ABSTRACT
All the social sciences are really studying different aspects of the same social system, which is the totality of human beings, plus the changes which they have made in their environments, stretching back into the past and out into the future, as they have spread out over the world and now even to the solar system. This social system includes all human bodies and minds, their knowledge, their images of the world, their character, their behaviour, their artefacts (buildings, furniture, clothes, works of art, commodities of all kinds), their documents (writings, financial instruments, laws), their relationships and organizations (families, tribes, nations, corporations, religious bodies, foundations) and so on. Each of the social sciences looks at this vast spectacle in time and space from somewhat different vantage points, but all of them are looking at parts of what is essentially a single system in three dimensions of space and one of time. The social sciences are part of the very system which they study, and indeed change the system as they study it. Something like the Heisenberg principle indeed dominates the social sciences. When we give people a questionnaire, we change their opinions. When we make a prediction, we change the future, depending on how much the prediction is believed. When we learn about other cultures, we transform our own culture, as well as the cultures that we are studying. We are looking at a system in constant flux, that even changes because we are looking at it.
