The future in the social sciences

Abstract

How the social sciences conceptualize the future depends in varying measure upon intellectual developments within these sciences, upon competition versus cooperation between them, and upon changes in the surrounding society that alter the role of social science. This article notes that social science has matured into a set of somewhat static disciplines that do not expect to grow rapidly as they did decades ago, and this fact may give them a relatively conservative view of the future. However, it is possible to identify trends and factors that might inspire social science to think very differently. The article presents these ideas through nine scenarios: a surprise-free projection, increased reliance of post-industrial society on social science, the clash of civilizations, a possible renaissance in cultural anthropology, the drive toward hegemony by economics, the potential impact of biological advances, a hypothetical resurgence of personality psychology, the emergence of new information-oriented social sciences, and the need for thinking outside the terrestrial box. Although I have published books on the future of religion and the space program, I write this not as a futurist or futurologist, but as someone who has been involved for nine years in American government social science funding [1]. Quite separately from the transdisciplinary cultural movement of futures studies, each of the social sciences occasionally attempts to foresee the results of current trends, including the progressive changes that are occurring within these disciplines themselves. Today, the social sciences find themselves under a number of pressures with various directions they might innovate, so their future and how they will view the future are very open questions. The social sciences are generally considered to include economics, political science, sociology, cultural or social anthropology, social psychology, and social geography. A number of other disciplines or interdisciplinary fields are also often included, such as criminal justice or socio-legal studies, aspects of archaeology, social linguistics, decision sciences, certain styles of historical research, social welfare, communications, and branches of philosophy such as ethics. There is some tendency today to distinguish social science from behavioral science, the latter being more closely tied to biological sciences, and economics often sets itself apart as a rigorous analytic discipline remote from the supposedly less rigorous sociology and political science. This essay will consider the separate futures of this collection of largely independent fields, as well as their possibilities for integration, in order to understand their changing approaches to futures studies. For present purposes, it is useful to counterpoise two alternative conceptions of the social sciences. The first perspective classifies such fields as economics, political science, anthropology and sociology among the hard sciences, alongside biology, physics, chemistry and other disciplines sometimes called either life sciences or natural sciences. It assumes that natural regularities exist at the group and societal level, and that rigorous methodologies have been developed that are capable of identifying these regularities. To the extent that the social laws of nature have been identified and good data are available about the current state of the world, it should be possible to predict the near future with some degree of accuracy. If definite natural laws of large-scale social behavior do not in fact exist, then this may be a vain and delusion-ridden effort. The second perspective conceptualizes the social sciences as more-or-less radical reform movements that have cloaked themselves in methodological rigor in order to exploit the pro-science bias of the very society they seek to change. From this viewpoint, social sciences may be snared in a tragic contradiction between their aims and their means, as methodological rigor and value commitments pull them in opposite directions [2]. Predictions will be normative, rather than descriptive, advocating the future that ought to exist rather than deducing the one that necessarily will exist. Probably, the current character of the social sciences lies somewhere between these extremes. Objective laws of social behavior may exist, but there is much room for debate what they are and whether the ones that are currently known provide much basis for making predictions. As society changes, often in unforeseen directions, the social sciences find it difficult to keep pace, let alone get ahead of the curve. Lacking clear scientific paradigms for the most part—outside economics—they are largely defined by the historical circumstances under which they were created, and this fact hinders their evolution. Other inhibiting factors include the rigidity of university bureaucracies and the processes by which personnel are recruited to the social sciences. More than a century after most of these disciplines came into being, they are now called upon to reinvent themselves, lest they lose the capacity to imagine and shape the future [3].