Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines four hybrid fields: historical sociologies, international political economy, psychology and economics, and biology and the social sciences. It analyses the process of hybridization through the ways by which scholars in various disciplines exchange the tools of their trades. The book discusses the diffusion of concepts, the borrowing of methods, the impact of new technology, the influence of theories, the hybridization of academic journals, and the productive results of conflicts between paradigms. Psychology, geography, demography, archaeology, and linguistics are partially natural sciences, but an inclusive definition would encompass them as well: although experimental psychology, social psychology, or linguistics may use methods familiar to the natural sciences, they are obviously sciences of man. The book explores neither the psychological and cognitive basis for epistemology in the sciences nor what Jean Piaget has labelled “genetic epistemology.”