Toward a Science of Society

Crime, Law, and Social Science, although the outcome of a three years' survey of criminology and criminal justice in the United States and abroad by an eminent group of scholars in various social and allied fields, is the work of only the director and one member of the survey staff. The main conclusion of the book is that criminology is not now a science, that investigator in psychology and sociology, upon which it depends, are incapable of doing scientific work, and that the only hope is to draft specialists from mathematics and the physical and biological sciences to apply scientific method to social study. In supporting their contentions the authors are ambiguos in their definition of the nature of science; they overemphasiz the rational phase in their discussion of scientific method; and in their distinctions between independent and dependent empirical sciences they ignore the fact that the sciences are essentially interdependent, constituting a structural and genetic whole, and containing immature as well as mature elements. Specialists in the field of chemistry, physics, and mathematics are prone to see social phenomena through the eyes of their specialties alone and fail to make, analysis of those variables which are unique in social relations. The authors' analysis of what they regard as five misconceptions regarding the nature of a science of society indicates rather the relative complexity of the subject matter and the immature condition of social studies. It should not be regarded as indicative of the impossibility of doing scientific work in the social studies

Behavioural sciences · Criminal justice · Criminology · Epistemology · Field (mathematics) · Impossibility · Interdependence · Physics · Political science · Science education · Social science · Social science education · Sociology · Subject (documents) · Work (physics) · Crime Patterns and Interventions · Crime, Illicit Activities, and Governance · Law · Mathematics

• A 'Scientific Revolution

  Open Access•Henrika Kuklick•Sociological Inquiry•1973

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