Why so many "social science" disciplines?

Question

I am a career anthropologist (20+ years) with a strong background in the hard sciences. This question is a little rhetorical, but I just wanted to know what others are thinking. A more exact version of this question is 'why do we have so many disciplines with the overlapping and redundant goal of explaining human behavior while the natural sciences relegate the study of ALL animal behavior to only one (biology)? Or - what are we afraid of discovering about ourselves through a truly scientific approach to human behavior?

Answer 1

The vast complexity of the social sciences was probably a little too overwhelming for early social scientists.  They probably branched out to explore one particular aspect that interested them.  "Social science" is sort of like  "biology".  Yes, biology relegates the study of all animal behavior into only one discipline but, like social science, it branches out into the specific areas that people want to explore (i.e.-marine biologist, microbiologist, ornithologist, biochem, biophysics, etc).  There not many biologists who are "all encompassing".  Rather, they specialize.  Same with the social sciences.  It is just too difficult to explain human behavior using one, all encompassing label.

Answer 2

Well, because the most important, rewarding, and yet practical sciences are the social sciences. We can only learn  things that our minds are capable to understand. How does something study itself with when it might not (or might) have the capability to understand itself? Through hard sciences, we are merely observing the universe through what we can see, hear, touch, etc. and relating rules to it from what we believe to be logical. We are not able to understand everything, nor are we worthy to understand everything in the universe. Therefore, if we know that we can't understand it all by exploring outwards, it is best to concentrate our attention to understand ourselves, the conscious learners.

I believe social science is less of a science, more of an investigation. I believe its ultimate goal is to answer the question "why are we here" and "what are we"?