ABSTRACT
Sociology and its companion social sciences, such as cultural anthropology and psychology, enjoy ambivalent relations with one another, and with sections of the humanities, from cultural history to the study of languages. To complicate matters more, the relations with the natural sciences are ambiguous as well and subject to debate. Intellectuals never created a clear-cut and generally accepted classification of the arts and sciences concerned with human behavior. The cognitive quality of literature and the visual arts never disappeared. Literary authors still claim to enlighten la comédie humaine, as Balzac coined the subject of his novels.
