The historical background of social sciences

With the five-lira coins now in circulation, perhaps we will see less of the five-lira banknotes, which feature the portrait of Turkish historian of science Ordinary Professor Dr. Aydın Sayılı, who notes that even though the amount of knowledge has increased throughout history, there have been periods of stagnation, regression, and crisis in scientific endeavors. He points to an example of this as the period of the Middle Ages known as the Dark Ages, where science lost its dynamism, leading to a significant decrease in the volume of scientific knowledge, and "Significant scientific activities are encountered in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Greek world in antiquity; in the Islamic world and Europe during the Middle Ages; and again in Europe during the Modern and Contemporary eras," he says, highlighting the geographical movement and continuity of scientific knowledge. 

In a sense, he discusses how science has undergone geographical migrations to reach the present day. He emphasizes that progress in science emerges through the cooperation, work, and efforts of various nations and people of different religions, which build upon one another. According to him, “Science is the common property of people who speak different languages and have different religions. It is an activity that transcends the boundaries of nationality, religion, and language.”

Maurice Duverger attributes the lag of social sciences behind natural sciences to the fact that they do not use a common language, leading to a lack of consensus among social scientists even on the most fundamental definitions. At the root of this, in natural sciences, theory develops before practice, whereas in social sciences, he states that, on the contrary, practice is ahead of theory.

Analyzing the historical development process of the emergence of science and subsequently social sciences can help us understand why conducting research in social sciences is difficult. In this regard, Duverger emphasizes the intertwining of social sciences and social philosophy. According to him, initially, priority was given not to understanding how social organization occurs, but to determining how it should be and establishing the rules to ensure this. This attitude, which we can call doing social philosophy and which lasted for centuries, has not yet completely disappeared. 

Until the 18th century, it is observed that the perspective of philosophy was largely dominant over the perspective of science. From this date onwards, and especially in the 19th century, it is seen that the scientific perspective became more dominant. Duverger explains this situation as follows:

"[...] in order to research the principles of an ideal organization, it is necessary to examine how the current social organization functions; for this reason, social philosophers were compelled to turn toward social science."

In the early stages of the historical development of social sciences, there is a dilemma that crystallizes in the Plato-Aristotle opposition. While Plato, as a philosopher, adopted abstract thinking as his primary method of analysis, we see that Aristotle, thanks to his observational skills, based his philosophical thought on very broad and diverse concrete research. For example, it is known that he wrote a monograph on the constitutions of 158 city-states in ancient Greece and elsewhere (only the constitution of the city-state of Athens has survived to the present day). Although Aristotle's intellectual background was philosophy-oriented, such studies are important in terms of social sciences. On the other hand, Plato also sought to examine economic, geographical, demographic, and social issues scientifically. In fact, the fact that he reached the following analysis is very important for social sciences: "In a city-state, there are at least two classes at war with each other: the class of the rich and the class of the poor."

As Sayılı points out, "[science] has passed throughout history from Egypt and Mesopotamia to the Greeks, from the Greeks to the Islamic World, and from the Islamic World to Europe." It is observed that when a period of stagnation and slowdown begins in the scientific activities of a region, these activities shift to another cultural region. Following the first few centuries of the Common Era, when Greek science began to decline, a revival in scientific activity began with the establishment of the Abbasid Caliphate in the 8th century and the spread of Islam to those geographies. It is observed that the brilliant phase of scientific development in the Islamic World was not long-lasting, and its momentum began to decline after continuing for two or three centuries. It can be said that, especially from the second half of the 8th century until the 13th century, the number of scientific activities and people engaged in science in the Islamic world was quite high, and even at a very advanced level when compared to the dark period of the Middle Ages experienced in Europe. Between the Islamic World and Europe During the Late Middle Ages (12th century), with the start of significant cultural exchange, scientific and philosophical works in Arabic were translated into Latin.

Aydın Sayılıstates that because the developments in Europe during this period were as significant as those of the 16th-century Renaissance, it is referred to as the "12th-century Renaissance." According to him, while the 16th-century Renaissance was primarily associated with art and literature, the 12th-century Renaissance was primarily “science and philosophy.” Furthermore, according to Sayılı, thanks to this Renaissance period, Europe ended the Dark Ages and, as a rival to the Islamic World, “entered a period of significant intellectual activity.” entered.

According to Richard Westfall, there were two significant perspectives in the field of science in the 17th century. The first of these is the Platonic and Pythagorean perspective, which accepts that the order of the universe is structured according to mathematical principles, Platonic and Pythagorean perspective, and the other is the perspective that accepts nature as a vast machine and seeks to explain the hidden mechanisms behind observable phenomena. In this context, I believe the following view by Westfall is quite significant: “The scientific revolution was more than just a restructuring of categories of thought regarding nature: It was a social phenomenon that also expressed the involvement of an increasing number of people in scientific research activities and the spread of a new set of theories that played an increasingly active role in modern life.”

Bertrand Russell also mentions that the work of great scientists in the 17th century enabled us to develop new perspectives on our world, which in turn influenced the scientific mindset of the 18th century. According to him, there were three important components to this period:

1. Facts should be based on observation, not on unsupported authority.

2. The inanimate world is a self-sustaining and self-operating system, and within this system, everything conforms to the laws of nature. 

3. The Earth is not the center of the universe, and in all likelihood, humans are not the purpose of the universe (if there is one); furthermore, the concept of “purpose” is scientifically unnecessary. 

As Duverger also mentions, we can see the effects of the voyages of discovery made in the 16th and 17th centuries in the increase of observational data and the shift of human interest toward concrete events in the 18th century. Although the general tendency during this period was toward philosophical studies rather than scientific ones, the Christian religion began to cease being the sole foundation of social philosophy. Thus, studies investigating how societies actually are began to increase, rather than studies focusing on how they ought to be. During that period, the development of social sciences took place in three areas.

The first is, the field of political economy, which with the French Physiocrat School and the Adam Smith School transformed this field into an autonomous scientific discipline. The second, is the field of statistics, which provided the foundation for early demographic studies. The third is the field where the lives of exotic societies, based on the observations of travelers and explorers, were examined comparatively.  

While these developments were taking place in the 18th century, the idea that social phenomena also have laws gained prominence. In fact, these "the physical laws of society" (Dupond de Nemours, 1768) and "necessary relations arising from the nature of things and events" (Montesquieu, 1748) are seen to be referred to as such. In this century, we see that the subject of social laws branched into areas such as probability calculations developed by Bernoulli, the laws regarding the history of the development of the human mind mentioned by Condorcet, and laws resembling those of the physical universe. In the 19th century, especially with the contributions of Auguste Comte, we see significant developments in this third area. Comte's most well-known achievement was naming an area that was called a new science in the 18th century sociology and providing its clear definition. While defining this subject, he put forward the concept of social physics defined the science of the human species as a "limitless and infinite social unit." Furthermore, he established social sciences as a field of positive science by separating them from moral rules and metaphysical thoughts.