to examine the humanities rather than to simply assume that the humanities and social sciences are separate and "never the twain shall meet."

I have a B.S. in education. I like when Ben's around and talks about "educationists" even though it's usually in the context "I'm not an educationist!" The term is hardly used here in the US, so I'm probably not safe in assuming the term has slightly derogatory connotations. I do think it's safe to say that education is not a very widely respected field in the academy. EdD carries with it the presumption your research sucked but they liked you anyway ;-) Education as a field often tries to finesse the fact that science, at least as we conceive of it, is necessary but not useful enough in the field. So we say that "education" is both an art and a science. MDs say the same thing, but nowadays seem hardly to believe that the art of it has anything to do with the practice except tradition.

The chasm between the humanities and science appears narrow, but it must be quite deep because all sorts of useful studies seem to fall in to it.

McCloskey I think makes a very good point that economics tries to separate out from study "human meanings." I think that observation holds more generally in the social sciences. Finding a place for meanings within these fields seems a very crucial and foundational project. That's why your concern, Linda, to put values into economics is of such interest to me.

In your chart you have Eduction and in the transaction column we might put "transfer of knowledge." In some ways that's fair enough, but education is concerned with the learning process, a construct much larger than knowledge transfer.

My hunch is that a general definition of social science would have a table that also includes a "why" column. And it's that column that's the trickiest part of all.

I have been thinking about integral development - balancing economic, social, intellectual, and spiritual development. What is the role of economics in that mix? What is the the role of government? It seems that government should be kind of like a traffic cop ... when things get jammed up or go wrong, it should be the governments role to enable things to get moving again in a right direction or regulate to control behavior. I was thinking of this this week particularly with regards to health care reform, the Supreme Court decision on campaign finance and the literature review I am doing on Christian Economics.

Catholic social teaching has two really important themes: solidarity and subsidiarity.

Solidarity is the old "no man is an island" concept and people supporting one another.

Subsidiarity is the concept that a task should be handled by the person lowest in the hierarchy. Person, family, church, community, government. All of this is to encourage the development of each individual.

Isn't that what the goal of all of life should be?

I like most of John's points - as usual - to the extent I follow. Perhaps we can think of each field as the study of a particular kind of transaction?

I could think of Anthropology as the study of human transactions . . .

Archeology as the study of the artifacts of ancient human transactions . . .

Let me think about it some more.

I changed the location of the table to a worksheet so that everyone could change it. I then used an "on include" to update it here every time.

A worth endeavour true! - the reall challenge with any science that involves human behaviour is a bit akin to Schrödinger's cat or the observer effect.

All surveys, even double blinds, have huge bias in them

So not being one to just state issues - without an attempt at solution, how about we overlay some of the studies with what happens in the animal world, since indeed many people would say that the only thing that lifts us from there, and I'm not just talking about Maslov's hierarchy, is the Ego.

OK, so I've gone slightly off topic, though this may give you some additional left of centre, tangential thinking!

LOL I don't have permission to edit that page. It's probably just as well because I'm not really with the program yet. I still want to pay of course ;-)

Behavioral sciences study the transactions among organisms.

Communications which enable transactions.

Management is the study of the maxima and minima of some objective function.

Enable decision making re transactions.

Sociology the study of transactions which promote social welfare.

Causes of transactions.

Political Science is the study of who gets what, when, how.

Transactions ?

Why?--It's interesting that Political science explicitly excludes this question.

Psychology is the study of mental transactions in organisms.

Transactions include chemical and electric signals within organisms as well as thought schemata.

John, I think you are enabled to edit that now as well as anyone else.

I have tried to add what you had there for the sake of others but there were things I didn't understand -

Communications which enable transactions.

Management is the study of the maxima and minima of some objective function.

Enable decision making re transactions.

...

Causes of transactions.

Political Science is the study of who gets what, when, how.

Transactions ?

Why?--It's interesting that Political science explicitly excludes this question.

...

Transactions include chemical and electric signals within organisms as well as thought schemata.

Can you please clarify or just put them in the table yourself?

I put everything you had in there although I do not agree with all of it. (I am sure you never expected I would!)

That one is right over my head. I guess I see the role of government as enabling the transactions of everyone and group below in the hierarchy and regulating when they get out of line. (I know I am idealistic!)

Hum, I clicked on edit just now--but didn't edit---in any case it works I can edit.

