It's a Science... It's an Art...
It's Batman!
For centuries, there has been great big debates about whether the social sciences — sociology, economics, psychology, etc. — are “actual sciences”.
Many founders of the social sciences based their new disciplines precisely on the methods and objectives of the natural sciences. Chemistry, physics, and biology thus served as their main inspirations, which they didn’t hesitate to copy and paste onto whichever society they found themselves investigating.
Today, a consensus remains a fantasy. While the majority of social scientists believe that fieldwork is a science and not an art, others question the purpose of scientificness in trying to solve primarily human problems.
One example is the French sociologist Numa Murard, who calls sociology an art. To him, it isn’t an art in the sense of a stage performance or an artwork hung on a wall. Instead, he uses the word “art” in the artisanal sense — sociology, and the social sciences in general, thus becomes the art of sculpting human understanding of ultimately human experiences.
It’s important to point out that the people having debates about epistemology — i.e. the study of how [scientific] knowledge is constructed — belong to a class of intellectually well-off individuals. To put it bluntly, arguing about whether something is a science or an art remains a pastime of the academic bourgeoisie, otherwise known as the scholarly dominant class.
In a similar vein, Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie slyly admits that “creative writing programmes are not very necessary. They just exist so that people like us can make a living.” Perhaps that is one area where universities excel in: providing financial incentives for subjects that serve as recreation for the world of academia alone.
But of course, there are always exceptions. “So what? Is it a science or an art?” you may say. On the one hand, the social sciences frequently resemble a DIY group of interpretative techniques. This is why they regularly have to share a department with the arts.
On the other, I find it impossible in response to stop myself from quoting Shakespeare:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.
For the inquisitive researcher, it seems that the answer rests within.
