Training Social Scientists for Post-War Conditions

Abstract

Although the various social sciences are to a large extent harmfully separated by the boundaries of their disciplines, there are some workers who recognize the essential oneness of the material in all studies of human behavior and relationship, and the need for mutual sharing and coordinated effort in training and research. The existence of the Social Science Research Council is an example of such a trend. The journal Psychiatry, "addressed not alone to psychiatrists and psychiatric research personnel in the narrow sense, but to all serious students of human living in any of its aspects, and to those who must meet pressing social needs with current remedial attempts," is another, and this journal might be mentioned as a third. Other instances could be cited. The war makes it more timely and urgent for Education, Economics, Political Science, History, Cultural Anthropology, Sociology, Psychology, and Psychiatry to appreciate their common problems and to recognize and further organize themselves as the Social Sciences. Certainly, this must be done if scientific humanism is ever to be anything more than a happy thought.