What Is Social Science? A Comparison with Biology

What is social science? This article examines this perennial question by addressing the relation between human biology and social science, exploring whether social science constitutes a "science" in the sense conventionally denoted. In suggesting that social science is defined by a "spatiotemporal specificity" different from life science, I will explore the historicist traditions represented by writers such as Knies, Schmoller, Weber, and Collingwood. Drawing on processual philosophies in sociology and biology and the example provided by sociotechnical "acceleration," I argue that the human flair for language, symbolism, and technology distinguishes humanity and is constitutive of the way social science tends toward process particularity and the historical rather than process recurrence and the transhistorical. I then consider implications for historicist conjecture, sociological theory, and natural science; the transposability of theory and data; the design of sociopolitical policy; and the need for epistemological pluralism among sociologists pursuing "biosocial" endeavors.