I don't expect you to agree with me Linda. Actually, I put some things out there to see if I'm more or less understanding what you're trying to do here with this table. so I welcome your feedback not so much as argument but as a way that I can better understand.

What is the the role of government?

Governments have the authority to enforce rules.

Political science is rather different from Civics, that is I think that political science is not necessarily the study of government.

The blog Firedoglake has been doing live blogging of the Prop. 8 trial. California had allowed gay marriage, but then as a result of a ballot initiative (Prop. 8) this right was taken away. The trial deals with the legal basis of the initiative. It's in Federal Court now and after that it may go to the Supreme Court. I mention it because while I have not followed the live blogging much I have checked in and have been quite interested in the expert witness testimony. It's rather boring but here is a page with some of the testimony of Gary Segura a professor of Political Science.

In a trial with experts there's a sort of a battle of plaintiff's experts and defendant's experts. So the interesting thing looking at such testimony is there's attention to the results of study as well as some defense as to why these results are credible.

I took that "who gets what, when, how" right from the Wikipedia article on political science. But I had in the back of my mind Segura's testimony. I can see the utility of the way political science operates, and why a court of law would give such expert opinion credence. But I still think there's something wrong with the discipline.

I'm sure you already know that I think that the social sciences are flawed at a fundamental level. My sense of what is wrong with them is they take as a model of science premises from the natural sciences that view causes the result of forces and impacts. Communications in contrast depend upon contexts where such a linear view of cause and effect tends to obscure rather than inform.

Political science is an empirical study and to describe how things are rather than how they ought to be. That's why "why" isn't a part of the study of political science. But that's precisely part of my problem with it. That's not to say I don't want to know "what is" but to say that I think the meaning of "what is", or the relevance of "what is", is essential to a rigorous study of politics.

Across the board I think there is a similar flaw in the social sciences where theory and method is constrained by a metaphor of science from the physical applied to phenomena which primarily have to do with form.

How subjects are broken up is not uniform. It's quite common for example for an education major to receive either a B.A. or a B.S. for essentially the same unit of study. "Management" might be a business course, but I was thinking about is "Management Science" which is more or less a mathematics discipline.

This idea of trying to find a unity among social sciences through the construct of "transactions" is likely to find some success, but the unity it displays is a shared flaw (my opinion). "Transactions" tend lend a physicalism to what are more often phenomena of not of substance but order.

Communication is the transfer of information (as distinguished from knowledge)from one entity to another. Communications Studies are all over the map, more likely than not to be seen as a discipline in the humanities than in the social sciences. There is a seminal paper which is very famous What the Frog's Eye Tells a Frog's Brain (PDF). It was first published in the Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers.

One reason to mention that paper is simply to show how broadly communications are studied. A second reason is that the paper presented a view that the information the eye provides the brain is not just an image but that the information has already been interpreted and organized by the eye. In trying to understand this in terms of "transactions" I'm not sure how to do it. The organization of information doesn't seem to me to fit neatly with the idea of forces and impacts. In trying to understand the mind from a physiological point of view, the researchers discovered that information has it's own rules distinguished from, and more general than the processes of physiology of the organism.

Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Transactions can occur without language, but surely language enables transactions. Clearly linguistics and communications studies are different beasts. I'm not clear how to distinguish the two in this table.

I am thinking that in this exercise we might find that some of the disciplines coalesce.

Off to bed where I dream up all this SH!7!

Linda, your dreams are amazing! You've got a knack for getting at the nut of issues and then studying and presenting them so that people can understand.

I am thinking that in this exercise we might find that some of the disciplines coalesce.

Oh I think so too. One way in which these disciplines coalesce is around ideas about science. The operating principle is that in a materialist universe knowledge ought to be a unity. Physical sciences have organized laws which primarily deal with substance, forces and impacts. Physical sciences are "mature" sciences as Thomas Khun called them. In the latter half of the 20th Century our knowledge about the fundamentals of form as distinct from knowledge of substance increased. These advances are altering our ideas about social sciences. Heretofore the assumption was that these disciplines had to build bridges to the scientific fundamentals of substance. With fundamental knowledge of form new bridges are possible.

The new possibilities at once create better understanding of what we don't know about and can't explain and open avenues for understanding not available before. so we see vast new territories of our ignorance, but now are able to build new ways to explore and to increase our understanding.

