Theory of Knowledge - Course Companion for Students Marija Uzunova Dang Arvin Singh Uzunov Dang

I. Scope
idea of describing society using the laws
The
physics and biology is not new. Henri de
of
1803 book, Lettres d’un habitant
Saint-Simon’s
Genève à ses contemporains, did just that.
de
student and collaborator was
Saint-Simon’s
Comte, the philosopher widely
Auguste
as the founder of sociology, who
regarded
social physics as “that science which
defined
itself with social phenomena,
occupies
in the same light as astronomical,
considered
chemical, and physiological
physical,
that is to say as being subject to natural and invariable laws, the discovery of which
phenomena,
Saint-Simon and Comte, it was statistician Adolphe Quetelet who, in 1835, wrote a book
After
Essay on Social Physics: Man and the Development of his Faculties, which describes using
entitled
probability to model society. A commonly told (and possibly apocryphal) story has
mathematical
that Comte invented the term “sociologie” (sociology) in response to Quetelet’s appropriation of
it
20th-century researchers including the geographer Reino Ajo and astrophysicist John Q.
Later,
used gravity models to show the distribution of social interactions. There is also the
Stewart,
model of trade, which builds a model of bilateral trading relations on the laws of gravity.
gravity
would seem a curious proposition to equate the trading behaviour of people in different
It
to the relationship between massive objects. However, the gravity model of trade is
countries
considered an empirical success, accurately predicting trade flows between countries
generally
we see that mathematics in the human sciences is neither a recent nor necessarily problematic
So
But in the past 20 years, a very large number of social science papers have used
invention.
mathematics. Contemporary academics have written books on the subject,
physics-inspired
the simply named Social Physics, by MIT professor Alex Pentland, and The Social Atom,
including
are coming to realize that human
“We
is determined as much by the
behaviour
of our culture as by rational,
patterns
thinking. These patterns can
individual
described mathematically, and used to
be
accurate predictions.” (www.endor.
make
assertion is that knowledge about
Pentland’s
behaviour can be used to describe,
human
and predict phenomena. To what extent
explain
you agree? What are the strengths and
do
of the different human sciences
weaknesses
this?
towards
8
Box 8.1: Applying natural laws to human behaviour
is the special object of its researches” (Comte quoted in Iggers 1959).
the term “social physics”, because Comte did not agree with his statistics.
for many goods andservices.
by Mark Buchanan, editor of Nature magazine.
For discussion
Knowledge used to describe, explain or predict
Alex Pentland, a professor at MIT, writes:
com/social-physics)
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