ABSTRACT
In an article published in March 1895 in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, entitled ‘Sociology and the Abstract Sciences, etc.’,i an American professor, Mr Franklin H. Giddings, suggested an idea that, if it were acknowledged as correct, would definitively clear the course of social science from methodological discussions that are blocking it, to the pleasure of those who are unwilling or unable to engage themselves in this science itself, whatever their reason. The idea was reproduced in 1896 in chapter II, ‘The Province of Sociology’, of Giddings’s Principles of Sociology.ii He stated that both physical sciences and social sciences are the result of the application of abstract and deductive sciences: mathematics, physics, economics, ethics, politics to concrete and inductive sciences: chemistry, astronomy, geology, biology, psychology, sociology. Hence, abandoning the classification of the sciences by columns, he has ranged the abstract and deductive sciences along a horizontal axis and the concrete and inductive sciences along a vertical axis, and, very logically, indicated the domain of the resulting science by a rectangle.iii
One might dispute the details of Mr Giddings’s classification, but the principle seems crystal-clear to me.