The shift is not easy. Part of what gives the various social sciences their boundaries is the methods of natural science. There is resistance to adopting methods and understandings which apply to form rather than substance. Nonetheless all of the social sciences are faced with the prospect that the physical laws of science are not sufficient for their disciplines. In order to become mature sciences their endeavors must work to build bridges from the fundamentals of form to their data and vise versus.

Linda Nowakowski said:

I am thinking that in this exercise we might find that some of the disciplines coalesce.

This is such a fascinating topic that I was also dreaming about it, though I guess at this time you guys are still in the land of Nod!

One of the things that hit me, was the fusion of psychiatry and social science and how so much of human behaviour is "unconscious" and that sometimes it takes momentous events to "wake" us up - a great example is the global response to disasters, such as 9/11, the Tsunami and the recent catastrophe in Haiti.

Also, I am curious to know if political science captures the effects that dictators or oligarchies have on society and people

I also found a great site, which could help your research Linda - Here is a link to The Social Science Research Council website

I also picked up on the thread around linguistics and how it has been said that words account for only 7% of our communication - I am curious to know where psychic intuition fits into this, especially where some people seem to "know" that things will happen and their corresponding actions that cause consequences amongst communities, not all of which were to declare them "mad"!

Finally, as I mentioned before with the "observer effect", how do we take into account "the filters" that each person engaged in studying social science has on the results they find. By filters I mean the total of their personal experiences, beliefs and values.

Just some more food for thought or dreams! Peter

I love Peter's comment perhaps because of my naughty tendencies to derail threads. Really, Linda slap my wrist when necessary!

Peter mentioned psychiatry, and while modern psychiatry is hardly enthrall to Freud nowadays, it's pretty hard to think about psychiatry and the unconsciousness without thinking of Freud.

Freud's theory doesn't really strike the modern observer as being "scientific." But it is useful to see how Freud viewed it as scientific. Gregory Bateson notes that for at least 200 years "the dominant preoccupation of science was with those chains of cause and effect which could be referred to as forces and impacts." So it was only reasonable for Freud to look for a bridge between behavioral data and the fundamentals of physical and chemical science. What he came up with was "psychic energy," but rather than understanding this as only a metaphor, simply assumed that it was "real."

Nowadays I think we understand even in the casual popular imagination "the unconscious" quite differently from the understanding of Freud. Recently Jonah Lehrer was on Fresh Air talking about his book "How We Decide." Lehrer also has a cool blog.It's interesting how he goes into the mechanics of emotions and the limitations of our reason.

Freud wanted to ground his theory solidly in science so he invented (he probably imagined he discovered) two drives: the life drive-libido and the death drive-Thanatos. It's easy to see the energetic approach of forces and impacts. Lehrer's view of decision making as the result of messy networks is qualitatively different because it depends on ideas about communication which are not so straightforwardly mechanical--forces and impacts.

Political science indeed does consider "the effects that dictators or oligarchies have on society and people" the discipline is steeped in a model of empirical science, so "effects" are precisely what political scientists look for.

I'm happy that Peter points to the SSRC Web site. In some one of these threads I'm sure I pointed to a discussion between Charles Taylor and Jurgen Habermas over there. Taylor is a philosopher who looks at social science and Habermas is a sociologist--social scientist--who considers the philosophy of social science. Taylor is also a devote Catholic. One of the SSRC blogs is The Immanent Frame. The name of the blog comes from the term which Charles Taylor coined. This blog post is a pretty succinct version of what Taylor means by it.

I won't go looking for the discussion between Taylor and Habermas, but as I remember it Taylor was having none of Habermas's pleas for common ground. That said, I think that the blog The Immanent Frame and generally the work of Habermas represents a new direction that sociology and more generally social science is going. The sort of physicalism that Freud's theories represent are part of an approach that looks to physical cause and effect, where as Jonah Lehrer's work as a neuoroscientist and Habermas as a sociologist reflect understanding that communication is something very different from the realm of forces and impacts.

Many physical scientists are aghast that quantum indeterminacy is generalized to notions about observations outside the quantum dimension of the world. The problem of an observer however is very related to thinking about social science. Linda has mentioned numerous time the problem of objectivity. Of course the other side of that coin has to do with phenomenology, the analysis of consciousness.

Social sciences today are being forced to consider the philosophy of social science. The disciplines as organized are still bounded by a 19th century view of science preoccupied with forces and impacts. Nonetheless the incapacity of such a view is apparent in all of the social sciences and so the disciplines are being forced to reconsider what the nature of evidence is.

