The term 'social scientist' has been used in such a misleading and
anachronistic way on this list that the matter demands clarification.

Pearson, Burt, Fisher, Spearman etc, and other people associated  with the
use of statistics did not call themselves social scientists.  Nor was that
name applied to them.   

The term social science came into general use in Britain only with the
Heyworth Committee Report of 1965.   The Report - that led to the creation
of the Social Science Research Council - was actually entitled 'Report of
the Committee on Social Studies'.

The Report identified 35 professors who were classified as social
scientists.  Social science was defined by the Report as 'economics,
economic history, anthropology, industrial relations, social science, social
psychology, demography, economic statistics, commerce, sociology and
political science'.    So the boundaries were drawn fairly widely - though
they did not include psychology or geography (both of which must surely have
been well established in a few universities at that time?).      

There were only 899 professors in Britain at that time so the social
sciences as defined above counted for less than 4% of the total.   

Of course these 35 social science professors had intellectual antecedents -
like Durkheim often regarded as the first social science methodologist,
Booth as one of the first survey methodologists, and people who could be
regarded as social science theorists like Marx, JS Mill and Spencer.   

It is arguable that the statisticians in the General Register Office who
were concerned with the use of statistics to raise standard in public
health, and who were the bastion against the eugenecist statisticians, were
also the antecedents of the social sciences.  But otherwise there was little
connection between the social sciences and the statistics tradition that in
Britain goes back at least to the establishment of the Royal Statistical
Society in 1832.

The social sciences have never been called Royal!   And at the time of the
establishment of the SSRC the main concerns publicly expressed were at the
apparently low level statistical knowledge among social scientists.    As
far as I am aware there has never been any great concern that statisticians
know little of the social sciences!   And that situation still obtains.   

People can, like the red queen, say that the meaning of a word is what they
say it is.   But for the sake of clarity of discussion on this list it might
be sensible to avoid using the word social scientist to refer to 19th
century statisticians.


Ray Thomas, Social Sciences, Open University
Tel: 01908 679081 Fax 01908 550401
Email: [log in to unmask] 
35 Passmore, Milton Keynes MK6 3DY 





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