In discussions with friends, this map of academic citations has surfaced. I remember seeing this map when it was published in the NYTimes about a year-and-a-half ago, but I didn't make much of it at the time. Another year plus of college, and I'm now in a much better position to assess some of what this means.
The first thing you'll notice when viewing this depiction is that the social sciences are in the center and the hard sciences are around the outside. There are a few points of convergence such as economics, which rests as the outskirts of the social sciences near statistics. There are also some environmental fields such as biodiversity and ecology that rest somewhere between the circle of hard sciences and the inner circle of social sciences. Music lies in such an area as well.
As you inspect this intricate web in greater detail, however, you will notice that some of the traditional academic disciplines are conspicuously absent. Political Science and History, arguably the two most established social sciences, are the two that struck me at first. But then I noticed the unnamed cluster in the middle of the inner circle of social sciences, and this seems like a logical place for both history and political science. It is impossible for these disciplines to ignore any other discipline. History, of course, includes the histories of science, medicine, technology, and the environment, and Political Science must deal with all relevant political issues, which span a similar breadth of academic orientation. And there is no other unnamed group of dots in the map.
Regardless, of whether or not Political Science and History do occupy this central place, I'd like to offer a hypothetical extension of this diagram into a third dimension. In the social sciences, there are articles that are written at the level depicted in this diagram (what I'll call Level 1). These would be articles about topics in these disciplines, such as your basic historical, sociological, anthropological, etc. article. But there is a second level at which these disciplines take place - at the theoretical level. Scholars in the social sciences are consistently engaged in a debate about how best to do research in their field. I believe that ascending to this second level allows scholars to see with greater perspective what is going on in the other disciplines that perhaps they were not able to see before.
Yet at Level 2, there is less interaction between the disciplines, such that sociologists are concerned with how to do sociology, historians with how to do history, psychologists with how to do psychology, etc., etc., etc. How then, do we transcend this second level, and see the interactions of the social sciences on a theoretical level? I believe that there may be a singular answer, the pinnacle of the pyramid so to speak, and that this apogee may well be political philosophy. Political philosophy must combine economic theory, social theory, and historical theory (among many others) to offer a successful view of what holds society together.
Although this view may seem to offer little in the way of consolation for the sciences, I would argue otherwise. The sciences are the frontier of knowledge, extending outwards the base of our pyramid of knowledge. They are likewise the foundation, the established knowledge. Political philosophy is the speculative thinking, to speak in Hegelian terms, that which is a synthesis of our established knowledge in the hard sciences and our theoretical ideas in the social sciences.
I am certain that this thesis I have put forward about the shape and relation of our knowledge structures is controversial, and I welcome your input and ideas.
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