It's useful to understand the unity that the construct of "transactions" provides not only among the social sciences, but science more generally. But it is also important to see that cracks are growing in the social sciences precisely around this unified vision of science as the study of forces and impacts.

I just received a copy of an interview with Laszlo Zsolnai who is Director of the Business Ethics Center at Corvinus University Budapest, a Fellow Associate at Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge, and Chairman of the Business Ethics Faculty Group at CEMS the Global Alliance in Management Education.

In that interview he explains that he has no real desire to work with existing businesses that are corrupted to their core. He would rather get on with the business of creating the new alternatives.

John, as you know from our talks, I believe that economics is "rotted" to its core. I think about this all the time because you keep challenging me on it. That is in part the source of this discussion. In Economics, the epistemology, the methodology, and even the ontology are wrong. Even economists can not tell you what economics is.They can not agree on what they are studying and if you don't know what you are studying, how can you even begin to formulate how to study it? There should also be a reason - a why - we study it. How do we measure success if we don't know who we are, what we are studying and why?

Some of the definitions I found in text books and other academic sources for economics included:

• Economics is the study of making choices
• Economics is the study of how individuals and groups make decisions with limited resources as to best satisfy their wants, needs, and desires
• Economics is a study of mankind in the ordinary business of life

These are significantly different definitions and what you might study under one of the definitions might not even be considered under one of the others. And these are just three examples.

So I have been trying to get to the bottom of what economics is. At this point, I don't want to go back and look at history, what was or even what is in the existing field. I want us to look at it with new eyes.

We want to study this "stuff" - you and I and David know what we want to look at at a gut level and I think Peter gets it too - but what is it?

Why we want to study it will influence what we are looking at and how we look. It will also help us measure our success. I am not sure that this is all about science. Somewhere in the history of science there has been this vision of prediction. Much of science has given that up certainly at the precision it used to imagine. I believe that social systems are just by definition too complex to reduce to linear, predictable, mechanistic systems that approach predictability. So, forget science for now. There is something out there to know. What is it and why do we want to know it. Once we know that, we will be better able to start to define what questions to ask, how to ask them, and how to measure success. I think we are going to find that the work we are doing is much more like participatory research than physics.

I enjoyed reading Laszlo Zsolnai's interview. Even more than having "no desire" to work with companies that are rotten to the core, he's inimical to them. But he also points out that different companies have different ethical profiles. And he even seems to think that some of the banks can turn around. I'm not so optimistic about that, but what do I know?

John, as you know from our talks, I believe that economics is "rotted" to its core. I think about this all the time because you keep challenging me on it.

I'm sorry I am so overbearing. What I've tried to point out about economics is I think a little like the point that Laszlo Zsolnai makes about businesses having different profiles. Again, what do I know?

I do like smart people and I admire people who've spent a lot of time and great effort studying in systematic ways. I don't disagree with you about economics being rotten, except perhaps that we disagree about the extent of the rot.

In one of those superficial Facebook quizes about what kind of philosopher you are, I came out as an Empiricist and I think the picture was of David Hume. I can't put too much stock in that, but there is a grain of truth too. If I were to self identify, I'd say I'm more a Pragmatist. Really the sort of way that American Pragmatists integrated rationalism and empiricism rather sorts out to modern concepts of what it means to be empirical anyway.

I watched a funny video last night Father Guido Sarducci's Five Minute University. The premise is that he teaches you in five minutes everything that the average college student remembers from college five years down the line. And I flunked out of college the first time around! Still I think some of my obsession about the philosophy of science comes from having gone to the University of Pittsburgh and the strand of logical positivism the department of philosophy there represents.

There is something out there to know. What is it and why do we want to know it.

Some of what I've been blathering about is about epistemology, or how it is that we know. Not completely off target for the conversation. But I was interested to see your observation:

I think we are going to find that the work we are doing is much more like participatory research than physics.

Before I met you Linda, I didn't have much clue at all about Buddhist Economics. However back in the 1970's I was quite interested in alternative technology and was familiar with the term "intermediate technology" and its connection to E.F. Schumacher.

Looking back 1980 was a pivotal year, a time when my views and the views of my peers really seemed to shift in many directions. At that time I was very impressed with a book by Warren A. Johnson called "Muddling Towards Frugality." The problem was that when I try to talk about the ideas what I got mostly was laughter. It wasn't really laughter about the ideas so much as it was "muddling" indeed seemed something I would embrace.

I didn't think the book was a big hit at the time, but I searched it. One reference I found was to John Michael Greer whose writing I discovered last year and I like very much. Here's an observation he makes about the book, and it strikes me as somewhat relevant to your observation about participatory research:

One of the things that makes Muddling Toward Frugality most interesting to me is that Johnson deals directly with the cultural narratives underlying projects for social change. The habit of relying on ideology, he suggests, unfolds from narratives drawn from the language of tragedy, in which great heroes risk themselves and everything else for an ideal. This makes great literature and drama, of course. Still, since the heroes of tragedy generally die, and not uncommonly take everything they care about down with them, they may not be the best model for constructive change!

As an alternative, Johnson offers the unexpected possibility of the comic hero. Throughout the Western literary tradition, comic heroes have most often been muddlers, stumbling half blind through situations they don’t understand with no grander agenda than coming out the other side with a whole skin and some semblance of comfort. They aren’t especially heroic, and their efforts at muddling through crisis fail to inspire the kind of reverent attention so many proponents of social change seem to long for. Unlike tragic heroes, though, they usually do come out the other side of the story, and not uncommonly bring the rest of the cast with them.

I don't think we're so far apart in how we see things Linda. One thing I feel pretty certain of is that you know a heck of a lot more than I do about these subjects. I don't mean to challenge you. I come off that way, and it's an annoying pattern of how I learn about stuff. I'm not sure what to do, but I surely don't mean to offend.

Oh, dear John, there was no offense taken. I need the challenges. I ache for them. It is the most frustrating part of doing this work in solitary confinement. The challenges make me think and rethink and rephrase until I can say what I really want to say in clear and concise way without the errors I started with. Keep challenging me but...right now, please help me fill out this table.

Of your three definitions I think of economics as:

Economics is a study of mankind in the ordinary business of life.

It is certainly much more limited than making choices and I don't see it as groups deciding how they will fulfill their needs. The ordinary business of life is indefinite enough to cover what is studied. I think, however, that we could limit it to something like the study of the production and distribution of goods and services 'as measured in money'.

We have had several conversations about the myopia caused by having this single measure of economic activities.

In my opinion, science as a whole contains this kind of myopia. It is derived from the requirement of testable hypothesis for how a particular action produces a particular result. Leaving all the implications of producing that result to some other discipline. I am not opposed to science - I follow it enthusiastically - but, I think, we will do well to recognize its limitations and develop this "other discipline" about building the kind of world we want to live in.

David Braden said:

... I think, however, that we could limit it to something like the study of the production and distribution of goods and services 'as measured in money'.

This eliminates all in family, in-kind, barter transactions that it would seem to me are distinctly "economic".

Agreed . . . that is Eisler's point that the science of economics as practiced does not consider whole categories of transactions pertinent to human well being.

As far as dictionary definitions of economics go three elements: production, distribution and consumption of goods and services, seem nearly universal. I think David's point about "as measured in money" pretty well describes what most economists do, but take your point about "all in the family" transactions seriously. Still for the sake of clarity I think David's definition with the addition of "consumption" aligns with standard definitions:

The study of the production, distribution and consumptions of goods and services.

I've been thinking about linguistics in terms of transactions. The standard definition of linguistics is the scientific study of language and for our purposes leaving out the word "scientific" probably simplifies matters. But then there's the problem of what transactions of language are? If one thinks of language as governed by sets of rules in a hierarchy then transactions might be similar to mathematical transforms where problems are mapped from one domain into another. So:

Linguistics = The study of language

Transactions = Mapping rule sets in a hierarchy

That probably doesn't make much sense, but I think the transactions involved in linguistics are similar to mathematical manipulations.

I think that you are looking at this through the narrow "scientific" lens.

People don't usually spend their precious time looking at things for inconsequential reasons. Why do people look at linguistics?

Language is used to convey so much. I think (and this may be arrogance or hopefully, if I am wrong, just ignorance) that our intricate use of of language is what separates us from other species. How did that happen? How does it grow and develop? How do languages compare?

We do this to better understand how we communicate. We certainly do it at some level just to understand but I think also to learn how to make it better.

S, I guess I see the transactions of linguistics being the trading and sharing of information.

Mapping rule sets is an experiment that we might do to understand those transactions.

Am I being too wacko here?

Interesting debate on economics - especially that it is rotten to the core - so maybe that is an excellent reason to study it, to see why, to learn and this be able to perhaps suggest a new and better construct - though, given that the world is capitalist dominated (which is good for progress) - how do we avoid people who conduct economic transactions doing so for the good of all, as opposed to greed and power!

OK, done that to death - let me help with the table - I will put the items/ideas here, as opposed to editing table directly.

Information science what it is - gathering, manipulating, storing, retrieving, and classifying recorded information Transactions - information that is used to create knowledge, which is then used to influence decisions Why - because most information is stored digitally today

now, I'll just do that one, and if that makes sense, I can help in more, since I have a back ground in IT, management and NLP

I think that you are looking at this through the narrow "scientific" lens.

I am thinking about definitions of social science. My feeling is that the social sciences often fall far short of producing real knowledge. So I wonder what the problem is with social sciences?

If I'm looking through a scientific lens, it's not so much a matter of personal thinking style, but rather an attempt to define these social sciences on their own terms. But I'm also very interested to try to imagine these disciplines as more productive ways to create knowledge.

In the United States in the early to mid 20th Century the study of linguistics was dominated by a school of thought closely associated with Leonard Bloomfield called structuralism. Quite central to Bloomfield's study was his adherence to behaviorism, a school of thought in psychology. In the late 1950's the whole study of linguistics changed focus with Noam Chomsky's ideas about generative grammar.

I've mentioned before that when I was first in college behavioral psychology was quite problematic to me. My hunch was that the approach mist the point about what is really important in psychology. At that time, you know the old days, I went into the media room where a librarian threaded up a film projector so I could watch a debate between Skinner and Chomsky. It's rather strange now to think that my experience of watching it was something like watching a boxing match in which I had a favorite--I wasn't rooting for Skinner.

Disciplines really do enforce orthodoxy, and so young students like me to some extent want to belong. In terms of psychology at that time I was probably throwing my lot with schools around Piaget. Later Chomsky would debate Piaget and threw his punches even harder. So as far as the boxing metaphor goes in that fight I was rooting for the other guy.

Anyhow, one of the basic ideas of generative grammar is that grammar is not the result of communicative function. And grammar is not simply learned from the environment--there must be something innate.

I see the transactions of linguistics being the trading and sharing of information.

It's quite sensible to think about the transactions of language as being the trading of information, but I don't think that's really how present-day linguistics conducts transactions. Rather I think that linguistics is concerned about the rules of language and therefore the transactions are more formal. You write:

Mapping rule sets is an experiment that we might do to understand those transactions.

You might be right, but I don't think that's how the field of linguistics sees it. Generative grammar is the theory, that is, it is the map onto which data is fitted. What I mean by transactions is fitting data to the map.

Sometimes linguistics is considered social science and sometimes it's considered humanities.

I think your ideas about transactions fit better with rhetoric, a discipline firmly in the humanities camp, rather than linguistics as a social science. I pointed to Deirdre McCloskey's piece earlier in this thread because I thought it was interesting that she was making a pitch to locate economics within rhetoric and the humanities.

Many of the fields listed in this table might be just as easily put within the humanities as within social science. What's the difference? In large part I think it comes down to method, what counts as evidence and why any of the knowledge generated should be given credence.

It seems to me that to define the social sciences that some attention must be given to our ideas about science. A thread that runs through my rambling on is a good deal of the problem in social science has to do with fundamental misunderstanding about what science is and ought to be.

Peter mentioned that much of communication is non-verbal. Linguistics doesn't deal much with this aspect of communication. And I know I'm off-topic as far as this thread goes. But in my defense I'm thinking about Linda's question:

What is it [that we can know] and why do we want to know it.

John Searle's "Speach Acts came to mind. The Wikipedia article has a neat sentence:

Searle has argued that critics like Daniel Dennett, who (he claims) insist that discussing subjectivity is unscientific because science presupposes objectivity, are making a category error.

People like Daniel Dennett claim that science presupposes objectivity. The notion that propositions ought to be mind independent is quite problematic when we enter the social arena where people have minds. But that's hardly to say that there is not underlying order in the patterns of social interactions.

Searle's contention is that Dennet is making a category mistake about science. As I understand it Searle is saying that science is not a category which only accepts brute facts. Brute facts are epistemically objective as well as ontologically objective. But Searle make the point to understand much of what we're interested in, indeed to function, we recognise some facts as ontologically subjective but epistemically objective.

Dennett is clearly brilliant and I'm not, but I often tangle with his point of view about all sorts of topics. Also I should note that the philosophy of language is really hard and I hardly understand Searle. In particular it seems to me that I tend to think differently than his biological naturalism, although take for granted a monist view which presumes a unity in knowledge. That said I don't see how social sciences can be pursued without taking subjectivity and inter-subjectivity into account. Searle it seems to me provides some useful ways to think about this problem of study in social sciences.

I've been thinking about history in the context of this table. History might be defined as the study of past events. But in recent years much of historical studies have turned attention to social history. This change in focus is quite relevant to coming up with a definition to ..Area Studies, and the same trends are apparent in Anthropology, psychology and other social sciences.

History was once assumed to be a record of great men and military battles. But with computers it became easier to crunch the numbers in huge data sets, so attention turned to "history from below" that is, history from the point of view of ordinary people.

In some way perhaps "transactions" might be thought of as a way of arranging things. In many fields of social science, even in economics, there is a feeling that the areas of study are somehow on the cusp of art and science. Art is the practice of arranging things in a pleasing way. We are accustomed to thinking of "beauty in the eye of the beholder," but there is also a long tradition of presupposing that beauty is truth.

The challenge in history and area studies in regards to the "art" of it is arranging a coherent story. Science as we think of it reveals objective "facts," but the truth in a story depends upon our being able to apprehend it. The trouble is, people fervently believe all sorts of nonsense. A sort of soft version of the notion that knowledge should be mind independent might be that presented with the evidence any reason alb person would believe it to be the case.

Journalism imagined as a social science rather than a craft might be defined as The study and analysis of the collection, preparation, and distribution of news. Objectivity in journalism is a tough nut to crack. The journalist Ron Suskind in a 2004 article quoted an "unnamed aide to George W. Bush (almost surely Karl Rove) as saying:

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

What's being said is something similar to the quote attributed to Alex Halley that history is written by the winners.

In all these studies I believe there is a presupposition there is a discernible reality to know. In other words that the unnamed aide to George Bush was mistaken in believing that people can create realities out of nothing; there really is a "there" there.

Science is a method for study which produces knowledge we can be rather confident about. But the social sciences often fail to create such confidence.

The most important thing I read in my first go around in college is an essay by Gregory Bateson "The Science of Mind and Order" which was published in his book "Steps to and Ecology of Mind." I've looked around to see if it's on the Web, it seems as though I've found copies of it before. Today the only place I could find it is at Google Books. That's akward because you can't print it out. Still it's a very important essay very much worth attention.

Bateson contends there is a fundamental division in the way people arrange problems; there is the problems of material creation and the problems of order and differentiation. In mapping the data gathered in the social sciences he contends that following the great success of the physical sciences, social science sought to map their data to the material side of this division. He thinks that in most cases social scientist would do better to map data to fundamentals of order and differentiation.

What sort of fundamentals are these? Bateson suggested that Claude Shannon's digital communications and information theory would be on the order and differentiation side of this division. I think constructal theory would be placed there too.

I'm not very up on things, but I don't really see much attention paid to the way Bateson differentiates these two sorts of problems. Maybe I am really off the mark, but I think being more aware of the distinction would be very useful to social sciences. Regardless of my opinion there clearly is a movement within social sciences to understand that the the data where methods used borrowed from the physical science are metaphors for physical things rather than physical things in an of themselves. What's hard is that part of what make metaphors work is precisely forgetting such distinctions. Part of getting the social sciences right will be to ferret out such mistakes.

I am short of time here but I do want to comment....

Economists do not do economics - they study it

Linguists study something - what and why? Forget present day anything and any of their definitions. Step back and look at what linguistics (or in my case economics) really is...who does "it"? - what is "it"? - why is it important to study it?

Right now in this exercise, I don't care what the field of Economics sees itself as. That's partly because I think it is so mixed up right now because it is some mixed up collage of crap that has been pasted together to look scientific and it doesn't really know what it is so it is clutching on to what it has...the change would be too traumatic.

In many ways you are talking about the methodology not the subject. Chemistry is about studying the properties of elements and the compound they make, it is not about distilling and purifying.